Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners



Quotes of the Day:


“Freedom is what makes us fight, and courage is what keeps us from running away. Our first duty to freedom is to defend our own.”
- Jiyun Park, UK Political Leader and escapee from North Korea

"Comrades, I took the red tram of socialism to the stop named Independence, but that's where I got off."
Jozef Pilsudski


"I would hope that all educated citizens would fulfill this obligation—in politics, in Government, here in Nashville, here in this State, in the Peace Corps, in the Foreign Service, in the Government Service, in the Tennessee Valley, in the world. You will find the pressures greater than the pay. You may endure more public attacks than support. But you will have the unequaled satisfaction of knowing that your character and talent are contributing to the direction and success of this free society." 
- John F. Kennedy



1.  Why Ukraine Won’t Quit

2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, NOVEMBER 26 (Putin's War)

3. The West needs to boost its industrial capacity fast

4. Congress should end the war in Ukraine by withdrawing from NATO

5. We can gain a critical edge in the great power competition

6. ‘PRC’s political warfare is total war without fighting major kinetic wars’

7. The US Can Contain China, But It Can’t Do It Alone

8. China Is Starting to Really Regret Its Friendship With Russia

9. Ukraine’s Victories May Become a Problem for the US

10. Alex Joske on China's Influence Operations Abroad

11. Manila’s Tricky US-China Balancing Act

12. Indian-American-led company gets USD5 million to develop 'zero-pressure' tires for US Army

13. Khamenei's niece arrested after calling for foreign governments to cut ties with Iranian regime

14. Iranian drone advisers who were helping Russia bombard Ukraine were killed in Crimea, Kyiv official says






1. Why Ukraine Won’t Quit



Why Ukraine Won’t Quit | Small Wars Journal

Small Wars Journal

Why Ukraine Won’t Quit

By Yurij Holowinsky





The world is witnessing the horrors of full-scale war in Ukraine, and some are beginning to offer the advice that Ukraine should seek peace with Russia. Those who do so do not understand Ukraine and Ukrainians; the unstoppable passion of a people awoken and pursuing the goal of real freedom.


I am a first generation American, born in the “Land of the Free.” My maternal and paternal families fled from Ukraine during the horrors of WW II, spent years in Displaced Person Camps in Europe, and arrived in the US in 1950. My father was prominently drafted, served in the US Army in Korea, and returned to build the American dream for our family. I grew up speaking Ukrainian at home while being fully integrated into American life. A college graduate, a PhD in history, twenty-two years as an Air Force officer with multiple deployments to combat zones, and a follow-on civilian career with the Defense Intelligence Agency, retiring at the age of sixty provided me with the education and experience to offer my thoughts on Russia’s war against Ukraine and why I believe Ukraine won’t quit.


It is safe to say that people are guided by both logic and emotion; by what is seen and unseen - the physical and spiritual aspects of life. It is extremely rare that one will live solely by logic and reason or conversely by passion and faith. Yet I would propose that what the world is currently witnessing in Ukraine’s resistance against Russia are the actions of a people finally fully awoken to the belief that they can and will prevail over a bullying aggressor that for hundreds of years has sought to extinguish Ukraine as a nation and Ukrainians as a people.


I recall the drills in grade school during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We would “take cover” under our desks or in the hallways. Neighbors built shelters in the back yard. The catchy phrase - “better dead than red.” Looking back through the prism of over a nearly six-decade long span, I am grateful that America prevailed through the Cold War, and we were never fully put to the ultimate test in our cities and farms. Today, in 2022, as I see Ukrainians holding signs defiantly proclaiming that they fight because they would rather be dead than part of Russia, I can’t help but marvel at Ukrainian courage and determination.


The pundits who propose negotiations with Russia appear to rely more on logic and reason, thinking Ukraine can’t possibly win. Therefore, let’s stop the carnage and suffering. Ukrainians on the other hand know from centuries of experience not to once again fall victim to words on paper. One of the latest examples is the 1994 Budapest Memorandum which promised the inviolability of Ukrainian borders in return for Ukraine relinquishing the inherited nuclear arsenal following the collapse of the Soviet Union. When, in 2014, Russia violated the agreement by invading the Donbas and annexing Crimea, Ukraine was shocked that Russian aggression would stand due to a wording technicality within said Memorandum. The English version used the term “assurance”, and this did not mean “guarantee” as Ukraine envisioned with the word “упевнення”


Therefore, for over seven years Ukraine withstood Russian tanks, artillery rounds and bullets in the Donbas. Then, on 24 February 2022 Putin launched the full-scale invasion.


Ukraine and Ukrainians understand better than almost anyone else the words of Ronald Regan pertaining to freedom. Our 40th President stated that - “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”


As a nation, every Ukrainian generation since at least 1914 has been impacted by war, death, and destruction. In turn, I would argue that the desire for Freedom, if not Freedom herself, has been passed on to every Ukrainian within the bloodstream. This desire has now fully awoken and there is no turning back. Ukrainian passion and belief in Freedom surpasses any calculating unemotional logic or reason.


Ukraine will not quit because that word does not exist in the Ukrainian language with the same concept or meaning as it does in English. Just as guarantee and assurance are not exactly the same, the Ukrainian word for “quit” translates as «залишати», «кидати», or «припиняти» words which do not fully carry the concept of permanence as does the word quit. The Ukrainian words leave open the option of resuming that which has been ceased.


Ukraine and the Ukrainian people have resumed their journey to real independence and Freedom. They are implementing words I first heard from a Ukrainian general in the early 1990s when, on a visit to our nation’s Capital, he explained why Ukraine had broken away from the Soviet Union and was on the path to full freedom and independence. He said - “a slave seeks a strong master to protect him while a free man provides for his own security.”


Ukrainians are no longer slaves to anyone but masters of their own destiny. They are the living modern-day embodiment of our own forefathers who fought the armies of King George III and created America. Ukrainians are committed to the end with each and every citizen ready to embody the immortal words of Patrick Henry -

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”


I close with a poster.



Dad, what does it mean to “surrender”?

I don’t know my son. We are Ukrainians!


About the Author(s)



Yurij Holowinsky

Yurij Holowinsky


1976 - B.A. Rutgers University, Phi Beta Kappa

1984 - Officer Training School, Commissioned Officer, US Air Force. Career in HUMINT, retiring with the rank of Major from the Reserves in 2006.

Mid-1990s - Contract Interpreter, Ukrainian language, US Department of State.

1997 - PhD in History, University of Virginia.

2001 - 2014, Intelligence Officer, Defense Intelligence Service. Retired as GS-15.


Numerous operational tours and deployments around the world throughout the course of a thirty-year government career including Russia, Ukraine, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Bosnia, Macedonia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.


Numerous military awards and decorations including Bronze Star with Valor for direct combat action in Afghanistan in November, 2001.

Small Wars Journal


2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, NOVEMBER 26 (Putin's War)


Maps/graphics:   https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-november-26

Key Takeaways
  • The overall pace of operations in Ukraine is likely to increase in the upcoming weeks as the ground freezes throughout the theater.
  • Russian officials are continuing efforts to deport Ukrainian children to Russia.
  • Russian officials may be trying to counteract Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s growing influence through the promotion of other parallel Russian military structures.
  • Russian forces are likely using inert Kh-55 missiles designed solely to carry nuclear warheads in its campaign against Ukrainian infrastructure, highlighting the Russian military’s depletion of high-precision weapons.
  • Russian forces continued defensive operations against ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive operations along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
  • Russian forces continued offensive operations in the directions of Bakhmut and Avdiivka.
  • Russian forces continued establishing fortifications in eastern Kherson Oblast.
  • Russian tactical, logistical, and equipment failures continue to decrease morale of Russian troops and drive searches for scapegoats.


RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, NOVEMBER 26

Nov 26, 2022 - Press ISW


Download the PDF



understandingwar.org

Karolina Hird, Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, Angela Howard, and Frederick W. Kagan

November 26, 3:45pm ET

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

The overall pace of operations along the frontline has slowed in recent days due to deteriorating weather conditions but is likely to increase starting in the next few weeks as temperatures drop and the ground freezes throughout the theater. Ukrainian and Russian reporting from critical frontline areas throughout eastern and southern Ukraine, including Svatove, Bakhmut, and Vuhledar, indicates that operations on both sides are currently bogged down by heavy rain and resulting heavy mud.[1] Temperatures are forecasted to drop throughout Ukraine over the next week, which will likely freeze the ground and expedite the pace of fighting as mobility increases for both sides. The temperature in areas in Ukraine’s northeast, such as along the Svatove-Kreminna line, will dip to near-or-below-freezing daily highs between November 28 and December 4. It will likely take the ground some days of consistent freezing temperatures to solidify, which means that ground conditions are likely to be set to allow the pace of operations to increase throughout Ukraine over the course of the weekend of December 3-4 and into the following week. It is unclear if either side is actively planning or preparing to resume major offensive or counter-offensive operations at that time, but the meteorological factors that have been hindering such operations will begin lifting.

Russian officials are continuing efforts to deport children to Russian under the guise of medical rehabilitation schemes and adoption programs. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on November 26 that the Russian occupation administration in Luhansk Oblast conducted medical examinations of 15,000 children between the ages of two and 17 and found that 70% of the children (10,500) are in need of “special medical care” that requires them to be removed to Russia for “treatment.”[2] The Resistance Center stated that Russian officials intend these forced deportation schemes to lure children’s families to Russia to collect their children after the children receive treatments, at which point the Resistance Center assessed Russian officials will prevent those families from returning home to Ukraine. The Center‘s report is consistent with ISW’s previous assessment that Russian officials are conducting a deliberate depopulation campaign in occupied Ukrainian territories.[3]

Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova additionally posted an excerpt from a documentary film chronicling the story of the children she adopted from Mariupol.[4] Lvova-Belova has largely been at the forefront of the concerted Russian effort to remove Ukrainian children from Ukrainian territory and adopt them into Russian families, which may constitute a violation of the Geneva Convention as well as a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign.[5] Lvova-Belova's documentary is likely meant to lend legitimacy to the ongoing adoption of Ukrainian children into Russian families, just as the guise of medical necessity is likely intended to justify mass deportations of Ukrainian children to Russian territory.

Russian officials may be attempting to counterbalance the influence of Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin through the promotion of other parallel military structures. The Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported on November 26 that Russian officials appointed a Viktor Yanukovych-linked, pro-Kremlin businessman, Armen Sarkisyan, as the new administrator for prisons in Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine and that Sarkisyan intends to use the role to create a new “private military company.”[6] The GUR reported that Sarkisyan modeled his effort to create a new private military company on the Wagner Group’s recruitment of prisoners in the Russian Federation and that Russian-Armenian businessman Samvel Karapetyan is sponsoring the effort.[7] Karapetyan is the owner of Tashir Holding company, a longtime subcontractor for Russian stated-owned energy company Gazprom.[8] The GUR reported that Sarkisyan’s attempt to create a new private military structure is an attempt to create a counterweight to Prigozhin’s de facto monopoly in the field of Russian private military companies.[9] It is likely that high-ranking Russian officials have approved Sarkisyan’s efforts as private military companies are illegal in Russia.

Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov reported that he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on November 25 and claimed that they discussed the participation of Chechen units in the war in Ukraine and the creation of new Russian military and Rosgvardia units comprised of Chechen personnel.[10] ISW has previously reported that Kadyrov routinely promotes his efforts to create Chechen-based parallel military structures.[11] Russian officials may be further promoting Kadyrov’s existing parallel military structures and Sarkisyan’s efforts to create a private military company to counteract the growing influence of Prigozhin, whom ISW has previously assessed uses his own parallel military structures to establish himself as a central figure in the Russian pro-war ultranationalist community.[12]

Russian forces are likely using inert Kh-55 cruise missiles in their massive missile strike campaign against Ukrainian critical infrastructure, further highlighting the depletion of the Russian military’s high precision weapons arsenal. The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported on November 26 that Russia is likely removing nuclear warheads from ageing Kh-55 missiles and launching the missiles without warheads at targets in Ukraine.[13] The UK MoD suggested that Russian forces are likely launching the inert missiles as decoys to divert Ukrainian air defenses.[14] Ukrainian officials have previously reported that Russian forces have extensively used the non-nuclear variant of the missile system, the Kh-555, to conduct strikes on critical Ukrainian infrastructure since mid-October.[15] The Russian military’s likely use of a more strategic weapon system in the role of a decoy for Ukrainian air defenses corroborates ISW’s previous reporting that the Russian military has significantly depleted its arsenal of high-precision missiles.[16] The use of more strategic weapons systems in support of the campaign against Ukrainian infrastructure suggests that the Russian military is heavily committed to the strike campaign and still mistakenly believes that it can generate strategically significant effects through that campaign.

Key Takeaways

  • The overall pace of operations in Ukraine is likely to increase in the upcoming weeks as the ground freezes throughout the theater.
  • Russian officials are continuing efforts to deport Ukrainian children to Russia.
  • Russian officials may be trying to counteract Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s growing influence through the promotion of other parallel Russian military structures.
  • Russian forces are likely using inert Kh-55 missiles designed solely to carry nuclear warheads in its campaign against Ukrainian infrastructure, highlighting the Russian military’s depletion of high-precision weapons.
  • Russian forces continued defensive operations against ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive operations along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
  • Russian forces continued offensive operations in the directions of Bakhmut and Avdiivka.
  • Russian forces continued establishing fortifications in eastern Kherson Oblast.
  • Russian tactical, logistical, and equipment failures continue to decrease morale of Russian troops and drive searches for scapegoats.


We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

  • Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Eastern Ukraine
  • Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and one supporting effort);
  • Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
  • Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
  • Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
  • Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)


Eastern Ukraine: (Eastern Kharkiv Oblast-Western Luhansk Oblast)

Russian forces continued defensive operations against ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensives along the Svatove-Kreminna line on November 26. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops are conducting active defense operations northwest of Svatove in the direction of Kupyansk and west of Kreminna in the direction of Lyman.[17] Russian sources continued to discuss marginal Russian advances within Novoselivske, 15km northwest of Svatove.[18] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian troops repelled Ukrainian attacks on Kolomychikha (10km west of Svatove) and Ploshchanka (15km north of Kreminna).[19] Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai noted that Ukrainian troops are continuing to succeed around Svatove and Kreminna, partially due to the low quality and incoherence of mobilized Russian recruits operating in the area.[20] Haidai reported that Ukrainian troops are additionally defending against continual Russian attacks on Bilohorivka, 10km south of Kreminna.[21]

Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine


Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Russian forces continued to conduct offensive operations around Bakhmut on November 26. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Bakhmut, within 4km south of Bakhmut near Opytne, and within 18km northeast of Bakhmut near Soledar, Bakhmutske, and Yakovlivka.[22] A Russian milblogger posted a control of terrain map claiming that Russian forces control Opytne, although ISW has not observed visual evidence to corroborate this claim.[23] Russian and Ukrainian sources continued to claim that muddy conditions are slowing operations in the Bakhmut area.[24] A Russian milblogger claimed that fierce fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces continued on the southern outskirts of Bakhmut.[25]

Russian forces continued to conduct offensive operations in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area on November 26. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults within 23km southwest of Avdiivka near Pervomaiske, Krasnohorivka, and Nevelske.[26] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces also continued offensive operations in the direction of Novomykhailivka (36km southwest of Avdiivka).[27] Geolocated footage posted on November 26 shows Ukrainian forces striking advancing Russian tanks southwest of Novoselivka Druha (9km northeast of Avdiivka).[28]

Russian forces continued to conduct defensive operations in western Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts on November 26. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are conducting active defensive operations in these areas.[29] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian counterattacks within 79km southwest of Donetsk City near Mykilske and Vremivka in western Donetsk Oblast.[30] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued routine artillery and air strikes along the line of contact in Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts.[31]


Supporting Effort—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

Note: ISW will report on activities in Kherson Oblast as part of the Southern Axis in this and subsequent updates. Ukraine’s counteroffensive in right-bank Kherson Oblast has accomplished its stated objectives, so ISW will not present a Southern Ukraine counteroffensive section until Ukrainian forces resume counteroffensives in southern Ukraine.

Russian forces continued establishing fortifications in eastern Kherson Oblast and conducted routine artillery fire against areas on the west (right) bank of the Dnipro River on November 26. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are fortifying their positions along an unspecified coastline, likely referring to the Black Sea coast, and are preparing a defense-in-depth.[32] Russian forces are reportedly moving MLRS and S-300 systems closer to Kherson City, indicating that Russian forces may intend to increase the tempo of rocket and anti-air missile strikes against ground targets north of the Dnipro River in the coming days.[33] Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces shelled Kherson City, Antonivka, Chornobaivka, and Beryslav – all on the west (right) bank of the Dnipro River.[34]

Ukrainian forces continued to strike Russian force concentrations and military assets in Russian rear areas in southern Ukraine. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian ammunition depot in Melitopol, Zaporizhia Oblast, injuring 50 Russian military personnel, and two warehouses in Vasylivskyi Raion, injuring 130 personnel and destroying seven pieces of equipment.[35] The Ukrainian Mayor of Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov, reported that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian ammunition depot in Mykhailivka on the northern outskirts of Melitopol on November 25.[36] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces struck Chaplynka (40km south of Nova Kakhovka on the T2202 Nova Kakhovka-Armiansk route) and Skadovsk (R57-T2213 intersection on the Kherson City-Skadovsk route) in Kherson Oblast.[37]

Russian forces continued to conduct routine artillery, rocket, and missile strikes west of Hulyaipole and in Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts on November 26. Russian and Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces struck Dnipro City.[38] Russian and Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces shelled Ochakiv, less than 5km north of the Kinburn Spit. Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces shelled Nikopol and Marhanets, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.[39]

Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

Russian tactical, logistical, and equipment failures continue to decrease the morale of Russian troops and drive searches for scapegoats. Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) First Deputy Information Minister Danil Bezsonov claimed on November 25 that “the mistakes of military authorities of all levels” forced Russian President Vladimir Putin to order unpopular partial mobilization.[40] Bezsonov alleged that Russian military authorities are relying on the mobilized personnel to correct authorities’ planning mistakes while leaving mobilized soldiers in poor conditions.[41] A prominent Russian milblogger described “extremely outdated equipment” with which mobilized soldiers were photographed during training in Kostroma as “depressing.”[42] Another Russian milblogger lamented the inability of Russian forces to defend against Ukrainian drones without anti-drone systems, thermal imagers, drones, and radio stations.[43] The milblogger blamed wealthy elites for their failure to understand the importance of anti-drone warfare.[44] The Ukrainian General Staff stated on November 26 that Russian authorities continue to struggle to provide logistical support for mobilized soldiers.[45] Russian civilians are reportedly decreasingly willing to support material drives to fill that gap, though civilian collection drives for mobilized soldiers are ongoing.[46]

Actors in the Russian information space have been divided on whether to accept complaints of Russian soldiers as guidance for improvement or to quash them for decreasing faith in Russian military leadership, as ISW has previously reported.[47] Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) First Deputy Information Minister Danil Bezsonov argued that mobilized soldiers deserve proper treatment, equipment, weapons, and attention and have the right to complain about a lack of proper equipment on November 25.[48] Bezsonov stated the mobilized do not have the right to complain about spending the night on the floor of a military recruitment office or about harsh conditions on the front.[49]

A Russian source framed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s November 25 creation of an electronic state information resource for information on citizens registered with the military as a resource useful in supporting better provisioning of soldiers fighting Ukraine.[50] The database is projected to begin working on April 1 to coincide with spring conscription.[51]

Russian forces’ continued difficulties providing for soldiers’ medical needs are already hindering treatment of civilians in Russian-occupied territories. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on November 26 that Russian forces in Luhansk Oblast have suffered major losses and are increasingly appropriating civilian hospitals in occupied areas for exclusively military use.[52] Civilians in Luhansk Oblast are reportedly facing increased difficulty accessing medical services and finding space in morgues.[53] ISW reported on additional impacts of Russian forces’ growing demand for medical care on November 25.[54]

The Kremlin continues to respond disproportionately to limited domestic resistance to Russia’s war in Ukraine. A prominent Russian news source reported on November 25 that Russian authorities created three additional police controls and dispatched almost a dozen police and Federal Protective Service personnel (FSO) to patrol the Kremlin walls around the clock after an unidentified individual wrote “no to war” on the wall of the Kremlin.[55] The scale of such a response indicates continued Kremlin concern over domestic resistance and commitment to shaping the domestic information space and/or for the security of the Kremlin itself.

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied and annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

See topline text.

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

[1] https://t.me/stranaua/77323; https://t.me/miroshnik_r/9699; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/43013https://www.kp dot ru/daily/27475/4682355/?from=tg

[2] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2022/11/26/rosiyany-pidgotuvaly-105-tys-ditej-do-vyvezennya-v-rosiyu/

[4] https://t.me/malvovabelova/809http://tsargrad-tv.turbopages dot org/tsargrad.tv/s/shows/jeto-moj-rebjonok-istorija-prijomnogo-syna-marii-lvovoj-belovoj_667473

[6] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/pryznacheno-novoho-smotriashcheho-za-v-iaznytsiamy-na-terytorii-rf-ta-tymchasovo-okupovanykh-terytoriiakh-ukrainy.html

[7] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/pryznacheno-novoho-smotriashcheho-za-v-iaznytsiamy-na-terytorii-rf-ta-tymchasovo-okupovanykh-terytoriiakh-ukrainy.html

[9] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/pryznacheno-novoho-smotriashcheho-za-v-iaznytsiamy-na-terytorii-rf-ta-tymchasovo-okupovanykh-terytoriiakh-ukrainy.html

https://twitter.com/blinzka/status/1596489111019425792

https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid024KvKFDVZP4U1YaUrzN...

[51] https://t.me/ctrs2018/16045http://publication.pravo dot gov.ru/Document/View/0001202211250017?index=0&rangeSize=1

understandingwar.org



3. The West needs to boost its industrial capacity fast


The subtitle says it all.


We can't just hope that there will not be another large-scale conflict anytime soon.


Excerpts:


Therefore an imperative exists for urgent action to expand and improve the West’s defence industrial base. As the RUSI report concludes, ‘the war in Ukraine demonstrates that war between peer or near-peer adversaries demands the existence of a technically advanced, mass scale, industrial-age production capability … If competition between autocracies and democracies has really entered a military phase, then the arsenal of democracy must first radically improve its approach to the production of materiel in wartime.

’Good, strategic and courageous decisions are needed now in the West. We may almost be out of time to make them.





The West needs to boost its industrial capacity fast


  • NOVEMBER 24, 2022
  • BY: MICK RYAN
  • THEMES: WAR

The West must re-examine its capacity to produce critical military supplies.

engelsbergideas.com

In February this year, a few days before the Russian Army began its invasion of Ukraine, the Pentagon released a report on the state of the US industrial base. The report examined reduced competition in the defence industrial system since the end of the Cold War, and the resulting increase in costs for military items such as rocket motors, microelectronics, and munitions.

A few months later, a July report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies exploring defence industry from a NATO perspective found that ‘many parts of NATO’s diverse national systems of weapons development and production have very limited surge capability. It can take years for given countries to rebuild stocks of modern and critical weapons.’ In the same month, the US Government Accountability Office described further challenges in the US industrial base, noting that ‘the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Industrial Base Policy office does not yet have a consolidated and comprehensive strategy to mitigate risks to the industrial base.’

The past eight months have been an opportunity to observe the impacts of this reduction on the US, and other nations’ military industrial capacity. The war in Ukraine has seen a return to what one analyst at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) describes as industrial scale warfare. This war has been a massive consumer of people, equipment, fuel, and munitions. The resupply of ammunition has been a major undertaking. Both sides have deployed large forces of both tube and rocket artillery. The use of the ammunition for these weapons has been prodigious, particularly during key phases of the Donbas campaign in May and June.

Recent reports from the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and CNBC have noted concerns in several military institutions about decreasing stockpiles of munitions across the US and NATO countries. There have even been initial meetings among Western procurement officials addressing this issue. And alternative sources of supply, such as the Republic of Korea, have been identified for some Ukrainian munitions requirements.

The West has a problem with constrained defence industrial capacity.

Lulled into a false sense of security in the wake of the Cold War, and because of low usage rates during the conflicts spawned by 9/11, most nations have consolidated and downsized their defence industrial bases. Large-scale continuous production has given way to periodic, lower-risk, small scale (and expensive) production runs. A major industrial expansion programme will be required if the nations of the West are to rebuild the capacity to design, produce and stockpile the large quantities of munitions (and platforms) that will be required for both deterrence and response missions in the twenty-first century. It is a challenge that authoritarian nations such as Russia and China have already been working on.

The Russians are beginning to mobilise their industry. In his September speech in which he announced the partial mobilisation initiative, President Putin spoke of industrial production: ‘The heads of defense industry enterprises will be directly responsible for attaining the goals of increasing the production of weapons and military equipment.’ He also described how ‘the government must address without any delay all aspects of material, resource and financial support for our defense enterprises.’

The Chinese, who have undertaken one of the largest peacetime rearmament programmes in history, have developed a robust industrial capacity able to produce large quantities of nearly every form of defence material. Their ship-building capacity is churning out naval vessels at a rate not seen since the Second World War. They produce their own ground and air combat systems, although there are still areas, such as jet engines and advanced microchips, that are not indigenously produced.

There have been limited similar programmes in the West. There are good reasons for this, particularly in nations where inflation, COVID health costs, and other domestic pressures on government spending can crowd out funding for ‘just in case’ factories and munitions. However, the growing industrial capacity of potential adversaries, reduced warning times for possible conflicts, and the lethality of the modern battlefield means the West must rapidly reconstitute its ability to mass produce and stockpile key weapons and munitions for future conflicts.

War — and the competitive activities beneath the threshold of violence — is now a battle of industrial systems. In some respects, this is a return to previous eras where mass production for conflict, such as during the US Civil War and the World Wars, provided a decisive advantage. The post-Cold War ‘small, exquisite, periodic and expensive’ approach to weapons procurement in the West must end.

The expansion of defence industrial capacity, whether nationally or as part of a larger compact between democratic nations, is an integral part of conventional deterrence. In defending themselves, countries need potential adversaries to know they can (and will) step up production if authoritarians pick a fight. The possession of an expanding industrial base is a demonstration of capability, and importantly, telegraphs the will of peoples to actively defend against the predations and aggression of countries such as Russia and China.

While this issue currently focuses on supporting Ukraine in defeating Russia, a larger and more challenging question is present in the Western Pacific. The industrial capacity of nations such as the US, Japan, India, Korea, and Australia is vital in deterring the wolf warrior diplomacy and military bellicosity of the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese expansion into the South China Sea, and President Xi’s clear designs on retaking Taiwan, provide a very compelling imperative for Western rearmament and industrial expansion in order to deter Chinese aggression. And if China can’t be deterred, nations in the western Pacific and beyond will need a large supply of lethal, long-range munitions to halt Chinese territorial ambitions.

Countries in Europe and beyond will need to make hard decisions about their indigenous industrial capacity. Programmes must consider industrial resilience through duplicating and dispersing capacity. They must also balance production of munitions versus platforms, crewed versus uncrewed systems, and the production of expanded war stocks. This will require investment from both governments and defence corporations. Small, medium, and large enterprises must all be included, as must venture capital firms looking to invest in defence industry and infrastructure. All must be willing to accept greater risk, over shorter time frames, with the development and production of new technologies that may yield a decisive advantage for soldiers, sailors, and aviators.

There is a final dimension to this expanded relationship between government and the defence industry: personnel mobilisation. If industrial mobilisation is a key ingredient of conventional deterrence and response, so too is an expansion in the number of people in military institutions — and in the defence industry itself. New and compressed learning methods will be necessary; expanded military forces will not have the time for current, exquisite training regimes of all-volunteer, professional forces. Industry has a role to play in this, and at the same time, will be required to develop platforms and munitions that possess simpler human-machine interfaces and a much-reduced training liability.

American scholar Anthony Cordesman has recently written on industrial capacity across NATO nations. He describes how ‘in spite of years of studies and warnings, little or no progress has been made in dealing with these issues in most countries with major defense industries and development efforts.’ The growth of potential adversary defence industrial bases, and the growing willingness of countries such as Russia and China to use military force, means there is little time to fix these problems. As the 2020 Defence Strategic Update in Australia noted, ‘reduced warning times mean defence plans can no longer assume Australia will have time to gradually adjust military capability and preparedness in response to emerging challenges.’

Therefore an imperative exists for urgent action to expand and improve the West’s defence industrial base. As the RUSI report concludes, ‘the war in Ukraine demonstrates that war between peer or near-peer adversaries demands the existence of a technically advanced, mass scale, industrial-age production capability … If competition between autocracies and democracies has really entered a military phase, then the arsenal of democracy must first radically improve its approach to the production of materiel in wartime.’

Good, strategic and courageous decisions are needed now in the West. We may almost be out of time to make them.

engelsbergideas.com



4. Congress should end the war in Ukraine by withdrawing from NATO


I thought this was satire from the Babylon Bee, the Onion, or the DIffleblog. But it seems to be a serious article though it is hard for me to take it seriously.


Congress should end the war in Ukraine by withdrawing from NATO

BY BRUCE FEIN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 11/25/22 3:00 PM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3750203-congress-should-end-the-war-in-ukraine-by-withdrawing-from-nato/?utm_source=pocket_saves


Congress can end the war in Ukraine and win a Nobel Peace Prize by enacting a statute withdrawing the United States from NATO — transforming it from a mighty offensive oak into a tiny acorn unalarming to Russia.  

As early as 1798, Congress nullified a defense treaty with France by statute. A congressional end to United States participation in NATO would be no constitutional novelty.  


At the very latest, NATO became obsolete in 1991 when its raison d’etre — the Soviet Empire — dissolved. By remaining in NATO and spearheading its expansion to Russia’s borders with 30 members, the United States provoked President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine. It was poised to join NATO to fortify the encirclement of an already diminished Russia constituting a greater existential threat to it than the existential threat the Cuban missile crisis posed to the United States.  

By withdrawing from NATO, Congress would end the existential threat that occasioned Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and extinguish the executive branch’s ambition for regime change or weakening Russia. The United States is NATO’s locomotive and the other members collectively the caboose. Congressional withdrawal would permit Putin to save face if he ended Russia’s military and political debacle in Ukraine by asserting that his war aim had been achieved. 


The nuclear and conventional military forces the United States can summon to destroy Russia or defend NATO members are staggering. The annual national security expenditures of the United States approach $1.7 trillion. We are the most secure nation in the history of the world. Europe’s NATO members sent the United States an SOS to pacify convulsions in its own backyard when Yugoslavia began to fragment in 1991. Russian forces were deterred from assisting their Serbian friends, as post-Soviet Russia had become a member of the United Nations. United States forces remain in Kosovo, which has pleaded for a permanent United States military base. In sum, NATO without the United States is a paper tiger and no existential threat to Russia with or without Ukraine. 

But Russia is a paper tiger as well. Its military forces have performed miserably in Ukraine. It has been forced to rely on Iran for weaponsRussia’s military spending is a fraction of the collective defense budgets of Europe’s NATO members. The European Union’s GDP is more than eight times Russia’s, and the EU’s per capita GDP is more than double Russia’s corresponding figure.   

Further, Russia has witnessed an incalculable brain drain because of its Ukraine war. Its 145 million population is down by nearly half a million since the start of the year. 

In sum, Russia is no military threat to Europe’s NATO members. Not even close. The United States departing NATO would not leave them in the lurch. 

Withdrawal from NATO by congressional statute and consequent termination of Russia’s war in Ukraine would save the United States hundreds of billions of dollars. The United States is on track to spend over $100 billion to support Ukraine in less than one year. The war shows no sign of ending in the foreseeable future as long as the United States remains in NATO.   

Diplomacy is a non-starter. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky insists on recapturing all territory occupied by Russia, including Crimea. Russia’s industrial-scale war crimes have steeled the Ukrainian people against any concessions. Putin’s propaganda and boasts would make any diplomatic settlement that would deny Russia territorial aggrandizement at Ukraine’s expense unthinkable.  

In other words, the Ukraine war will drag on and on indefinitely draining the United States of $100 billion annually if diplomacy is the exit strategy in lieu of NATO withdrawal.  

Congress would burnish its own image and be lauded as peacemakers worldwide if it set in motion the termination of the Ukraine war by a statute ending United States NATO membership. It would also begin a desperately needed challenge to an imperial presidency.  


Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan and is the author of “American Empire Before The Fall.” 


5.  We can gain a critical edge in the great power competition


Excerpts;

Indeed, innovation is a discovery-based learning endeavor rather than a deliberately designed one. A discovery-based approach enables realization of incremental insights that can lead to new business models or operating concepts. For example, the Amazon Web Services cloud platform grew out of a discovery-based approach for Amazon’s retail business experience. 
This approach has been proven in the military domain. The U.S. Navy’s carriers, for example, were developed through iterative learning geared toward gaining better feedback on battle damage from battleship engagements with opposing navies. These innovations were achieved through iteration at scale and assembling problem-solvers who learned through experimentation. An innovation doctrine would organize such a process at scale.
We believe the development and adoption of an innovation doctrine is required for the safety and security of Western systems and values. Innovation must become a warfighting function and the development of an innovation doctrine must be a top priority. We can — and we must — accelerate our technological innovation. We cannot wait. The country that continuously innovates at speed and scale will win the next war.


We can gain a critical edge in the great power competition

BY PETER A. NEWELL AND ALEX GALLO, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 11/26/22 2:00 PM ET


https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3748698-we-can-gain-a-critical-edge-in-the-great-power-competition/


We live in a time of significant change and uncertainty, as authoritarian regimes challenge Western values and political systems, both militarily and economically. In particular, the rise of China as a superpower suggests unprecedented challenges for the United States and the West’s role in the world. In his recently released National Security Strategy, President Biden called attention to our nation’s economic well-being as inextricably linked with China’s rise.

Strategic competition with China has expanded beyond the traditional battlefield to all sectors of society. And yet, little has changed in the U.S.-led approach to international security and political economy. The United States and its allies must harness a modern arsenal of democracy — an “arsenal of innovation” — to maintain our economic and security standing and the prevailing international order. 

At the close of World War II, the United States led the creation of an international order based on free enterprises and open economies, an unprecedented action. Over the past 70 years, the United States and Western-led systems have faced threats from revisionist actors, including the Chinese Communist Party, Iran’s Islamic regimeKim Jong Un’s North Korea, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Today, these actors are attempting to rewrite international rules and norms — de facto and de jure — to tilt the global system in their favor in the short term and lead it in the long term. Increasingly, they have the power to do so economically and militarily.

This modern context of strategic competition requires the United States to rethink its entire approach to international security. What if we could overhaul how the Department of Defense (DOD), or any organization experiencing stagnancy, collaborates and thinks with the development of an “innovation doctrine”?


An innovation doctrine would define how we organize and act for defense innovation to get ahead of the challenges of strategic competition. We define a doctrine as organized guiding principles (theories or beliefs) that steer our thinking and actions. Such an innovation doctrine would take a holistic approach to problem-solving that fast-tracks ideation and experimentation in order to rapidly surface innovative approaches with minimum resources.

Doctrine organizes, disciplines and accelerates innovation. It enables us to handle discontinuous change, perhaps the leading characteristic in today’s political-strategic environment. Complacency in any line of work can damage your psyche. But it’s downright diabolical when it exists in an environment considered to be the backbone of our nation’s line of defense. Doctrine helps us achieve mission acceleration, creating a process by which innovators can focus more on creative and inventive activities, instead of the friction that inevitably occurs in the absence of a framework or process.

Indeed, innovation is a discovery-based learning endeavor rather than a deliberately designed one. A discovery-based approach enables realization of incremental insights that can lead to new business models or operating concepts. For example, the Amazon Web Services cloud platform grew out of a discovery-based approach for Amazon’s retail business experience. 

This approach has been proven in the military domain. The U.S. Navy’s carriers, for example, were developed through iterative learning geared toward gaining better feedback on battle damage from battleship engagements with opposing navies. These innovations were achieved through iteration at scale and assembling problem-solvers who learned through experimentation. An innovation doctrine would organize such a process at scale.

We believe the development and adoption of an innovation doctrine is required for the safety and security of Western systems and values. Innovation must become a warfighting function and the development of an innovation doctrine must be a top priority. We can — and we must — accelerate our technological innovation. We cannot wait. The country that continuously innovates at speed and scale will win the next war.

Peter A. Newell is CEO of BMNT, an innovation consultancy whose clients include the Department of Defense and other U.S. government agencies. A retired U.S. Army colonel and former director of its Rapid Equipping Force, he chairs the Common Mission Project board.


Alex Gallo is executive director of the nonprofit Common Mission Project, a fellow with the National Security Institute at George Mason University, and a former professional staff member with the House Armed Services Committee.



6. ‘PRC’s political warfare is total war without fighting major kinetic wars’


If we would really understand and embrace what the PRC is doing in terms of political and unrestricted warfare we could develop innovative approaches. But our fear to recognize political warfare as the maincomepetition vehicle hinders our ability to respond or to gain the initiative. Our failure to recognize political warfare is one of our strategic weaknesses. 


‘PRC’s political warfare is total war without fighting major kinetic wars’


Cleo Paskal

  • Published : November 26, 2022, 11:27 pm | Updated : November 26, 2022, 11:27 PM


https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/news/prcs-political-warfare-total-war-without-fighting-major-kinetic-wars?utm_source=pocket_saves



sundayguardianlive.com · November 26, 2022

Kerry Gershaneck, a former US Marine officer and a university professor, speaks to The Sunday Guardian.


Alexandria, Va.: China’s Political Warfare operations are killing millions and destroying economies, yet they seldom get called what they are: acts of war. In this edition of “Indo-Pacific: Behind the Headlines”, we speak with Prof Kerry K. Gershaneck, a former US Marine officer and Asia-based university professor with over 30 years of national-level strategic communications and counterintelligence experience. He literally wrote the book on the topic: Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to ‘Win without Fighting’.

Q: What is political warfare?

A: Political Warfare is not a new concept. State and non-state actors have engaged in it for thousands of years. The US views political warfare as the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. These means are both overt and covert, and include political alliances, economic measures, propaganda, and covert operations such as support for underground resistance against hostile states.

Q: How does China view political warfare?

A: Political Warfare is Beijing’s preferred instrument to achieve its national objectives without having to fight a major kinetic war. Its version is much more expansive—and often much more effective—than that of other countries. China’s political warfare is Total War, waged through a wide array of Unrestricted Warfares.

It is secretive and highly deceptive—characteristics government leaders globally fail to fathom. It seeks to win without fighting, primarily by ensuring that we cannot or will not fight back!

Everything is permitted to include violence, coercion, bribery, propaganda, psychological warfare, legal warfare (or Lawfare), and United Front work that builds coalitions of organizations globally to support the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) objectives.

Its active measures include assassination, kidnapping, and terrorist attacks, as well as chemical warfare and biological warfare that have killed millions worldwide and have corroded the social fabric and economies of entire nations. They also include entropic warfare to demoralize and destabilize countries via corruption and social division, and other forms of coercive, destructive attacks.

In comparing the PRC’s political warfare with that of most other nations, it is crucial to understand the ends China seeks to achieve. The PRC is a coercive, expansionist, hyper-nationalistic, militarily powerful, brutally repressive, fascist, totalitarian state. Through its political warfare, it seeks to impose its hegemony regionally initially, and ultimately globally.

The nature of the CCP-PRC party-state and the ends it seeks to achieve set China apart from all other nations and make its political warfare an existential threat to democracies worldwide.

Q: How does the Xi Jinping era correlate with PRC Political Warfare operations?

A: Since Xi Jinping’s ascent to the pinnacle of China’s Party-State a decade ago, the PRC has become even more sophisticated, ambitious, and assertive in its use of political warfare.

During this time, Xi has been the driving force behind highly aggressive and often-successful political warfare campaigns. Now that Xi has obtained his third term of office and enjoys uncontested authority, he will employ his massive political warfare apparatus even more aggressively.

There has been increasing pushback from some nations that belatedly recognize China’s increasing threat, but results are not conclusive. Yes, populations in many countries now view Xi’s PRC much more negatively. But China has achieved considerable success with United Front operations and “elite capture” in the US and other advanced industrial nations, as well as in much of the developing world. Xi’s political warfare successes must also be measured in the number of votes in the UN that China can now count on and the increases in its infrastructure and PLA access agreements globally.

The CCP has long employed propaganda and disinformation against its enemies, but under Xi it has taken Social Media Warfare to unprecedented heights. He uses social media to flood adversaries’ societies with propaganda and disinformation in order to ultimately weaken people’s faith in democracy and create political instability. In pursuit of social media dominance, the PRC has a civil and military establishment of more than 20 million, including the PLA Strategic Support Force, so-called netizens and a 50-Cent Army, and part-time commentators.

Another form of Unrestricted Warfare Xi has waged against much of the world is biological warfare. The release of the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan is now responsible for the death of more than 15 million people worldwide: it may or may not have been intentional. What is known is the PRC’s failure to fulfill its legal and moral responsibilities: as Covid engulfed China, the CCP allowed millions of infected people to travel globally, while blocking travel to Beijing. The CCP knew full well the virus would engulf and devastate the rest of the world but lied about it, and had its United Front organizations vacuum up PPE from around the world before other nations comprehended the Wuhan Virus threat. Then the CCP initiated a savage political warfare campaign to cover up the PRC’s involvement in the development and spread of the pandemic.

In the CCP’s assessment of what it calls Comprehensive National Power, it was essential that the rest of the world be weakened by the virus as much as China. This Biological Warfare was successful beyond expectations. Among other outcomes, it helped cost the CCP’s most effective adversary the 2020 US presidential election and helped devastate America’s military recruiting efforts. The CCP took close notes, so expect it to employ biological warfare again in pursuit of political warfare objectives.

Q: Has the US responded effectively to the threat?

A: No. This failure goes back decades. The Trump Administration began taking effective steps but ran out of time.

There are many reasons for the ineffective US response to this insidious, increasing destructive threat. Perhaps the most important reason is willful blindness and risk aversion. Even when informed of the existential dangers posed by the PRC’s political warfare, most officials who should be focused on this threat have chosen to ignore the evidence and have refused to act.

These shortcomings are exacerbated by lack of leadership at the top. While senior Trump Administration officials spoke out forcefully regarding PRC political warfare, not one person in the Biden Administration has spoken out on it clearly, forcefully, or consistently. As Presidents Truman and Reagan proved, to fight political warfare effectively there must be strong leadership from the top.

At nearly all levels, Mirror Imaging and the naive projection that everyone is “just like Americans and want the same thing” are serious problems for US officials. Many believed that the CCP would accept values such as democracy, human rights, rule of law, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion if the US accommodated a rising China after the fall of Soviet communism in 1991. Even after the bloody 1989 massacre of democracy protesters, many continued to naively believe that the PRC would eventually accept our values. They ignored the fact the PRC is still dominated by the party whose internal political warfare caused the deaths of an estimated 50-to-70 million Chinese since 1949. For any CCP official to accept our values would be to commit professional (and possibly physical) suicide, especially now under an all-powerful Xi Jinping.

Some in government, business, and academia have been co-opted with the lure of fame and fortune, while others allowed themselves to be compromised and blackmailed. Some are victims of the highly successful march on America’s higher education institutions by the CCP and American enablers. A key PRC political warfare objective is to infiltrate the education systems by co-opting faculty and administrators through funding and other inducements.

Another objective is to propagandize and weaponize students from the PRC at those universities to spike criticism of China by guest speakers, faculty, or other students. Well-known American education institutions proved all-too willing to self-censor and kowtow for cash, access to prestigious China-related activities, and to avoid disruptions by CCP-instigated students.

Even at US government higher education institutions such as the National War College, Army War College, and Foreign Service Institute, the prevailing theme was “Do not anger China, we need to work with it on (fill in the blank).” Consequently, many of those graduating these institutions were denied an honest education regarding the nature of the CCP regime and its political warfare operations.

Defense officials are a particularly high-value target for PRC influence. Often the PRC influences officers and officials indirectly through co-opting faculty and administrators in US military education institutions, and by co-opting American think tanks that influence those officers and officials.

The PLA employs very sophisticated political warfare operations through such organizations as the China Association for International Friendly Contact. These organizations co-opt senior active-duty and retired military officers, as well as executive assistants supporting senior civilian and military officials. Tactics used to lure in these officials include lucrative business deals if, say, a retired admiral or official is willing to support China’s position on regional issues.

Such co-option can reap significant political warfare benefits, as evidenced when a senior National Defense University official acted as both a spy and an agent of influence for the PRC, and when a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff allegedly illegally lobbied Congress to support the PRC in its efforts to annex Taiwan.

The intelligence community has its own problems. It became highly politicized over several decades and said what its political masters wanted it to report. For many years that meant downplaying the PRC threat. Senior analysts routinely softened reports on the massive expansion of the PLA, and totally ignored the threat of PRC political warfare. Good senior intelligence officers who tried to report the PRC’s real intentions and capabilities were silenced or fired for telling the truth.

Q: What should the US do?

A: The Biden Administration must rapidly become firm, coherent, and effective in developing a strategy regarding PRC political warfare. Essential steps the Administration must take to allow it to effectively detect, deter, counter, and defeat PRC political warfare follow:

* Identify the PRC malign influence and interference threat by its rightful name: Political Warfare. The PRC is engaged in war against the United States: that is the term the CCP uses. It is not mere competition or malign influence, but war. Words matter. Correct terminology is essential to properly assess this existential threat and conceptualize national goals and objectives that form the basis of the policies, strategies, and operations to defeat the threat.

* Develop a national strategy to counter PRC Political Warfare. The US must develop a national strategy and establish an operational center of gravity like the Cold War-era US Information Agency (USIA). Without a sound strategy and a credible, empowered center of gravity to operationalize the strategy, the US has no chance of winning this war.

* Establish education programs regarding PRC Political Warfare. The US Departments of State and Defense should establish courses of varying lengths for senior-level and intermediate-level professionals. Further, civilian universities must once again offer such education to those studying international relations, national security, law, business, law enforcement, and political science.

* Vastly improved US capabilities to investigate, disrupt, and prosecute PRC Political Warfare Activities. The US Department of State, Department of Defense, Department of Justice, FBI, and Intelligence Community each play key roles on countering PRC political warfare. Based on past US failures in countering political warfare operations, it is imperative to review existing laws and policies to ensure the existence of clear mission statements, requirements for action, authorities, resources, training, and assessments of success.

* Routinely expose PRC Political Warfare operations. The US government should mandate an annual publicly disseminated report on the CCP’s political warfare against the United States, similar to the Reagan-era annual report on Soviet active measures. The report should include practical advice for leaders and citizens regarding those threats. This report should be augmented by periodic reports on PRC political warfare in geographic regions and against institutions such as the UN and the news media.

* Raise the costs for CCP interference. Too often, the US government has been weak in confronting PRC transgressions, even on American soil. For example, State Department has stopped law enforcement officials attempting to arrest PRC operatives, thereby accommodating PRC political warfare activities. While espionage is an increasing focus of the FBI, political warfare operatives currently face few or no consequences for their harmful actions against the US. It is time to raise the cost of PRC political warfare. For example, when PRC embassy officials threaten students or news media organizations the US government must revoke their diplomatic status.

* Use civil rights laws to take legal action against PRC operatives. The US must better protect Americans of Chinese descent and visiting students from the PRC. For example, although ostensibly a student support association, the real mission of Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSA) is to penetrate academia to subvert democratic institutions and engage in espionage against foreign countries, academics, and Chinese students matriculating abroad. Confucius Institutes engage in censorship, coercion, and surveillance of Chinese students and academics. With existing civil rights legislation such as “Conspiracy Against Rights” law, legal action could be taken against CSSAs, Confucius Institutes, diplomatic, and intelligence officials who threaten, coerce, or intimidate Chinese people (or others) in the United States.

Q: Any areas where India could take leadership?

A: India has invaluable experience confronting PRC political warfare, and it has much to teach those in the Indo-Pacific region confronting the same danger. To this end, India should establish an Indo-Pacific-focused Political Warfare Center of Excellence (PWCE). While Europe has several such centers to deal with threats there, the Indo-Pacific lacks an institution that provides an intellectual foundation for combatting PRC political warfare. The APWCE will highlight India’s leadership, and help like-minded nations develop a common understanding of PRC political warfare and effective responses. Therefore, it is crucial that India initiate such a center.

To download a free copy of Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to “Win without Fighting” by Kerry K. Gershaneck https://www.usmcu.edu/Portals/218/Political%20Warfare_web.pdf

sundayguardianlive.com · November 26, 2022


7. The US Can Contain China, But It Can’t Do It Alone




The US Can Contain China, But It Can’t Do It Alone

Conflict in the Indo-Pacific is becoming more likely — and if it happens, the US will need allies.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-11-27/us-can-contain-china-but-it-can-t-do-it-alone?sref=hhjZtX76


ByBrooke Sample

November 27, 2022 at 2:00 PM GMT+1


The world has kept an increasingly wary eye on the China-US rivalry, with tensions growing more heated by the day between the global superpowers. In a series of columns, Hal Brands explores how a war between the US and China would most likely be waged in the Indo-Pacific region and how four key US allies — Japan, Australia, India and the UK — could shape the outcome of an ever-more-likely conflict.

“Just two years ago, it was still a fringe opinion to suggest that China might invade Taiwan or otherwise touch off a major regional conflict in the 2020s,” Hal writes. “Now, in Washington at least, that view is becoming conventional wisdom.” Unfortunately, the data give that view plenty of credence:

Taiwan Outgunned

China's built-up military dwarfs Taiwan's defensive capability

Hal’s dispatches from America’s most important partner nations in such a conflict also explore how war in the region would have global consequences, as each side of the rivalry is acutely aware.Part I:  America Can Contain China With an Alliance of Five

Part II: Why Japan Is Gearing Up for Possible War With China

Part III: The US’s most reliable ally, Australia, doesn’t have a large military — but defense spending has been on the rise as it becomes clear just how important a role the country plays in the stability of the Indo-Pacific.

Part IV:  If China Invaded Taiwan, What Would India Do?

Part V: If China Invaded Taiwan, What Would Europe Do?

This is the Theme of the Week edition of Bloomberg Opinion Today, a digest of our top commentary published every Sunday. New subscribers to the newsletter can sign up here.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:

Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net



8. China Is Starting to Really Regret Its Friendship With Russia



Can we exploit this?




China Is Starting to Really Regret Its Friendship With Russia

IN HINDSIGHT

Russia was not the first Chinese partner to believe it would win a very fast war and found itself in a hole, but China wasn’t usually pulled into it with them.


Andrew Small

Updated Nov. 27, 2022 4:11AM ET / Published Nov. 27, 2022 12:16AM ET 

The Daily Beast · November 27, 2022

Photo Illustration by Erin O'Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty

“The biggest surprise for China was that Russia totally misjudged its own power. We thought that Russia would win a very fast war,” the Chinese expert explained ruefully, a few weeks after the invasion.

This was not the official line, which was then in the phase of intense attempts to persuade global audiences that Beijing had no idea what was coming. But it was a better reflection of Chinese foreign policy thinking than either playing innocent or repeating ad nauseam that the invasion of Ukraine was the responsibility of the United States and NATO pushing a big power against the wall. One of the main reasons behind Beijing’s resistance to such entanglements in the past was not because partners and allies weren’t useful but because the countries in question risked dragging China down with their mistakes. The “Pakistan model,” which China had been touting, was conditioned by exactly this experience: Beijing didn’t want to get stuck defending every Pakistani intervention in Kashmir or inadvertently drawn into a conflict with India, so it confined itself to providing the capabilities its friend needed and then staying above the fray. Russia was not the first Chinese partner to believe it would win a very fast war and found itself in a hole, but China wasn’t usually pulled into it with them.

The problem Beijing faced in 2022 was that in crucial areas, it was still too soon to make a break with the West. China remained dependent on the U.S. dollar system. For all the speculation about renminbi internationalization, Chinese payment systems, and its new digital currency, China was barely any closer to constructing a resilient alternative financial architecture than it had been in 2014. The technology story was equally problematic: despite the massive push to build its own semiconductor industry, Chinese firms were still painfully reliant on U.S. intellectual property. This left many of its companies exposed if they continued to do business in Russia, much like any other sanctioned entity. It was Huawei’s and ZTE’s sanctions-busting dealings in Iran that had risked decimating the two firms once the United States had the legal justification to go after them with full force. Now articles entitled “Is Russia the New Huawei?” were popping up, as the United States applied the same Foreign Direct Product Rule restrictions to the entire Russian tech sector that had been the final blow for Huawei’s 5G plans in the UK. Circumvent them, and those Chinese firms could kiss goodbye to their advanced semiconductors. The net effect was that from banks to telecoms, most of the companies that might have wished to take advantage of the newly opened vacuum in the Russian market instead faced even greater limitations on their activities.

Almost as bad for China, the narrative about a West divided and in decline was becoming harder to sustain, to the extent that its propaganda outlets stopped trying to advance it at all. Beijing had been able to make considerable hay with Trump, COVID, Brexit, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and much else in recent years. But now it was confronted with a different picture. The sanctions put in place by the United States, Europe, Japan, and a healthy array of other states in Asia were not the thin gruel of 2014 but far more potent in their effect—and disturbingly replicable for China too. Central bank sanctions threatened China’s $3 trillion foreign reserves war chest, prompting emergency meetings between Chinese regulators and banks to discuss how to protect China’s overseas assets from comparable measures. The new U.S.-led plurilateral grouping established on Russian export controls, comprising countries wielding more than half of the world’s GDP, could deny China critical components and technologies too. It was the first such effort on this scale since the entity that did the job during the Cold War—the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, more widely known as COCOM—was retired in favor of a multilateral regime in its aftermath.

“ Beijing was watching the country that was supposed to be its great strategic asset helping to bring about precisely the coalitions and instruments of economic warfare it had sought to prevent.”

In addition, Beijing watched companies simply writing off tens of billions of dollars of assets in Russia as they fled for the exits, going well beyond any formal requirements by Western governments. It undercut one of China’s most important hedges: Xi had personally laid out plans to tighten international firms’ dependence on China in order to form “a powerful countermeasure and deterrent capability against foreigners.” That countermeasure and deterrent now looked a great deal less effective. Surveys of sentiment among international investors in China, which had held up during the early stages of the pandemic, weakened sharply. The combined effect of investors’ anxiety about being swept up in the Russia sanctions directly, and a repricing of risk in light of fears that China could go through a repeat of the Russia experience itself, was one factor.

As the FBI director, Christopher Wray, noted in a speech: “There were a lot of Western companies that had their fingers still in that door when it slammed shut. If China does invade Taiwan, we could see the same thing again, at a much larger scale. Just as in Russia, Western investments built over years could become hostages, capital stranded, supply chains and relationships disrupted.”

Xi’s continued pursuit of a zero-COVID policy, rendering global supply chains increasingly dysfunctional after two years of strict lockdowns in coastal economic hubs, had even greater immediacy for firms’ bottom line. Nearly a quarter of European companies surveyed in April 2022 said they were now considering moving out altogether. As the head of the EU Chamber of Commerce there, Jörg Wuttke, put it:

Western companies are grappling with the scenario that they would have to leave China—just as they are now leaving Russia—if China tried to forcibly integrate Taiwan. And it doesn’t help, of course, that China is adopting Russia’s aggressive rhetoric. The effect is the same as from the COVID policy: foreign companies are hitting the pause button. New investments are suspended for the moment... The president has maneuvered himself into two dead ends at once: He can’t change his COVID policy, and he can’t change anything about his friendship with Vladimir Putin.

The China risk was being priced differently now. The military picture was also troubling to Chinese policymakers. Backed with Western training, arms, and intelligence support, the domestic will to resist, and a public opinion climate in the West that saw the war in starkly black and white terms, Ukraine was proving far more resilient than China had anticipated, even without direct NATO military involvement. The read-across to Taiwan was not reassuring: what would already be an extremely difficult military operation for a PLA inexperienced at real warfighting—potentially involving a complex amphibious assault, and the intervention of both the United States and Japan—now looked even more daunting, especially once the wider strategic context was taken into account. As one widely circulated analysis document by a group of influential Chinese think-tankers argued:

The changing nature of warfare dictates that Putin cannot win in the true sense of the word... The war is being updated in real time on social media, the impact of the war is expanding from the maritime to land to air transport and gradually affecting regional trade links; transnational capital is being withdrawn and projects are being stalled. War is no longer simply a military conflict but a broad economic war. The issue of territorial borders is no longer the most important aspect. Even if Putin wins militarily, he will not win the war.

China’s bet was that the world’s liberal democracies were on the wane, incapable of collective mobilization in the face of a common challenge. Instead, Beijing was watching the country that was supposed to be its great strategic asset helping to bring about precisely the coalitions and instruments of economic warfare it had sought to prevent.

“Even for those who wanted to keep some version of globalization alive, it no longer had China at the center.”

Western policymakers had failed to deter Russia, surprising even themselves with the breadth of the financial measures taken. An economy based on commodity exports could always find buyers too, blunting at least the short-term effectiveness of any efforts to place Moscow under a constrictive squeeze. Yet China could not afford to be sanguine about the consequences for its own situation if the liberal democracies delivered a like-for-like response to a future case of Chinese belligerence.

The factors that made Beijing vastly more capable as a strategic competitor than Moscow—the breadth, scale, and sophistication of its integration into the global economy—also made it more vulnerable if international banks, insurers, software companies, and semiconductor manufacturers suddenly cut it off. Western policymakers and firms were also starting to work backward from some of these worst-case scenarios—which would be immensely costly for them too—to look at how to mitigate their own vulnerabilities. Re-shoring, near-shoring, friend-shoring, diversification, and a host of other phrases had moved from the fringes to the mainstream and into firms’ operational planning. Even for those who wanted to keep some version of globalization alive, it no longer had China at the center. As one European policymaker remarked soon after the invasion: “Everything we had been talking about doing during COVID was still a choice; now it’s a necessity.”


Publisher

No Limits: The Inside Story of China’s War with the West copyright © 2022 Andrew Small. Used by permission of Melville House, Brooklyn NY. All rights reserve

The Daily Beast · November 27, 2022


9. Ukraine’s Victories May Become a Problem for the US



The headline had me scratching my head. Would we not want Ukrainian victories?

Ukraine’s Victories May Become a Problem for the US

Washington has been a big winner from Russia’s fiasco, but a lengthy stalemate could become a huge burden.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-11-27/ukraine-won-t-negotiate-with-putin-a-problem-for-us?sref=hhjZtX76

ByHal Brands

November 27, 2022 at 9:00 AM GMT+1

Ukraine has notched another big victory in its war against Russian aggression: the liberation of the Kherson without a grueling urban battle. Yet that triumph was met with mixed messages from US President Joe Biden’s administration on a very sensitive subject: whether the Ukrainians should begin peace negotiations with Russia.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, argued that the Kyiv government should seek a settlement before the conflict becomes a stalemate like World War I. Other US officials pushed back, saying that Washington would never force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to negotiate or make concessions. “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” Biden pledged.


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It was a rare display of rhetorical messiness by a relatively disciplined administration, which reflects real uncertainty about four critical questions — not least of which is whether a long war strengthens or weakens the US.

For months, Russian forces had been exposed in Kherson, with 20,000 troops holding a vulnerable beachhead on the right bank of the Dnipro River, near where it flows into the Black Sea. The Ukrainians pounced, using US-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and other weapons to isolate those forces, and then grinding them down with a methodical offensive. The Russians couldn’t sustain their position forever; they withdrew in early November rather than have the isolated, ill-supplied units captured or destroyed.

It was just one in a series of Ukrainian victories since early September, including the liberation of large swaths of territory around Kharkiv in the northeast and the severing of the Karch Bridge from Russia to Crimea. But if the Biden administration seems suddenly conflicted about the course of the war, that’s because several key challenges are looming.


First, is Ukraine headed for further gains or a grinding deadlock? On the one hand, the liberation of Kherson has brought Ukrainian forces within HIMARS range of Russia’s remaining supply lines into Crimea, while troops freed up by this victory can prepare for new offensives elsewhere.

On the other hand, Ukraine’s battle-bruised army may need a rest. It may also face stiffer resistance as Russian forces increase their numbers thanks to an influx of conscripts; shorten their supply lines; prepare trenches and other layered defenses; and dig in for the cold weather ahead. To be fair, the Ukrainians have surprised skeptics before. But given that they have now squeezed Russia out of its most vulnerable positions, the next steps could be harder.

Second, how likely is escalation? Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons to hold five regions he has illegally annexed since 2014. Ukraine has walked right over those red lines in eastern Ukraine and Kherson. Yet Crimea is more central to Putin’s narrative of Russian resurrection; its loss could undermine his political prestige more seriously than any prior reversal. So recent events haven’t fully quieted those within the administration who think an imperfect peace may be preferable to even a slight risk of catastrophe.

Third, will the pro-Ukraine coalition hold together? The European allies have mostly been solid; Ukrainian victories have likely ensured international support through the winter. Candid observers, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, acknowledge that Putin has shown no interest in compromise.

Yet Biden’s team still aims to avoid a scenario in which Ukraine is seen to be blocking diplomacy as Europe — deprived of Russian energy supplies — suffers an economically punishing winter. The White House may also be concerned about what a Republican-led House of Representatives will mean for America’s position on Ukraine aid come next year.

This is presumably why the administration urged Zelenskiy to retreat from his earlier statement that Ukraine would only negotiate with the next leader of Russia, which had effectively made regime change in Moscow a Western war aim. If Ukraine wants the support necessary to win the war, it must show that it is open to negotiating an end to it.

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Finally, does a protracted conflict help or hurt the US? If this war has imposed terrible costs on Ukraine, it has been a strategic windfall for Washington. Russia’s military is being reduced to rubble. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is expanding and strengthening its defenses. China is facing greater resistance in the Western Pacific, as Japan, Taiwan and Australia hasten their military preparations. European nations that now see the downsides of dependence on one coercive autocracy are reconsidering their ties with another: Beijing. Amid Putin’s serial struggles in Ukraine, assertive authoritarianism no longer looks like the wave of the future.

Yet key officials wonder whether the US has already reaped all the advantages the Ukraine war has to offer. As time passes, the cost may get higher — in distraction from other regions, in scarce munitions consumed, in vulnerability to crises that break out elsewhere.

There are countervailing considerations: A long war that exposes how pitifully inadequate the US defense industrial base has become could force the nation to get serious about rearmament. Still, if the situation in the Taiwan Strait is deteriorating as rapidly as American officials say, then the premium on ending the Ukraine conflict relatively soon may get higher.


Of all the debates and dilemmas lurking behind the recent talk about negotiations, perhaps the most pressing is the fear that Washington just doesn’t have all the time in the world.

More From This Writer at Bloomberg Opinion:

  • America Can Contain China With an Alliance of Five: Hal Brands
  • If China Invaded Taiwan, What Would Europe Do?: Hal Brands
  • Can the US Take on China, Iran and Russia All at Once?: Hal Brands

Want more Bloomberg Opinion? OPIN <GO>. Web readers click here.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:

Hal Brands at Hal.Brands@jhu.edu

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net



10. Alex Joske on China's Influence Operations Abroad


Excerpts:

ZD: If there's one takeaway from your book that you would want a reader to understand, what would it be?
AJ: I have three.
One is just that I think open-source research has really been neglected, and hasn't been used to its full potential. The book pretty much entirely relies on open-source research to identify some of these MSS officers, front organizations, and operations. And I just don't think it's been fully appreciated by governments.
The second: Governments really need to prioritize countering political interference from the MSS inside the intelligence community, making it a collection priority, not just in the United States but also in third countries.
That gets to my third key point, which is that even though the MSS has had a lot of success in Australia and the United States, it's going have a hard time shifting U.S. policy towards China. The political climate is really changing, and it's the same in Australia.
At the same time, we shouldn't be sort of patting ourselves on the back because we might largely have things under control in our countries. But there are strategically important regions and nations in the Pacific, in Southeast Asia, where China has a pretty broad license and pretty broad foundation and history of running covert influence operations. To achieve our strategic interests in those places we have to counter those activities. And I don't think that's well understood now. We barely understand the history and the practices of these operations in our own countries. That's only happened in the past couple of years, I think. And we also have to apply that understanding to third countries that really matter to our foreign policy and our strategic interests.

Alex Joske on China's Influence Operations Abroad

thebrushpass.projectbrazen.com · by Zach Dorfman · November 21, 2022

Most national security analysts in the United States will tell you that China presents a unique challenge to the U.S.-based order. What U.S. officials refer to as the “scope and scale” of the threat from Beijing outstrips that posed by other Western adversaries, even Russia, these officials say.

Yet the structure of China's intelligence apparatus remains relatively opaque. During the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies developed a granular understanding of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s main civilian intelligence agency, and the GRU, its military counterpart. It’s not that the CIA or the wider U.S. intelligence community had perfect insight into its main rival — far from it. But U.S. officials did have a clear sense of how the KGB functioned.

Not so with China, which remained cut off from the outside world for decades, and whose security services evolved in an isolated ideological hothouse. As China shed its isolationism and emerged as a world power, its intelligence operatives also fanned out across the globe.

But Western intelligence analysts were still looking through a glass, darkly, when it came to Beijing’s espionage abroad. That’s a gap that Alex Joske’s important new book, Spies and Lies: How China's Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World, tries to fill. Joske, a former analyst with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, traces the evolution of the Ministry of State Security (MSS), China’s premier civilian intelligence agency, focusing on the MSS’s ubiquitous — and largely unknown— role in directing and executing Beijing’s influence operations abroad.

Joske’s work challenges the consensus that these influence schemes are largely run through other arms of the Chinese government. He shows the hidden hand of the MSS in such operations for decades.

I recently spoke with Joske. Here's a transcript of our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity.

Alex Joske: I lived in China for six years as a kid and a teenager and picked up Chinese through that and studied at university. And then when I was a university student I started working as a reporter with the student newspaper and ended up writing about the Chinese Students and Scholars Association at my university and how it was linked to the Chinese Embassy and the Chinese government, and how it was trying to censor discussions and organize rallies for Chinese leaders. That was sort of my starting point. From there I just got more interested in the topic and have been working on it ever since.

But my real interest has always been influence operations in this space specifically – so, trying to understand how China exerts political influence around the world. And the area I initially focused on was United Front (UF) and really the activities of the United Front Work Department (UFWD) specifically, which are fascinating on their own. Then I started to feel like there was something missing that we hadn't really accounted for.

The role of professional intelligence agencies in influence work, and your reporting on Christine Fang for example, is a great example of how important the MSS is in the space of influence operations. So it was a kind of natural transition from looking at United Front work to looking at MSS influence work.

Zach Dorfman: To step back for a second, I think that one of the difficulties in talking about Chinese intelligence or influence operations is understanding the Stalinist origins of the system and what UF work is. Can you just explain what the UF is, what that system is, and why it matters?

AJ: The Chinese Communist Party was initially set up by the Soviet Union's COMINTERN and operated closely under its direction initially. And around a year after its establishment, the Chinese Communist Party was directed to basically implement a United Front policy. And at the time what this was about was sort of building alliances between the Chinese Communist Party and other so-called pro-democracy groups, political organizations within China. So the concept that they borrowed from the Soviet Union and Lenin specifically was this idea that even though you are the vanguard party, you have to basically build alliances of convenience with other sympathetic and broadly aligned political organizations so that you can eventually seize power and dominate them.

The Chinese Communist Party really took this idea of the United Front, and United Front work, and made it its own. It has developed its own traditions and it really credits United Front work as an important part of its victory against the Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War, where it managed to flip enemy generals, encouraged defections, manipulated politics, inside the KMT to stifle its effort to suppress and push back against forces from the Chinese Communist Party. This tradition continues to this very day, where you have the United Front Work Department, which is really responsible for a lot of these efforts to manage and build the party's relationship with people outside of the Chinese Communist Party.

It's a difficult concept to understand because there's no clear parallel in Western governments. It's closely related to intelligence work, but it's not quite intelligence work. But that also doesn't mean it's not a problem. As I try to show, it’s well integrated with intelligence operations and it really has been from pretty much the beginning.

ZD: Can you give a couple examples of these United Front organizations? One that I can think of in San Francisco and the Bay Area, which has a whole variety of them is — and this isn't obviously just San Francisco, this is worldwide — are “peaceful reunification” organizations.

What's fascinating to me about United Front work, and is almost shocking, is that I even hesitate to say that it's hiding in plain sight because it's not even hiding. It's just in plain sight. They're just like, no, that's what we are: We are a Chinese government-linked organization that is devoted to, in their terms, obviously fostering better relations between China and Taiwan with the idea of an eventual Anschluss. But it's one of those things that I think people don't understand and would be shocked that it's just been allowed to fester for as long as it has.

AJ: I think you're right that overseas, it's peaceful reunification councils that are some of the most easily identifiable and important United Front organizations. Their stated goal is to essentially ease the path for a PRC takeover of Taiwan. And a lot of them work very closely with the United Front Work Department. You'll see them traveling to Beijing for conferences hosted by the United Front Work Department, where they're educated on relevant policies and build connections with actual Chinese Communist party officials. And then back in their home countries, they'll often engage in a lot of political mobilization and activism. They’ll be building up community networks trying to position themselves as genuine community organizations that represent Chinese people. And they've done that quite successfully in the past, in Australia for example.

But I think they’re really interesting organizations, in a way, because they are often at that interface between overt and covert work in the sense that you'll have an organization that, at face value, even if it has weird alignment with Chinese Communist party goals, looks like a genuine community organization.

Then below the surface, you'll find actual tasking from Chinese Communist Party officials. You'll find involvement in some cases with organized crime networks. You'll find involvement in corruption and also actual covert operations intelligence work. These organizations can often give a legal sort veneer and appearance of normalcy to something that actually involves some more covert activity.

ZD: Can you describe the prior – I think, in your argument, mistaken — consensus around the work of the Ministry of State Security, which is China's premier civilian intelligence agency, and these UF entities? This is a striking part of your book, and I think an unusual and somewhat revolutionary view of their relationship and individual functions.

AJ: A lot of people don't really get the distinction in the sense that so much of what looked like CCP-backed political influence efforts could be publicly linked to people who were connected to the United Front Work Department.

And that, I think, has led to a lot of this [political influence work] being actually attributed to the United Front Work Department in a kind of command-and-control structure, essentially. But the argument I make is that what's actually happening is you have these United Front networks that are involved in a whole range of activities, and then you have professional intelligence agencies coming in behind the scenes and actually directing some of these political influence operations and other covert activities.

In a sense, I argue that we've been mistaking that kind of the cover for the actual puppet master in these activities. And I think [the MSS's hidden role] implies a whole new degree of sophistication, professionalism to these activities where it's not just some weird entity called the United Front Work Department that builds relationships with people. It's actually a professional intelligence agency like the MSS that runs espionage operations, has one of the largest cyber activities in the world. Right now it's probably the world's largest foreign intelligence agency around the world.

ZD: Can you talk a little bit about the particular bureau within the MSS that handles these operations? It's fascinating, but I think opaque. Can you talk about the MSS’s 12th Bureau, and how it came to evolve and how it functions within the MSS and the larger kind of influence apparatus in China?

AJ: The structure of the Chinese intel community is still pretty mysterious in some ways. The way it coordinates, the way different parts integrate, I think people actually working professionally on this inside intelligence agencies probably still have a lot of questions about these fundamental aspects of China's intelligence community.

But I've focused my research on what's known as the 12th Bureau, or internally as the Social Investigation Bureau or the Social Liaison Bureau of the Ministry of State Security. And this is the part of the ministry that seemed to really excel at integrating with United Front work, at exploiting existing United Front networks for covert and clandestine work. It's still very mysterious to me.

I'm not sure exactly when it was set up, but probably sometime in the eighties. But from the beginning it's had a clear focus on some quite creative forms of cover, and a kind of elite way of operating. You seem to get some of the best and most professional and most politically backed MSS officers turning up in the 12th Bureau, running some of the ministry’s more sensitive operations.

That's why they've kind of excelled at political influence specifically: Because they've been able to plug into both the Chinese political system and foreign political systems through academic cover, cultural cover, business cover, media cover, and really place this bureau as an interface between a lot of China's engagement with the outside world.

ZD: In the book, you give a fascinating, almost nested argument about the MSS’s organizational history and why it was involved in influence operations the way it was. Some of this traces back to the fact that the MSS, in your retelling, was basically kicked out of embassy work, official cover work by Chinese leadership decades ago. We don't often get that kind of institutional history of an intelligence agency.

The MSS is a relatively young intelligence agency. Can you talk a little bit about that, and why its very distinct evolution has led it to doing the kinds of influence operations it does today, and in the way that it does them?

AJ: For such an old communist party, the MSS is a pretty new addition to its bureaucratic lineup. It was established in 1983. Part of what made it unique in Chinese intelligence history is the way that it integrated foreign intelligence and domestic counterintelligence work. It combined police powers, law enforcement work, with foreign intelligence and subsumed some of its predecessors that were involved in those activities.

Even though it was kind of set up with a pretty broad remit — certainly broader than its predecessors — it was actually established under a kind of political cloud. The MSS never really seemed to have the same kind of backing from Deng Xiaoping that military intelligence had. For a long time, that led people to, I think, dismiss the MSS and pay a lot more interest, put a lot more stake in, military intelligence operations, which seemed more sophisticated.

The MSS, on these political grounds, was largely denied access to diplomatic cover. So it had to basically rely on working within China, and finding less official forms of sending operatives overseas.

But I've argued that for the kinds of operations that the 12th Bureau has really excelled at — long-term cover and political influence work — they don't actually need diplomatic cover. They've actually specialized, in a way, in chaperoning people around China. So operating within China, but with an eye to building China's influence externally.

Another thing that actually didn't make it into the book, because I found out after I submitted the manuscript, was that Chou En-lai, the former premier of China who really set up and presided over China's intelligence apparatus until his death in 1976, he actually credited his two intelligence agencies, the Ministry of Public Security and the Central Investigation Department, both predecessors to the MSS, with two great feats. And those feats were winning him an emperor and winning him a president.

The emperor that he's talking about is Puyi, the last emperor of China, who was reformed by the Ministry of Public Security’s sort of reeducation efforts. And then the president was a former president of Taiwan who defected to China in the 1960s. So I think it's really striking example, because the two great achievements he's attributing to his intelligence agencies are not what we'd normally think of as intelligence operations or espionage — they’re essentially influence operations.

ZD: Those are great examples of the deeply rooted nature of influence operations and MSS work. One that I think is pretty surprising — less surprising now I suppose, because there's been a bit of a real shift in the China conversation in a lot of American political discourse — but nonetheless, the idea that the discussion around “peaceful rise” — the idea that China would emerge as a world power without seeking to overturn the current global order, and would indeed strengthen it — was, itself, an influence operation led by the MSS, or designed by people that were closely aligned with the MSS.

Can you talk a little bit about that? That was such an accepted predicate of US-China relations for almost two decades. It's almost uncanny to see you write about, argue for, and substantiate, the idea that this kind of fundamental, this cornerstone, of US-China relations was predicated on an influence operation.

AJ: I think peaceful rise, some people doubted it, some people accepted it to different degrees. Regardless, it became a concept that framed discussions around China and helped give a brand to a lot of the different ideas and hopes people had for China's rise.

I found that it had its origins in the MSS 12th Bureau. This wasn't some theory that came out of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It came out of a front organization that was established and staffed by undercover offices of the MSS 12th Bureau who specialized in U.S. operations. And, specifically, in political influence operations.

Part of why I really focused on the peaceful rise story and the MSS’s role in it is I feel like there's been a tendency to underappreciate the strategic significance of intelligence operations, to kind of see them as things that can push the direction of a battle but aren't really shaping the world's direction.

A lot of other people who study intelligence have the same frustration with how these things are viewed. But here you have something where these agencies aren't just trying to steal a piece of information, actually trying to really fundamentally shape and manipulate how people understand China, the actual basis for policy-making on China. I think it was incredibly effective, and it also had this effect of positioning the MSS officers who were involved publicly undercover in the theory of China's peaceful rise as kind of reformists and liberals within the Chinese Communist Party. So it gave them a lot more currency and access to foreign capitals, to foreign scholars. They weren't just putting out this theory of China's peaceful rise, they were going to embassies, the U.S. Embassy, and talking about it, saying the same to the Australian Embassy. They were bringing over scholars from the United States educating them on this idea, giving them access to officials and reformists inside China. And they were really successfully at building up this world that actually backed up the theory of China's peaceful rise.

ZD: Is there any other example from your book that you'd like to share about a U.S. operation, an influence operation, that was being ultimately overseen and driven by the MSS, but appeared to either be run out of the UF, or where even the UF connections weren't present? Was there anything, in particular, that was eyebrow-raising for you in any specific cases?

AJ: It really surprised me, realizing that there was more than just Katrina Leung. Leung, who I think with the understanding we have now, we would look at as a United Front figure, became an asset of the FBI while actually I think ultimately reporting to the 12th Bureau of the MSS. But it turns out that the 12th Bureau was also reaching out to dozens of people in that sort of community, in those United Front circles in America, and that many of those same people were also FBI assets. So it's kind of remarkable that the MSS, which I think genuinely didn't have particularly advanced tradecraft, in fact quite rudimentary tradecraft at that point, managed to basically run successful double agent operations against the FBI across California.

People have dismissed Chinese intelligence agencies because they weren't using really sophisticated tradecraft. But if you look at what they actually managed to achieve — sure it might have made it harder for them to, for example, penetrate the CIA. But building up those sorts of community networks, building political influence, acquiring technology, building United Front networks, running double agents, recruiting billionaire proxies — none of that was actually impeded by this lack of sophisticated tradecraft. To some extent [China's intelligence successes] might have even been aided by [their often-rudimentary methods], because it encouraged this kind of dismissive attitude towards the MSS. It encouraged people not to prioritize the MSS and look more closely at what was actually going on. And now, in response to heightened competition with the U.S., the MSS actually does have pretty good tradecraft. Combining that with all the successes they've had without good tradecraft is a pretty scary picture.

ZD: If there's one takeaway from your book that you would want a reader to understand, what would it be?

AJ: I have three.

One is just that I think open-source research has really been neglected, and hasn't been used to its full potential. The book pretty much entirely relies on open-source research to identify some of these MSS officers, front organizations, and operations. And I just don't think it's been fully appreciated by governments.

The second: Governments really need to prioritize countering political interference from the MSS inside the intelligence community, making it a collection priority, not just in the United States but also in third countries.

That gets to my third key point, which is that even though the MSS has had a lot of success in Australia and the United States, it's going have a hard time shifting U.S. policy towards China. The political climate is really changing, and it's the same in Australia.

At the same time, we shouldn't be sort of patting ourselves on the back because we might largely have things under control in our countries. But there are strategically important regions and nations in the Pacific, in Southeast Asia, where China has a pretty broad license and pretty broad foundation and history of running covert influence operations. To achieve our strategic interests in those places we have to counter those activities. And I don't think that's well understood now. We barely understand the history and the practices of these operations in our own countries. That's only happened in the past couple of years, I think. And we also have to apply that understanding to third countries that really matter to our foreign policy and our strategic interests.

Get in touch at zach@projectbrazen.com or securely at brushpass1@protonmail.com.


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thebrushpass.projectbrazen.com · by Zach Dorfman · November 21, 2022



11. Manila’s Tricky US-China Balancing Act


When I left the Philippines in 2007 I told my Filipino friends that my hope was that someday I would be able to bring my family to the beautiful beaches of the South Philippines. There is so much tourist potential there.


Manila’s Tricky US-China Balancing Act

The US’s vice president comes calling for more than ‘resorts and beaches’

asiasentinel.com · by Asia Sentinel

By: Viswa Nathan


The November 21 visit of US Vice President Kamala Harris to the Philippines has given new impetus to a lingering drive against a US-Philippine military alliance. Some are concerned that the existing agreements could put the Philippines at risk should there be an armed conflict between China and the US.

This risk appears to have lessened somewhat following the three-hour-plus meeting between Chinese president Xi Jinping and US president Joe Biden on Nov 14, in Bali, Indonesia, just before the 17th G20 meeting. But then came Harris on an official visit to the Philippines, some say to anchor Manila inextricably to Washington’s Asia-Pacific agenda. It rekindled the fear of the Philippines getting caught in the Sino-US rivalry.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., receiving the visitor at the presidential palace, tried to calm nerves. In a light banter about Harris’ planned trip to Palawan, which lies in a sensitive area of the South China Sea, regularly patrolled by Chinese coast guard vessels, asserting Beijing’s claim to the waters, Marcos said: “I’m sure you’re just going to the resorts and the beaches.”

However, it was serious business when they got to formal talks. Clear signs emerged that the foreign policy pursued by Marcos’ predecessor, President Rodrigo Duterte, who abused the former US president Barack Obama with epithets and went on to embrace the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, is now history. To the chagrin of the faction seeking to push Manila to abandon the military pact with the US, Marcos described Harris’ visit as “a strong symbol” of US-Philippine relations remaining important.

“I do not see a future for the Philippines that does not include the United States,” Marcos said. The statement was true to what Marcos defined in his policy statement soon after assuming office: A friend to all, enemy to none.

Harris told Marcos that Washington’s and Manila’s mutual concern about security for the region is a vital part of their bilateral relationship. As it relates to the Philippines, said Harris, “I will say that we must reiterate, always, that we stand with you in defense of international rules and norms as it relates to the South China Sea. An armed attack on the Philippines’ armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft in the South China Sea would invoke US mutual defense commitments. And that is an unwavering commitment that we have to the Philippines.”

Whether or not it was warmongering, warning China that the US interest is not confined to Taiwan and that it goes far beyond securing Washington’s Asia-Pacific allies, Marcos thanked Harris for the firm commitment she had reiterated “for the US to be defensive of the Philippines.”

The following day, Harris was in Palawan, some 320 km from islands in the Spratlys that China has militarized with airfields and missiles. There, on board a Philippine Coast Guard vessel, Harris told Manila’s maritime law enforcers: “We must stand up for principles such as respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, unimpeded lawful commerce, the peaceful resolution of disputes, and the freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea, and throughout the Indo-Pacific.”

These words sent a new chill down the spines of those worried that the US-Philippine military pacts could drag their country deep into a dangerous situation should a Sino-US conflict erupt over Taiwan or whatever other reason.

Among the three treaties between Washington and Manila, the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) of August 1951 and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) sealed in April 2014 are the most sensitive.

MDT provides that each party will rise to the aid of the other in the event a third-party attacks either country, its ships, aircraft, or other assets in the Pacific region. This provision is not as alarming as some make out. For example, if Beijing attempted to take over Taiwan forcefully, and the US rose in Taiwan’s defense, Manila is not obliged, according to analysts well-versed in international law, to rise to the aid of the US, for the US is not the victim of a foreign attack.

Marcos père had drawn the distinction in the face of US pressure for military support in the Vietnam War by sending only a civic action group comprising medical and civilian personnel.

So, what concerns the security of the Philippines most is EDCA, which former president Benigno Aquino III signed in April 2014, less than a year after instituting proceedings in the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague—allegedly at the instigation of Washington—against China’s claim over most of South China Sea.

EDCA is seen as a clever pact that circumvents the provision in the 1987 Constitution banning permanent foreign military bases in the country. Under this treaty, America will not seek permanent bases like Clark airbase and Subic Bay naval base, which were under total US control, but decommissioned in the early 1990s. Instead, EDCA provides for stationing US military personnel and hardware, on a rotation basis, in chosen Philippine military facilities “at the invitation of the Philippines” to provide “humanitarian assistance and disaster relief” besides deepening “defense cooperation,” developing individual and collective capacity “to resist armed attack,” and creating maritime security and “maritime domain awareness.”

This program is already in force in five Philippine defense facilities, and five more are being sought by Washington.

EDCA critics fear these sites could become China’s first-strike targets if Washington and Beijing crossed swords. They believe that if Manila repeals EDCA, China will have no reason to move against the Philippines. They claim China is abandoning its wolf-warrior diplomacy for a smile diplomacy which Xi Jinping launched at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in Bangkok this month. Meeting Marcos there, Xi spoke of writing a new chapter in China-Philippines relations with both countries keeping “strategic independence” while upholding “peace, openness and inclusiveness” and “staying the course of regional cooperation,” the Chinese foreign ministry reported on its website.

That smile diplomacy was reflected in how Beijing dealt with Chinese rocket debris a Philippine coastguard boat recovered from disputed waters. Philippine coast guard officials claimed Chinese coastguards intercepted them and “forcefully” took away the debris. In contrast, China said: “After friendly consultation, the Philippine side returned the floating object to the Chinese side on the spot, and the Chinese side expressed gratitude to the Philippine side.”

But quoting the adage, can a leopard change its spots, a seasoned China watcher asked whether the communist rulers of China could be trusted. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, he cited two examples.

In the 1950s, relations between China and India were rooted in the principle of brotherhood, known as Hindi-Chini Bhai, Bhai. However, after the Dalai Lama fleeing from the Chinese invasion of Tibet sought asylum in India, they became enemies; a border war broke out in 1962, and border skirmishes continue to this day. Second, in June 2017, 20 years after Britain handed over Hong Kong to China based on the Sino-British Joint Declaration defining Hong Kong’s future for 50 years, which is also lodged with the United Nations, Beijing unilaterally declared that it was just a historical document that no longer had a practical significance.

The Philippines, of course, has its own experience over the 2016 decision in favor of the Philippines by an independent arbitral tribunal established under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea on China’s claims of ownership of nearly the entire South China Sea. China’s response at the time was to dismiss the ruling as “nothing more than a piece of waste paper.”

These, the China watcher said, are lessons for the Philippines to ponder when trying to balance itself between Washington and Beijing as “a friend to all.”

asiasentinel.com · by Asia Sentinel


12. Indian-American-led company gets USD5 million to develop 'zero-pressure' tires for US Army




Indian-American-led company gets USD5 million to develop 'zero-pressure' tires for US Army

ptinews.com

Updated: Nov 26 2022 8:28AM

Washington, Nov 26 (PTI) An Indian-American-led company has received USD5 million in funding to develop and manufacture path-breaking 'zero-pressure' tires for the US Army, it said in a statement.

The Ohio-based American Engineering Group (AEG), headed by Kerala-born Abraham Pannikottu, has developed an innovative carbon fiber pressure zero tire technology, which the Pentagon now wants it to manufacture for its armed forces, the company said on Friday.

The first pressure zero tire will be delivered in 2023, AEG founder and CEO Pannikottu said.

ptinews.com


13. Khamenei's niece arrested after calling for foreign governments to cut ties with Iranian regime


Are we going to see a revolution?


Revolution is an attempt to modify the existing political system at least partially through unconstitutional or illegal use of force or protest.

–(Page  xvi) https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/books/pdf/CasebookV2S.pdf

Insurgency (or revolutionary warfare), then, is used to describe the means by which a revolution is attempted or achieved.

–(Page  xvi) https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/books/pdf/CasebookV2S.pdf

Resistance is a form of conflict involving the collective and subversive efforts of participants against an authority or structure. Broad in conceptual scope, but also limited in reach, resistance can be carried out through either violent or nonviolent means (or both) on either an international or an intranational scale.

–(Page 7) https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/books/pdf/typology-resistance.pdf


Khamenei's niece arrested after calling for foreign governments to cut ties with Iranian regime | CNN

CNN · by Hira Humayun · November 27, 2022

CNN —

Farideh Moradkhani, the niece of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been arrested after calling on foreign governments to cut all ties with the Iranian government.

Moradkhani was arrested on Wednesday when she went to the prosecutor’s office in response to a court order, according to a tweet from her brother Mahmoud Moradkhani.

In a video statement shared by her brother prior to her arrest, Moradkhani called on people around the world to urge their governments to cut ties with the Iranian regime amid protests sweeping the nation, and to ask their governments to “stop any dealings with this regime.”


Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting with a group of students in Tehran, Iran, on November 2.

West Asia News Agency/Reuters

“Oh, free people, be with us and tell your governments to stop supporting this murderous and child-killing regime. This regime is not loyal to any of its religious principles and does not know any laws or rules except force and maintaining its power in any possible way,” she said.

“Now in this critical moment in history, all of humanity is observing that Iranian people, with empty hands, with exemplary courage and bravery are fighting with the evil forces,” she said. “At this point in time, the people of Iran are carrying the burden of this heavy responsibility alone by paying with their lives.”


Iranian Leader Press Office/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images/FILE

Iran's supreme leader praises paramilitary for crackdown on 'rioters' and 'thugs'

Farideh Moradkhani said Iranians are at war with governments who support the Iranian regime, and called on democratic countries to recall their representatives from Iran and expel the representatives of Iran from their own countries.

“What is urgently needed is not to support this regime that killed thousands of Iranians in four days in November 2019 while the world was only watching,” she added.

Farideh and Mahmoud Moradkhani are the children of Ali Tehrani, a cleric and longtime opposition figure who was married to the supreme leader’s sister Badri Hosseini Khamenei. Tehrani died last month.

Farideh Moradkhani has been arrested by the regime before. She was arrested on January 13 while on her way home. Following her arrest Iranian security reportedly searched Moradkhani’s house and seized some of her belongings, according to human rights organizations.

Iran’s ongoing protest movement was initially sparked by the death of 22-year-old woman Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s morality police in September.

The unprecedented national uprising has taken hold of more than 150 cities and 140 universities in all 31 provinces of Iran, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Chief Volker Turk.


Iranian demonstrators taking to the streets of the capital Tehran on September 21 during a protest for Mahsa Amini.

AFP/Getty Images

More than 14,000 people, including children, have been arrested in connection with the protests, according to Turk. He said that at least 21 of them currently face the death penalty and six have already received death sentences.

The violent response of Iran’s security forces toward protesters has shaken diplomatic ties between Tehran and Western leaders.

On Saturday, Khamenei praised the country’s Basij paramilitary force for its role in the deadly crackdown on anti-regime protesters.

Meeting with Basij personnel in Tehran on Saturday, Khamenei described the popular protest movement as “rioters” and “thugs” backed by foreign forces and praised “innocent” Basij fighters for protecting the nation.

The Basij is a wing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and has been deployed to the streets as protests have swelled.

CNN’s Hamdi Alkhshali contributed to this report.

CNN · by Hira Humayun · November 27, 2022


14. Iranian drone advisers who were helping Russia bombard Ukraine were killed in Crimea, Kyiv official says






Iranian drone advisers who were helping Russia bombard Ukraine were killed in Crimea, Kyiv official says

Business Insider · by Alia Shoaib


A Russian drone, considered by Ukrainian authorities to be an Iranian-made Shahed-136, over Kyiv on October 17, 2022.

REUTERS/Roman Petushkov

  • Ukraine killed Iranians who were in Crimea to advise Russians on how to use Iranian-made drones.
  • Ukraine's top security official confirmed previous Israeli reports that Iranians had been killed.
  • Iran initially denied sending the drones to Russia, but later admitted to sending a small number before the war.

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Ukraine killed Iranians who were advising Russians on how to pilot Iranian-made drones in Crimea, Ukraine's top security official confirmed, per a report.

"You shouldn't be where you shouldn't be," Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine's national security and defense council, said in an interview in Kyiv, according to The Guardian.

"They were on our territory. We didn't invite them here, and if they collaborate with terrorists and participate in the destruction of our nation we must kill them."

Danilov said that the Iranians were in occupied Crimea to help Russians operate the Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones.

The White House said in October that Iran had sent advisers to Crimea to provide drone training and maintenance to Russian pilots.

Iran initially denied having supplied Russia with drones, which are often called "kamikaze" or "suicide" drones because they detonate on impact.

Ukraine claimed that Russia has used the drones to strike infrastructure targets and power stations across the country.

Despite public denials, a Russian defense official was caught on a hot mic in October admitting that it was an open secret that the Kremlin had in fact imported Iranian drones.

Iran has since admitted to sending a "small number" of drones to Russia, but claimed it did so months before the war in Ukraine began.

Ukraine has cast doubt on Iran's claims, and the military has claimed it has evidence to suggest some of the drones were supplied after Moscow's invasion in February.

Danilov's comments confirm previous reports in the Israeli press from October which said that 10 Iranian advisers have been killed through Ukrainian strikes on Crimea. Danilov confirmed that there had been casualties, but did not say how many.

"The Iranians keep insisting that they are not suppliers of weapons to the Russian Federation but we need confirmation. Do we have this confirmation as of today? No we don't." Danilov said.

"We understand these things don't fly without [people] learning how to operate them, and the Russians don't have the brains to figure it out themselves."

The UK and the EU have announced sanctions on Iran for providing Russia with the Shahed-136 drones.


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Business Insider · by Alia Shoaib





De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com


V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Subscribe to FDD’s new podcastForeign Podicy
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

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