Quotes of the Day:
"I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him."
- Abraham Lincoln
"An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come."
- Victor Hugo
"In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful."
- Leo Tolstoy
1. RUSSIA-UKRAINE WARNING UPDATE: RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 25, 2022
2. UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 8
3. Ukraine Conflict Update - Feb 26, 2022 | SOF News
4. The Rhyming of History & Russian aggression
5. Why Ukraine Matters by Francis Fukuyama
6. Ukraine military says soldier blew himself up on bridge to halt Russian advance
7. War in Ukraine and the forgotten lesson of Munich
8. War in Ukraine: How we got here — and what may come next
9. The world could do more to stop Putin. Here’s why it won’t.
10. Opinion | Why Is Putin at War Again? Because He Keeps Winning.
11. China is Russia's best hope to blunt sanctions, but wary
12. How is Beijing Portraying Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine for the Chinese Public?
13. PROF MICHAEL CLARKE We’ve reached Peak Putin and he’s sure to fall – but with China bailing him out he will be the new Kim Jong Un
14. Zelensky defiant as Putin's noose tightens around Kyiv
15. Putin’s War at Home
16. The Man Behind Putin's Military
17. China struggles to navigate its partnership with Russia following Ukraine invasion
18. Ukraine Now. Taiwan Next?
1. RUSSIA-UKRAINE WARNING UPDATE: RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 25, 2022
Graphic at the link.
RUSSIA-UKRAINE WARNING UPDATE: RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 25, 2022
Mason Clark, George Barros, and Kateryna Stepanenko
February 25, 3:00 pm EST
Russian forces entered major Ukrainian cities—including Kyiv and Kherson—for the first time on February 25. Russian forces’ main axes of advance focused on Kyiv (successfully isolating the city on both banks of the Dnipro River). Russian military operations along Ukraine’s northern border have been less well-planned, organized, and conducted than those emanating from Crimea. They have also been less successful so far. The divergence in performance likely arises in part from differences in the composition and organization of the Russian ground forces elements in the Western Military District and Belarus (to Ukraine’s north) and Southern Military District and Black Sea Fleet (to its south and east), as ISW has previously observed.[1] Determined and well-organized Ukrainian resistance around Kyiv and Kharkiv has also played an important role in preventing the Russian military from advancing with the speed and success for which it had reportedly planned.[2] The Russian military has deployed additional forces to southeastern Belarus, likely beyond those Moscow had planned to use against Ukraine, to offset these problems and challenges. Russian forces remain much larger and more capable than Ukraine’s conventional military, however. Russia will likely defeat Ukrainian regular military forces and secure their territorial objectives at some point in the coming days or weeks if Putin is determined to do so and willing to pay the cost in blood and treasure.
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces entered the outskirts of Kyiv on the west bank of the Dnipro on February 25. Russian sabotage groups in civilian clothes are reportedly active in downtown Kyiv.
- Russian forces have so far failed to enter Kyiv’s eastern outskirts. Ukrainian forces have successfully slowed Russian troops, which have temporarily abandoned the failed attempt to take the city of Chernihiv and are instead bypassing it.
- Elements of the Russian 76th VDV (Airborne) division have concentrated in southeastern Belarus likely for use along the Chernihiv-bypass axis toward Kyiv in the next 24 hours.
- Russian forces will likely envelop Kharkhiv in the next 24 hours after failing to enter the city through frontal assaults on February 24.
- Russian forces have achieved little success on frontal assaults or envelopments against Ukrainian forces in Donbas but may not have intended to do more than pin Ukrainian forces in the east.
- North of Crimea, Russian forces fully captured Kherson and are likely on the verge of seizing Melitopol in the east. Unconfirmed reports indicate that Russian forces had bypassed Kherson earlier and headed directly for Mykolaiv and Odessa.
- Russian forces may be assembling in Stolin, Belarus, to open a new line of advance against Rivne in western Ukraine.
Russian forces carried out additional air and missile strikes on Kyiv and other major cities around 3:00 am local time on February 25. ISW cannot confirm the frequency and targets of overnight Russian strikes at this time. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are increasingly targeting civil infrastructure and residential buildings “to intimidate the population of Ukraine.”[3] Russian forces continue to refrain from using the likely full scale of Russian air and missile capabilities, likely seeking to limit the negative imagery of heavy Ukrainian civilian casualties. However, Russian forces will likely increase their use of bombardments in coming days to overcome heavier-than-anticipated Ukrainian resistance.
Russian ground forces are advancing on four primary axes, discussed in turn below:
- Belarus/Kyiv;
- Kharkiv;
- Donbas; and
- Crimea-Kherson.
1) Belarus/Kyiv axis: Russian forces entered the outskirts of Kyiv on the west bank of the Dnipro on February 25. Russian forces have so far failed to enter Kyiv’s eastern outskirts. They have abandoned for now the failed attempt to take the city of Chernihiv and are instead bypassing it. Elements of the 76thVDV (Airborne) division have concentrated in southeastern Belarus likely for use along the Chernihiv-bypass axis toward Kyiv in the next 24 hours.
- Russian forces entered the northwest Kyiv suburb of Obolon, on the western bank of the Dnipro River, as of 11:00 am local time.[4] The Ukrainian General Staff asked residents of Obolon to shelter in place and make Molotov cocktails the morning of February 25.[5] The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed at 3:30 pm local time on February 25 that Russian forces had isolated Kyiv from the west.[6]
- Russian forces bypassed the city of Chernihiv on the eastern approach to Kyiv after being halted by Ukrainian forces much of February 24-25.[7] The UK Defense Ministry reported at 6:00 pm local time that Russian forces opened a “new route” to Kyiv after failing to capture Chernihiv.[8] Russian forces have not yet entered Kyiv’s eastern outskirts.
- The Ukrainian general staff reported Russian VDV (airborne) troops redeployed from Belarus to the east bank of the Dnipro River due to damage to the Hostomel military airport on the western bank, now in Russian hands after Ukrainian forces withdrew sometime early on February 25.[9] Russian forces failed to secure Hostomel airport by air assault and appear to have taken it only when mechanized units from Belarus arrived. Ukrainian defenders appear to have damaged the runway enough to make it unusable, preventing Russian forces from airlifting troops directly onto Kyiv’s western flank and causing Russian forces to reprioritize the eastern axis of advance.
- Russian reconnaissance and sabotage units, many reportedly operating in civilian clothes or captured Ukrainian uniforms, are reportedly active in central Kyiv. A Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister reported Russian forces seized two Ukrainian trucks to break through Ukrainian lines into central Kyiv around noon local time.[10] The Ukrainian General Staff warned at 5:00 pm local time that Russian units in civilian clothes are operating in several unspecified Ukrainian cities.[11]
- President Zelensky, his Chief of Staff, and Prime Minister Shmyhal released a video from downtown Kyiv at 8:00 pm local time on February 25 stating “we are all here, defending our independence.”[12]
- The Ukrainian military reported it redeployed unspecified units to assist in the defense of Kyiv.[13] ISW cannot currently confirm the extent of Ukrainian preparations to conduct urban fighting in Kyiv.
2) Kharkiv axis: Russian forces will likely envelop Kharkiv in the next 24 hours after failing to enter the city through frontal assaults on February 24. Russian forces are now advancing on a broad front along the northeastern Ukrainian border as of February 25.
- Kharkiv civil authorities reported Russian forces entering the outskirts of Kharkiv from several directions at 9:00 pm local time.[14] Elements of Russia’s 25th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, part of the 6th Combined Arms Army and permanently deployed near St Petersburg, are confirmed to be active in Kharkiv.[15]
- Russian forces have reportedly crossed the northeastern Ukrainian border at several other points both west of Kharkiv, including Okhtyrka and Sumy.[16] Russian forces are likely advancing toward Kyiv on a broad front and may seek to envelop and isolate Kharkiv.
3) Donbas axis: Russian forces have achieved little success on the frontal assaults or the envelopment but may not have intended to do more than pin Ukrainian forces in the east. The Russians have not weighted their ground offensive efforts toward breaking through Ukrainian defensive positions on the line of contact, taking Mariupol from the east, or driving rapidly through Luhansk Oblast to the north. Ukrainian forces remain largely in their original defensive positions in the east. The Russians may be content to leave them there while concentrating on capturing Kyiv and imposing a new government on Ukraine. They may alternatively seek to envelop and destroy Ukrainian forces at and near the line of contact at a later date.
- Russian forces have been unable to continue an enveloping maneuver through Donetsk Oblast as of 4:00 pm local time February 25.[17] They have not apparently reinforced their efforts to do so, however, suggesting that they may not be very determined to make rapid progress on this axis as long as Ukrainian forces remain in defensive positions. Ukrainian forces report undergoing continuous shelling.
- Ukrainian forces claim to continue to hold the entire line of contact in Donetsk and Luhansk as of 1pm local time February 25.[18]
- Russian forces are likely conducting a frontal assault on Mariupol from the northeast. The mayor of Mariupol claimed Ukrainian forces destroyed twenty-two Russian tanks advancing from Pavlopil at 4:00 pm local time on February 25.[19] Russian sources reported shelling Mariupol with MLRS systems at 7:00 pm local time on February 25.[20]
4) Crimea axis: Russian forces fully captured Kherson and are likely on the verge of seizing Melitopol in the east. Unconfirmed reports indicate that Russian forces had bypassed Kherson earlier and headed directly for Mykolaiv and Odessa.
- Russian forces reportedly captured Kherson at 6:00 pm local time on February 25.[21] Elements of the Russian 42nd Motor Rifle Division of the 58th Combined Arms Army and unknown VDV (Airborne) elements are confirmed to be active in Kherson.[22]
- Russian forces are advancing west of Kherson and reportedly bypassed it early February 25 before its capture by follow-on Russian forces later in the day. Ukrainian forces destroyed at least one bridge over the Dnipro to slow Russian forces.[23] The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense reported Russian forces are advancing on Mykolaiv.[24] ISW cannot confirm the current depth of Russian advances.
- Russian forces may have captured Melitopol, east of Crimea, late on February 25. Ukrainian forces reported defending the city at 10:00 am local time February 25.[25] Russian forces claimed to have captured the city as of 6:00 pm local time.[26]
- The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russia is deploying second echelon troops to Kherson on February 25. If confirmed, this is the first Russian deployment of second-line troops into Ukrainian territory.[27]
- ISW cannot confirm any Russian amphibious landings as of 3:00 pm EST. Several Western sources misreported a quote from an anonymous US official that there are indications of Russia’s capability to conduct an amphibious assault west of Mariupol with thousands of troops as meaning a landing had already occurred.[28] Russia may wait until forces from Crimea have fully secured crossings over the Dnipro River or gotten closer to Odesa before attempting to seize Odesa by air and sea.
Immediate items to watch
- Social media users observed a Russian armored column assembling in Stolin, Belarus, on February 25.[29] These forces could potentially conduct a new line of advance against Rivne in western Ukraine.
- Russian Naval Infantry have not yet conducted amphibious landings but retain the capability to do so against the Odesa or the Azov Sea coasts or both.
- Russian forces continue to refrain from using their likely full spectrum of air and missile capabilities. The Ukrainian air force also remains active. Russian operations will likely steadily wear down Ukrainian air capabilities and eventually take the Ukrainian air force out of the fight.
- Russian forces have not yet attempted the decapitation strike several analysts and outlets have forecasted and may attempt to do so in the near future.
- Russia has sufficient conventional military power to reinforce each of its current axes of advance and overpower the conventional Ukrainian forces defending them.
[14] https://www.rbc dot ua/ukr/styler/situatsiya-harkove-pryamo-seychas-proishodit-1645692584.html
2. UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 8
UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 8
Institute for the Study of War, Russia Team
February 25
This daily synthetic product covers key events related to renewed Russian aggression against Ukraine.
Key Takeaways February 25
- Russian forces entered major Ukrainian cities—including Kyiv and Kherson —for the first time and carried out additional air and missile strikes on military and civilian targets.
- Russian forces entered the outskirts of Kyiv on the west bank of the Dnipro River as Russian sabotage groups in civilian clothing reportedly moved into downtown Kyiv.
- Ukrainian forces have successfully slowed Russian troops on the east bank of the Dnipro, forcing them to bypass the city of Chernihiv after stout resistance. Russian airborne forces have concentrated in southeastern Belarus, likely for use along the Chernihiv-bypass axis toward Kyiv in the next 24 hours.
- Russian forces will likely envelop Kharkhiv in the next 24 hours after failing to enter the city through frontal assaults on February 24-25.
- Russian forces have achieved little success through frontal assaults or envelopments against Ukrainian forces in Donbas but may not have intended to do more than pin Ukrainian forces in the east.
- North of Crimea, Russian forces fully captured Kherson and are likely on the verge of seizing Melitopol in the east. Unconfirmed reports indicate that Russian forces bypassed Kherson earlier and headed directly for Mykolaiv and Odessa.
- Russian forces may be assembling in Stolin, Belarus, to open a new line of advance against Rivne in western Ukraine.
- Western intelligence officials told CNN on February 25 that Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to invade all of Ukraine and could install a pro-Kremlin regime within days.
- Russian opposition groups and citizens opposing the Russian war in Ukraine may be laying the foundations of a coordinated anti-war movement that will be unlikely to alter Putin’s decision making but will likely provoke harsher domestic crackdowns, further eroding Putin’s domestic popularity.
- The United States, United Kingdom, and European Union expanded their sanctions on Russia to target Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on February 25, but sanctions to sever Russia from SWIFT remain unlikely.
- NATO activated its 40,000-troop Response Force for the first time ever on February 25 to reinforce NATO’s eastern flank in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
- The International Criminal Court (ICC) announced possible investigations into alleged Russian war crimes amid Russian denials.
Key Events February 24, 4:00 pm EST – February 25, 4:00 pm EST
Military Events:
Russian forces entered major Ukrainian cities—including Kyiv and Kherson – for the first time on February 25. Russian forces’ main axes of advance focused on Kyiv, successfully isolating the city on both banks of the Dnipro River. Poorly planned and organized Russian military operations along Ukraine’s northern border have been less successful than those emanating from Crimea so far. Determined and well-organized Ukrainian resistance around Kyiv and Kharkiv has also played an important role in preventing the Russian military from advancing with the speed and success for which it had reportedly planned.The Russian military has deployed forces beyond those it likely planned to use against Ukraine to offset these challenges. However, Russian forces remain much larger and more capable than Ukraine’s conventional military. Russia will likely defeat Ukrainian regular military forces and secure their territorial objectives at some point in the coming days or weeks if Putin is determined to do so and willing to pay the cost in blood and treasure.
Russian forces carried out additional air and missile strikes on Kyiv and other major cities around 3:00 am local time on February 25. ISW cannot confirm the frequency and targets of overnight Russian strikes at this time. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are increasingly targeting civil infrastructure and residential buildings “to intimidate the population of Ukraine.” Russian forces continue to refrain from using the likely full scale of Russian air and missile capabilities, likely seeking to limit the negative imagery of heavy Ukrainian civilian casualties. However, Russian forces will likely increase their use of bombardment in the coming days to overcome heavier-than-anticipated Ukrainian resistance.
Russian ground forces are advancing on four primary axes:
- Kyiv Axis: Russian forces entered the outskirts of Kyiv on the west bank of the Dnipro on February 25. Russian forces have so far failed to enter Kyiv’s eastern outskirts. They have abandoned for now the failed attempt to take the city of Chernihiv and are instead bypassing it. Elements of the 76th VDV (Airborne) division have concentrated in southeastern Belarus likely for use along the Chernihiv-bypass axis toward Kyiv in the next 24 hours.
- Kharkiv Axis: Russian forces will likely envelop Kharkhiv in the next 24 hours after failing to enter the city through frontal assaults on February 24. Russian forces are now advancing on a broad front along the northeastern Ukrainian border as of February 25.
- Donbas Axis: Russian forces may not have intended to do more than pin Ukrainian forces in the east. The Russians have not weighted their ground offensive efforts toward breaking through Ukrainian defensive positions on the line of contact, taking Mariupol from the east, or driving rapidly through Luhansk Oblast to the north. Ukrainian forces remain largely static on the line of contact.
- Crimea Axis: Russian forces fully captured Kherson and are likely on the verge of seizing Melitopol in the east. Unconfirmed reports indicated that Russian forces had bypassed Kherson earlier and headed directly for Mykolaiv and Odessa.
Russian Activity
Kremlin officials and Russian government media advanced the dual narratives that Ukrainian “nationalists” are the only Ukrainians fighting and that Russian forces are easily succeeding in Ukraine throughout coverage on February 25 to counteract the growing unpopularity of the war in Russia. TASS falsely claimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) forces are advancing toward the administrative borders of Donetsk Oblast and Luhansk Oblast late on February 25.[1] Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova falsely claimed Russian forces are only striking Ukrainian military infrastructure, not Ukrainian cities or civilians. Zakharova also claimed that Ukrainian “nationalists” threaten ethnic Russians with “direct reprisals” in Ukraine.[2] Russian domestic media additionally amplified a Russian Defense Ministry announcement claiming Ukrainian nationalist battalions are destroying bridges and civilian infrastructure to prevent other Ukrainians from surrendering.[3] Russian TV channels reported that the West and Ukraine are artificially insinuating panic across all Ukrainian cities to amplify mobilization and mass nationalist revolts by supplying Ukrainian civilians with weapons.[4] Russian Defense Ministry Spokesperson Major General Igor Konashenkov claimed that Russian forces neutralized 11 Ukrainian military aircraft, 18 tanks and armored vehicles, and 211 military infrastructure facilities but did not mention Russian losses.[5] Konashenkov also claimed that Russia’s seizure of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant prevented “Ukrainian nationalists” from using the power plant to conduct a “nuclear provocation.”[6] Kremlin media amplified false Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) claims that the Ukrainian 36th and 53rd Brigades “laid down their arms.”[7]
Russian President Vladimir Putin called on Ukrainian soldiers to stage a military coup during a Russian Security Council meeting on February 25, indicating continued Kremlin misunderstanding of the scale of Ukrainian resistance. Putin updated the Russian Security Council on the progress of the operation in Ukraine and claimed that Russian forces are primarily clashing with “Ukrainian nationalists,” not Ukrainian Armed Forces personnel.[8] Putin told Ukrainian forces to prevent Ukrainian “nationalists” from using civilians as “human shields,” likely aimed at bolstering the false Kremlin claim of a genocide of ethnic Russians in Ukraine.[9] The Kremlin’s continued calls for Ukrainians to reject ”nationalists” and that Russia's operations are only directed at the government in Kyiv may indicate the Kremlin falsely expected the Ukrainian military to collapse quickly or for Russian troops to be greeted as “liberators,” as Putin has claimed.
Russian opposition groups and citizens opposing the Russian war in Ukraine may be laying the foundations of a coordinated anti-war movement that will be unlikely to alter Putin’s decision making but will likely provoke harsher domestic crackdowns, further eroding Putin’s popularity.[10] Russian police detained 1,012 anti-war demonstrators in Moscow, 458 in St Petersburg, and more than 300 in other Russian cities in total as of February 25 according to rights group OVD-Info.[11] Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta condemned the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine on February 25 and emphasized that “only the antiwar movement of Russians” can help peacefully resolve the situation.[12] The Yeltsin Center and more than 180 Russian academics from the Russian Academy of Sciences called for an immediate end to the war in Ukraine.[13] Separately, a Russian human rights group, the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, condemned the Russian military for sending conscripts to the frontlines with less than four months of training, laying the potential groundwork for an influential anti-war bloc even among Putin’s grassroots supporters.[14] Russians withdrew more than $1.3 billion in cash on the first day of the war with Ukraine as Russia‘s financial markets plummeted, demonstrating public unease with the Russian government’s ability to handle the economic consequences of the invasion.[15] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov condemned Russian protests against the war and warned Russian citizens they will face consequences if they continue violating the law by protesting.[16] Russia enacted a “partial restriction” of Facebook following accusations that Facebook blocked several Russian media outlets on the website on February 25.[17] Protests are highly unlikely to affect Putin’s decision making on the war, but will require the Kremlin to expend further resources on domestic crackdowns and will likely accelerate Putin’s declining popularity.
Belarusian Activity
N/A
Ukrainian Activity
The Kremlin and Ukrainian Presidential Office confirmed on February 25 that Ukraine and Russia are negotiating a time and location for talks, during which the Kremlin will likely seek to impose maximalist surrender demands. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky offered to “sit at the negotiation table to stop deaths of people” with Putin on February 25.[18] Zelensky vaguely stated that Ukraine “is not afraid to discuss neutral status” with Russia due to its current lack of NATO membership, but his advisors clarified that media misrepresented Zelensky’s statements.[19] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed that Putin is ready to send a presidential, Defense and Foreign Ministry delegation to Minsk after discussing Zelensky’s offer with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Peskov later claimed that Ukraine counteroffered to hold meetings in Warsaw before breaking off negotiations, which Ukrainian officials denied.[20] Peskov and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov issued incongruous statements on Russian-Ukrainian dialogue terms. Peskov said that the Kremlin “positively” welcomes Zelensky’s consideration of neutrality status and officially recognizes his presidency.[21] Lavrov, however, claimed that he does not believe that Zelensky wants to negotiate and stated that Ukrainian Armed Forces must surrender before the dialogue.[22]
US Activity
Western intelligence officials told CNN on February 25 that Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to invade all of Ukraine and could install a pro-Kremlin regime within days, refuting Russia’s claims that it is conducting a “limited operation.”[23] UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace stressed that intelligence suggests Russia’s ultimate objective remains a full invasion of Ukraine but that Russian troops have failed to achieve their major military objectives as of February 25. Unnamed American intelligence officials told CNN that Russian troops may take Kyiv by March 1 and that Russia will install a “Russia-friendly proxy government.”[24] US intelligence sources told CNN that it is unclear if Russia will continue to hold Ukrainian territory after installing a proxy government. Notably, the Pentagon reported that the Russian offensive has lost momentum and has been unable to seize control of Ukrainian airspace.[25] US Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Senator Mark Warner added that Russian cyber-attacks in support of the invasion have been more muted than anticipated, likely due to deliberate restraint rather than diminished cyber capacity.[26]
The European Union (EU), United States, and United Kingdom expanded their sanctions on Russia to target Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov on February 25, but sanctions to sever Russia from SWIFT remain unlikely.[27] The EU approved an additional sanctions package on February 25 largely targeting Russia’s financial sector in conjunction with US and UK sanctions packages.[28] EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borell denied that a third EU sanctions package is under preparation but affirmed the EU is ready to supplement existing sanctions based on Russian activity and EU consensus.[29] The EU asked the European Commission and European Central Bank (ECB) to assess the ramifications of further cutting off Russian institutions‘ access to the EU financial system, including Russian access to the SWIFT high-security payment network. The European Council emphasized that “all options are on the table.”[30] French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said cutting Russia from SWIFT is an option of ”last resort” on February 25.[31] UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson urged NATO and EU leaders to immediately remove Russia from SWIFT and announced new UK sanctions suspending export credit and investment guarantees for Russia.[32] Bloomberg Wealth reported that international sanctions cost Russia’s wealthiest citizens a cumulative 39 billion USD within 24 hours of Russia’s invasion.[33] Taiwan announced that it will join international economic sanctions against Russia on February 25.[34] Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov warned on February 25 that Russia will retaliate against international sanctions.[35] Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency, Rosaviatsiya, banned all UK-based airlines from landing in Russia and crossing Russian airspace on February 25 after the United Kingdom banned Russian airline Aeroflot on February 24.[36]
NATO and EU Activity
NATO activated its 40,000-troop Response Force on February 25 in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.[37] Elements of the NATO Response Force will remain on standby to help support NATO countries in Eastern Europe should Russia threaten their territorial integrity.[38] NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg stated that elements of the Response Force, including the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, a land brigade of approximately 5,000 troops, can deploy rapidly where needed to bolster eastern flank security.[39] NATO heads of state, along with those of Finland, Sweden, and the European Union, reinforced their commitment to NATO’s Article 5 and their support for Ukrainian sovereignty during a call on February 25.[40] Stoltenberg emphasized that Russia and Belarus will be held economically and politically accountable for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.[41] Separately, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on February 25 that Ukraine requested military, financial, and humanitarian aid from European leaders and that France was ready to help “if necessary.”[42] French President Emmanuel Macron stated that France will provide Ukraine with military defense equipment and an additional 300 million euros in budgetary assistance.[43]
Other International Organization Activity
The International Criminal Court (ICC) announced possible investigations into alleged Russian war crimes amid Russian denials, and several states and international organizations began preparing humanitarian aid packages on February 25. ICC prosecutor Karim Kahn said on February 25 that the ICC may investigate possible war crimes in Ukraine and urged all sides to respect international humanitarian law.[44] US officials reported that about 200 Russian missiles have hit residential areas in Ukraine as of February 25.[45] The Russian Defense Ministry denied claims that Russia is indiscriminately targeting civilian and military targets and said Russia would not endanger civilians by attacking cities.[46] Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to state if the Kremlin had data on civilian deaths.
The Kremlin denied UN reports of at least 127 civilian deaths and a UN assessment that the invasion could cause up to five million Ukrainian refugees to flee abroad.[47] Polish border officials reported that about 29,000 Ukrainian refugees entered Poland on February 24.[48] United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi estimated that about 100,000 Ukrainians were displaced from February 24-25.[49] United Nations Aid Chief Martin Grifiths reported that aid operations in Ukraine will require about 1 billion USD over the next three months to provide humanitarian aid to fleeing Ukrainians. US Chairman of the State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee Senator Chris Coons announced his support for a minimum $10 billion US aid package to support Eastern European and NATO countries taking in Ukrainian refugees.[50]
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Special Monitoring Mission (OSCE SMM) announced on February 25 that it could not safely run ground patrols due to heavy fighting and that it would continue monitoring the conflict from limited listening posts and with a reduced posture.[51] Doctors Without Borders also suspended its operations in Eastern Ukraine due to the conflict on February 25 but announced plans to station medical teams in neighboring countries.[52]
Individual Western Allies’ Activity
N/A
Other International Activity
China has not cohered a consistent public approach to the Russian war against Ukraine; The Chinese government is beginning to comply with US sanctions on Russia while calling for negotiations and declining to fully denounce Russian aggression. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed Ukraine on February 25. Xi called for rejecting Cold War mindsets and reaching a balanced, effective, and sustainable European security mechanism through negotiations. Xi emphasized China’s claimed respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity and said that China will work with the international community to safeguard the UN-based international order.[53] Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin reiterated that China seeks to resolve Ukraine issues in line with UN principles and that sanctions are an ineffective tool during a February 25 press conference.[54] Two of China’s largest state banks, the Industrial and Commerical Bank of China (ICBC) and Bank of China (BOC), also began complying with US sanctions and started restricting financing for Russian commodities on February 25. The ICBC is still offering limited Chinese Yuan-based lines of credit to select Russian clients, pending senior approval.[55] Chinese banks have largely complied with US financial sanctions against Iran and North Korea in the past to retain access to US dollar markets.
[9] https://tvrain dot ru/news/putin_zajavil_o_shajke_narkomanov_v_kieve_i_prizval_ukrainskih_voennyh_brat_vlast_v_svoi_ruki-548652/?from=rss.
[11] https://ovd dot news/news/2022/02/24/spiski-zaderzhannyh-v-svyazi-s-akciey-v-protiv-voyny-s-ukrainoy-24-fevralya-2022
[13] https://meduza dot io/news/2022/02/25/eltsin-tsentr-prizval-nemedlenno-ostanovit-voynu-v-ukraine; https://tvrain dot ru/news/akademiki_ran_i_nauchnye_zhurnalisty_potrebovali_ostanovit_voennye_dejstvija_v_ukraine-548545/?from=rss
[15] https://tvrain dot ru/news/rossijane_v_pervyj_den_vojny_s_ukrainoj_snjali_bolee_110_milliardov_nalichnyh-548632/?from=rss
[19] https://nv dot ua/ukraine/politics/voyna-rossii-protiv-ukrainy-zelenskiy-zayavil-chto-ukraina-ne-boitsya-govorit-o-neytralnom-statuse-50219834.html; https://nv dot ua/ukraine/politics/vladimir-zelenskiy-gotov-obsuzhdat-neytralnyy-status-ukrainy-kommentariy-opu-novosti-ukrainy-50219958.html.
[54] https://www.mfa dot gov.cn/fyrbt_673021/202202/t20220225_10645686.shtml;
3. Ukraine Conflict Update - Feb 26, 2022 | SOF News
Ukraine Conflict Update - Feb 26, 2022 | SOF News
sof.news · by SOF News · February 26, 2022
This is a 24-hour roll up on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, ground and air operations, diplomatic initiatives, and NATO response. The Russians launched their offensive in the early morning hours of Thursday, February 24, 2022 with an air campaign of missiles and aircraft. This was followed by simultaneous ground movements of troops and armor from Belarus in the north, Russia in the east, and Russian-occupied Crimea in the south. This is now ‘Day Three’ of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Stiff Ukrainian Resistance. The Russians do not appear to be advancing as quickly as many military analysts thought. This seems to be a combination of a few factors. The Ukrainian armed forces are putting up a determined fight. There are reports that the Ukrainian citizenry are also playing a supporting role. The Ukrainian forces are showing resilience in the face of the Russian onslaught. However, in the near term, the Russians will prevail. Their manpower and military units vastly outnumber the Ukrainians. They have sometimes ten or twenty times the numbers of tanks, airplanes, and helicopters. And the Russians have the vast resources of its huge nation behind them.
The Russian Air Offensive. Moscow’s war optimism has now met reality. While the situation is dire for Ukrainians the resolve of the Ukrainian fighters seems intact. The start of the offensive should have knocked out the Ukrainian air defense systems and decimated its Air Force. But apparently the Russians are not that adept at suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD). However, the Russians have plenty of aircraft to expend – their Air Force has a significant quantitative and qualitative superiority.
The Russian Ground Offensive. Initially it appeared that Russian forces made the most headway in the south with forces fighting up from Russian-occupied Crimea. However, recent analysis indicates that the most territory gained in the past two days may have been along Ukraine’s northern border with Belarus and Russia after the initial invasion units were reinforces. A series of small enclaves along the Ukrainian east border have been secured by Russian forces.
The artillery pieces of Russia will play a huge role in its offensive. The TOS-1 Buratino, a heavy shot-range multiple launcher rocket system (MLRS) is equipped with incendiary and thermobaric warheads. It is feared that these weapons will be used in the attack on Kiev. There appears to be a lack of coordination between Russian air support and ground units. Two important air assault operations on key objectives have failed due lack of good coordination. Key Ukrainian targets have yet to be destroyed and important airfields remain uncaptured.
But the overwhelming numbers of troops and military equipment of the Russians will assure them of a victory in the coming days or weeks. The Russians may revert to their World War II strategy of throwing bodies and equipment at the Ukrainians until they are simply overwhelmed by numbers. Some estimates on social media say the casualty rate is about 1 to 10 (Ukrainian to Russian); although this could be hopeful speculation.
Russian Maritime Operations. Russian warships are patrolling the coast of Ukraine. Its naval assets are taking some of the small islands located off the Ukraine coast. One such island has made the headlines over the past few days due to the heroic resistance by Ukrainian border guards. There are reports of a Russian 1,000 man amphibious landing force near the Ukrainian coast that is likely to be used against one of the seacoast targets still held by Ukrainian defense forces. Control of the Ukrainian coastline will provide Russia with a more dominant strategic position in the Black Sea.
Attack from Belarus. In the initial invasion on the Thursday, February 24th Russian troops and tanks poured across the Belarus border into northern Ukraine. This country continues to be a staging area and support zone for thousands of Russian troops that are using this avenue of approach to capture Kiev and cut off Ukrainian troops fighting in eastern Ukraine. The latest news reports indicate that Russian forces continue to mass in Belarus and then move southward into Ukraine. One unit of note is the Russian 76th VDV (Airborne) division currently located in southeastern Belarus.
Kiev. One of the goals of the Russian campaign would be to encircle and then capture the capital of Ukraine. The city is already short of food. An interruption of water and electricity would lead to the start of a humanitarian crisis. The Russians would certainly be assured of victory – capturing Kiev – in time. So at some point the political leadership of the country may surrender the city to spare the civilian population of suffering. Immediately following the fall of Kiev Russia would escort in the ‘new regime’ to take charge. There are reports that Russian special operations forces entered an area just six miles north of the city center but the attack was repelled by Ukrainian forces. The Russian soldiers involved in the Friday attack were wearing Ukrainian military uniforms. Some news reports say that the city (as of Friday night) was already surrounded by Russian forces. Apparently the president of Ukraine has rebuffed U.S. pleas to leave the country and is prepared to ‘go down with the ship‘.
Narrative Battles. Russia has been waging a disinformation campaign for years about Ukraine and NATO. This info war is continuing. Russia is no stranger to social media manipulation. American social media companies are closely monitoring the situation. It will be interesting to see how the social media platforms ‘manage’ this new situation. Read more in “Tech on high alert for Russia’s Ukraine disinformation offensive”, Axios, February 24, 2022.
The Cyber War. Although the Russians are very adept at cyber warfare, they are probably better at the offensive part than the defensive part. Apparently Anonymous has breached the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) website and has now downloaded its contents. In the meantime, hackers from Belarus are targeting the members of the Ukrainian government and military. Ukraine’s internet backbone provider (GigaTrans) has been targeted over the last several days. Russia’s history of destructive cyberattacks in Ukraine is raising concerns about a cyberwar in the future. “Is the cyberwar coming or is it already here?”, Vox.com Recode, February 25, 2022.
NATO’s Response. NATO’s Secretary General has announced that member nations are now sending military equipment, supplies, and weapons into Ukraine to help with its fight against the invading forces. Five NATO countries have decided to supply weapons to Ukraine and shipments had begun as early as Thursday, February 24th. Elements of NATO’s Rapid Response Force are being moved to eastern Europe. Secretary of Defense Austin says that the United States may train Ukrainian soldiers remotely. There have not been a lot of details on how this would be done . . . or how effective it would be.
NATO and Romania. One of President Putin’s complaints is that NATO’s forces keep getting closer to his borders. He demands that NATO scale back its deployments in Eastern Europe, but his aggressive posture toward neighbors is having the opposite effect. On February 11, 2022, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced plans for a permanent deployment of a NATO battle group to Romania. This Balkan country has strategic importance as it shares a land border with Moldova and Ukraine. It also has a coastline on the Black Sea, a body of water the Russians would like to dominate. JD Fuller, a serving NATO officer with extensive experience working in Eastern Europe, provides his thoughts on this topic in “Romania: NATO’s Next Strategic Frontier?”, Small Wars Journal, February 19, 2022.
No Fly Zone? Probably one of the few things that NATO could do to help Ukraine stop the Russians is to establish and enforce a no fly zone over the Ukraine. But there is no appetite among the European nations for that. Some supporters of the plan cite the no fly zones over Iraq and Serbia. However, things could escalate quickly with a country that has sophisticated air defense systems and nuclear weapons. The U.S. has a (if you watch flightradar24.com) a RQ-4B Global Hawk keeping tabs on the region as it circles over the Black Sea.
Sanctions. The European Union has responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine with legal acts that are aimed at Putin, Lavrov, and other Russian officials. Numerous actions are being taken by the corporate world to disassociate itself from Russian business interests. At least two airlines – Delta and United – have opted out of alliances with Aeroflot. Britain has blocked all Russian flights from its airspace and Manchester United has cancelled its deal with Aeroflot. Poland has denied all Russian commercial overflights. News agencies are cutting their ties with Russian counterparts. The long list of ‘separations’ grow each hour. This will have a psychological and economic impact on the Russian people. Unfortunately, sanctions alone will likely not constitute an immediate deterrent to Putin. (Hudson Institute, Feb 23, 2022).
Future Resistance Under an Occupying Russian Army. The Russians could be in for a long hellish time if they remain in the territories of Ukraine that they have captured and will continue to capture. Ukraine has been preparing for this time when they could be occupied by Russia. It has established auxiliary civilian units to continue a resistance. In addition, there are a number of Ukraine paramilitary militias that have existed for years that will continue operations against the occupying Russians. (Small Wars Journal, Feb 21, 2022).
Irregular Warfare. U.S. special operations forces have been providing instruction to Ukrainian forces in irregular warfare (IW). This type of warfare will prove to be costly to the Russian occupation forces. The longer the fight continues the costlier it will be for Russia. Guerrilla forces can raise havoc along the supply lines that will provide the logistic needs of an occupying force in eastern Ukraine and Kiev. Read more on how IW can cost Russia its victory in “The Key to Blunting Russia’s Strategic Victory in Ukraine and Beyond? Irregular Warfare”, by Spencer Meredith, Modern War Institute at West Point, February 19, 2022.
Hybrid Warfare. Russia has been using offensive hybrid warfare to its advantage over the past few decades; however, it may soon see itself conducting counterinsurgency operations and on the receiving end of hybrid warfare. The current conflict in Ukraine will provide the U.S. special operations community, especially United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and Special Operations Command – Europe (SOCEUR), an opportunity for some self-reflection on the future doctrine, organization, and capabilities it needs during this new era of confrontation with Russia . . . and of course, China.
Putin’s Mind. In a long essay published on February 21st (before the invasion), Brian E. Frydenborg explored the pre-invasion composition and disposition of Russian forces in Belarus, Russia, and Russian-occupied Crimea. He then explained the complex relationship between Russia and Ukraine and attempts to understand Putin’s reasoning for an attack on Ukraine. Read more in “The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine”, Small Wars Journal, February 21, 2022.
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Ukraine and Russia Map, Russian military districts, NATO, December 2018.
sof.news · by SOF News · February 26, 2022
4. The Rhyming of History & Russian aggression
This is a very useful historical perspective (yes it rhymes). But what struck me is the description of how quick and agile the US national security apparatus appeared to operate at the time. Can we learn from this? I would say the "secret sauce" at the time was the leadership throughout the national security system.
Excerpts:
The speed is significant, especially considering the reactions today. The State Department worked quickly and collaboratively with other departments and the White House long before email and cell phones, during a move, while the Secretary was preparing to fly to Moscow for a major international meeting with a complex agenda, and while a lot of other activities were taking place in the post-war world, including severe food and fuel shortages across Europe, which Russia was also seeking to exploit. Further, Truman would face a Republican Congress he labeled the “Do Nothing Congress” because of its opposition to his agenda, both foreign and domestic. Yet there was action, not paralysis.
Marshall did travel to Moscow for the Council of Foreign Ministers meeting and was there when Truman spoke before Congress to punctuate the message of the Truman Doctrine. This may have felt like a sudden policy change, but as Truman declared in his speech, the US was confidently adhering to the principles the US just fought and bled for. These were demonstrably not the same principles Russia had bled for in the war. The US had reached a tipping point with Russian activities that were increasingly clear and antithetical to the peace and security of nations near and far.
It is an understatement to say Russian aggression is more blatant and overt today than in February 1947. In February 2022, Moscow invaded Ukraine – again, as we must not ignore their earlier invasion and continued occupation of Crimea. We must also not forget or set aside Moscow’s invasion and continued occupation of Georgia and continued threats, subversion, and egregious cyberattacks against Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and others.
The Rhyming of History & Russian aggression
Looking back to February 1947 as a lesson for February 2022
Seventy-five years ago, nearly to the day, the United States found itself in a situation very much like that of the present. Russian aggression abroad was picking up and chipping away at the principles we had spent significant blood and treasure defending. While Russia had fought the same war, and some may point out they lost more blood than the US, they did so for a substantively different outcome. Moscow broke promises and violated agreements as it actively sought to expand its empire by undermining the peace, security, and independence of multiple countries. For the US, the tipping point came on February 21, 1947.
It was a cold and gray Friday in Washington, DC. George C. Marshall had been sworn in as Secretary of State exactly one month earlier and after a long and arduous diplomatic mission to China. He left his office earlier than usual to go to Princeton, where he would deliver his first address as Secretary and receive an honorary degree. It was to be an easy weekend for Marshall, an intentional lull in the schedule to recharge his batteries before flying to Moscow in two weeks for the next round of discussions with the foreign ministers of Great Britain, France, and Russia. Among the agenda items for the Council of Foreign Ministers were terms for the yet unsigned peace treaties with Germany and Austria. Also happening on this winter day was the State Department’s move from the old State, War, and Navy Building to “gaudier, more commodious, even air-conditioned quarters in a questionable part of town” called Foggy Bottom. The War and Navy Departments had decamped from the building with the “curious contours” at Seventeenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, next to the White House, years before, long enough that the State Department was now moving into a structure built for but already abandoned by the War Department in favor of a five-sided building on the Potomac.
This would not be a routine day. The British Embassy rang the State Department to request an urgent meeting between the Secretary of State and the British ambassador. Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson decided to let Marshall continue with his trip and assigned the meeting to Loy Henderson, Director of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, and John Hickerson, the Deputy Director of the Office of European Affairs. Hickerson was unavailable and the British, following protocol, sent the embassy’s First Secretary to meet with Henderson. That afternoon, the British informed the State Department that London would immediately end its promised economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey. The aid had been a reaction to clear Russian aggression toward both countries. Neither London nor Washington had an alliance with Athens or Ankara. Still, the threats to these nations threatened the larger peace and stability sought by Washington and London and the principles embodied in the new United Nations. The American reaction was swift and substantial.
Nineteen days later, President Harry S. Truman stood before a special joint session of Congress he requested to ask for the necessary authorities and funding to send supplies and US civilian and military personnel to Greece and Turkey to oppose Russian imperialism.
One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion. This was a fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan. Our victory was won over countries which sought to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other nations… We shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes. This is no more than a frank recognition that totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.
“This is no more than a frank recognition,” Truman declared, “that totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.” This was not just about two countries. The President declared Russia’s aggression in Greece, Turkey, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Iran, and Korea as fundamentally the same as that of Germany and Japan which led to World War II. Soon, more countries would be added to that list.
For more than a year, the proverbial warning lights had been flashing from Russia’s emerging patterns of abrogating agreements and direct and indirect activities against other nations. Kennan’s so-called “Long Telegram,” a response to a Treasury Department request for more information on Russia’s foot-dragging around an agreement, had been received at the State, War, and Navy Building one year, less a day, before the British Embassy’s phone call. Five months before the same phone call, again nearly to the day, the Clifford-Esley report “American Relations with the Soviet Union” cataloging Moscow’s antagonistic pattern, including abrogations of agreements, was sent to the President. Two weeks after the meeting between the British and Loy Henderson, Winston Churchill gave his “The Sinews of Peace” speech in Fulton, Missouri, in which he declared “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” There was also a growing recognition of Moscow’s growing mendacious propaganda campaigns directed against the US, the United Nations, and democratic principles. The US finally realized it needed to respond to what Kennan had labeled as Moscow’s “subterranean” policies, or political warfare by another name.
The speed is significant, especially considering the reactions today. The State Department worked quickly and collaboratively with other departments and the White House long before email and cell phones, during a move, while the Secretary was preparing to fly to Moscow for a major international meeting with a complex agenda, and while a lot of other activities were taking place in the post-war world, including severe food and fuel shortages across Europe, which Russia was also seeking to exploit. Further, Truman would face a Republican Congress he labeled the “Do Nothing Congress” because of its opposition to his agenda, both foreign and domestic. Yet there was action, not paralysis.
Marshall did travel to Moscow for the Council of Foreign Ministers meeting and was there when Truman spoke before Congress to punctuate the message of the Truman Doctrine. This may have felt like a sudden policy change, but as Truman declared in his speech, the US was confidently adhering to the principles the US just fought and bled for. These were demonstrably not the same principles Russia had bled for in the war. The US had reached a tipping point with Russian activities that were increasingly clear and antithetical to the peace and security of nations near and far.
It is an understatement to say Russian aggression is more blatant and overt today than in February 1947. In February 2022, Moscow invaded Ukraine – again, as we must not ignore their earlier invasion and continued occupation of Crimea. We must also not forget or set aside Moscow’s invasion and continued occupation of Georgia and continued threats, subversion, and egregious cyberattacks against Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and others.
Seventy-five years ago, a Democrat President stood before a Republican-controlled Congress that was expressly against his policies and made a case for a strategic response to Russian aggression. While Moscow lies about de-Nazification, invades countries, and threatens others, the White House should invoke the principles behind our de-Nazification of Europe to again reject Russian imperialism. Moscow has expanded its threats to Finland and Sweden, and maybe others by the time this is read. At the same time, Moscow is far more vulnerable to outside financial, economic, and societal pressures than it was seventy-five years ago, and its victims are stronger, too. They just need clear and confident support. The White House must exercise the confidence to do more than issue an executive order and should push Congress to go on the record to either “to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity” or support Putin’s aggression that seeks to impose totalitarian and criminal regimes.
5. Why Ukraine Matters by Francis Fukuyama
Not to be snarky but history has been resurrected from its end in 1991. Liberal democracy had a temporary and short-lived win.
Conclusion:
The outcome of the war in Ukraine will also affect domestic politics in the United States. Former President Trump has over the years expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin, a pattern that has continued up to the past week when he called Putin a “genius” for declaring the independence of parts of Ukraine. Democracies do not decay out of an ideological choice for authoritarian government, the way they might have affirmed Marxism-Leninism. They decay because of an admiration for strength and strong men who can get away with big actions outside the bounds of the checks and balances that exist in rule-of-law countries. If Putin succeeds in his aggression in Ukraine and the Republican Party follows Trump in his admiration for what he has done, then it will be making a decisive break with fundamental American democratic values. This will consolidate the authoritarian turn the party took by affirming the January 6th attack on the US Capitol. Given the importance of the United States to the maintenance of a liberal world order more broadly, this will be a very bad development for the free world as a whole.
Why Ukraine Matters
Vladimir Putin has launched a massive military assault on Ukraine, with the stated purpose of overthrowing the democratically-elected regime there and replacing it with one subservient to Moscow. Russian forces have arrived in the suburbs of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.
Ukraine is a country I know well. My center at Stanford University has run a series of leadership training programs for mid-career Ukrainian activists and officials who are trying to reform their country, and I have visited to teach there many times. Ukraine suffers from high levels of corruption, but my personal experience has convinced me that there is a rising new generation of Ukrainians imbued with democratic values, and who want to join Europe rather than a kleptocratic Russia. I take the invasion very personally: many of my friends—human rights activists, journalists, anti-corruption campaigners—would be the first targets of a pro-Moscow regime were it to come to power.
Prior to the invasion, many observers believed that Putin was bluffing and that the Biden administration was hyping the threat. The Russian troop buildup and Russian propaganda revived the long-standing discussion in Europe and the US of how NATO expansion threatened Russia, and that the United States was in part responsible for the present situation. There were calls from many “realists” to grant Russia a sphere of influence over the territory of the former USSR, and to negotiate the neutralization of Ukraine.
These arguments were weak even before the invasion: Ukrainian entry into NATO was purely theoretical; no one had pushed for this since 2008, and the Ukrainian military was heavily overmatched by the 190,000 Russian troops gathering on their borders.
In the past week, the Russians have put forward a series of increasingly ridiculous justifications for its actions: that Ukraine was a fascist, neo-Nazi state, that it was committing genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Donbas, or was contemplating a huge military operation against Russia. The invasion has made all of these claims utterly hollow. It is crystal clear now that the threat runs only in one direction, from Russia to Ukraine, and indeed, to every country that borders on Russia, and beyond.
Putin’s motives are not hard to fathom, since he has talked at length about his worldview and strategic objectives. He stated some years ago that the dissolution of the USSR was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. In a long article last summer, and in the rambling speech he gave on the eve of the invasion, he stated that Ukraine was not an independent nation but an essential part of Russia, one that did not have the right to a separate identity and existence. The demands made of NATO in the discussions that have taken place in recent weeks indicate that Moscow cares not just about Ukraine, but the entire European order created in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It has demanded that NATO cease any military support not just for Ukraine, but for all the countries that joined the organization from the 1990s onwards. He wants, in other words, to restore as much of the former USSR as possible, to neutralize Eastern Europe and turn it into a buffer zone, and to undo the entire post-1991 settlement of a “Europe whole and free.”
A democratic Ukraine does in fact threaten Putin—not the Russian people, but Putin’s view that democracy is not suitable for Slavic peoples, who according to him naturally gravitate towards strong, centralized leadership. The success of a democratic Ukraine and its desire to join Europe suggests that something similar could happen in Russia as well, which would spell the end of Putin and Putinism. This is why he would never have settled for a neutral Ukraine that foreswore NATO membership—as long as it remained a democracy, it would undermine his narrative and would need to be eliminated.
We are currently at a critical juncture in world history. If Putin succeeds in overthrowing democracy in Ukraine and replacing it with a puppet regime, he will have set a terrible precedent for the use of naked force. China will take a cue from this, as it contemplates options for re-incorporating Taiwan. The US and NATO will have been humiliated, and a signal will go out across the world that American promises of support are hollow and cooperation among democracies non-existent.
On the other hand, it is just possible that Putin has made a blunder of monumental proportions. The invasion has triggered massive protests in Russia itself; even propagandists and diplomats promoting the Russian line have been taken aback by the fact that the invasion actually happened. It has unified the Ukrainian people like nothing else, and they have shown incredible willingness to fight back. In military terms, Putin does not have remotely enough forces to control a country of nearly 40 million people, or even a city like Kyiv with 2.8 million inhabitants. NATO has been unified in imposing stiff sanctions, including German agreement to cancel the Nordstream II gas pipeline. The Russian offensive may bog down in house-to-house fighting and produce massive casualties among Ukrainians, but will also lead to large numbers of Russians returning home in body bags. Russians are already astonished that their military investments are being used in the first instance to kill fellow Slavs and destroy a country with which they feel close kinship.
The outcome of the war in Ukraine will also affect domestic politics in the United States. Former President Trump has over the years expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin, a pattern that has continued up to the past week when he called Putin a “genius” for declaring the independence of parts of Ukraine. Democracies do not decay out of an ideological choice for authoritarian government, the way they might have affirmed Marxism-Leninism. They decay because of an admiration for strength and strong men who can get away with big actions outside the bounds of the checks and balances that exist in rule-of-law countries. If Putin succeeds in his aggression in Ukraine and the Republican Party follows Trump in his admiration for what he has done, then it will be making a decisive break with fundamental American democratic values. This will consolidate the authoritarian turn the party took by affirming the January 6th attack on the US Capitol. Given the importance of the United States to the maintenance of a liberal world order more broadly, this will be a very bad development for the free world as a whole.
6. Ukraine military says soldier blew himself up on bridge to halt Russian advance
Unverified but I would not be surprised if it is true.
But it is also important to use these heroic actions for influence operations with multiple target audiences.
Ukraine military says soldier blew himself up on bridge to halt Russian advance
The Hill · by Chloe Folmar · February 25, 2022
Vitaliy Volodymyrovych Skakun was an engineer for a battalion of marines on the Crimean isthmus, where Russian tanks and military forces began to advance into Ukraine.
The marines decided to blow up the Genichesky Bridge to stop the invasion, a task for which Skakun volunteered despite being in a different battalion.
Skakun placed mines on the bridge and told his fellow soldiers that he was blowing up the bridge. The bridge blew up before Skakun was able to run away, and he died in the explosion.
“His heroic deed significantly slowed the advance of the enemy, which allowed the unit to redeploy and organize the defense,” wrote the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine of Skakun in a Facebook post.
Skakun’s death allowed the rest of the soldiers to prepare for the oncoming Russians and saved the Ukrainian military time and ammunition.
Skakun will be awarded for his actions, the Armed Forces announced, and the Marine Command will honor him as a sailor in one of its battalions.
The post from the Armed Forces of Ukraine honored Skakun as a “hero,” using the hashtag #stoprussia to bring attention to the death and destruction resulting from the Kremlin’s invasion.
The post concluded: “Russian occupiers, know that the earth will burn under your feet! We will fight while we live! And while we are alive we will fight!”
The Hill · by Chloe Folmar · February 25, 2022
7. War in Ukraine and the forgotten lesson of Munich
Excerpts:
We don’t know how far Putin will ultimately end up going. An all-out invasion and occupation of Ukraine now seems likely. But will the Baltic states and Eastern Europe be next? Will an emboldened Russia team up with China to impose a new world order? If we are on the path to another bloody global confrontation, future historians will no doubt claim it would have been easier to stop Putin in 2008 when he invaded Georgia, or 2014 when he seized Crimea, or 2022 when he invaded Ukraine.
But the sad paradox of Munich is that when thuggish aggressors can be easily stopped, there’s rarely the moral case necessary for democracies to take action, and when there is such a case, the cost of waiting needs to be measured in human lives.
War in Ukraine and the forgotten lesson of Munich | The Strategist
Many are comparing the events unfolding in Ukraine with those at Munich 84 years ago. Indeed, if history isn’t quite repeating, it’s certainly rhyming. Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing his best impression of German dictator Adolf Hitler, disregarding international laws and invading his neighbours. Like the events in the 1930s, fingers are being pointed and questions raised as to why this aggression wasn’t stopped earlier.
Having lost the First World War, Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and agreed to sweeping limitations on its armaments and the demilitarisation of the crucial Rhineland region bordering France. Upon entering office in 1933, Hitler promptly started rearming, and in 1936 his troops rolled back into the Rhineland. Many, in retrospect, think enforcing the terms of the Versailles Treaty in the mid-1930s would have prevented the global calamity that later ensued.
Likewise, Russia signed a treaty in 1994 in Budapest with the United States and the then newly independent nation of Ukraine. After the collapse and dismemberment of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine found itself the owner of a large stockpile of nuclear weapons. The gist of the agreement was that Ukraine would voluntarily give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for guarantees of its borders. Russia’s annexation in 2014 of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea was in clear breach of this agreement. But the West singularly failed to enforce the Budapest agreement, and Ukraine was left to rue giving up those nukes.
Hitler did not remain content with reclaiming the Rhineland. In 1938, he annexed Austria and then turned his eyes to the borders of Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland, a region with a predominantly German-speaking population. To avoid war, during a peace conference at Munich in September 1938, Britain and France agreed that Germany could take over the area (and its intimidating border fortifications) and forced the Czechs to comply.
Putin also has had his eyes on predominantly Russian-speaking borderlands, the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. He backed a separatist movement in these regions in 2014 that resulted in a bloody civil war, and on 21 February he formalised their effective annexation by declaring them independent republics and sending in Russian ‘peacekeepers’. The response by American President Joe Biden, which has so far been limited to some tepid (but growing) sanctions, will no doubt lead to comparisons with arch-appeaser British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.
Chamberlain’s caving in at Munich has been almost uniformly denounced for resulting in a strengthened and emboldened Hitler who was then willing to keep going and demand more. The outcome was the Second World War and the death of tens of millions.
Will a timid Western response to Russian aggression in Ukraine embolden Putin? Will he keep pushing his luck and make further demands on his neighbours that might result in a much larger war?
Yet the failure to stand up to Hitler was not the real lesson to be learned from the debacle at Munich. Critics of appeasing Hitler fail to grasp a crucial reality. For a liberal democracy to effectively oppose aggression, especially if that comes at the risk of a long and costly war, it requires the overwhelming support of the people.
There’s no doubt that it would have been easier to fight Hitler in 1936 after he seized the Rhineland, or in 1938 before he occupied the Sudetenland, but could the citizens of the democracies that opposed him have really been roused to do so? What exactly had he done that was so outrageous that the risk of starting another world war was warranted? Hitler had rearmed his nation with weapons all his neighbours were already armed with. He occupied the Rhineland, sovereign German territory. He annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, both German-speaking regions, to the overwhelming agreement of the people who lived in those places.
At the time of the Munich conference, the moral case against Hitler wasn’t as clear as it would later seem. And few in the West have been aroused to sacrifice blood and treasure to resist Russian aggression in largely Russian-speaking provinces like Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk.
It was not until Hitler had ripped up the Munich agreement, invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia and then did the same to Poland (non-German-speaking countries very much opposed to German annexation) that the righteous outrage among the voters of Britain and France was sufficient to empower their leaders to finally decide on war. By that time, Germany had become a European military superpower.
We don’t know how far Putin will ultimately end up going. An all-out invasion and occupation of Ukraine now seems likely. But will the Baltic states and Eastern Europe be next? Will an emboldened Russia team up with China to impose a new world order? If we are on the path to another bloody global confrontation, future historians will no doubt claim it would have been easier to stop Putin in 2008 when he invaded Georgia, or 2014 when he seized Crimea, or 2022 when he invaded Ukraine.
But the sad paradox of Munich is that when thuggish aggressors can be easily stopped, there’s rarely the moral case necessary for democracies to take action, and when there is such a case, the cost of waiting needs to be measured in human lives.
8. War in Ukraine: How we got here — and what may come next
Relatively long read with a "360" perspective at "a moment of tectonic shifts — a moment when geopolitics and history are colliding with issues ranging from the future of energy to misinformation, from cybersecurity to the rise of China."
War in Ukraine: How we got here — and what may come next
What are 360s? Grid’s answer to stories that deserve a fuller view.
Overview
When the war came, its breadth and ferocity stunned Ukrainians, and perhaps many Russians as well. Any idea of a limited invasion ended with the initial bombing raids against several major cities, and the first reports of casualties came within hours of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s declaration of war. Ukrainian officials said the country’s military, badly “outnumbered and outgunned,” had lost dozens of soldiers in the early fighting.
The onslaught confirms the worst fears of the U.S. and its allies, who had held out hope that diplomacy and threats of damaging sanctions would pull Putin back from the brink. Many global leaders and diplomats — several of whom were huddled in an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting when the war began — appeared stunned as well.
Putin’s decision to declare war in the face of the threats and high stakes may make little sense, but the Russian leader has rarely been motivated by logic alone. As Grid Global Security Reporter Joshua Keating explained earlier this month: “The man who has led Russia since the dawn of the century is animated by a desire to restore Moscow’s sphere of influence over the areas once controlled by the Soviet Union, a determination to reduce U.S. and Western European influence in the region, and a desire to stay in power.”
Thesis
The result of Putin’s decisions is a war that endangers the lives of millions of Ukrainians, risks a major refugee crisis, threatens the global economy and even raises the specter of nuclear deployment. It will also test old alliances and emerging global rivalries. This is a moment of tectonic shifts — a moment when geopolitics and history are colliding with issues ranging from the future of energy to misinformation, from cybersecurity to the rise of China.
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Geopolitics Lens
What the war is about
Global Editor
Global Security Reporter
From an outside perspective, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine looks illogical, even wildly irrational: the ultimate high-risk, low-reward proposition for Putin. The Russians will face a determined adversary that has had ample time to prepare and be hit hard by the raft of economic sanctions.
And for what? Putin is punishing a smaller, weaker neighbor that poses no real threat to Russia’s security or sovereignty. His principal case for war — to stop a “genocide” against Russians in eastern Ukraine — has no basis in reality. Meanwhile, there was ample evidence, even before the troops rolled in and bombs began to fall, that Putin’s aggressive stance had been counterproductive, uniting NATO in opposition and pushing Ukraine closer to Putin’s adversaries.
And yet this was no bluff. And clearly not a small operation to take those “people’s republics” in the east. Putin has gone all-in, a full-fledged assault on a sovereign nation in Europe.
How did we get here?
A long, “low-boil” conflict
The Russia-Ukraine crisis began in 2014. That’s when a Kremlin-backed Ukrainian president was forced from power amid protests by Ukrainians supporting closer ties to Europe. In the West, this “Revolution of Dignity” was seen as a democratic triumph over a corrupt leader; for Putin, it was a double offense — a blow to his regional ambitions and to his wish to drive the West from his neighborhood. In Russia, the events were portrayed as a Western-backed coup, akin to U.S.-led regime-change wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the chaotic days following the revolution, Russian special forces — with almost no opposition — seized and annexed Crimea, a largely Russian-speaking peninsula that belonged to Ukraine. Sanctions and statements of outrage from the Obama administration and other Western governments did nothing to stop them.
Russian troops then entered Ukraine to support pro-Russian separatists in the country’s east, helping to create two separatist enclaves — the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics.” Though a series of peace deals known as the Minsk agreements were signed in 2014 and 2015, neither Russian nor Ukraine abided by their key terms. The on-off conflict took nearly 14,000 lives.
Between Crimea and these two regions, before the bombs fell this week, 7 percent of Ukraine’s territory was already under de facto Russian control.
Putin’s game
Putin once served the Soviet state as a KGB agent, and he has described the breakup of the Soviet Union as a “geopolitical catastrophe.” Time and again he has returned to this theme — the idea that 1991 was a moment of shame and humiliation for Russia, and that every effort had to be made to repair the damage. In his two decades in power, he has intervened not only in Ukraine but also in the former Soviet republics of Belarus, Armenia and Georgia. In January, when violent protests roiled the ex-Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, Putin quickly answered a call from the Kazakh president to send troops.
But for Putin, the post-Soviet separation of Ukraine and Russia was a particular tragedy.
He once told President George W. Bush, on the sidelines of a NATO summit, “Ukraine is not a country.” Over the years, he has blamed the idea of Ukrainian independence on the nefarious designs of Polish elites, Austro-Hungarian colonialists and the Bolsheviks. In his Monday Kremlin address that laid out the case for war, Putin said Ukraine had been a creation of Vladimir Lenin.
For Putin, any expansion of Western influence and military power into Ukraine has always been seen as a clear threat to Russia, a continuation of NATO’s spread into post-communist Eastern Europe which — according to the Russian narrative — has gone against assurances given to Moscow at the end of the Cold War. While there had never been serious consideration given to NATO membership for Ukraine, NATO members have trained Ukrainian forces and held military exercises in the country. Indeed, Ukraine was the fourth-largest recipient of U.S. military aid last year and the largest outside the Middle East.
Ukraine Permanent Representative to the United Nations Sergiy Kyslytsya (R) walks to his seat during an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Ukraine in New York on Wednesday. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images)
“From the perspective of the paranoid old men in the Kremlin, they do feel that the West is fairly implacably hostile,” Mark Galeotti, a Russia analyst at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, told Grid. “This fear that Ukraine could become some kind of NATO advanced base, it’s easy to dismiss using logic, but logic doesn’t necessarily apply.”
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Military Lens
What war may look like
Global Security Reporter
In his Thursday morning declaration, Putin announced a “special military operation” aimed at the “demilitarization and denazification” of Ukraine. The strong implication, in this and his Monday address that laid out his reasons for war, was that he wants to overthrow the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. At the same time, Putin said Russia did not plan to “occupy” Ukrainian territory. It’s hard to see how he does the first of those things without the second.
Russia may opt for a short, sharp strike to decimate the Ukrainian military, humiliate its government, force Zelenskiy to make painful concessions, and perhaps expand the territory held by the now well-known breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. A precedent might be Russia’s five-day invasion of Georgia in 2008.
But the operation in Ukraine already appears to be much larger than that one, which killed roughly 850 people, including Georgian civilians and troops from both sides. And there is also the possibility, according to Western intelligence assessments released over the past few weeks, that the Russian military will attempt to seize and hold large parts of Ukrainian territory outside the eastern Donbas region or march into the capital, Kyiv, and other major cities — especially if the aim really is to overthrow the Ukrainian government. In the latter scenario, a U.S. official quoted by NBC News estimated that between 25,000 and 50,000 civilians could be killed or wounded in the first two weeks of war. These same intelligence assessments were mostly correct in the lead-up to the invasion.
Resistance?
Few give Ukraine’s military (around 200,000 active personnel to Russia’s 850,000) much chance of defeating Russia in a conventional war, but it’s far stronger than it was when fighting first broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and has received substantial military aid, particularly in recent weeks. This time, the Russians certainly don’t have the element of surprise on their side, and its troops will be fighting on unforgiving (in some places even radioactive) terrain. It could be a bloody fight.
Tanks of Ukrainian forces move following Russia's military operation on Thursday, in Chuhuiv, Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine. (Anadolu Agency/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
There’s also the possibility that the war could turn into an insurgency against the occupiers, with ordinary citizens — many of whom now have combat experience after eight years of conflict — taking up arms, and the U.S. and European countries providing support. If Russia ends up waging a full-on counterinsurgency in Ukraine, including urban warfare and airstrikes on populated areas, a better guide to what it might look like are Russia’s two wars in Chechnya in the 1990s, where estimates suggest more than 100,000 people were killed.
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Global Economy Lens
Energy crises: $100 oil and beyond
Global Security Reporter
Domestic Economics Reporter
There is of course no comparing what Ukrainians are experiencing to the effects war will have outside the country, but global disruptions are likely. The war is already creating havoc in global energy markets — the price of oil spiked north of $100 as the first bombs fell — and the trend may continue, particularly if Russia plays the strongest economic card it has to counter Western sanctions: slowing or entirely cutting off energy supplies to Europe.
Russia is a major player in the world energy markets, especially in shipping natural gas to Europe, where the hydrocarbons flowing from east to west make up about a third of the continent’s natural gas usage. While these pipelines are still in operation, the status of “energy as a weapon” remains one of the biggest unknowns of the crisis.
The knock-on effects of a disrupted or completely cutoff gas supply would be tremendous. It would likely reduce the supply of natural gas available for world consumption, potentially creating even more of an inflation crunch here at home.
Americans may think this is all happening “over there,” but disruptions in world energy prices could quickly be felt at home. Even though the United States is largely self-sufficient when it comes to oil production (and even exports oil), prices for oil are set globally and feed into consumer prices paid for gasoline, food and airfares, as well as natural gas price fluctuations affecting electricity costs.
If the Russian gas supply were to be cut off, “The volumes you’re talking about are so large that it’s unlikely Europe would get the gas it needs. It’s more than enough to cause the mother of all gas spikes but in the global natural gas market. Not just in Europe, but in Asia as well,” said Pierre Noël, a scholar at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
Beyond oil and gas
Energy isn’t the only commodity to watch. The White House recently advised the U.S. semiconductor chip industry to diversify its supplies, anticipating Russian retaliation if the U.S. slaps severe export control sanctions on the country’s electronics industry. In particular, the war may threaten global supplies of key minerals used in chip production. Thirty-five percent of the palladium used by the industry is sourced from Russia, and 90 percent of the United States’ semiconductor-grade neon supplies come from Ukraine.
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Technology Lens
The first true cyberwar?
Technology Reporter
Russia is waging war against Ukraine online as well as on the ground. Over the last six weeks, Russian cyberattacks have spread malware and taken down the websites of key Ukrainian agencies and the country’s leading banks.
The latest cyber barrage began Wednesday, disrupting the websites of Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers, along with the country’s ministries of foreign affairs, infrastructure and many others. Also on Wednesday, cybersecurity researchers said they had discovered destructive malware on “hundreds of computers” in Ukraine that is capable of wiping data from infected machines. The source of the malware has not yet been identified.
Several experts said that Russia has far greater cyber capabilities than it has displayed in the Ukraine fight so far. None of the incidents has amounted to a cataclysmic cyberattack, said Andrei Soldatov, a senior fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis and an investigative journalist who has covered Russia’s security services for more than two decades.
The U.S., EU and other Ukraine allies have said they are aiding Ukraine in hardening its cyberdefenses, and Biden has made clear that the U.S. will defend itself against any retaliatory attacks. But it’s not clear how far those allies are prepared to go to prevent a full-on cyber war.
“The last thing that the Biden administration wants to do is get into a tit-for-tat with Russia in cyberspace,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, founder of the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at Johns Hopkins University and chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a D.C. think tank. “One of the advantages that the Russians have in cyberspace is that they don’t have any limits.”
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China Lens
Walking a geopolitical tightrope
China Reporter
As the bombs exploded across Ukraine and global leaders condemned Putin for the invasion, China stood almost alone.
Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying refused to call it an “invasion”. The history of the conflict was “complicated.” Asked about Putin’s false claim of genocide, Hua said, “we don’t go rushing to conclusions.” Later, in a call between Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov, Wang reiterated China’s respect for “sovereignty and territorial integrity” — a veiled word of support for Ukraine — while also saying that Russia had “legitimate concerns” regarding security issues.
China’s response reflects the strong and growing partnership that Presidents Xi Jinping and Putin have forged. The two leaders met at the Beijing Winter Olympics earlier this month and said the friendship between their countries had “no limits.” They also signed a series of economic and trade deals that Putin wanted as part of a safeguard against the sanctions that loomed. These included $117.5 billion in new energy contracts with China, including a 30-year agreement between Russia’s Gazprom and the China National Petroleum Corporation to supply 10 billion cubic meters of gas per year via a new pipeline from Russia’s Far East region to northeast China.
Russia-China experts told Grid that those deals, and the general support Xi offered Putin at their Olympic summit, likely emboldened Putin as he considered war.
“I think China’s potential economic support for Russia plays a very important role in Russia’s decision-making. It was not a coincidence that Russia just signed multiple megadeals with China,” said Cheng Chen, a political scientist at the State University of New York at Albany. “Russia has been trying to ‘sanction-proof’ its economy in the past years, but these measures wouldn’t be effective without the support of an economic powerhouse like China.”
China’s leaders may not have condemned Russia’s attack, but they didn’t full back the invasion either. That diplomatic tightrope reflects China’s twin priorities: maintaining a bond with Russia against Western democracies while also demonstrating its commitment to upholding sovereignty and national borders — all while trying to maintain a relationship with the West.
There may be a Taiwan connection as well. China may be hoping Russia will reciprocate when it comes to China’s interests surrounding the island, which China has long sought to “reunify” with the mainland. “China wants Russian support on the Taiwan issue, especially in case of a possible future crisis,” Joseph Torigian, an assistant professor of international service at American University, told Grid. “For that purpose, it wouldn’t be useful if Moscow believes China did not provide support on Ukraine.”
Supporting Russia, supporting the sanctity of national borders and keeping some semblance of a relationship with the West — China’s balancing act was already precarious before the invasion. It may just have gotten a lot harder.
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Misinformation Lens
The information war
Misinformation Reporter
In the run-up to war, Russian-backed separatists were caught staging false flag attack videos that were then distributed in Russian state news sources to justify a Russian invasion.
One particularly grisly example involved an alleged improvised explosive device attack in eastern Ukraine. The video was analyzed by Grid and Victor Weedn, a renowned career forensic pathologist with experience examining victims of IED blasts and former chief of the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory. The evidence, Weedn said, suggested a very different sequence of events: The person in the image had died sometime before, an autopsy had been performed on the body, the body was subsequently placed in the car, and the car was then torched.
It was one of many alleged false flag operations that circulated in pro-Russian media in recent weeks. Reporters have also discovered falsified accounts posting divisive content about Western countries and Ukrainian leadership.
These incidents were only the latest chapter in Putin’s long-running elaborate campaign of disinformation — a mix of staged events, lies spread on social media and revisions of history spread by Putin himself. The culmination was Putin’s Kremlin address Monday, in which he promoted a pro-Russian view of history and falsely accused Ukraine of waging genocide against ethnic Russians inside its borders.
It’s a playbook similar to the one Putin employed in the buildup to the 2008 war in Georgia and the 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. In both cases, the Kremlin claimed to be coming to aid beleaguered Russian residents. It also had echoes of the Soviet era, when press manipulation and official lies were commonplace.
“It seemed that there was a lot of continuity in the types of strategies, that you can really classify pro-Kremlin disinformation in ways that were very similar to ways that analysts 30 years ago, 40 years ago, had classified that disinformation,” said Aaron Erlich, a political scientist at McGill University who has researched disinformation in Ukraine.
“You distort and distract and give so many different versions and possibilities of things that it could have been,” Erlich said, “that people just give up trying to figure out anything that’s true or false.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow on Thursday. (Alexey Nikolsky/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images)
Can Putin win at this game? Can he be stopped?
It is too early to answer either question. And it remains entirely possible that Russia will manage to take the territories in eastern Ukraine and even install a pro-Russian regime in Kyiv.
But as the war continues, casualties will mount, and Putin and his country will be battered by sanctions. The invasion has already brought two results likely to infuriate the Russian leader: an almost unprecedented unity within NATO and antipathy toward Russia within Ukraine itself.
Weeks before the first bombs fell, Serhii Plokhy, professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, told Grid that “Ukraine is much more pro-European and much more unified today than it ever was before the events of 2014. And Russia’s aggression is the sole, the most important factor in that development.”
In 2013, roughly 43 percent of Ukrainians approved of the Russian government; in 2018, the figure was 7 percent. In polls taken well before the war, some 64 percent of Ukrainians favor NATO membership, a number almost certain to rise. The figure hovered between 15-25 percent before the 2014 conflict.
“Russia’s capacity to misunderstand Ukraine is hard to overstate,” said Olga Oliker, program director for Europe and Central Asia at Crisis Group, speaking to Grid before the war. “When they look at what’s happening in Ukraine, they don’t see it as Ukraine making choices. They see it as Western influence. They see it as Western pressure. There’s this belief that there’s a silent majority in Ukraine that actually loves Russia, and that the Ukrainian government is acting against their interests.”
9. The world could do more to stop Putin. Here’s why it won’t.
Excerpts:
The unfortunate reality is that Ukraine’s supporters don’t have much leverage, at least not with the tools policymakers are realistically willing to use. It’s almost certainly too late to change Putin’s mind on Ukraine, if that was ever possible. Whatever costs the West imposes on Moscow now were likely priced into his calculations months ago. And the risks of military escalation and catastrophic superpower conflict are real and should not be dismissed.
Lucas said that in the wake of the new sanctions and righteous denunciations of Putin and his brazen attack, Western countries are essentially “toasting ourselves over the corpse of Ukraine.” But, he added, “it’s very important that we try and draw a line that doesn’t go any further.”
Ultimately, the U.S. and its European allies must confront an uncomfortable truth: Unless they are willing to absorb significant economic pain, or risk the lives of their own people, Putin may well have his way. And the aggression — for all the rhetoric to the contrary — will stand.
The world could do more to stop Putin. Here’s why it won’t.
Tough rhetoric and the threat of sanctions didn’t prevent a Russian assault on Ukraine. Now the world is scrambling to stop it.
Global Security Reporter
February 25, 2022
The day Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden told Americans from the White House, “This aggression cannot go unanswered. If it did, the consequences for America would be much worse. America stands up to bullies. We stand up for freedom. This is who we are.”
The president was, perhaps intentionally, echoing his predecessor George H.W. Bush, who addressed the nation after another dictator invaded his neighbor more than 30 years ago: “This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.” But the echo only served to underscore the difference between the two responses. In 1991, the U.S. built a multinational coalition that sent nearly 700,000 soldiers to the Persian Gulf. That aggression did not stand; Iraqi forces were driven from Kuwait. Today, the U.S. has said repeatedly it will not be sending in troops or building a military coalition to fight Russia directly. Doing so would risk a nuclear war.
So far, the U.S. and allied response to Russia’s assault on Ukraine has mostly taken the form of economic punishment. The U.S. sanctioned two major Russian state-owned banks and imposed sweeping controls on technology exports to Russia. The U.K. says it will sanction more than 100 individuals and entities, freeze the assets of Russian banks in U.K. and ban Russian airline Aeroflot from the country. The European Union also announced sanctions that will sever 70 percent of Russia’s banking system from international financial markets, as well as an export ban targeting the Russian oil industry.
Still, none of these steps has deterred Putin so far, and if the conflict drags on, there will be pressure on world leaders to back up their righteous language about “standing with Ukraine.”
What leverage do the U.S. and its allies have? What measures are they willing to use? Is there anything Western countries can still do to back Ukraine and punish Russia, short of starting World War III?
Use the energy weapon
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who said Thursday that Russian “sabotage forces” were hunting for him, has called on European countries to go beyond the existing sanctions and embargo all Russian oil and gas imports. Doing so would strike a huge blow against an industry that accounts for a third of the Russian state’s annual budget. Given what we’ve seen to date, that seems extremely unlikely.
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In the longer term, perhaps this crisis will be Europe’s wake-up call to finally wean itself off Russian gas entirely. But for now, “stand with Ukraine” does not include a willingness to pay more at the pump.
Hit Putin’s enablers
Edward Lucas, senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and author of several books on Russian politics, has a different idea. This week, he called on Western countries to impose “visa bans on all government ministers, on all members of the Duma and Federation Council, all governors and officeholders in Russia’s regions, on all officials in the ‘power ministries’ and security agencies, and on the 35 individuals named in Alexei Navalny’s list.” The last point refers to 35 Russian oligarchs and officials identified by the imprisoned opposition leader and his organization, people seen as key to Putin’s hold on power and complicit in human rights abuses — including Navalny’s own poisoning. A bill introduced this week in Congress would urge the Biden administration to sanction all 35 of them.
Of course, after eight years of sanctions, many of Russia’s richest oligarchs are very good at finding ways to hide their money. This hidden wealth accounts for as much as 85 percent of Russia’s GDP, according to some estimates. British journalist Oliver Bullough suggests that if the U.K. were serious about cracking down on the oligarchs who have used London as a friendly place to live and stash money, it needs to crack down on offshore property and on laws that make it easy to register shell companies.
Lucas told Grid that in some ways, the focus on oligarchs misses the mark. “There’s a Western misapprehension that the oligarchs run Russia. They did in the ’90s, but the oligarchs now are sort of franchise holders for Putin.” He said that new sanctions should instead “shift the focus away from oligarchs to the top 1,000, or top 5,000, people in Russia who are making the actual decisions. Then you go after their spouses and their children and their parents and their siblings and their significant others. And so if you have any relationship with anyone like that, you can’t come to the West anymore. That would create a bit of a headache.” New EU sanctions targeting members of Russia’s State Duma and Putin’s cabinet could be the beginning.
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SWIFT action
Much of the debate around sanctions has focused on whether Russia should be kicked off SWIFT, the global financial messaging system that banks use to communicate and conduct transactions. The U.S. and United Kingdom reportedly favor taking this step, which was previously used against Iran, but a number of European countries oppose it, fearing the disruption to financial markets. Biden noted, somewhat tersely, in his remarks on Thursday that SWIFT sanctions were “not the position that the rest of Europe wishes to take.”
The U.S. has ways of unilaterally forcing SWIFT, a Belgium-based company, to remove Russia without the EU’s consent. It did this with Iran in 2012. Ultimately though, knocking Russia off SWIFT may be less consequential than the banking sanctions already being applied. Anders Aslund, an economist and former adviser to the Russian government, told Grid, “SWIFT is an information messaging system. If you’re off SWIFT, you’re still allowed to have dealings with financial institutions. With [these sanctions], everyone is prevented from dealing with you.”
Rightly or wrongly, SWIFT has become a kind of litmus test for countries’ will to respond to Russian aggression. And for the moment, it looks like there are limits on that will.
Diplomatic expulsions
The U.S. expelled the second-highest-ranking diplomat from the Russian Embassy in D.C. this week, though at least according to the State Department, this was not related to the invasion, but a response to the expulsion of the U.S. deputy chief of mission in Moscow earlier this year. Lucas suggests all EU, NATO and OECD countries should withdraw their ambassadors from Moscow and send their Russian counterparts home. There’s precedent for such a move; in 2018, the U.S. and several European countries expelled dozens of Russian diplomats over the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter.
Also on the diplomatic front, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations has launched a long-shot bid to challenge Russia’s seat on the Security Council. The Russian Federation took over the Soviet Union’s seat in 1991, but that change was never voted on, and the U.N.’s charter still refers to the USSR, which became 15 different countries after the Soviet collapse. Ukraine is one of them.
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Military options
A number of Ukrainian leaders are calling for NATO to establish a no-fly zone over the country, to neutralize or at least weaken Russia’s air power. This tactic has been used by the U.S. and allies in the past in Libya, Iraq and Yugoslavia.
This is extremely unlikely to happen. As U.K. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace put it on Friday, “To do a no-fly zone, I would have to put British fighter jets directly against Russian fighter jets.” This would essentially “declare war on Russia,” he added.
More troops are being moved into the countries surrounding Ukraine. Biden has ordered a total of 14,000 additional U.S. troops to Europe since the Ukraine crisis began to escalate, including 7,000 after the invasion began. Eight hundred U.S. infantry troops have been relocated to the Baltic countries, and eight F-35 fighter jets deployed along the eastern border of NATO.
But the White House has said at every turn — including in Biden’s Thursday remarks: No U.S. soldiers are going to enter Ukraine. They may assist with the relief effort for refugees fleeing the conflict, but their main purpose is to reassure NATO member states in Eastern Europe that they won’t be next in Putin’s sights.
Aiding and equipping
Ukraine’s defense minister has called on the nation’s supporters to supply the country with more Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and Javelin anti-tank weapons. Early reports suggest the Javelins, which the U.S. began supplying in 2018, are one reason why the Ukrainian military has been holding up better than it did in the Crimea conflict in 2014. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said that the U.S. will continue to provide Ukraine with these weapons systems, though the logistics of those deliveries will be tricky with the country’s airspace closed.
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But it’s a little late for conventional military aid. “At this point, the table is set, and the guests are not just arriving for dinner, they’re sitting down. I don’t think that there’s much that the U.S. can do in terms of training and equipping,” Sean McFate, a retired U.S. Army paratrooper who now teaches at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, told Grid. “At this point, what they can try to think about is planning some sort of insurgency.”
Given Biden’s no-U.S.-troops-on-the-ground restriction, support for such a fight would have to take place outside Ukraine, perhaps from a forward operating base in a neighboring country. McFate notes that this would be something of a return to the original role of U.S. Special Forces in the early days of the Cold War, when Americans organized anti-communist guerrilla movements around the world.
But, McFate notes, this plan “assumes that Ukrainians have a will to have a bloody and protracted insurgency. You have to remember, Russia’s counterinsurgency is not the Petraeus doctrine, it’s not winning hearts and minds. It looks like Grozny in 1999.” Grozny, the Chechen capital, was obliterated by the Russians; more than 100,000 people were killed in the two Chechen wars.
Foreign Policy also reports that there are ongoing debates within the U.S. administration as to whether the president has the legal authority to support an insurgency in Ukraine, and whether doing so would raise the risk of direct conflict with Russia.
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The unfortunate reality is that Ukraine’s supporters don’t have much leverage, at least not with the tools policymakers are realistically willing to use. It’s almost certainly too late to change Putin’s mind on Ukraine, if that was ever possible. Whatever costs the West imposes on Moscow now were likely priced into his calculations months ago. And the risks of military escalation and catastrophic superpower conflict are real and should not be dismissed.
Lucas said that in the wake of the new sanctions and righteous denunciations of Putin and his brazen attack, Western countries are essentially “toasting ourselves over the corpse of Ukraine.” But, he added, “it’s very important that we try and draw a line that doesn’t go any further.”
Ultimately, the U.S. and its European allies must confront an uncomfortable truth: Unless they are willing to absorb significant economic pain, or risk the lives of their own people, Putin may well have his way. And the aggression — for all the rhetoric to the contrary — will stand.
10. Opinion | Why Is Putin at War Again? Because He Keeps Winning.
Conclusion:
The U.S. strategy of making public intelligence about Russia’s military buildup around Ukraine was clever, but Mr. Putin has called our bluff. It was once popular to mock the Russian president for his 19th-century worldview, but his use of military power to bolster Russia’s influence has worked in the 21st century, too. The West’s assumption that the arc of history naturally bends in its direction is looking naïve. So, too, is the decision to let our military advantage slip. Soft power and economic influence are fine capabilities to have, but they cannot stop Russian armor as it rolls toward Kyiv.
Opinion | Why Is Putin at War Again? Because He Keeps Winning.
Guest Essay
Feb. 25, 2022, 5:50 a.m. ET
A Russian convoy headed toward Georgia in 2008.
By
Mr. Miller is an assistant professor of international history at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and a co-director of the school’s Russia and Eurasia program. He has written extensively about Russia and is the author of “Putinomics.”
There is no world leader today with a better track record when it comes to using military power than President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Whether against Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, or in Syria since 2015, the Russian military has repeatedly converted battlefield success into political victories. Russia’s rearmament over the past decade and a half has been unmatched by a comparable increase in Western capabilities. So it is no surprise why Russia feels emboldened to use its military power while the West stands by.
Russia’s past three wars are textbook examples of how to use military force in limited ways to achieve political goals. The invasion of Georgia in 2008 lasted five days but forced that country into humiliating political concessions. In Ukraine in 2014, regular Russian military units were deployed at scale for a few weeks, but this proved enough to force Kyiv to sign a painful peace deal. When Russia intervened in Syria in 2015, some Western analysts predicted a disaster along the lines of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which began in 1979 and ended, after a decade of quagmire, in retreat. Instead, that Syria’s civil war served as a testing ground for Russia’s most advanced weaponry.
For the past decade, Americans have come to believe that Russia’s strength lies in hybrid tactics — cyber-warfare, misinformation campaigns, covert operations — and its ability to meddle in other countries’ domestic politics. Yet as we have searched for Russian phantoms behind every misinformed Facebook post, Russia has replaced the poorly equipped army it inherited from the Soviet Union with a modern fighting force, featuring everything from new missiles to advanced electronic warfare systems. Today, the threat to Europe’s security is not hybrid warfare but hard power, visible in the cruise missiles that have struck across Ukraine.
“We are 50 percent plus of global G.D.P.,” Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, argued recently, contrasting this to Russia’s unimpressive 3 percent share of the world’s economic output. However, economies don’t fight wars; militaries do. America’s economic power was tested when Mr. Biden threatened tough sanctions if Russia were to invade Ukraine; Mr. Putin did so anyway, betting that hard power would carry the day.
There’s still no doubt that America’s military has better trained soldiers and more capable systems in aggregate. However, what matters is not theoretical military matchups but the ability to use force for specific aims. Russia has developed precisely the capabilities needed to rebuild its influence in Eastern Europe. The United States, meanwhile, has watched its room for maneuver in the region steadily shrinking, hemmed in by Russian antiaircraft systems and cyber and electronic warfare threats.
Letting the military balance in Europe shift in Russia’s favor was a choice. The United States has itself partly to blame. Even after Russia’s first attacks on Ukraine in 2014, America’s reinforcements on the continent were only enough to slow the rate of improvement in Russia’s position. The Biden administration has presided over military spending cuts once inflation is considered. America’s roughly $700 billion defense budget may look impressive, but Russia has the advantage of paying less for soldiers’ salaries and for domestically produced equipment. Adjusting for these differences, Russia’s defense budget has grown far more rapidly than America’s over the past two decades. European allies have even more to answer for: Germany and other European countries must wake up from the fantasy that peace is their birthright. They used to have serious fighting power. It is time to rebuild it.
It may be that, in trying to swallow all of Ukraine, Mr. Putin has finally overstepped. A long occupation of Ukraine would stretch Russia’s capabilities, especially because its military advantages will be less significant if the conflict shifts into Ukraine’s populous cities. However, we should not simply assume that Ukraine will become Putin’s Afghanistan or his Iraq because other leaders have made their own errors. Mr. Putin could simply choose to destroy Ukraine and leave the West to pick up the pieces. Such a dismembered, dysfunctional Ukraine could well suit his interests. Russia’s recent wars have been carefully calculated and limited in cost. There’s no guarantee that this conflict won’t be, too.
The U.S. strategy of making public intelligence about Russia’s military buildup around Ukraine was clever, but Mr. Putin has called our bluff. It was once popular to mock the Russian president for his 19th-century worldview, but his use of military power to bolster Russia’s influence has worked in the 21st century, too. The West’s assumption that the arc of history naturally bends in its direction is looking naïve. So, too, is the decision to let our military advantage slip. Soft power and economic influence are fine capabilities to have, but they cannot stop Russian armor as it rolls toward Kyiv.
Chris Miller (@crmiller1) is an assistant professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
11. China is Russia's best hope to blunt sanctions, but wary
Will China continue to help Russia evade sanctions? Note the comments about China helps north Korea evade sanctions. I heard a comment that China has even imported coal from Russia despite China having the largest coal reserves.
China is Russia's best hope to blunt sanctions, but wary
AP · by JOE McDONALD · February 26, 2022
BEIJING (AP) — China is the only friend that might help Russia blunt the impact of economic sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine, but President Xi Jinping’s government is giving no sign it might be willing to risk its own access to U.S. and European markets by doing too much.
Even if Beijing wanted to, its ability to support President Vladimir Putin by importing more Russian gas and other goods is limited.
Relations with Moscow have warmed since Xi took power in 2012, motivated by shared resentment of Washington, but their interests can conflict. While their militaries hold joint exercises, Putin is uneasy about the growing Chinese economic presence in Central Asia and Russia’s Far East.
“China-Russia relations are at the highest level in history, but the two countries are not an alliance,” said Li Xin, an international relations expert at the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law.
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In response to the invasion, Washington, Britain, the 27-nation European Union and other Western allies have announced or promised sanctions against Russian banks, officials, business leaders and companies, as well as export controls aimed at starving Russia’s industries and military of high-tech products.
Xi’s government might support Putin within those limits — and Chinese companies might use the situation to pursue better deals — but will balk at openly violating sanctions and being targeted for penalties, experts said.
“China doesn’t want to get so involved that it ends up suffering as a result of its support for Russia,” said Mark Williams, chief Asia economist for Capital Economics.
Chinese trade with Russia rose to $146.9 billion last year, but that is less than one-tenth of China’s total $1.6 trillion in trade with the United States and European Union.
“It all hinges on whether they’re willing to risk their access to Western markets to help Russia, and I don’t think they are,” said Williams. “It’s just not that big a market.”
China, the world’s second-largest economy, is the only major government not to have condemned the invasion.
“The degree of Chinese support Russia receives is likely to prove a crucial factor in how well it can weather the long-term consequences,” wrote Kevin Rudd, a former Australian prime minister and president of the Asia Society, on the Asia Society website.
China’s multibillion-dollar purchases of Russian gas for its energy-hungry economy have been a lifeline for Putin following trade and financial sanctions imposed in 2014 over his seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.
Putin’s government has spent the past decade trying to expand exports to the Far East to reduce reliance on European markets. Moscow and Beijing both are trying to de-dollarize, or use the U.S. currency less in trade, to reduce their exposure to the American financial system and official pressure.
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China bought one-sixth of Russia’s total exports last year and two-thirds of that was oil and gas, according to Rajiv Biswas, chief Asia-Pacific economist for IHS Markit.
“China will be an important growth market for Russian energy exports,” Biswas said.
China wants more gas, but Moscow can’t immediately deliver. Pipelines linking the two countries are fully loaded. They signed a 30-year supply deal last month but said pipes to carry that gas won’t be completed for at least three years.
Beijing has shown its self-interest by using pressure on Moscow from the 2014 sanctions as leverage to negotiate lower gas prices in an earlier contract.
“We will not take advantage of others’ difficulties,” said Li. “But as an economic entity, Chinese companies will strive for the maximum gains with the possible lowest costs.”
A foreign ministry spokesman didn’t answer directly when asked Friday whether China might buy more Russian oil. But he criticized “illegal unilateral sanctions” and said Beijing and Moscow carry on “normal trade cooperation.”
“We demand that relevant parties should not damage the legitimate rights and interests of China and other countries,” said the spokesman, Wang Wenbin.
Also this week, China announced it would allow imports of wheat from all parts of Russia for the first time. That cannot replace all lost gas revenue if Europe stops buying but could help to buoy incomes of Russian farmers.
Still, that announcement came with a warning that looms as a potential obstacle: Shipments must be kept free of a fungus that led China earlier to avoid Russian wheat.
Moscow also might have undercut Beijing’s willingness to help by launching its invasion after Xi endorsed Russian complaints about security and the expansion of the NATO military alliance in a statement with Putin last month.
Xi’s government has tried to distance itself from the attack by urging respect for national sovereignty, which Foreign Minister Wang Yi said last weekend includes Ukraine.
While trade deals will go ahead, “China will not side with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine,” said Zhang Lihua, an expert on Chinese-European relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
In a phone call Friday with Putin, Xi said China “supports Russia and Ukraine resolving this problem through dialogue,” state TV reported.
China’s relations with Washington and Europe already are strained by complaints about Beijing’s technology ambitions, market access, human rights, Hong Kong and Chinese claims to disputed seas and territory in the Himalayas.
China is accused by the United States and its allies of helping Iran and North Korea evade sanctions, but the scale of violations and penalties have been limited.
Beijing says it complies with a U.N. ban on most trade with North Korea over its nuclear weapons development. But China has been accused of failing to enforce that fully for fear of causing an economic collapse and a refugee crisis on its border.
Chinese-flagged ships are suspected of taking oil to North Korea and exporting its coal, though it isn’t clear whether that has approval from Chinese leaders. North Korea is accused of using Chinese brokers to launder stolen cryptocurrency.
Except for tech giant Huawei Technologies Ltd., which was accused of trading with Iran, Chinese violators are small and have few foreign activities that are vulnerable to sanctions.
Western anger over Putin’s attack on Ukraine is more intense, suggesting governments will watch closely and enforcement will be more stringent.
Beijing has criticized U.S. threats to impose “secondary sanctions” that hit not just companies or banks dealing with North Korea but their customers and business partners. If Washington were to carry out such secondary sanctions in relation to Ukraine, there would be little China could do to protect state-owned banks and other companies with operations in foreign economies.
Some Chinese oil and gas companies with Russian partners were hurt by earlier sanctions on Moscow, Li said.
“This is what Chinese companies are worried about,” Li said.
___
AP researcher Yu Bing and video producer Caroline Chen in Beijing and AP Writers Hyung-Jin Kim in Seoul and David Rising in Bangkok contributed.
AP · by JOE McDONALD · February 26, 2022
12. How is Beijing Portraying Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine for the Chinese Public?
How is Beijing Portraying Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine for the Chinese Public?
Beijing has avoided direct criticism of Russia’s attack on Ukraine. But Beijing’s domestic portrayal of the crisis for its own citizens is far from an enthusiastic embrace of Moscow’s actions.
Ukrainian National Guard patrols the streets of Kyiv, Ukraine. Gleb Garanich/Reuters
February 25, 2022 3:34 pm (EST)
Internationally, China’s position on the Ukraine crisis has been muddled. As Evan Feigenbaum has noted, Beijing has sought to straddle mutually competing – and conflicting – priorities: a strategic partnership with Russia, long-standing foreign policy principles of “territorial integrity” and “noninterference,” and a desire to limits collateral damage from Western sanctions.
Even after Russia’s military assault on Ukraine, Beijing has strenuously sought to maintain this position. In his February 25 telephone call with Putin, Xi Jinping avoided the use of the term “invasion,” instead noting that “dramatic changes in the situation in eastern Ukraine have drawn great attention from the international community,” expressing the desire to see Russia and Ukraine “solv[e] the issue through negotiation” and reiterating China’s “basic position on respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries.”
State media has reflected this ambiguous stance in portraying the conflict for China’s domestic audience. The evening news reiterates Moscow’s statements describing Russian actions as a “special military operation” targeting military facilities. It shows clips of Putin asserting that Moscow’s assault are the result of NATO actions that left him no choice. However, it also repeats Ukrainian president Zelensky’s statements regarding Ukrainian death tolls. And it shows clips of explosions in urban areas and residential buildings burning.
This is vastly different from the portrayal by official Russian state media outlets of the conflict, which has shown images of quiet and calm Ukrainian streets, and little to no impact on civilian life.
Why is this important?
First, it underlines the extent to which Beijing and Moscow are not in complete alignment. And that raises the question as to whether there may indeed be practical limits to China’s professed “no limits” friendship with Russia. Reports are emerging that at least two Chinese state-owned banks have restricted financing for Russian commodity purchases.
Second, as a result of Beijing’s own indecision, ordinary Chinese citizens are being presented with a somewhat blurry official portrait of who is actually at fault in the crisis. This is creating a degree of space for nationalist and anti-war voices to square off in Chinese social media.
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License.
13. PROF MICHAEL CLARKE We’ve reached Peak Putin and he’s sure to fall – but with China bailing him out he will be the new Kim Jong Un
Quite an analogy.
Excerpt:
Putin may be the new Kim Jong Un — another bloody nuisance that Beijing has to support.
PROF MICHAEL CLARKE We’ve reached Peak Putin and he’s sure to fall – but with China bailing him out he will be the new Kim Jong Un
- Michael Clarke
- 16:00 ET, Feb 25 2022Updated: 17:20 ET, Feb 25 2022
WITH Russian troops in Kyiv, it looks increasingly that Putin’s military will overrun Ukraine’s brave, out-gunned forces.
But the Russian leader’s moment of great triumph is likely to be the beginning of his collapse.
7
This is the beginning of the end for Russian president Vladimir PutinCredit: Getty - Contributor
I am convinced we have now reached peak Putin.
From here on he is finished, no matter how much China supports him.
Whether that collapse will be quick or long we don’t yet know. But from now on the only way is downhill, because Putin has damaged Russia so much in the world’s eyes.
The man is not a lunatic but he is a different Putin to the one of five years ago.
Then, we didn’t like him but we understood him. Now we still don’t like him but we don’t understand him either.
Russia feels safest surrounded by weak or broken states that are dependent on Moscow.
It doesn’t like being neighbours with prosperous, well-functioning countries.
7
Putin will end up isolated like North Korean dictator Kim Jong UnCredit: AP
With his 1930s-style aggression, Putin wants to create a Novo-Russiya — New Russia.
In his mind, eastern Ukraine might even return to Russia like in Donbas and Crimea.
He would hold “referendums” on merging with Russia, “votes” that would be “won” by an “overwhelming” majority.
He would install a puppet regime in the rest of the country, west of the Dnieper River, a Ukrainian version of Belarus.
I don’t think it is remotely realistic. Putin, who now truly believes his own propaganda, has committed a massive strategic blunder.
Nato will go to war if Russians set on foot in the Baltic States, now full Nato members.
Sanctions won’t deter him but they will certainly hurt Russia.
They may last for ten years or more and the West is united as never before against Russia.
China is nervous that Putin will be more dependent on it than ever and fears Russia becoming another North Korea.
Putin may be the new Kim Jong Un — another bloody nuisance that Beijing has to support.
14. Zelensky defiant as Putin's noose tightens around Kyiv
Zelensky is pretty impressive. He is demonstrating real leadership.
Excerpt:
Zelensky in a Friday night phone call reportedly rejected President Joe Biden's offer to evacuate him from Kyiv, telling the US leader: 'The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.'
Zelensky defiant as Putin's noose tightens around Kyiv
'We survived the night. The occupiers wanted to capture our capital and install their puppets...We broke their idea': Zelensky's warning shot to Putin as noose tightens around Kyiv, Ukrainian civilian death toll hits 198 and missile hits tower block
- On Saturday morning, Kyiv was still holding out and President Zelensky remained defiant in face of invasion
- UK intel suggests that the bulk of Russian forces are now within 19 miles of the capital Kyiv
- Ukraine officials are calling on all citizens to remove street signs to 'confuse and disorient' Russian invaders
- Shocking video shows a devastating missile strike on an apartment block near Zhuliany airport
- A hole covering at least five floors was blasted into the side of the building, as rubble is strewn across street
- A barrage of cruise missiles have also been launched by Russian forces against Ukrainian military facilities
- Volodymyr Zelensky declares Kyiv will resist the Russian advance and vows to fight Vladimir Putin's forces
- He rejected Biden's offer of an evacuation flight telling US president: 'I need ammunition, not a ride'
PUBLISHED: 08:11 EST, 26 February 2022 | UPDATED: 10:25 EST, 26 February 2022
Daily Mail · by Keith Griffith For Dailymail.com · February 26, 2022
Defiant Ukraine President Volodmyr Zelensky on Saturday said his country's army had successfully repelled Russian forces advancing on Kyiv and was in control of the capital after a night of brutal fighting that saw terrified residents seeking shelter underground.
In a video message to the besieged nation, Zelensky accused the Kremlin of attempting to seize Kyiv, overthrow the government and install a 'puppet' regime 'like in Donetsk', one of two separatist regions which warmonger Vladimir Putin officially recognized before launching an all-out invasion.
Declaring 'we broke their idea', Zelensky added: 'The fights are going on in many cities and areas of our state. But we know that we are protecting the country, the land, the future of our children. Kyiv and key cities around the capital are controlled by our army.
'The [Russian] occupants wanted to block the center of our state and put here their marionette, like in Donetsk. We broke their idea.'
It comes after a high-rise apartment block in Kyiv was hit by a devastating missile this morning, while Ukraine's civilian death toll hit 198.
'More than 100,000 invaders are on our land. They insidiously fire on residential buildings,' Zelensky said in a Twitter update on Saturday morning.
Civilian volunteers are now digging trenches on the outskirts of Kyiv, where on Saturday Ukrainian tanks patrolled the eerily empty streets, silent except for the sound of air raid sirens and birdsong.
A senior US defense official said that the successful defense of Kyiv overnight Friday demonstrated a 'viable' Ukrainian resistance, and said that there is increasing Russian frustration at the lack of momentum in their invasion push.
Britain's ministry of defense says the bulk of Russian forces involved in the advance on Kyiv are now stalled 19 miles from the city center.
Ukraine's ministry of defense is calling on citizens in Kyiv and across the country to remove all street signs and other directional signage to 'confuse and disorient' the Russian invaders.
Zelensky in a Friday night phone call reportedly rejected President Joe Biden's offer to evacuate him from Kyiv, telling the US leader: 'The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.'
Late Friday, Biden signed a memo authorizing up to $350 million in additional security assistance to Ukraine, with another $250 possible, bringing the total security aid approved for Ukraine to $1 billion over the past year.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Saturday that the new US aid would provide 'immediate military assistance to Ukraine to help defend itself from Russia's unprovoked and unjustified war.'
NATO members Czech Republic and Slovakia said they were sending arms, and Slovakia's defense minister said up to 1,200 foreign troops from other NATO members could be deployed in his country to reassure member countries on the alliance's eastern flank.
In a stinging rebuke, Poland's prime minister slammed Germany's offer to send 5,000 military helmets to Ukraine as 'a joke', accusing Berlin of 'selfishness' and 'egoism' in withholding arms and ammunition.
Evacuation trains are now running from Kyiv to Lviv in the far west of Ukraine, near the Polish border. Poland's border guard says that since war began, 100,000 refugees have crossed the border.
A 5pm to 8am curfew in Kyiv is now in force across the capital to ensure the most effective defense of the city and the safety of its people. The previous curfew had run from 10pm to 7am.
Mayor Vitaly Klitschko said: 'All civilians on the street during the curfew will be considered members of the enemy's sabotage and reconnaissance groups.'
As Ukrainian forces said they had fought off a Russian attack on their capital as the sun rose on Saturday, Zelensky vowed to stay and fight on in an impassioned video to his people.
'I am here. We will not lay down any weapons. We will defend our state, because our weapons are our truth,' he said outside his office, denouncing as disinformation claims that he had surrendered or fled.
Wearing military garb the president added: 'A lot of fake information has appeared on the internet saying that I allegedly called on our army to lay down its arms and that evacuation is underway.
'Our truth is that this is our land, our country, our children and we will protect all of this. This is what I wanted to tell you. Glory to Ukraine!'.
Russian troops are now encircling Ukraine, and meeting stiff resistance. Top Russian targets likely include the Presidential Palace at the heart of the city, and one of the remaining airports after Antonov Airport's runways were intentionally destroyed
Surveillance footage shows a missile hitting a residential building in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Saturday morning
A view shows an apartment building full of civilians hit by a recent shelling in Kyiv, Ukraine on Saturday morning
Ukrainian soldiers take positions outside a military facility as two cars burn, in a street in Kyiv, Ukraine on Saturday. Russian troops stormed toward Ukraine's capital Saturday, and street fighting broke out
Ukrainian service members are seen after defeating a Russian raiding group in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on Saturday morning, according to Ukrainian service personnel at the scene. Ukrainian soldiers repulsed a Russian attack in the capital
A Ukrainian service member is seen at the site of a fighting with Russian raiding group in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on Saturday morning, according to Ukrainian service personnel at the scene
Ukrainian service members collect unexploded shells after a fighting with Russian raiding group in Kyiv on Saturday
A Ukrainian service member patrol the empty road on west side of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on Saturday morning after Ukrainian soldiers beat back a Russian attack in the capital
People wait for a train to Poland at the railway station of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv on Saturday. Ukrainian forces repulsed a Russian attack on Kyiv but 'sabotage groups' infiltrated the capital, officials said
Briefly switching to Russian, Zelenskyy hailed prominent Russians who have denounced the invasion and urged them to redouble efforts to force the Kremlin to halt the attack.
He claimed that thousands of Russian troops were killed and hundreds of those who were taken prisoner 'can´t understand why they were sent into Ukraine to kill and get killed.'
'The sooner you say to your government that this war should be immediately stopped, the more of your people will stay alive,' he said.
Meanwhile, shocking footage on Saturday showed a missile ripping apart a tower block near Zhuliany airport, while CCTV from inside also shows the extent of the damage after the site was hit.
Images show the building with a hole covering at least five floors blasted into the side and rubble strewn across the street below.
There have been no fatalities recorded from the attack, however, according to an adviser to the interior minister. Anton Herashchenko also said Russia was lying about not shelling civilian infrastructure, claiming at least 40 such sites had been hit.
Some 198 civilians, including three children, have been killed so far by Russian forces attacking the pro-Western country, Ukraine's health minister said today, while 1,115 - including 33 children - have been wounded.
Ukraine has also claimed to have inflicted massive casualties on Russia, saying that more than 1,000 Russian troops were killed in combat on Friday alone. The casualties could but be independently verified.
It comes as a barrage of cruise missiles have also been launched by Russian forces against Ukrainian military facilities.
'Russia has yet to gain control of the airspace over Ukraine greatly reducing the effectiveness of the Russian Air Force,' the UK defence ministry said in an intelligence update posted on Twitter.
But armed forces minister James Heappey said today there was no reason to think a 'happy ending is just around the corner' as he warned the conflict could rumble on for months.
He told BBC Breakfast: 'Nobody should think that this is anywhere near over. What stands in front of Ukraine, its armed forces and very tragically its people, is days, weeks, months more of what we have seen over that last 48 hours.'
Claims that Russia has taken full control of the southern city of Melitopol, however, were dismissed this morning by Mr Heappey.
Meanwhile, the mayor of a city south of the capital says the country's military has fended off a Russian attempt to take control of a military air base.
Ukraine's president Volodmyr Zelensky today claimed the country's army has successfully repelled Russian forces advancing on Kyiv and is in control of the capital after a night of brutal fighting that saw terrified residents seeking shelter underground
A Ukrainian soldier walks past debris of a burning military truck, on a street in Kyiv, Ukraine on Saturday morning
A Ukrainian soldier stands guard behind tires in Kyiv during Russia's military intervention in Ukraine
People take cover as an air-raid siren sounds, near an apartment building damaged by recent shelling in Kyiv
A militant of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic inspects the remains of a missile that landed on a street in the separatist-controlled city of Donetsk, Ukraine on Saturday
Natalia Balansynovych, mayor of Vasylkiv, about 25 miles south of Kyiv, said Russian airborne forces landed near the city overnight and tried to seize the base. She added that fierce fighting also raged in Vasylkiv's central street.
She said Ukrainian forces repelled the Russian attacks, and the situation is now calm. Ms Balansynovych said there were heavy casualties, but did not give any numbers.
It comes as Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted: 'Yesterday I urged NATO and Nordic partners to do all they can to support Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
'I am pleased even more allies have come forward with defensive and humanitarian aid. We must stand with the Ukrainian people as they defend their country and democracies everywhere.'
Yet even as Zelensky spoke, the Ukrainian interior ministry was warning Kyiv's residents to shelter in place and not venture out onto the streets.
Ukraine's armed forces on Saturday morning claimed 3,500 Russians had been killed overnight, and 200 taken prisoner. They said 14 Russian aircraft, eight helicopters, and 102 tanks had been seized.
Smoke could then be seen billowing from the tower block following the devastating attack earlier this morning
A view shows an apartment building damaged by recent shelling in Kyiv, Ukraine on Saturday morning
Firefighters look on after an apartment building in Kyiv was devastated by a missile attack on Saturday morning
Firefighters extinguish fire in an apartment building damaged by recent shelling in the Ukrainian capital this morning
Meanwhile, dozens of people were wounded in overnight fighting in Kyiv, city mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Saturday morning.
As of 6am local time, 35 people, including two children, had been wounded, he said. It is unclear whether he was referring only to civilians. Klitschko added there was currently no major Russian military presence in Kyiv, although he said saboteur groups were active.
Armed forces were engaged in a fierce battle for control of the city, with footage on social media showing explosions close to a metro station in the western center of the capital by the zoo; a battle ongoing for control of a thermal power plant to the north; and multiple reports suggesting fierce fighting 20 miles south, near a vital airbase.
In Kyiv, footage shared on social media showed a bombardment close to Beresteiska metro station, in the west of the city, which is near the zoo.
More than 50 explosions and heavy machine gun fire were reported in the district of Shulyavka, near Beresteiska metro and the zoo, according to The Kyiv Independent.
A bridge near the metro was blown up, according to reports. It was unclear whether the explosion was caused by artillery or by Ukrainian forces intent on stopping the Russian advance.The district is under the control of the 101st Independent Security Brigade of the General Staff.
CCTV images show the inside of the Kyiv apartment block moments before it was attacked by a Russian missile
Seconds later the devastation can be seen as the window smashes and a plume of smoke billows through the room
Terrified residents posted videos filmed from their apartments, with flashes of light and the sound of gunfire. One video shared on social media showed an apartment building glowing with red lights, which some speculated was to guide bombers or snipers. Others said the lights were to warn the military not to bomb them.
The northern suburb of Troieshchyna was also coming under sustained attack for another night, as Russia tried to wrest control of the thermal power plant on the banks of the Dnieper river. Unconfirmed reports suggested dozens of Russians had been arrested.
Meanwhile, satellite images show a huge queue of trucks and cars waiting in a traffic jam leaving Ukraine, near the Romanian border in Siret.
Defence Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said the military struck a range of installations with long-range Kalibr cruise missiles.
He said that since the start of Russia's attack on Thursday, the military has hit 821 Ukrainian military facilities, including 14 air bases and 19 command facilities, and destroyed 24 air defence missile systems, 48 radars, seven warplanes, seven helicopters, nine drones, 87 tanks and eight military vessels.
In Sydney, several hundred people marched in heavy rain on Saturday chanting 'Ukraine will prevail' and demanding more action against Moscow, while protesters in Tokyo called for Russia to be expelled from the United Nations Security Council.
The fresh protests came as Russian and Ukrainian forces clashed in fighting for Ukraine's capital and after Russia vetoed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that would have deplored the Kremlin invasion of Ukraine.
From Tokyo through Warsaw and London to New York, thousands have protested in recent days against the invasion, Europe's biggest security crisis in decades.
Draped in Ukraine's blue and yellow flag and waving the country's national banner, Sydney protesters also carried also signs condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin's attempts to topple the Ukrainian government.
Demonstrators attend a protest rally outside of the Russian Embassy in London, on Saturday following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The UK government on Friday ordered all assets of President Vladimir Putin and his Foreign Minister frozen
In Kyiv on Saturday, Ukrainian 61-year-old Volodymyr Babich stages one-person protest against the Russian invasion
Security forces detain a suspected Russian saboteur in the Ukrainian capital Kiev on Saturday
The streets of Kyiv were eerily empty on Saturday as Russia's military attack in Ukraine continues
An armed local resident carries a cat in a carrier and a fish in an aquarium, which he took out of an apartment building damaged by recent shelling in Kyiv on Saturday
A person walks down the subway steps in the empty streets of Kyiv after sirens blared and explosions were heard Saturday
Some speakers demanded that the government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison expands sanctions against Moscow and bans Russian citizens from visiting Australia, while others called for the NATO to step into the conflict.
'I want more economic sanctions on Russia, I want military help for Ukraine,' said Katarina, a protester who gave only her first name. 'I want more action, more concrete action and less words. It's too late for diplomacy right now.'
Another protester, Mogdan, called on the Australian government to lead other countries in attempts to stop Putin.
'It's World War Three, it's a war not only on Ukraine, it's a war on everyone,' the protester said.
A smaller protest took place in front of the Russian embassy in Canberra, Australia's capital, with people carrying signs 'Putin off Ukraine' and 'Stop War'.
Several hundred Russian, Ukrainian and Japanese protesters gathered in the busy Shibuya shopping district in central Tokyo, many with their children and holding Ukrainian flags, chanting 'stop the war' and 'stop Putin' in Japanese and English.
'I just want to say, 'Putin stop this, regain your sanity',' said Hiroshi Sawada, a 58-year-old musician who attended the rally in Tokyo.
A 28-year-old Russian worker who asked not to be named said none of the people she knew from her home country supported the war. 'We hate what is just happening now in our country,' she said.
SPAIN: Demonstrators hold signs reading "More sanctions, less words" and "It you don't help Ukraine now, tomorrow you neighbour will be Putin" during a protest against Russia's military operation in Ukraine, in Barcelona on Saturday
TURKEY: Ukranians gather to protest Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Saturday in Istanbul. Russia's invasion has killed scores and prompted widespread condemnation from US and European leaders
UNITED KINGDOM: Demonstrators hold a pro-Ukraine rally outside Downing Street in London on Saturday
GREECE: Protesters rally against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, outside the Russian embassy in Athens on Saturday
Australia and Japan joined the United States, the European Union, and many other countries in imposing a series of rounds of sanctions against Russian politicians, businesses, and elite citizens over the invasion.
Ahead of a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda in Berlin Saturday afternoon, Poland's prime minister urged Germany to put aside 'selfishness' and 'egoism' and offer substantive support to the people of Ukraine.
'Nothing is going to stop Putin if we are not decisive enough,' Mateusz Morawiecki said in Berlin. 'This is a very historic moment... we have no time to lose.'
Morawiecki said Germany´s aid thus far - of military helmets, not weapons -- is a far cry from what´s necessary to help Ukraine defend itself.
'What kind of help was delivered to Ukraine? Five thousand helmets? This must be a joke,' Morawiecki said.
He added that the sanctions on Russia need to be 'crushing,' calling for the exclusion of Russia from the SWIFT global financial system and for measures targeting Putin himself, oligarchs who back him, and Russian business more broadly.
Slovakia's defense minister says up to 1,200 foreign troops from other NATO members could be deployed in his country in response to Russia´s invasion of Ukraine.
The plan is part of the NATO initiative to reassure member countries on the alliance´s eastern flank by sending forces to help protect them. Slovakia borders Ukraine.
Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad said forces from the Netherlands and Germany are among those expected to come. Germany will also provide the Patriot system to boost Slovakia´s air defense.
The country´s government and Parliament have not yet approved the plan.
Ex-actor who's inspired a nation... and shamed the West: How President Zelensky exemplifies the openness of Ukraine's political system - in stark contrast to Russia where Putin is president-for-life
By EDWARD LUCAS for the DAILY MAIL
As his Ukraine teetered on the abyss, Volodymyr Zelensky delivered the speech of his life in the early hours of Thursday morning. He vowed unflinching resistance to Russian invaders.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine needed a war, he said. 'Not a cold war, not a hot war. Not a hybrid one.
'But if we come under attack, if we face an attempt to take away our country, our freedom, our lives and lives of our children, we will defend ourselves.
'When you attack us, you will see our faces. Not our backs, but our faces.'
They were stirring words. He even switched from Ukrainian to Russian, addressing the Russian people directly in the hope of piercing the toxic fog of propaganda spread by the Kremlin's lie machine.
The Kremlin lie machine - headed by Vladimir Putin - has been claiming Ukraine is a Nazi-run puppet state of the West
Zelensky's only previous political role was in TV show 'Servant of the People' (pictured) playing a history teacher who is unintentionally elected as the president of Ukraine, after a video of his character giving an anti-corruption rant goes viral
It depicts Ukraine as a Nazi-run puppet state of the West, bent on persecuting ethnic Russians in Ukraine and advancing Nato's aggressive agenda. Too many believe it.
Volodymyr Zelensky's mere presence in office dispels that vile slur. Not only is he a native Russian-speaker, who grew up in the country's heavily Russified south- eastern region. He is Jewish.
Indeed, for a time Ukraine was the only country other than Israel to have both a Jewish head of state and a Jewish prime minister, the president's ally Volodymyr Groysman.
And Zelensky exemplifies the openness of Ukraine's political system – in stark contrast to Russia where Putin is president-for-life.
A former actor and political novice, his campaign for election started as a joke but struck a chord with millions of ordinary Ukrainians. In April 2019 he defeated the veteran incumbent and scandal-plagued president, Petro Poroshenko, with an astonishing 72 per cent of the vote.
Pictured: Ukrainian comedian, and Presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelensky reacts at his campaign headquarters following a presidential elections in Kiev, Ukraine, on April 21, 2019
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, pictured, is an native Russian speaker from the south-eastern region of the country. He is also Jewish - which dispels Putin's lie about Nazism
And this week Mr Zelensky's unflinching rhetoric has again inspired his country – and shamed the West.
As the invaders cut Ukraine in two, closing on the capital, Kyiv, yesterday morning, the 44-year-old president, dressed in military style T-shirt, warned that Russian death squads were aiming to assassinate him and his family as a way of destroying 'Ukraine politically by destroying the head of state'.
His wife, Olena, and their two children are at an undisclosed location in the country.
He also issued a mordant rebuke to the West for its inaction. 'Who is willing to fight alongside us?' he asked. Ukraine's darkest hour is its leader's most shining one.
And it marks an astonishing turnaround. Only a few weeks ago, Zelensky's presidency was languishing, beset by allegations of sleaze and incompetence.
As the invaders cut Ukraine in two, closing on the capital, Kyiv, yesterday morning, the 44-year-old president, dressed in military style T-shirt, warned that Russian death squads were aiming to assassinate him and his family as a way of destroying 'Ukraine politically by destroying the head of state'
Pictured: Ukrainian comedian, and Presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelensky reacts at his campaign headquarters following a presidential elections in Kiev, Ukraine, on April 21, 2019
His attempts to reform Ukraine's horrendous corruption had become bogged down.
His rating had plunged to a record low. His attempts to win international diplomatic support in the West were perceived to have failed, and so too had the attempt to defuse tensions with Russia.
His inner team combined inexperience and highly questionable judgment. It seemed that his presidency was fizzling as quickly as it flared.
For it is only four years ago that Zelensky, a law graduate who turned to showbusiness, was a middle-ranking actor in a popular political satire — in a British context somewhere between Monty Python and Yes Minister. Called Servant of the People, it starred him as a humble, harassed but idealistic schoolteacher whose televised rant about corruption goes viral, leading to his unexpected election as president.
This fanciful-seeming plot was trumped by reality.
Ukrainians were fed up with Mr Poroshenko, a confectionery tycoon whose patriotic rhetoric was undermined by persistent allegations of corruption.
They wanted change. Mr Zelensky's platform – he called his party Servant of the People after his TV show – lambasting corruption and criticising narrow-minded Ukrainian nationalism – seemed to offer it. Yet the script soon soured as Zelensky's promised sleaze- busting proved selective at best.
His main backer was Igor Kolomoisky, a tycoon accused by the FBI of involvement in a multi- billion-pound banking fraud.
Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky was heaped with praise today after giving a moving speech in which he vowed Vladimir Putin's forces would 'see our faces, not our backs' if they chose to attack - hours before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of his country
Mr Kolomoisky, known for displaying his 'pet' shark as a means of intimidating visitors, has always denied wrongdoing. Ukraine's corruption – worse than Russia's in many eyes – has deep roots.
Power and wealth are deeply intertwined. Among the public, mistrust of a predatory state is entrenched, and all too justified.
Oligarchs run media empires, with politicians and officials on the payroll. The judicial system is a festering mess where arrests, prosecutions and verdicts are used as score-settlers between political and commercial rivals. Senior positions are bought and sold.
Healthcare and education are plagued by kickbacks. The security service, the SBU, is infested with intrigue and sleaze – and penetrated by Russian agents of influence.
Mr Zelensky's team, mostly showbiz pals, stumbled through this minefield. They found that satirising corruption was much easier than uprooting it.
Exasperated voters deserted his party in droves, as criticism from international human rights groups and from foreign governments intensified.
For the tragic truth is that Mr Zelensky is only the last in a line of leaders who have promised much but delivered little during Ukraine's three decades of independence.
The brave, adaptable Ukrainian people have survived and even thrived despite the incompetence and corruption of their rulers.
Mr Zelensky's stirring rhetoric and personal bravery are the focus of national unity now. But they do not compensate for his own failures – and those of the rest of Ukraine's political class.
Daily Mail · by Keith Griffith For Dailymail.com · February 26, 2022
15. Putin’s War at Home
What could the domestic situation do to Putin and his decision making? And hypothetically, what would happen if Putin did fall (though the author does not see this as likely)? I hope someone is war gaming this.
Excerpts:
Finally, the war itself could threaten Russia’s domestic stability. Just as no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, no effort at political spin survives first contact with reality. As events unfold, the reactions of the governments of China, Germany, and Turkey and the people of Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of Europe will be hard to predict. Putin has repeatedly misread public opinion in Ukraine and has likely been surprised by the vigor of the Western response. More surprises could be in the offing. For a leader whose greatest professed achievement is bringing predictability to daily life in Russia, this must be unsettling, to say the least.
None of this signals the impending fall of Putin’s government or the end of autocracy in Russia. Authoritarian leaders who control their countries’ security services have withstood much tougher challenges. But Putin’s old playbook of governing by a clever mix of carrots and sticks is no longer viable. Having thrown his lot in with the hard men of the security services, Putin must now weather the fallout from the war he and they have championed.
Putin’s War at Home
How Conflict in Ukraine Complicates His Balancing Act
February 26, 2022
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s greatest claim is to have restored his country’s stability after the turbulent early post–Cold War years. But by launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine this week, he has put that stability at risk. Balancing Russia’s many competing interests to maintain order and control has never been easy. But doing so in the wake of a conflict that could divide the public and pinch the pockets of some Russian elites will be even harder.
For almost two decades, Putin deftly balanced the dual threats that confront all autocrats: coups from other elites and protests from the masses. A booming economy in the first decade of this century allowed him to consolidate power, and his successful annexation of Crimea in 2014 ensured his place in Russian history. Putin could manipulate elections and public opinion, deliver rents to his cronies while still improving the living standards for the masses, and bask in high approval ratings.
Yet as the warm glow of his Crimea success has faded, Putin has struggled to find a narrative to legitimate his rule. A decade of slow economic growth, a botched response to the pandemic, corruption, and simple Putin fatigue among the populace have all blunted his tools for governing Russia. As I argued in the May/June 2021 issue of Foreign Affairs, Putin has therefore come to rely more heavily on the security services to maintain his grip on power, a dangerous bargain that necessitates greater repression at home and risks greater belligerence abroad. The invasion of Ukraine both flows from and reinforces this bargain, making Putin more dependent on the men in uniform who encourage his aggression.
BALANCING ACT
Within Russia, Putin’s greater reliance on the security services is most apparent in treatment of the political opposition. For almost a decade, opposition leader Alexei Navalny outed the corruption of powerful figures in the security services. Now he sits in jail while his organization lies in tatters. Russian authorities have also targeted nongovernmental organizations and media outlets that report on abuse and corruption, effectively muzzling political dissent.
In foreign policy, too, the rise of the security services has left its mark. Even as many political and economic elites voiced disbelief over the prospect of war in Ukraine, the hard men of Putin’s inner circle competed with one another to be the most hawkish toward the West. This group of advisers has been the driving force for war in Ukraine.
But turning to the big men with big guns to solve one’s problems comes with a cost. Reliance on the security services will do little to solve Russia’s deep-seated social and economic problems. To the contrary, it will likely make them worse. Putin will still face the dual threats of coups and popular revolts, but his tools for managing them—like Russia’s tools for wielding influence in Ukraine—will become blunter and more one-dimensional.
As the warm glow of his Crimea success has faded, Putin has struggled to find a narrative to legitimate his rule.
Some Russians will welcome Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but a repeat of the popularity bump the Kremlin enjoyed after its bloodless annexation of Crimea appears unlikely. Public opinion surveys show that the Russian public does not share Putin’s view that Ukraine is not a “real country.” Polls conducted over the last decade consistently indicate that roughly 80 percent of Russians recognize Ukraine as an independent state, and that only about 20 percent prefer some form of unification. How Russians will respond to violence directed against friends, acquaintances, and family in Ukraine is difficult to predict.
A long war and a difficult occupation of Ukraine could drain public support for the Kremlin. Russian public opinion has long been sensitive to casualties. In May 2014, when fighting in eastern Ukraine was hot, just 31 percent of Russians supported “sending direct military assistance, such as the introduction of troops.” Public support for Russia’s intervention in Syria is similarly modest, and the Kremlin has taken great pains to limit casualties there. The legacy of World War II cuts both ways for Putin: it provides a wellspring of nationalist fervor that he can tap but also a deep societal awareness of the costs of war.
The Kremlin can rely on state media to tell its version of the story in Ukraine, but to effectively shape public opinion it will need to censor alternative sources of information even more aggressively than it has to date. That many Russians have friends and family in Ukraine will make this task more challenging, as will Russia’s well-educated and media-savvy public. More antiwar protests like those organized in Moscow on Thursday are unlikely—especially after Russian authorities arrested more than 1,800 demonstrators—but there will be no groundswell of popular support, either.
RISKY BUSINESS
Putin is an autocrat, so he doesn’t need public approval to stay in power. But it is easier to govern as a popular autocrat who can deliver the goods than as a dictator who has to rely on repression, censorship, and intimidation to beat back protests.
Moreover, Putin must worry about threats from his inner circle regardless of what the public thinks of him. The Russian leader has been remarkably adept at managing the competing interests of Russia’s elites, but the war in Ukraine may make this balancing act even harder. Members of Putin’s inner circle, along with their allies in state banks and the energy sector, benefit the most from the status quo of corruption, slow growth, and economic isolation. Not only does confrontation with the United States and its European allies increase the value of their expertise and enhance their status but it also brings them direct economic gains. As the Russia expert Alexander Gabuev has noted, the children of many officials in Putin’s war cabinet have lucrative positions in state-owned firms.
Other economic elites, however, are less enthusiastic about an economy built around fortress Russia. At a meeting between Putin and business leaders on the day of the invasion, a visibly nervous Alexander Shokhin, the head of Russia’s largest business lobbying group, told the Russian president that “everything should be done to demonstrate as much as possible that Russia remains part of the global economy and will not provoke, including through some kind of response measures, global negative phenomena on world markets.” Putin assured Shokhin and the other assembled business leaders that the Kremlin would not cause economic instability—cold comfort, no doubt, for those watching the Russian stock market plunge to near-historic lows on news of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Given that the route to great wealth in Russia runs through good relations with the Kremlin, business elites are unlikely to abandon Putin. But the conflict in Ukraine will make it harder for the Russian leader to keep all of his cronies happy, especially since U.S. and European sanctions will hurt some of them more than others.
Sanctions will also stoke broader economic uncertainty, potentially erasing one of Putin’s most important achievements. But the real damage to the Russian economy will come less from sanctions than from the entrenchment in power of a coalition that resists economic modernization, efforts to reduce corruption, and greater competition. The war in Ukraine will only widen the gap between those who want to bring Russia’s economy into the twenty-first century and those who do not.
Finally, the war itself could threaten Russia’s domestic stability. Just as no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, no effort at political spin survives first contact with reality. As events unfold, the reactions of the governments of China, Germany, and Turkey and the people of Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of Europe will be hard to predict. Putin has repeatedly misread public opinion in Ukraine and has likely been surprised by the vigor of the Western response. More surprises could be in the offing. For a leader whose greatest professed achievement is bringing predictability to daily life in Russia, this must be unsettling, to say the least.
None of this signals the impending fall of Putin’s government or the end of autocracy in Russia. Authoritarian leaders who control their countries’ security services have withstood much tougher challenges. But Putin’s old playbook of governing by a clever mix of carrots and sticks is no longer viable. Having thrown his lot in with the hard men of the security services, Putin must now weather the fallout from the war he and they have championed.
16. The Man Behind Putin's Military
Excerpts:
Over the past year, as Putin began to plan his campaign in Ukraine, it was clear that he was no longer going to look to the FSB for leadership. Instead, Shoygu and the newly revamped army would lead the way. Notably, when the Russian Security Council met on the eve of the invasion, the army seemed much closer to Putin than his intelligence officials did. After Putin announced his decision to recognize the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, the chief of foreign intelligence struggled for words, and the FSB director and the foreign minister acted as if they were automatons following commands. By contrast, Shoygu, having spent much of the past decade building up the military into a powerful political force, sounded confident and ready to lead Russia headlong into battle.
In the weeks leading up to Russia’s invasion, many analysts doubted that Putin would actually launch such a large-scale war of choice. But the militarization of Russian society and the remaking of the military under Shoygu provided Putin with an overwhelming temptation, one that could not be slowed by intelligence misgivings or diplomatic considerations. And now that the assault is violently under way, the full implications of the Kremlin’s new military strategy are becoming clear. Not only is the campaign being shaped by an army that has openly embraced war—the bigger, the better. It is also being led by Shoygu, a man who has so far experienced only successes and who lacks the proper military training to understand that a battlefield victory, no matter how impressive, can sometimes lead to an even larger political defeat.
The Man Behind Putin's Military
How Sergey Shoygu Paved the Way for Russia’s Ukraine Assault
February 26, 2022
On February 25, barely 24 hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces reached Kyiv. Even accounting for Russia’s vastly superior firepower, the speed of the military advance has been startling. But it also has highlighted something else: the extent to which the Kremlin’s entire pressure campaign on Ukraine has been driven by the Russia military. In contrast to many previous efforts by Moscow to achieve political goals in the West—or to exact retribution on a perceived enemy—the Ukraine offensive has not been driven by the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia’s security agency, which has often drawn the lion’s share of Western attention. Instead, it has been shaped from the outset by old-fashioned military power projection: first by amassing an overwhelming force on the border and then, with the world watching, quickly and efficiently putting that force to use.
In giving the military such a decisive role, Putin is consolidating a dramatic shift that has occurred in the Kremlin’s security hierarchy over the past decade. Whereas in earlier years, the army was not involved in Russian policymaking and was kept subordinate to the security services, from whose ranks Putin himself came, in recent years, the army has taken on new importance, not only in Russia’s interactions with neighboring countries but also in how policies are shaped. At the same time, the military has gained new public support at home. Previously regarded by many Russians as poorly run, underfunded, and backward, it is now equipped with a new generation of technology and supported by a military-industrial complex that has growing reach in Russian society. And with its newfound political clout, it has emerged as one of the most important institutions in Putin’s Russia.
Leading this transformation is one of the most ambitious members of Putin’s inner circle: Sergey Shoygu. Although he has received relatively little attention in the West, Shoygu is a longtime Kremlin insider who became the defense minister in 2012. Moreover, in contrast to the FSB, which has suffered a series of setbacks and embarrassments in recent years, Shoygu’s military has enjoyed almost unbroken success going back to the capture of Crimea in 2014 and the intervention in Syria a year later. Anyone seeking to understand why Putin was willing to unleash Russian troops, tanks, and planes in a hugely risky invasion of Ukraine must look first at the transformation of the Russian military under his powerful defense chief.
Guns Without Power
For nearly two centuries, the Russian military, despite its importance in Russian society, was rarely involved in political decision-making. Under Soviet rule, the streets in some districts of Moscow and in other big cities were dominated by men in green uniforms. Military service in Russia traditionally conferred a degree of social prestige. In the later decades of the Soviet era, the Kremlin promoted a mythology about the armed forces shaped around Russia’s heroic defeat of the Third Reich in World War II. Yet through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the military never enjoyed much of a voice in government. The last time the Russian military played an independent part in politics was probably in 1825, during the failed Decembrist revolt against the tsar in which several elite regiments tried to start a revolution. During the Soviet era, the government was wary of the danger of the military gaining too much power, and the KGB kept it under a watchful eye.
When he first came to power, Putin, a former KGB officer, stuck to Soviet tradition and promoted the security services above the army. His first war, the one that began in Chechnya in 1999, was run by the FSB, the successor to the KGB. The war was presented as a counterterrorism operation, and the military was subordinated to the security service. Meanwhile, Putin continued to rely on the FSB for keeping his elites under control and suppressing dissent, both in the country and abroad.
In the past, Putin privileged the security services over the military.
By contrast, the military enjoyed little prestige. During those early years of Putin’s rule, Russians remembered too well the failures in Afghanistan, as well as two messy and bloody wars in Chechnya that the army fought with outdated Soviet-era military equipment. The younger generation made every effort to avoid conscription. As a result, many Western analysts did not spend much time scrutinizing the Russian military: to understand Putin, it was assumed, one needed to fathom the inner workings of the security services. In 2012, however, Shoygu was appointed defense minister, and the fortunes of the military quietly began to change.
A veteran member of Russia’s political elite, Shoygu has had a notably durable career among the highest echelons in Moscow. Arriving in the capital from Tuva, the region on the border with Mongolia, just in time for the breakup of the Soviet Union, he rapidly rose to prominence in the early 1990s as an all-around troubleshooter, becoming the minister of emergency situations, a cabinet-level position that he himself invented.
In the 1990s and the following decade, he cultivated an image as a brave and energetic official who frequently visited the sites of natural disasters and terrorist bombings with an elite professional rescue team; he even led some rescue operations himself. At the time, it was highly unusual for a member of the post-Soviet elite to wear a field uniform and talk to victims of a flood in Siberia or a bombing in Moscow, as Shoygu did. His rapid-response team—spearheaded by an airborne unit of professional rescuers who were always ready to jump on a plane and go to any spot in the world where they might be needed—brought him popularity both in the Russian leadership and among ordinary Russians.
Pleasing the Public, Paying the Oligarchs
For Putin, Shoygu’s successful record and large public profile made him a natural ally, and he quickly found him useful to the Kremlin beyond his emergency missions. In 1999, Putin picked Shoygu to be one of the leaders of his party, United Russia, giving him the opportunity to tour the country and build a political base. More surprising, however, was Putin’s decision in 2012 to make Shoygu the minister of defense. An engineer by training, Shoygu had never served in the army, and he did not have a reputation among the military hierarchy. Nor did his blunt leadership style endear him to the old guard.
Consider Shoygu’s approach to uniforms. According to sources in the military, shortly after he became the defense minister, Shoygu was walking along the corridors of the general staff headquarters in Moscow on Arbat when he spotted a colonel in a gray suit. According to the old tradition, the officers of the general staff wore suits, not military uniforms, but the practice irritated Shoygu, who felt that officers should dress for battle, not for the office. He confronted the colonel and told him to report for duty the following week in a regiment in Siberia. Only good connections saved the colonel, but everybody got the point: Shoygu was serious about uniforms and the suits had to go. Nor did he stop there. In 2017, Shoygu changed the army dress uniform to make it resemble the Soviet uniform of 1945—known in the military as the winner’s uniform. The new design became his uniform of choice when he inspected military parades on Red Square; it also, not coincidentally, made him look like Georgy Zhukov, Stalin’s vaunted field marshal during World War II. (In another potential nod to history, Zhukov is remembered not only as the Soviet Union’s most successful and ruthless commander but also as the man who helped get rid of Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s much-feared chief of the secret police, after Stalin’s death).
Far more important, though, is Shoygu’s approach to military strategy and battle readiness. He has embraced high-tech innovation, forming a cyber-command and merging the air force and the space force into the new Russian Aerospace Forces. He has also increased salaries for the officers’ corps. At the same time, he has made it almost impossible for Russian youth to avoid army service. Yet above all were two early military successes, which sealed Shoygu’s reputation with the Kremlin and helped give the military new status within the government.
Shoygu showed that the military could succeed where the FSB had failed.
Shoygu’s first military success, notably, came in Ukraine. In 2014, when the Euromaidan revolution erupted in Kyiv against Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s Russian-backed president, Putin’s first instrument of choice was the security services. As per usual practice, Putin dispatched the FSB to Kyiv, where it was supposed to help local forces quash the uprising. But the FSB failed to stop the protesters or prevent Yanukovych from fleeing the capital. As a result, Putin turned to the military, and under Shoygu’s command, Crimea was swiftly and efficiently annexed. Shoygu had demonstrated that the military could succeed where the FSB had failed.
Soon after, Shoygu had another opportunity to show the military’s strength—this time, in a conflict much farther away. In the initial phase of the Syrian civil war, Russia’s ally, the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, seemed to be rapidly losing ground, and Putin’s diplomats were not making much progress in saving the regime. Once again, the army came to the rescue, carrying out a decisive military intervention in September 2015. At a relatively low cost to the Russian troops themselves, the military quickly turned around the course of the war, putting Assad back on track to survive and ultimately triumph. It almost looked like Shoygu’s old rapid-response airborne rescue unit had rushed in—although now, it was fixing Putin’s political problems rather than helping people on the ground.
So successful and popular was the Syrian intervention that in 2019, the Russian army arranged a huge traveling exhibition of tanks, guns, and other military hardware seized from Syria. It was transported by train to 60 different stops across the country from Moscow to Vladivostok, including Crimea; at many stops, it was met by jubilant crowds. In the wake of the successes in Crimea and Syria, popular support for the military grew.
Meanwhile, Shoygu began to enjoy a bigger military budget and a growing profile in the Kremlin. In fact, the successes in Crimea and Syria had another important consequence: it brought the oligarchs closer to the military and helped jump-start a new Russian military-industrial complex. Paradoxically, this effect was driven by the Western sanctions imposed on Russia’s elite following the annexation of Crimea. Because of these penalties, many oligarchs were losing money and contracts in the West; to compensate, the Russian state rushed to help them by providing their companies with huge military contracts. For example, before the sanctions were imposed, Siemens, the German company, provided engines for the Russian navy; today, the Ural Mining and Metallurgical Company, a Russian firm, holds that contract. Buttressed by this combination of rising popular support and powerful ties among the Russian elite, the military had emerged by 2017 as one of the most powerful institutions in Russia.
Headlong to Kyiv
Over the past year, as Putin began to plan his campaign in Ukraine, it was clear that he was no longer going to look to the FSB for leadership. Instead, Shoygu and the newly revamped army would lead the way. Notably, when the Russian Security Council met on the eve of the invasion, the army seemed much closer to Putin than his intelligence officials did. After Putin announced his decision to recognize the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, the chief of foreign intelligence struggled for words, and the FSB director and the foreign minister acted as if they were automatons following commands. By contrast, Shoygu, having spent much of the past decade building up the military into a powerful political force, sounded confident and ready to lead Russia headlong into battle.
In the weeks leading up to Russia’s invasion, many analysts doubted that Putin would actually launch such a large-scale war of choice. But the militarization of Russian society and the remaking of the military under Shoygu provided Putin with an overwhelming temptation, one that could not be slowed by intelligence misgivings or diplomatic considerations. And now that the assault is violently under way, the full implications of the Kremlin’s new military strategy are becoming clear. Not only is the campaign being shaped by an army that has openly embraced war—the bigger, the better. It is also being led by Shoygu, a man who has so far experienced only successes and who lacks the proper military training to understand that a battlefield victory, no matter how impressive, can sometimes lead to an even larger political defeat.
17. China struggles to navigate its partnership with Russia following Ukraine invasion
Excerpts:
Inside China, where the government has sought to temper strong opinions on the conflict through censorship, public opinion largely follows Beijing’s line, railing against the U.S. and its allies. Some voices, however, have questioned the official response, pointing out China’s own strong stance on noninterference in the affairs of other countries and respecting sovereignty.
“What is Russia’s war if is not blatant aggression? What reasons do these netizens choose to support trampling on national sovereignty?” said professor Qu Weiguo at China’s Fudan University in a blog posted on Thursday in reaction to social media commentary. “Aren’t we worried that we might be ravaged by the same kind of robbery ourselves tomorrow?”
Yet others said that if China manages to maintain its strategic balancing act between Russia and the West, Beijing could benefit from the redirection of resources from Biden’s much-touted Indo-Pacific strategy to Europe.
“As long as we do not make subversive strategic mistakes ourselves, not only will China’s modernization process not be interrupted, but China will instead have the ability and will to play a more important role in the process of building a new international order,” said Chinese political scientist and government adviser Zheng Yongnian in a social media post on Thursday.
China struggles to navigate its partnership with Russia following Ukraine invasion
Beijing is struggling to navigate its newly upgraded partnership with Moscow, as its lends rhetorical support to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while attempting to remain unscathed by a war that has few benefits for the world’s second largest economy.
In the days since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered troops into Ukraine, China has not directly addressed Russia’s role, declining to label it an invasion and calling for a diplomatic resolution.
However one element of China’s messaging has remained consistent: scathing criticism of NATO and U.S. response to Ukraine, including sanctions, which China’s foreign ministry said on Thursday will only bring “serious difficulties” to the region.
“The truly discredited countries are those that wantonly interfere in other countries’ internal affairs and wage wars in the name of democracy and human rights,” said Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin on Thursday. At the same time, Chinese officials have issued broad calls for the sovereignty of countries to be respected.
Analysts say Beijing’s muddled messaging reflects anxiety over potential threats to China’s extensive trade partnerships with the West, particularly with large European Union countries, whose contribution to the Chinese economy vastly outweighs Russia’s. China’s trade volume with E.U. countries rose 27.5 percent to $828 billion in 2021, compared to $147 billion in Russian trade in the same period, according to official Chinese figures.
“It’s becoming quite clear that Beijing is scrambling a little bit, they’re trying to square the circle,” said Helena Legarda, a senior analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Germany. “I don’t think that’s sustainable now war has broken out.”
On Thursday, President Biden said any country that backed Russia’s war in Ukraine would be “stained by association.”
“I think that China doesn’t want the world to split into this sharp divide between autocracies and democracies in which it is put into a can with Russia and some other autocracies, and this would be detrimental not only to China’s political interests, [and] importantly its economic interests,” said Bonnie Glaser, director of the German Marshall Fund’s Asia program.
The war in Ukraine is likely to challenge the limits of the Sino-Russian relationship, which has grown stronger in recent years but falls short of an alliance and is — in practice — a partnership based on a mutual disdain for the U.S.-led global order.
It’s unclear how much of Putin’s plans Beijing was aware of before Russian troops entered Ukraine, but analysts say China may have been blindsided by the scale and speed of the invasion.
“If China really knew, would they send [Foreign Minister] Wang Yi to the Munich security conference to revive the Minsk agreement only for Putin to tear it up? I do wonder if Beijing got played a little,” said Legarda. Wang called for Russia and Ukraine to return to a diplomatic agreement known as the Minsk accords.
In the weeks before the invasion, China and Russia laid out sweeping agreements as part of a “no limits” pact that formalized the growing ties between the two powers.
“It was a position advantageous to Russia and China to put forward the idea that they could operate outside the U.S. international rules-based order, but that architecture doesn’t fully exist,” said Craig Singleton, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies who specializes in China.
Part of China’s Ukraine calculus will hinge on how it handles a more dependent Russia as the United States and others seek to cripple Putin’s economy with sanctions.
“In my view, the relationship will be increasingly asymmetric — with China having the leverage — but I think Russia sees that as a necessity because it has far bigger national interests at stake, at least in Vladimir Putin’s view,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. Gabuev said there is hesitancy in Russia about over reliance on the Chinese, but “that is all out the window because of bigger events.”
For Chinese President Xi Jinping, the conflict also comes at a critical time as he is looking to solidify his image as a global leader ahead of China’s 2022 National Party Congress, where he is poised to accept an unprecedented third term after abolishing term limits in 2016.
Inside China, where the government has sought to temper strong opinions on the conflict through censorship, public opinion largely follows Beijing’s line, railing against the U.S. and its allies. Some voices, however, have questioned the official response, pointing out China’s own strong stance on noninterference in the affairs of other countries and respecting sovereignty.
“What is Russia’s war if is not blatant aggression? What reasons do these netizens choose to support trampling on national sovereignty?” said professor Qu Weiguo at China’s Fudan University in a blog posted on Thursday in reaction to social media commentary. “Aren’t we worried that we might be ravaged by the same kind of robbery ourselves tomorrow?”
Yet others said that if China manages to maintain its strategic balancing act between Russia and the West, Beijing could benefit from the redirection of resources from Biden’s much-touted Indo-Pacific strategy to Europe.
“As long as we do not make subversive strategic mistakes ourselves, not only will China’s modernization process not be interrupted, but China will instead have the ability and will to play a more important role in the process of building a new international order,” said Chinese political scientist and government adviser Zheng Yongnian in a social media post on Thursday.
Paul Sonne in Washington, Christian Shepherd and Vic Chiang in Taipei, Taiwan, and Lyric Li in Seoul contributed to this report.
18. Ukraine Now. Taiwan Next?
Excerpts:
So what now? Of course, Russia will be able militarily to occupy or control Ukraine (at least in the short term), and of course, we are not going to risk nuclear Armageddon to stop it. Since we cannot actually stop it, we will have to impose very serious financial and economic and technological sanctions on Russia and just hope we change the calculus of Putin and his kleptocratic nationalist regime over the medium term. We are also going to have to recommit to the very NATO whose specter helped create this crisis, and push back Russia even further into a corner. We will have to arm a Ukrainian resistance — which could escalate to a new Cold War, or worse.
...
All of which brings us to what seems to me to be the larger dimension of this clash: how it will resonate in Beijing and Taiwan. With apologies to Mitt Romney, China is easily the greater geostrategic challenge. And the parallels with Russia are as striking as they are unnerving. China sees Taiwan as part of its national identity in a similar way to how Russia sees Ukraine as part of its. And we are committed to the defense of Taiwan the way we have committed to the defense of Ukraine: kinda, but not really. In the face of this underlying Western ambiguity, the fall of Kiev is news that Xi will be watching closely.
The parallels are not exact, but nonetheless striking. Taiwan is next door to and deeply entangled with China in its history and culture, just as Ukraine is uniquely entangled with Russia. Seeing Taiwan and China (like Ukraine and Russia) as simply random sovereign states with a right to self-determination under international law is correct, so far as it goes. It’s also moral — as majorities of both Ukrainians and especially Taiwanese want independence and have constructed nascent democracies in the wake of autocracy.
But the nationalist passion Russia feels about Ukraine and China feels about Taiwan is real, visceral, and hard for outsiders to understand intuitively. The sense of a rogue region that somehow got away from the homeland is vivid among Russian and Chinese nationalists. This kind of understanding — claiming a “sphere of influence” — is now deemed reactionary by the West’s foreign policy elites, as, perhaps, it should be. But that doesn’t mean that everyone, especially China and Russia, have actually moved past it. Even Americans have very different emotional responses to perceived threats in our own hemisphere compared with the rest of the world. So this is also a culture clash of sorts — globalism and the nation state vs nationalism and spheres of influence.
Ukraine Now. Taiwan Next?
Putin has called the West's bluff. Xi will not have failed to notice.
22 hr ago
A Ukrainian demonstrator protests outside Downing Street against the invasion of Ukraine. (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
Over the last few months, a conversation I had 30 years ago keeps popping into my consciousness. It was the end of the Cold War, and a post-Soviet Russian state was on the horizon. I remember talking with a journalist friend about the astonishing potential of that turn of events: the return of Russia as a great power, returning to its ancient nationhood and old religion, moving away from communism, and resuming a major role in world and European affairs. Probably not a democracy, but no longer totalitarian, and worth engaging with as an authoritarian power.
And my friend looked at me as if I were insane. Russia is always a threat, he said. The Kremlin is always the Kremlin — communist or nationalist. America will always have to confront and contain it. And now we have our chance to keep it permanently cut down to size, and protect its neighbors in the future from the threat they’ve always lived under. So what are we dithering about? No pandering to the Russians!
And he wasn’t wrong, was he? This week’s horrifying, brutal invasion of all of Ukraine — an independent sovereign state since 1991 — sure bolsters his case. The brazenness of this assault and the scale of the attempted regime change have shocked even those who had some sympathy for Putin’s worldview. And listening to the tyrant’s rants this week proved to me at least that he always saw the Soviet Union’s hegemony in Eastern Europe as indistinguishable from Russia’s historic destiny. The very distinction I was relying upon — a Russia different than the Soviet Union — is one Putin himself didn’t and doesn’t recognize. Many saw the death of the Soviet regime as a rebirth for Russia. Putin saw it merely as a funeral for Russian power and prestige, which it became his duty to restore.
But that doesn’t mean I was completely wrong either. I was being romantic in a way, believing in something like the tortured “Russian soul” that so many writers have conjured up over the centuries, something uniquely European and Asian, profound, alien, and dark. I had an idea of a future Russia that would perhaps evolve into something slightly more democratic and European, but would never lose its deeper difference, a distinctive Russianness that even Soviet communism was unable to eradicate. And while it couldn’t be just another European country, it need not be an eternal enemy or paranoid pariah either.
In this, Solzhenitsyn was a fascinatingly symbolic figure to me: passionately anti-Communist to the point of utter self-sacrifice, and yet after Communism, also deeply reactionary, nationalist, and illiberal. This is not a pattern often seen in America (though it does seem to be getting more common on the far right). Neocons sometimes failed to understand that opposition to communism could spring from reactionary nationalism as well as liberalism.
And such an emergent authoritarian Russia, in my fantasy, would pursue its traditional national interests rather than sustain a global ideological crusade for equity; and we could live with that. But what are those interests? Here is how Churchill put it, in his famous quote about Russia in 1939, in the fuller context:
I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. It cannot be in accordance with the interest of the safety of Russia that Germany should plant itself upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that it should overrun the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of south eastern Europe. That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia.
That’s an interesting phrase: “the historic life-interests of Russia.” What did Churchill mean by that? It appears to refer to Russia’s long paranoia about its own region and European backyard, which would, of course, include Ukraine first and foremost. And this paranoid, domineering worldview, especially toward its West, didn’t come out of nowhere. Both France under Napoleon and Germany under Hitler advanced deep into the Russian homeland, and stayed a while, with incalculable human costs for the Russians. And this kind of history deeply shapes national identity. It is no mystery why the Russians get very antsy when the West moves toward them, especially when they feel weak.
And so when NATO, in the wake of our Cold War victory, decided to expand membership all the way to Russia’s borders, many Russian specialists feared triggering the worst kind of response. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake,” George Kennan told Tom Friedman in 1998. “There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else … We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.” (We still don’t, as we have just witnessed.)
Kennan went on: “I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.” Then he went even further: “Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.” Similar misgivings over NATO expansion came from figures such as Kissinger, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Brzezinski, Moynihan, Gaddis, and Burns.
This debate, of course, is unresolvable. We will never know what might have happened if NATO had displayed more magnanimity after our victory in the Cold War, and allowed Russia more dignity and space in the wake of its defeat and collapse. At the same time, it may be that a Putin-style tyrant was always bound to emerge in Russia and bully his neighbors once again — given the long sweep of Russian authoritarianism — and so my friend was also correct. Or it could just be dumb luck or fate that a KGB nationalist who witnessed up close the end of the Soviet Union in East Germany came to dominate the Russian kleptocracy. This debate will go on for a very long time, but it is increasingly academic. Because here we are. Kennan’s and the neocons’ fear have both been borne out. They could both have been right (and wrong) in some measure. And where we are now makes many of these debates moot.
So what now? Of course, Russia will be able militarily to occupy or control Ukraine (at least in the short term), and of course, we are not going to risk nuclear Armageddon to stop it. Since we cannot actually stop it, we will have to impose very serious financial and economic and technological sanctions on Russia and just hope we change the calculus of Putin and his kleptocratic nationalist regime over the medium term. We are also going to have to recommit to the very NATO whose specter helped create this crisis, and push back Russia even further into a corner. We will have to arm a Ukrainian resistance — which could escalate to a new Cold War, or worse.
But what else are we going to do? In the wake of this foul aggression, we have to make sure it fails. Acquiescing in this invasion — let alone justifying it — would tear up the entire international order. Could we still eat crow and commit to Ukraine’s neutrality outside NATO? At this point, that would be a definition of appeasement. So our best hope is that Putin has over-reached, and that this will undo him in the long run.
In fact, whatever our views of the situation before this week, from now on, it seems clear to me that we must do all we can to ensure that Putin becomes a snake that has eaten a porcupine. He has already resuscitated NATO; the invasion will surely intensify a push for Europe’s energy independence; Ukrainian nationality is being forged anew under this kind of assault; and resistance may not be restricted to Ukraine itself. The big anti-war crowds in St. Petersburg and near Red Square must worry the dictator. Make him pay for this assault.
But in one crucial sense, Putin has already won a victory. A nuclear-armed great power has invaded and occupied a neighboring country in Europe, and there is nothing anyone else has been able to do to stop it. Many in the West assumed Putin wouldn’t go that far — surmising that international law, universal condemnation, economic sanctions, and the lack of any serious threat from Ukraine to Russia would restrain him. But he has called our bluff. He has even hinted at Russia’s nuclear capacity to intimidate other states from intervening. And so we have a precedent. Ukraine is a Russian possession. A fact on the ground. All we have been able to do is watch.
All of which brings us to what seems to me to be the larger dimension of this clash: how it will resonate in Beijing and Taiwan. With apologies to Mitt Romney, China is easily the greater geostrategic challenge. And the parallels with Russia are as striking as they are unnerving. China sees Taiwan as part of its national identity in a similar way to how Russia sees Ukraine as part of its. And we are committed to the defense of Taiwan the way we have committed to the defense of Ukraine: kinda, but not really. In the face of this underlying Western ambiguity, the fall of Kiev is news that Xi will be watching closely.
The parallels are not exact, but nonetheless striking. Taiwan is next door to and deeply entangled with China in its history and culture, just as Ukraine is uniquely entangled with Russia. Seeing Taiwan and China (like Ukraine and Russia) as simply random sovereign states with a right to self-determination under international law is correct, so far as it goes. It’s also moral — as majorities of both Ukrainians and especially Taiwanese want independence and have constructed nascent democracies in the wake of autocracy.
But the nationalist passion Russia feels about Ukraine and China feels about Taiwan is real, visceral, and hard for outsiders to understand intuitively. The sense of a rogue region that somehow got away from the homeland is vivid among Russian and Chinese nationalists. This kind of understanding — claiming a “sphere of influence” — is now deemed reactionary by the West’s foreign policy elites, as, perhaps, it should be. But that doesn’t mean that everyone, especially China and Russia, have actually moved past it. Even Americans have very different emotional responses to perceived threats in our own hemisphere compared with the rest of the world. So this is also a culture clash of sorts — globalism and the nation state vs nationalism and spheres of influence.
I’m not saying that this belief in a sphere of influence is a universal view in Russia or China — or that it is justifiable. I’m just saying it is real. And I’m not excusing Putin or Xi from taking a particularly zealous view of this irredentist nationalism, which they both do, for their own personal and political advantage. I’m just noting how national pride deeply informs them, that resentment of the West consumes them, that a sense of historical grievance spurs them on — and that they are not outliers among their compatriots. It is crazy to underestimate the power of this kind of revanchist nationalism — among rulers and ruled. And I fear we underestimated it in the case of Putin.
This means, as Barack Obama once insisted, that Russia will always care much more about Ukraine than we do; and China will always care much more about Taiwan than we do. In those cases, the last thing we should do is promise support that we do not seriously — truly seriously — intend to provide. The vague pledge by the Western powers not to rule out future NATO membership for Ukraine was the worst of all worlds: poking the bear, with no serious intention of fighting it.
What happened this week is that Putin finally called our bluff. The question to me is when and if Xi will decide to do the same.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
