Quotes of the Day:
"Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and diligence."
- Abigail Adams
"I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do! That is character!"
- Theodore Roosevelt
"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 27 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. Volodymyr Zelensky on why Ukraine must defeat Putin
3. The true story about Russian lying
4. Here’s What Russia Did in Ukraine While You Were All Squabbling Over Biden’s ‘Attack’ on Putin
5. Putin wants ‘Korean scenario’ for Ukraine, says intelligence chief
6. If you want to help in Ukraine Please Consider Spirit of America
7. Ukraine’s warfare outmodes ‘psy-ops’
8. Ukrainian town near Chernobyl revolts against Russian occupiers
9. Instability brewer: Behind every war and turmoil in the world is shadow of the Star-Spangled Banner - Global Times
10. Ukraine's Intel Chief: We Have Sources In The Kremlin, But We Need Jets
11. Zelensky opens the door for Ukraine neutrality in Russia peace deal
12. Biden’s Putin remark pushes U.S.-Russia relations closer to collapse
13. Analysis | Social media wasn’t ready for this war. It needs a plan for the next one.
14. Oft Forgotten But Critical Elements of Ukrainian Resistance
15. A Proxy War in Ukraine Is the Worst Possible Outcome — Except For All the Others
16. China’s Plan for Digital Dominance
17. The Ukrainian Exodus
18. Operation ‘brain drain’: Help Russian talent flow west
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 27 (PUTIN'S WAR)
Maps and graphics here: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-27
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 27 (PUTIN'S WAR)
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 27
Mason Clark
March 27, 4:30 pm ET
Russian forces have not abandoned efforts to reconstitute forces northwest of Kyiv to resume major offensive operations, and the commander of Russia’s Eastern Military District (EMD) may be personally commanding the operations. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russia’s 35th Combined Arms Army is rotating damaged units into Belarus and that Russian forces established a command post for all EMD forces operating around Kyiv in the Chernobyl area. Ongoing Russian efforts to replace combat losses in EMD units and deploy additional reinforcements forward are unlikely to enable Russia to successfully resume major operations around Kyiv in the near future. The increasingly static nature of the fighting around Kyiv reflects the incapacity of Russian forces rather than any shift in Russian objectives or efforts at this time.
Ukrainian forces continued to conduct limited counterattacks in several locations, recapturing territory east of Kyiv, in Sumy Oblast, and around Kharkiv in the past 24 hours. Ukrainian counterattacks are likely enabling Ukrainian forces to recapture key terrain and disrupt Russian efforts to resume major offensive operations. Likely escalating Russian partisan operations around Kherson are additionally tying down Russian forces. Russian forces continue to make slow but steady progress in Mariupol, but Russian assaults largely failed elsewhere in the past 24 hours.
Key Takeaways
- Russian Eastern Military District (EMD) Commander Colonel-General Alexander Chayko may be personally commanding efforts to regroup Russian forces in Belarus and resume operations to encircle Kyiv from the west. The Kremlin is highly unlikely to have abandoned its efforts to encircle Kyiv but will likely be unable to cohere the combat power necessary to resume major offensive operations in the near future.
- Neither Russian nor Ukrainian forces conducted major operations northwest of Kyiv in the last 24 hours.
- Ukrainian forces counterattacking east of Brovary since March 24 successfully retook territory late on March 26.
- Ukrainian forces conducted limited counterattacks in Sumy Oblast on March 26-27.
- Fighting continued around Izyum in the past 24 hours, with little territory changing hands.
- Russian forces continued steady advances in Mariupol.
- Ukrainian partisans around Kherson continue to tie down Rosgvardia units in the region, likely hindering Russian capabilities to resume offensive operations in the southern direction.
The Ukrainian General Staff continued to report Russian difficulties to replace personnel and equipment losses. The General Staff reported on March 27 that Russian forces are increasingly using old and substandard ammunition, leading to a rise in the rate of accidents at Russian arsenals and depots, particularly highlighting the use of old munitions by the 35th Combined Arms Army’s 165th Artillery Brigade, operating northwest of Kyiv.[1] The General Staff additionally stated that Russia has deployed up to nine logistics battalions and up to five “main logistics centers” to Ukraine to solve ongoing supply challenges.[2]
We do not report in detail on the deliberate Russian targeting of civilian infrastructure and attacks on unarmed civilians, which are war crimes, because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
Russian forces are engaged in four primary efforts at this time:
- Main effort—Kyiv (comprised of three subordinate supporting efforts);
- Supporting effort 1—Kharkiv;
- Supporting effort 1a—Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts;
- Supporting effort 2—Mariupol; and
- Supporting effort 3—Kherson and advances northward and westward.
Main effort—Kyiv axis: Russian operations on the Kyiv axis are aimed at encircling the city from the northwest, west, and east.
Subordinate main effort along the west bank of the Dnipro
Russian Eastern Military District (EMD) Commander Colonel-General Alexander Chayko may be personally commanding efforts to regroup Russian forces in Belarus and resume operations to encircle Kyiv from the west. The Ukrainian General Staff reported at midnight local time on March 26 that units of the 35th Combined Arms Army are being withdrawn to the Chernobyl area and further into Belarus to restore combat capabilities and added at noon local time on March 27 that Russian air and artillery strikes are intended to provide cover for withdrawing units.[3] The Ukrainian General Staff and the Chernihiv Regional Administration separately reported on March 27 that Russian forces established a command post to control the grouping of Russian forces from the Eastern Military District (EMD) near Chernobyl and are stockpiling munitions in the area.[4] Pro-Russian telegram channels previously shared unverified footage they claimed depicted Chayko northwest of Kyiv on March 23, which may have depicted this reported command post.[5] The Kremlin is highly unlikely to have abandoned its efforts to encircle Kyiv, though ISW continues to assess Russia will be unable to cohere the combat power necessary to resume major offensive operations in the near future.
Neither Russian nor Ukrainian forces conducted major operations northwest of Kyiv in the last 24 hours. Kyiv Oblast civil authorities and the Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian shelling concentrated on Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel, Borodyanka, and Makariv on March 27, though Russian forces do not appear to have conducted any ground attacks in the last 24 hours.[6] The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense additionally claimed that precision weapons fired by Russian warships destroyed a Ukrainian missile depot in Plesetske (southwest of Kyiv) on March 27, though we cannot independently verify this claim.[7]
Subordinate supporting effort—Chernihiv and Sumy axis
Ukrainian forces counterattacking east of Brovary successfully took territory late on March 26. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces recaptured Lukyanivka and Rudnytske, 40km east of Brovary, and forced units from Russia’s 30th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade to retreat.[8] Ukrainian forces began this counterattack on March 24.[9] Kyiv Oblast civilian authorities confirmed the presence of Russian forces in Baryshivska, Kalityanska, and Velykodymerska, tracking with previous ISW assessments of the extent of Russian advances.
Local civil authorities confirmed on March 27 that Russian forces captured Slavutych, about 35 kilometers west of Chernihiv, on March 26. Slavutych Mayor Yuriy Fomichev confirmed on March 27 that only Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces defended the city March 25-26 after Russia successfully blocked the Ukrainian Armed Forces from reinforcing the town.[10] Fomichev stated the Ukrainian forces surrendered to preserve civilian lives, but that the city government refuses to cooperate with Russia. Numerous social media users shared footage of Ukrainian civilians confronting Russian forces in Slavutych on March 26-27.[11] The Ukrainian General Staff reported at midnight local time on March 26 that units from Russia’s 41st Combined Arms Army and 90th Tank Army continued operations to surround Chernihiv city.[12]
The Ukrainian General Staff and local social media users reported that Ukrainian forces conducted limited counterattacks in Sumy Oblast on March 26-27, recapturing Trostyanets and Husarivka.[13] The Ukrainian General Staff reported Russian reinforcement columns moving in the direction of Velykui Sambir, Deptivka, and Holinka (in northeastern Ukraine between Chernihiv and Sumy) at midnight local time on March 26, though ISW cannot independently verify these reports.[14]
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv:
Russian forces did not conduct any offensive operations around Kharkiv city in the past 24 hours.[15] Ukrainian forces conducted a local counterattack toward Vilhivka, on the eastern outskirts of Kharkiv, on March 26-27 but do not appear to have recaptured the town.[16]
Fighting continued around Izyum in the past 24 hours, with little territory changing hands. Kharkiv Oblast civil authorities and social media users additionally confirmed that Ukrainian forces recaptured Husarivka (northwest of Izyum) and captured equipment from Russia’s 3rd Motor Rifle Division on March 27.[17] The Ukrainian General Staff reported at midnight local time on March 26 that three Russian battalion tactical groups (BTGs) are trying to gain a foothold in the areas of Kamyanka, Sinichyne, and Sukha Kamyanka (all southeast of Izyum) and local civilian authorities reported fighting was ongoing on March 27.[18]
Supporting Effort #1a—Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts:
The Ukrainian General Staff reported on March 27 that Ukrainian forces continued to repel the Russian assaults on Popasna and Rubizhne that began on March 26.[19] The Ukrainian General Staff reported at 6:00 am local time on March 27 that Ukrainian forces repelled seven Russian attacks in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in the past day.[20] Pro-Russian telegram channels circulated a video claiming to show Chechen fighters and members of the pro-Russian “Night Wolves” motorcycle club ”liberating” Ukrainian civilians in Rubizhne on March 26.[21] Russian forces have not captured Rubizhne and the video was likely faked elsewhere. The Ukrainian General Staff additionally reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian assault on Krasnohorivka (west of Donetsk) on March 26-27.[22]
Supporting Effort #2—Mariupol:
Russian assaults on central Mariupol continued on March 27, though ISW cannot confirm any changes in control of terrain.[23] Russian forces will likely gain control of the city in the relatively near future.
Supporting Effort #3—Kherson and advances northward and westwards:
Russian forces did not conduct any offensive operations in the southern direction in the past 24 hours.[24] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Rosgvardia units continue to fight centers of Ukrainian resistance in Kherson Oblast and other areas, confirming reports from March 26 that Ukrainian partisans are successfully contesting Russian control of Kherson.[25] The Odesa Oblast civil administration reported on March 27 that Russian forces are conducting aerial reconnaissance of Odesa and stated there is a high likelihood that Russian warships will strike Odesa.[26] However, an unsupported Russian amphibious landing on Odesa remains highly unlikely, and Russia has likely committed much of its Naval Infantry reserves to fighting in Mariupol.
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces will likely capture Mariupol or force the city to capitulate within the coming weeks and have entered the city center.
- Successful Ukrainian partisan actions around Kherson will continue to tie down Russian manpower.
- Russia is deploying additional Eastern Military District assets around Kyiv and is likely attempting to restart offensive operations on a limited scale.
- Russian and proxy troops will continue efforts to seize the full territory of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, but will not likely make rapid progress in doing so.
[10] https://hromadske dot ua/posts/u-slavutichi-yakij-opinivsya-pid-okupaciyeyu-rosijski-vijska-prodovzhuyut-shukayuti-zbroyu-u-budivlyah.
2. Volodymyr Zelensky on why Ukraine must defeat Putin
Ukraine must defeat Putin in Putin's War.
Volodymyr Zelensky on why Ukraine must defeat Putin
At his headquarters in Kyiv, Ukraine’s president speaks to The Economist about his country’s battle and the struggle of light over dark
Mar 27th 2022
Kyiv
HE NEVER WANTED a war and he did not prepare his country for one. He may quote Winston Churchill, but he is no Churchill. He wears khaki but he is leaving the battle-plans to Ukraine’s generals. “[The] people are leaders,” declares Volodymyr Zelensky. The man the Ukrainian people chose as their president in 2019 because of his starring role in a television series called “Servant of the People” has in real life become a servant to his people—their representative and the embodiment of their spirit.
Speaking to The Economist in a government building fortified with sandbags and surrounded with tank traps, Mr Zelensky is disarmingly authentic and humane (see 1843). So great is the real-life tragedy that has befallen his nation that there is no room for acting. He talks of Ukraine’s need for weapons, his views of President Joe Biden and his other Western backers, of what victory means (see our edited transcript of the interview). But Mr Zelensky speaks most powerfully about the inhumanity of the Russian commanders ranged against him.
“The invaders do not even mourn their own casualties,” he says. “This is something I do not understand. Some 15,000 [Russian soldiers] have been killed in one month…[Vladimir Putin] is throwing Russian soldiers like logs into a train’s furnace. And, they are not even burying them…Their corpses are left in the streets. In several cities, small cities, our soldiers say it's impossible to breathe because of the…stench of rotting flesh.”
He compares the pitilessness of Mr Putin’s war machine with the compassion of the soldiers and volunteers defending Ukrainian cities. “Our fearless soldiers are defending Mariupol now…They could have left a long time ago, but they are not leaving the city.” After 31 days of bombardment and siege, they are still fighting—not because Mr Zelensky ordered it, but because they “say they must stay and bury those killed in action and save the lives of those wounded…[And] long as people are still alive, we must continue to protect them. And this is the fundamental difference between the way the opposing sides in this war see the world.”
Mr Putin and Mr Zelensky are both native Russian-speakers, but they talk a different language of power. Mr Putin’s world, where life is cheap and history belongs to great men, has no place for pity and no room for Ukraine. “I don’t think he visualises in his own mind the same Ukraine we see,” Mr Zelensky says. “He sees Ukraine as a part of his world, his worldview, but that doesn't correspond with what's happened over the last 30 years. I don't think Putin has been [in] a bunker for two weeks or six months, but for more like two decades.”
To Mr Putin, strength means violence. Anyone too squeamish to shed blood is weak. That explains why the Russian army is using the same methods in occupied territory that it used in Donbas in 2014. “They are kidnapping the mayors of our cities,” Mr Zelensky says. “They killed some of them. Some of them we can't find. Some of them we have found already, and they are dead. And some of them were replaced…The same people are carrying out these operations.”
But if weakness means humanity, then it is this weakness that makes Mr Zelensky strong—and it is why the Ukrainian flag flies over both Whitehall and Pennsylvania Avenue. He celebrates how ordinary Ukrainians “waved their hands in the middle of the streets in order to stop tanks” as they did in Kherson, one of the cities now occupied by Russian forces. “They decided to stand up and do this of their own volition. I could not have ordered them not to do it or to throw themselves under the tank treads,” he says. “I will stay with these people until the end.”
He is emphatic about what that end will be: “We believe in victory,” he says. “It's impossible to believe in anything else. We will definitely win because this is our home, our land, our independence. It's just a question of time.” However, getting there depends not just on the fighting spirit of Ukrainians, but also on support from the West. If Ukraine is to defend its way of life it needs tanks, armoured personnel vehicles and military aircraft; and it needs them now.
“[The West] can’t say, ‘We’ll help you in the weeks [to come],’” Mr Zelensky argues. “It doesn’t allow us to unblock Russia-occupied cities, to bring food to residents there, to take the military initiative into our own hands.” And however strong the spirit of Ukraine’s people, Russia has more firepower. “The Russians have thousands of military vehicles, and they are coming and coming and coming. If we can joke in this situation, I will. There are some cities where there are so many tanks, they can't go away. They have tank traffic jams,” he says.
Mr Zelensky divides NATO into five camps. First are those who “don’t mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives.” Others want a quick end to the fighting because “Russia's market is a big one [and] their economies are suffering”. They would like to see Russia keep certain markets. A third, more diverse, group of countries “recognise Nazism in Russia” and want Ukraine to prevail. They are joined by smaller liberal countries that “want the war to end quickly at any cost, because they think people come first”. And last are the embarrassed countries that want peace now and in any way possible, because they are “the offices of the Russian Federation in Europe.”
Mr Zelensky praises America and Britain. Although he notes that the complexities of American politics have sometimes caused delays, he acknowledges that Mr Biden has become increasingly engaged. But Germany, he says, is trying to strike a balance between Russia and Ukraine. “They have a long relationship with Russia and they are looking at the situation through the prism of the economy,” he says. “They can help, if there is pressure on them domestically to do so, and they can stop when they see what they have done is sufficient.” Asked why leaders like President Emmanuel Macron of France would not supply tanks to help Ukraine win, he retorts that “they are afraid of Russia. And that’s it.”
Mr Zelensky is equally frustrated by the reactive nature of sanctions that are designed to punish Russia for what it has done rather than prevent it from going further. Existing sanctions have loopholes. Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, for example, has not been cut off from the SWIFT payment system, because it is one of the main ways Europe pays for its gas. An embargo on oil and gas has been discussed but so far not implemented by Europe, though America has ordered one. “The first thing is to put yourselves in our place and act pre-emptively…We are hearing that the decision depends on whether Russia launches a chemical attack on us. This is not the right approach. We are not guinea pigs.”
And what does Mr Zelensky believe Ukraine’s victory will look like? He pauses. Everyone has their own version of victory and defeat. To Mr Putin victory is about the destruction of Ukraine as Russia’s antithesis, and about the killing of people who have free will and who have put human life and feelings above state, ideology or religion. When Mr Zelensky finally speaks, he talks about life and everything it entails— humanity, compassion, and freedom.
“Victory is being able to save as many lives as possible…because without this nothing would make sense. Our land is important, yes, but ultimately, it's just territory.” To save everyone, defend all interests while protecting people and not giving up territory is probably an impossible task, he concedes. He does not know when or how it will end, but he knows that “it will end with us still standing here defending” life in Ukraine.
Nobody knows for certain where Mr Putin was when his army attacked Ukraine. But Mr Zelensky was at home with his wife and his two children. It was they who woke him up early on February 24th. “They told me there were loud explosions. After a couple of minutes, I received the signal that a rocket attack was underway.” Soon after Russia attacked, America offered him a passage to safety. He chose to stay.
“It's not about being brave,” he says. “I have to act the way I do.” He did not prepare for the role of war hero. “If you don’t know how to do something this way or that way, be honest and that’s it. You have to be honest, so that people believe you. You don’t need to try. You need to be yourself…And it’s important not to show that you are better than who you are.”
In Mr Putin’s world honesty is weakness. His power is based on secrecy and deception. Mystery and violence fuel his cult of authority. Mr Zelensky might be sitting in what his aides call a fortress, but his strength lies in his openness and his ability to hear and reflect what people want of him. It is the strength of Everyman.
Vasily Grossman, a Soviet novelist and war correspondent born in the small Jewish town of Berdychev in northern Ukraine, put it well in “Life and Fate”, his vast novel about the second world war: “Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil,” he writes. “It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”
3. The true story about Russian lying
Excerpts:
The best satirists write a cigarette paper’s breadth from the truth, and Voinovich was renowned for that. Indeed, he was regarded at his death in 2018 as prophetic:
'People keep saying that all the bad things I write come true, so I’m going to write something good.'
That’s not mere jest. It’s at heart a strong defence of the importance of choosing words well – truthfully, however old-fashioned the concept. It’s also a statement of agency, and therefore a good reason to treat with scorn the assertion that ‘if it wasn’t for us, none of this would be happening’.
How very self-obsessed to think that Russians are incapable of evil behaviour without our having a hand in it.
The true story about Russian lying
27 March 2022, 3:00am
We were having a few drinks in a rented flat in the centre of Grozny in late 1994. A bunch of foreign reporters, including myself, who were usually based in Moscow, had been sent to check out the strange conflict flickering in Chechnya. It was late at night. The room was full of fag smoke. Someone played a guitar, inevitably. There was vodka. Outnumbered women journalists were enduring attention from men who were digging warfare, and living their best life to date. In a few cases, it was vice-versa: young male producers made interesting targets for seasoned female reporters.
At the time, the background noise from the Kremlin was that if Chechen rebels didn’t stand down, there would be unspecified but terrible consequences. But nobody truly believed the Russian general staff meant it. We scoffed, and had big evenings not far from a market where you could buy grenades, AK-47s and God knows what else for cash.
It had to be a bluff, a pose – none of it made sense. The men in Moscow weren’t that crazy. The president, maybe. But he was surrounded by grown-ups. Right? (Which might sound familiar.)
To date, it had been a semi-phoney conflict: an insurrectionist government in Chechnya was being harried and periodically attacked by ‘local’ troops directed by the GRU – Russian military intelligence – who used as their figureheads ‘local’ leaders from ‘breakaway’ areas of the republic. (Probably also rings a bell.)
The then Russian defence minister, the famously corrupt Pavel Grachev, had boasted that he could take Grozny in two hours with one airborne regiment. It would be a walk in the park. So don’t tempt us. (A final comparison.)
Suddenly, amid our by now somewhat debauched soirée, a correspondent from Sky News shouted: 'Bloody hell! They’re actually doing it!'
The drunken strumming of a local hack came to a stop, drowned out by massive explosions, very close by, and the sound of jet planes returning for another run. All of us sobered up, piled into the nearest vehicles, the competitive journalist instinct overriding inebriation and also good sense.
Just up the road, an apartment building was smouldering. Walls that should have been protecting those dreaming in their beds were there no longer. I could see someone on an upper floor wandering around her bathroom.
At ground level, the camera lights reveal a man covered in plaster dust and soot, his hair literally up on end, arms spread wide and hands gesturing madly, as though trying to grasp the impossibility of the moment. His eyes and mouth were wide open, but he had no words. We filmed.
Some of my former Russian colleagues rapidly jumped ship and joined the disinformation bandwagon
A few days later, I returned to our bureau in Moscow. There was admin to do and there were faxes to look through. One was from a government information service. It quoted Oleg Soskovets, a now forgotten official, then deputy prime minister with the portfolio for security matters:
'The bandit groupings in Chechnya have taken to blowing up their own apartment blocks in order to simulate the effects of air raids.'
I couldn’t believe what I was reading.
A press release that followed accepted that there may have been air raids after all, but said they were by ‘unidentified aircraft’.
Planes from Lichtenstein, I wondered? Is that what you’re saying? Maybe devilishly clever pilots from outer space with missions we can only guess at? Given what I had seen in Grozny, I was astonished by the insane scale of the lies.
I kept the fax, because it seemed so utterly egregious. A bad version of Nazi propaganda. Goebbels on an off day. It had to be the exception rather than the rule. I got the print-out framed and hung it in my toilet, the better to examine it at my leisure with a mix of wonderment and horror.
Only now do I recall that at no point at the time did the Kremlin call what was happening ‘a war’. It was referred to as an ‘operation to restore constitutional order’. Much as what is taking place almost thirty years later in Ukraine is also not a war, but a ‘special military operation’.
Among the many compliments paid to Vladimir Putin’s version of tyranny is a supposed special and novel gift for devious information warfare. As though he were some kind of post-modern genius: Foucault with novichok and tanks.
The truth is that he is merely an inheritor of the ingrained governing DNA. Pathological lying to foreigners and one’s own citizens is standard operating procedure.
The late dissident Soviet author Vladimir Voinovich said, at the twilight of the USSR, that his domestic critics had never appreciated ‘a method that is very alien to us – depicting reality as it is.’
Opposition figures like Alexei Navalny will know what he meant. The anti-corruption campaigner has called out the astonishing chutzpah of self-appointed officials who demand a frugal observance of cultural pieties – skrepi, in Russian – while rewarding themselves with grotesque luxury and big second homes in Italy and Spain. Having survived attempted assassination by poisoning, Navalny, already behind bars, was sentenced this week to nine years in jail for his troubles.
A great many Russian journalists have been killed under Putin. And, in recent days, those who remain have been given the choice of silence or exile, including very brave friends from the BBC Russian service. It is, in effect, against the law to tell the truth. Now more than ever, you cannot dishonour a principle taken for granted by many in the country: 'menshe znaesh, luchshe spish’ – the less you know, the better you sleep.
So to think that Putin and his acolytes at outlets like Russia Today have some special talent for mendacity is both to ignore the past and pay such dismal characters an undeserved compliment. Falsehood has a serious pedigree here.
It is also seems to be attractive: some of my former Russian colleagues rapidly jumped ship and joined the disinformation bandwagon when it was being lavishly constructed. A producer at Associated Press Television, who used to tuck into Big Macs in the nineties and enjoyed being paid in dollars, became a Russia Today founding grandee. A BBC reporter I used to work with in Moscow picked up a contract to run the UK bureau of Sputnik, the written companion to the poison-laced broadcast offering.
There is an often-voiced idea that what happens in Russia, and what Russia is doing today in Ukraine, is the fault of myopic or malign western leaders. As if in some state of nature, like noble savages, Russians would be at peace with their neighbours and themselves, were it not for ‘us’. So one logical conclusion would be that these two people I once tried to cover the news with were compelled to talk nonsense for money because of something I did, or failed to do.
This approach simply seems untrue to human nature, which we know allows us to believe several incompatible things with honest fervour if it suits us to do so.
In the case of oligarchs and KGB men, maybe it’s that the fabulous riches gained by robbing your country are actually deserved because you’re protecting the nation in an ineffable but very important way.
Or in the case of my ex-team mates, perhaps that telling outright lies at home and abroad somehow serves a greater truth. Is that’s how they square it with their consciences, as they enjoy dual citizenships and more than one pension scheme? Or possibly it wasn’t ideology, or the anger of the scorned: they just fancied the money. Or all three together. How would I know?
But it is surely better to assume such men have moral autonomy – that theirs were freely reached decisions, rather than the inevitable consequence of mistreatment or misunderstanding by western co-workers. The latter view would be deeply patronising: bigotry verging on racism.
Whatever the post-Soviet catechism of these people, it falls within a long tradition of deceit: the idea that you can change abject reality by renaming it. The problem is, of course, that at some point people get tired of being fed bullshit and start to speak up.
The best satirists write a cigarette paper’s breadth from the truth, and Voinovich was renowned for that. Indeed, he was regarded at his death in 2018 as prophetic:
'People keep saying that all the bad things I write come true, so I’m going to write something good.'
That’s not mere jest. It’s at heart a strong defence of the importance of choosing words well – truthfully, however old-fashioned the concept. It’s also a statement of agency, and therefore a good reason to treat with scorn the assertion that ‘if it wasn’t for us, none of this would be happening’. How very self-obsessed to think that Russians are incapable of evil behaviour without our having a hand in it.
Oleg Soskovets, the hero of the fax in my toilet about how Chechens were faking air raids, might even agree. He’s still alive and will celebrate his 74th birthday this spring, if Wikipedia is to be believed. How could one be sure, though? Perhaps a journalist could find out and report back. OK, perhaps not in Russia.
Meanwhile, a friend advised me not to look at the ex-BBC Sputnik guy’s Twitter feed, because it would make me angry. So of course I did. A week into the war in Ukraine, the man posted this comment below a video of bombed out residential buildings: ‘What makes you think the Russians did it?’
Nichego ne menyaetsya, as they say where he comes from. Nothing changes.
WRITTEN BY
Christopher Booth is a former BBC Moscow bureau chief
4. Here’s What Russia Did in Ukraine While You Were All Squabbling Over Biden’s ‘Attack’ on Putin
A list of Putin's and the actions he has ordered his military to conduct.
Conclusion:
But yes, by all means, let’s all keep bickering about the fallout over Biden pointing out that Putin’s a bad man.
Here’s What Russia Did in Ukraine While You Were All Squabbling Over Biden’s ‘Attack’ on Putin
WORDS AND DEEDS
While many in the West were busy debating Biden’s words, Putin’s troops were using white phosphorus munitions and snatching up civilians.
Updated Mar. 27, 2022 1:12PM ET / Published Mar. 27, 2022 12:04PM ET
opinion
Anadolu Agency
But don’t let the wall-to-wall coverage of Biden’s “rhetorical escalation” distract you from the very literal, bloody escalations by Putin’s shock troops.
You may have heard about the six missiles Russia fired at the Ukrainian city of Lviv even as Biden was speaking just across the border.
But what about the reports of white phosphorus munitions being used by Russian troops on Saturday night—just as much of the Western world was in a tizzy over Biden’s assessment of Putin. Ukrainian forces in Avdiivka shared photos of the white phosphorus raining down, days after President Volodymyr Zelensky had warned the world that Russia was using “phosphorus bombs against peaceful people in Ukraine.”
Using a highly toxic chemical substance known for its ability to burn, as one chemical weapons expert put it, “very vigorously” through human flesh—that’s an escalation the whole world should be talking about.
Want another one?
The mayor of Slavutych on Saturday announced at least three civilian deaths as he said the northern city had been taken over by Russian troops. He said the decision to surrender was made to save civilian lives—and pleaded with relatives to come identify the bodies.
Imagine how many Ukrainians were agonizing over whether their missing loved ones were dead or alive while so many in the West focused on Biden’s speech, acting as if his comments might somehow drastically alter the trajectory of the war.
Their stories were pushed on the back burner as Western commentators speculated on how Russia might respond to Biden’s remark.
The story of survivors in Mariupol forced to bury their loved ones—or even complete strangers—in hastily dug graves in courtyards of apartment buildings.
The story of the funeral home there literally giving out empty coffins because there are so many dead bodies on the street.
“When burying the dead, put in the coffin at least some kind of information about the person,” the funeral home director, Nikolai Saparov, flatly advised on Facebook.
Ukrainians who said they’d made it out of Mariupol alive took to social media to vent about the nightmares they’d witnessed there playing on loop in their minds—and the fear that people in the West no longer want the realities of the war looping in their media feeds. That maybe it’s easier instead to nitpick over Biden’s remarks.
“Unfortunately, not many people want to hear about ripped off legs, fecal matter in buckets, and dead children with ashes instead of lungs,” one Twitter user wrote after she said she fled the devastated city.
It’s hard to look directly at what is happening in Ukraine for too long, and on some level people are probably getting tired hearing about all the dead children.
But don’t we owe it to the people standing up to Putin on behalf of the whole world to stay focused on what’s important there?
On the real escalation. On the war crimes. On the cities wiped off the face of the earth.
The soldiers found the civilians taking shelter from the incessant bombing in the basement of the building, and snatched them “by force.” Sick people in need of urgent treatment. Taken away at gunpoint, presumably to somewhere in Russia.
But yes, by all means, let’s all keep bickering about the fallout over Biden pointing out that Putin’s a bad man.
5. Putin wants ‘Korean scenario’ for Ukraine, says intelligence chief
My first inclination has been to say no to all DMZs.
But then I think about the huge difference between north and South Korea. Perhaps that is what will happen if they establish a DMZ. We will have a failed russian state in the east and a rich, powerful, free, and democratic Ukraine in the west.
But then I think about the suffering of the people of Ukraine and those who would (and already) suffer in Russian occupied Ukraine. And of course I do not wish the Russian people to suffer because Putin decided to initiate Putin's War. A lot of people will have to suffer for seven decades for a Korea-like outcome (just as the people in north Korea continue to suffer)
And beyond the people, I fear this so-called "Korea-scenario" would give Putin much of what he wanted. He may have overshot his objectives but in the end this would give him a victory and that is not something the Ukrainian people and the free world can allow.
I hope no one is going to support this scenario though I am sure there are international relations theorists and international negotiations experts who can spin this as a win-win. It will not be a win for the Ukrainian people, the international order and freedom.
So in the end I still say no to DMZs.
Putin wants ‘Korean scenario’ for Ukraine, says intelligence chief
Ukrainian general says Moscow unable to ‘swallow’ country but faces guerrilla warfare if it tries to divide it
Vladimir Putin wants to split Ukraine into two, emulating the post-war division between North and South Korea, the invaded country’s military intelligence chief has said.
Gen Kyrylo Budanov, who predicted Russia’s invasion as far back as November, said Moscow had been unable to “swallow” the country but faced guerrilla warfare should it seek to split it.
His warning came as Leonid Pasechnik, the leader of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic in the contested Donbas region in the east, said he may stage a referendum on his territory becoming part of Russia.
“I think that in the near future a referendum will be held on the territory of the republic, during which the people will… … express their opinion on joining the Russian Federation,” Pasechnik said.
Russia’s president recognised the two such eastern self-proclaimed republics of Luhansk and Donetsk shortly before the start of the war. He launched his so-called “special military operation” on 24 February, claiming that he was acting in defence of its people.
Budanov said he believed that Putin had wanted to take over the whole of Ukraine but has changed his plan since failing to take its capital, Kyiv, and overthrow Volodomyr Zelenskiy’s government in the early days of the war.
Saturday’s missile attacks on Lviv, in the west of Ukraine close to the Polish border, are being seen as a message of defiance to the US president, Joe Biden, who was speaking in neighbouring Poland, and an attempt to hit Ukrainian fuel and military hardware supplies.
The two targets of the attacks, after which black smoke billowed across Lviv’s historic horizon of steeples and domed cathedral, were a fuel depot and a factory used for repairing tanks, anti-aircraft systems and radar stations. Both were close to apartment blocks and only a mile from the Unesco world heritage protected city centre.
One witness, Dmitry Leonov, 36, an IT worker, said the ground shook and people had been thrown to the ground by the force of the blasts at the tank factory. The windows of a local school were said to have been smashed by the force.
The Lviv emergency services chief, Khrystyna Avdyeyeva, said the fire at the fuel depot had been finally put out after 13 hours at 6.49am on Sunday. “The boys have been through hell,” she said.
Of those responsible for launching the missiles, which came from Crimea, up to 1,000 miles away, she said: “Let them burn in the same hell. But our heroes will not be there, so nobody will survive.”
Budanov said he was convinced the Russian president was seeking to split Ukraine despite the attack in the west, only the third major assault there since the war began.
He said: “Putin is already changing the main operational directions – towards the south and the east. There is reason to believe that he is considering a “Korean scenario” for Ukraine.
“That is trying to impose a dividing line between the unoccupied and occupied regions of our country. In fact, it is an attempt to create North and South Korea in Ukraine. After all, he is definitely not able to swallow the entire country.”
Russia has been bogged down in the besieged port city of Mariupol in its attempts to create a land corridor between Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, and the Donbas region.
Budanov said he did not believe Mariupol would fall soon and that Russian troops would face guerrilla tactics even if it did manage to defeat the experienced Azov battalion in the flattened city.
He said: “The occupiers will try to unite the occupied territories into a single quasi-state entity, which will oppose independent Ukraine. We are already seeing attempts to create ‘parallel’ authorities in the occupied territories and force people to give up the hryvnia [Ukraine’s national currency].
“They may want to bargain at the international level. However, the resistance and protests of our citizens on the occupied territories, counter-attacks by the armed forces and gradual liberation – significantly complicate the implementation of enemy’s plans.
“In addition, the season of total Ukrainian guerrilla safari will soon begin. Then there will be one relevant scenario left for the Russians – how to survive.”
Oleksii Arestovych, an adviser to Zelenskiy, echoed the intelligence chief’s analysis. “Within a week or two, Russia will withdraw troops from Kyiv and Kharkiv regions and send them to Donbas”, he said.
“They realised that they will not be able to take over the big cities, they will announce the completion of the first phase of the ‘special operation’ and the beginning of the second – the ‘liberation of Donbas’.”
Arestovych continued: “They now have three tasks: to surround our troops in Donbas, to completely occupy Mariupol and the south. If they lose Kherson [a city west of Mariupol], their entire Mariupol occupation will collapse. And that’s all. There will be no capture of Kyiv, Kharkiv or Odesa.”
Elsewhere, in Kharkiv the authorities reported 44 artillery strikes and 140 rocket assaults in a single day, including on a nuclear research facility. In Kyiv, the authorities warned that Russians were increasingly disguising themselves as civilians to engage in sabotage.
6. If you want to help in Ukraine Please Consider Spirit of America
Here is Jim Hake the Founder and CEO of Spirit of America speaking on C-Span Sunday 3/37/22. He describes SOA and the work they are doing in Ukraine. I recommend watching it (and I recommend supporting SOA - for transparency I am a member of the board of advisors of SOA)
Donate at the link below.
Take Ukraine's Side. Defend Freedom. Save Lives.
Spirit of America is working closely with US military and State Department personnel in Poland to meet the urgent needs of Ukrainian forces and provide humanitarian assistance to those displaced by the fighting.
Here are three ways you can help:
7. Ukraine’s warfare outmodes ‘psy-ops’
I missed this editorial. But it is still timely and shows that Taiwan is watching and learning.
Mon, Mar 14, 2022 page8
- Ukraine’s warfare outmodes ‘psy-ops’
- By Chu-Ke Feng-yun 諸葛風雲
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Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Kyiv has controlled the narrative with a hybrid approach of news, public opinion, psychological and cognitive elements, and disinformation. Information warfare has displaced traditional political warfare and gained new strategic importance.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been broadcasting live daily, as well as at significant times during the conflict, to show his country and the world his resolve to fight to the end and to castigate Russia for launching an unjust, unprovoked war.
During particularly tense episodes, he has given impassioned speeches, telling Ukrainians to stay alive so that they can once again sit down to eat together.
Reports have referenced the “Ghost of Kyiv,” a suspected flying ace who the Ukrainian Security Service claims has shot down 10 Russian fighter jets; the civilian army — comprised of men and women, young and old — willing to die for their country; and the weapons — Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stinger surface-to-air missiles and shoulder-fired next generation light anti-tank weapons — which have been crucial in repelling the Russians.
There have been images of destroyed or abandoned Russian military vehicles, and stories of poorly trained Russian soldiers.
These accounts have all found their way onto social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — all while people refuse to report on Ukrainian troop movements.
Public opinion around the world — with the exception of Belarus and China — sides with Ukraine, which is pressuring EU countries to provide military equipment and humanitarian aid.
Even SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has donated his company’s Starlink terminals to Ukraine to sidestep Russian efforts to block its Internet access.
Such support has enabled the EU to assist Ukraine, and paint Russia forces and Russian President Vladimir Putin as inhumane invaders.
The lack of a legitimate cause for the war and Russia’s inadequate preparation, amplified by Ukraine’s effective media use, has led to low morale among Russian troops and reportedly caused some invaders cast aside their equipment and abandon their vehicles.
Stories of derelict equipment and soldiers going AWOL are regularly replayed online. One video on YouTube shows a Russian mother saying that her son told her that he was deployed on a military exercise, only to later discover he was a prisoner of war in Ukraine.
People from around the world, as well as Ukrainians living abroad, are traveling to Ukraine to enlist in a volunteer army.
What Ukrainians have achieved is straight from the pages of the political warfare handbook: consolidate at home, bring others together and disrupt the enemy.
Taiwan’s armed forces can learn from this approach. The military should consolidate its operations, bringing together instructors and political warfare operatives to form a psychological operations and warfare unit responsible for utilizing social media to control the narrative during a potential war.
The military should reinforce training related to online campaigns — including the use of keywords, broadcasts, statistical analysis, visualization, and methods to increase online traffic and facilitate the setting of agendas — to shift away from relying on conventional “psy-op” techniques.
It should procure the equipment needed to avoid Internet disruptions and the blocking of online accounts.
The time is right for the military to learn from how Ukraine’s armed forces organized and consolidated its operations so that Taiwan can be ready to control the narrative.
Chu-Ke Feng-yun is director of a medical management department at a hospital.
Translated by Paul Cooper
8. Ukrainian town near Chernobyl revolts against Russian occupiers
This war is providing incredible stories about the human spirit and what the Ukrainian people are doing to protect their country. This is obviously because of the communications capabilities and social media.
Ukrainian town near Chernobyl revolts against Russian occupiers and frees its mayor after families stage mass protest
PUBLISHED: 16:57 EDT, 26 March 2022 | UPDATED: 17:46 EDT, 26 March 2022
Daily Mail · by Nick Enoch for MailOnline · March 26, 2022
The mayor of a Ukrainian town occupied by Russian forces near Chernobyl has been released from captivity after hundreds of residents, and families, staged a mass protest - despite stun grenades being thrown into the crowd.
Yuri Fomichev, mayor of Slavutych, was briefly detained by Russian soldiers after they took control of the town, which is home to staff who work at the Chernobyl nuclear site.
'I have been released. Everything is fine, as far as it is possible under occupation,' he said, after officials in the Ukraine capital Kyiv earlier announced he had been detained.
An agreement was reached that the Russians would leave if those with arms handed them over to the mayor with a dispensation for those with hunting rifles, according to the Guardian.
Kyiv earlier stated that Vladimir Putin's troops had entered Slavutych and occupied the municipal hospital.
The mayor of a Ukrainian town occupied by Russian forces near Chernobyl has been released from captivity after hundreds of residents, and families, staged a mass protest - despite stun grenades being thrown into the crowd
Hundreds of residents took to the streets, carrying a large blue and yellow Ukrainian flag and heading towards the hospital, the administration said
Yuri Fomichev, mayor of Slavutych, was briefly detained by Russian soldiers after they took control of the town, which is home to staff who work at the Chernobyl nuclear site. Above, demonstrators at the scene
Fomichev (file image, above) said: 'I have been released. Everything is fine, as far as it is possible under occupation'
Some 25,000 people live in the town 160 kilometres (99 miles) north of the capital, built after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident.
Hundreds of residents took to the streets, carrying a large blue and yellow Ukrainian flag and heading towards the hospital, the administration said.
It added that Russian forces fired into the air and threw stun grenades into the crowd.
The administration also shared on its Telegram account images in which dozens of people gathered around the Ukrainian flag and chanted: 'Glory to Ukraine'.
Governor Oleksandr Pavlyuk said on Saturday that residents of Slavutych took to the streets with Ukrainian flags to protest the Russian invasion.
The administration also shared on its Telegram account images in which dozens of people gathered around the Ukrainian flag and chanted: 'Glory to Ukraine'
The Chernobyl plant (above) was taken by the Russian army on February 24 on the same day that Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine
'The Russians opened fire into the air. They threw flash-bang grenades into the crowd.
'But the residents did not disperse - on the contrary, more of them showed up,' Pavlyuk said.
The Chernobyl plant was taken by the Russian army on February 24 on the same day that Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine.
The International Atomic Energy Agency expressed 'concern' on Thursday after Ukraine informed the organisation of Russia's bombardment of Slavutych.
The town's capture comes after the first staff rotation at the Chernobyl plant last weekend since Russia took control.
About 100 Ukrainian technicians continued to run the daily operations at the radioactive site for nearly four weeks without being rotated.
Daily Mail · by Nick Enoch for MailOnline · March 26, 2022
9. Instability brewer: Behind every war and turmoil in the world is shadow of the Star-Spangled Banner - Global Times
Please note the obvious. Global Times is a Chinese propaganda source. I guess like two former presidents (from each party) have said in their own ways, we do bad things too. And the Chinese are using that.
This takes a long historical view that spins select history to make the CHinese argument. This is worth studying for its propaganda value.
Here is the Chinese conclusion. The sad part is I hear strains of this refrain on social media from people who are not bots and trolls.
Conclusion:
One of the characteristics of the US launching a war is to weave a set of discourse, such as democracy and to create a public opinion atmosphere. "We have seen too many of these. This high hat and moralistic gaslighting cannot hide the nature of the US' foreign aggression, belligerence, crisis creation, and chaos," Li said.
Instability brewer: Behind every war and turmoil in the world is shadow of the Star-Spangled Banner - Global Times
Editor's Note:
"This man cannot remain in power." US President Joe Biden made this remark about Russian leader Vladimir Putin on March 26, 2022 during a speech he made in Poland. Though the White House had tried to explain away the utterance for the president, the real purpose of Washington was ultimately exposed: To bring down Russia, overthrow the Russian government, and maintain US hegemony.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict is just the latest of many examples in which the US seeks its own geopolitical interests by intensifying conflicts in other countries or directly launching wars.
In order to seek global hegemony, the US has used many resources including political, economic, cultural, educational, and the manipulation of public opinion platforms, and has created turmoil around the world under the banner of "human rights," "democracy," and "freedom."
A US armored vehicle drives near the village of Yalanli, on the western outskirts of the northern Syrian city of Manbij on March 5, 2017. Photo: VCG
During the past 240-plus years after it declared independence on July 4th, 1776, the US was not involved in any war for merely less than 20 years, according to a report released by the China Society for Human Rights Studies in May 2021. Incomplete statistics showed that from the end of WWII in 1945 to 2001, among the 248 armed conflicts that occurred in 153 regions globally, 201 were initiated by the US, accounting for 81 percent of the total number.
These wars have devastated the invaded countries, killed millions of civilians, and displaced tens of millions. Looking back at the history of US aggression and intervention, we can see that Washington is the driving force behind the turmoil and the source of the chaos in the world.
From provoking wars around the world to leading NATO's eastward expansion, from imposing sanctions on "disobedient countries" to coercing other nations to pick sides, the US has acted like a "Cold War schemer," and an "vampire" who creates "enemies" and make fortunes from pyres of war.
The Global Times is publishing a series of stories and cartoons to unveil how the US, in its superpower status, has been creating trouble in the world one crisis after another. This is the second installment.
US soldiers in Afghanistan on September 23, 2012. Photo: VCG
Is America belligerent?
Is America belligerent? From a big data perspective, the answer is yes. Since World War II, almost every US president has had a "war of his own."
In his speech to troops of the US Third Army in 1944, General George S. Patton had made the point very clear. "Americans love to fight. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players, and the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time."
"That's why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans. Battle is the most significant competition in which a man can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base," the general said.
So why is the US always "willing to use troops" after World War II? The answer is that the history of the founding of the US and its expansion is through wars. From the very beginning, productivity and influence under coercive violence seemed to be a creed for the Americans.
After World War II, the US competed with the Soviet Union for global hegemony in the Cold War. Afterward, a wave of interventionism, wars, subversion, and infiltration were proliferated with only one end goal -to maintain its global hegemony.
For more than 200 years, the US has kept waging and participating in wars, and wars have also shaped the US.
A child looks on as military vehicles of US Army's 5th Stryker Brigade drive past his village near Kandahar, Afghanistan, on August 6, 2009. Photo: VCG
Fight for hegemony
"The strategic intention of the US is to pursue hegemony. In other words, the US wants to seek absolute dominance. The US guides its behavior with a peculiar security concept, that is, the more the world outside the US resembles it, the more secure the American political elites feel," Li Haidong, a professor from the Institute of International Relations at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times.
"The actual action derived from this concept is the endless expansion of the US around the world, and Americanization wherever it expands," he said.
"Warfare has become an American tradition. Without wars, this country would not know what to do with itself. War is a label that defines American identity," he said.
Taking advantage of internal conflicts in other countries is one of the most common ways that the US incites wars, said international relations experts and military observers. And the Korean War (1950-53) is a typical case to support this finding, they said.
In 1945, before Japan's surrender, the US and the Soviet Union decided to carve up the Korean Peninsula into two occupation zones. The dividing line was widely known as the 38th Parallel. In this way, the originally united country of Korea was divided into two halves by the hegemony of the great powers.
After the defeat of Japan, the US and the Soviet Union quickly moved toward the "Cold War" period due to the need for an ideology and sphere of influence competition, and the fierce struggle for control of the Korean Peninsula became the most typical manifestation of the confrontation between the two camps.
In 1950, the Korean War broke out. The US quickly intervened and brought the war to the Yalu River. Today, when we look back on this history, it is not difficult to find that both North and South Korea were not willing to be divided by hegemony powers, which was the internal cause of the Korean War. US intervention was the important external cause of the war. Experts said that the history of the Korean War is the evil history of US intervention in other countries and the killing of civilians.
Rubble and trouble
Excluding those who are in a different camp is one of the drives for the US to provoke wars around the world. The former socialist Balkan state Yugoslavia was thus "dismembered" in US' seek of hegemony.
Yugoslavia was once a target to be courted by the US-led West in the early years of the Cold War.
Given Yugoslavia's geopolitical conflict with the Soviet Union and personal discord between Josip Broz (commonly known as Tito) and Joseph Stalin, the US saw an opportunity. As a result, the US gave Yugoslavia a large amount of economic aid, and some other Western countries opened the door to trade with Yugoslavia.
Serbians protest against NATO in Belgrade, Serbia on March 24, 2022, the 23rd anniversary of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Senior Serbian officials attended events commemorating the victims of the bombing, and defense minister Nebojsa Stefanovic described the day "not only a symbol of our pain, but also a symbol of injustice." Photo: AFP
Yet America's "gift" had a hefty price tag. As the prowess of Soviet Union waned in the 1980s, so too did Yugoslavia's importance in America's global strategy. Washington's attitude toward a country that could no longer serve as a "strategic buffer" rapidly changed. What's more, Yugoslavia's socialist national policy and its location on the crossroads of the Eastern Mediterranean made it even more of a thorn in the eyes of the US.
Under a series of American actions including economic containment, internal ethnic conflicts incitement, and an ideological war, Yugoslavia fell into a state of division and civil war in the early 1990s. In the name of "human rights," the US advocated for separatism of the republics, which made the situation worse.
In 1999, US-led NATO launched bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. During the 78-day military attack, 2,500 civilians were killed, among whom 79 were children, according to the Serbian government. The Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia was bombed and three Chinese journalists were killed, which has become an unremitting pain for Chinese people to this day.
Latin America - 'Too close to the US, too far away from God'
The US has not only stirred up wars in East Asia, Middle East, and Europe, but has also done so in Latin America, which is viewed as its back yard. In fact, Washington has a history of always trying to take "absolute advantage" in Latin America. It would instigate a military coup or directly launch a military invasion in a Latin American country if anti-US sentiments develop there.
In 1983, a civil unrest broken out on the island of Grenada. Former deputy prime minister and pro-Soviet Union politician Bernard Coard became the country's new leader. The US certainly could not put up with this.
US troops landed in Grenada in October 1983 and captured the airport in the capital St. George's. In less than 10 days the US seized total control of Grenada, a country with a population of 110,000. They did not withdraw until a new pro-US government was established with Washington's "assistance".
Analysts deemed the US' invasion of Grenada was in fact meant to be a show of strength to the Soviets and deter Cuba and Nicaragua where anti-US sentiment was growing.
Give peace a chance
During the Serbian football club Red Star's game halftime at the Rajko Mitic stadium on March 18, 2022 Serbian fans raised huge banners listing US-led NATO military interventions in past decades.
One of the banners displayed the Beatles songwriter John Lennon's anti-war song: "All we are saying is give peace a chance."
During the UEFA Europa League Round of 16 second leg football match between Red Star Belgrade and Glasgow Rangers at the Rajko Mitic Stadium, in Belgrade,Serbia, on Thursday, thousands of Serbian soccer fans displayed five huge banners listing over 20 countries which have been invaded by the US and NATO. Photo: AFP
Five other banners listed in smaller characters the countries that the US and NATO have directly or indirectly been involved in with regards to invasions. For more than 60 years, behind every war and turmoil in the world, one can almost always be assured to find the star spangled banner.
Although the US always tried to defend its invasions with flimsy excuses, the history has proven its bellicosity. A warfare-addicted US has become the biggest threat to global peace and stability.
One of the characteristics of the US launching a war is to weave a set of discourse, such as democracy and to create a public opinion atmosphere. "We have seen too many of these. This high hat and moralistic gaslighting cannot hide the nature of the US' foreign aggression, belligerence, crisis creation, and chaos," Li said.
Next Up:
In the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, arms dealers made a fortune in war and financial predators took the opportunity to take advantage of the situation. Moreover, in the US, there is a group of "politicians, experts, or think tanks" who live by creating imaginary enemies and attacking Russia or China. These warmongers are "vampires" feeding on the bloody turbulence in other countries. In our next story, we will reveal the nature of the US' national military-industrial complex.
10. Ukraine's Intel Chief: We Have Sources In The Kremlin, But We Need Jets
Howard Altman is doing some excellent reporting now that he is no longer the editor at Military Times.
Excerpts:
Beyond those sources, he said, Ukraine has developed a robust cyber intelligence operation that has allowed Ukraine to have “access to all the military defense complex in Russia.”
Budanov provided Coffee or Die a unique behind-the-scenes look into how Ukraine’s military and intelligence community has pulled off a string of stunning successes against their Russian foes in the invasion’s first month.
Budanov discussed help Ukraine is getting from foreign intelligence agencies, how his directorate is overseeing operations of foreign fighters and homegrown guerrillas, the Russian propensity for treating its troops as disposable, and how Ukraine can hold off the Russians but really needs more modern arms from allies, like fifth-generation fighters.
Ukraine's Intel Chief: We Have Sources In The Kremlin, But We Need Jets
Brig. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov is not surprised that Russia is making little headway in its all-out assault on his nation.
“We understood how it would go,” Budanov told me Friday morning, via a translator, in a far-ranging interview with Coffee or Die Magazine.
Budanov, head of his military’s defense intelligence agency, had good reason for his confidence.
The Ukrainian military intel chief said that both before Russia’s invasion and in the weeks since Ukraine has obtained a wealth of information about Russian intentions through human sources — including sources in the Kremlin — and cyber intelligence. Among many other things, those surreptitious insights allowed Ukraine to know back in November how and when Russia was planning to attack.
“We have sources, lots of sources working for us,” he told me. “Our sources are everywhere. In the army, in the political circles, as well as administration of the president.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, left, named Brig. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov as the military’s intelligence chief in 2020. Photo from Ukraine Ministry of Defense.
Beyond those sources, he said, Ukraine has developed a robust cyber intelligence operation that has allowed Ukraine to have “access to all the military defense complex in Russia.”
Budanov provided Coffee or Die a unique behind-the-scenes look into how Ukraine’s military and intelligence community has pulled off a string of stunning successes against their Russian foes in the invasion’s first month.
Budanov discussed help Ukraine is getting from foreign intelligence agencies, how his directorate is overseeing operations of foreign fighters and homegrown guerrillas, the Russian propensity for treating its troops as disposable, and how Ukraine can hold off the Russians but really needs more modern arms from allies, like fifth-generation fighters.
A DC Meeting
Budanov, now 36, was appointed by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskky to his job running Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency on Aug. 5, 2020.
I first met Budanov in November 2021 at a hotel in Washington when he traveled to the US with Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Resnikov to visit with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
A veteran of the already simmering eight-year conflict with Russia, Budanov began serving in the Donbas region shortly after Russia and its separatist allies there began attacking in 2014. He told me he has been wounded twice in that fighting, once in 2015 and again a year later while on missions for the special forces of the Ukrainian intelligence agency, known as the GUR.
Budanov was part of a delegation with Ukrain Minister of Defence Oleksii Resnikov, left, who met with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in November 2021. Photo from Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
Taking time from his busy schedule on a Saturday morning, Budanov told me that Russia was planning to be ready to attack Ukraine by late January or early February. He also provided a map laying out how Russia would attack, though thanks to a combination of a stiff Ukrainian resistance and poor Russian planning and execution, much of the initial plan Budanov showed me has failed to materialize.
After I spoke with Budanov in November, Moscow pushed back hard against his assessment, but then proved him right on Feb. 24 when they began what has been a devastating and deadly war on its smaller neighbor.
But in all our conversations, he never said how the Ukrainians seemed to know so much.
Until Friday.
Sources Everywhere
Despite Moscow’s denials and skepticism elsewhere, Budanov was steadfast about what he said in November, which proved fairly accurate.
“Not many people believe[d] in this,” he told me Friday, March 25, about his November assessments. “As a head of the intelligence agency, I said this and it happened in this way.”
The assessment, he said, was unwavering.
Ukraine’s intelligence community didn’t rely on terms like “I believe it will” happen. Or “I don’t believe.” Or “I want to be,” or “I don’t want it to be.”
“We just substantiate our information,” he said. “As time showed us, we were absolutely right.”
The reason, he explained Friday, is that Ukraine has managed to penetrate many layers of Russia’s military, political and financial sectors, using the information to its great advantage.
Budanov provided this picture to Coffee or Die of the initial impact of a Russian Alligator-class landing ship burning in Berdyansk harbor after being struck with a Ukrainian missile. Ukrainian forces were able to hit the ship when fuel was being loaded, Budanov said, thanks to its extensive intelligence network, including sources in the Kremlin.
One example he offered was the recent strike in Berdanysk that destroyed a Russian Alligator-class landing ship as it sat at a dock. Thanks to its intelligence-gathering capabilities, Ukraine hit at the right moment to cause maximum damage.
“The rocket hit at the same time where the fuel trucks and the ammunition trucks came to the ship,” he said.
Cyber and Allies
Having spies across Russia’s military and political landscape, including in Putin’s administration, has been extremely beneficial to Ukraine, Budanov said. And that human intelligence has been augmented by Ukraine’s rapidly increasing cyber intelligence capabilities, which Budanov claims offer a deep view into both Russian military plans and the country’s political and economic sectors.
“We have made considerable progress in cyber intelligence,” he said.
Aside from information about the Russian military, Ukraine has been able to “see the circulation of Russian money very well,” Budanov told me. “We will know where [the money goes], where [it is] accumulated and when they move [it]. We also can see what’s going on in the fuel area of Russia. And we also keep track of all the innovations of armaments.”
Ukraine, he said, also sees Russian troop communications.
“We see the letters and all they write,” he said.
Ukrainian intelligence services have released intercepted phone calls from Russian soldiers, leading to propaganda coups like revealing in early March the battlefield death of a Russian general, below.
This is not the worst part. In the phone call in which the FSB officer assigned to the 41st Army reports the death to his boss in Tula, he says they’ve lost all secure communications. Thus the phone call using a local sim card. Thus the intercept. pic.twitter.com/cgHHo7VaRi
As good as Ukraine’s organic intelligence has been, Budanov said his agency has also been getting help from allies.
Top US intelligence officials recently testified before Congress that its intelligence sharing with Ukraine was “revolutionary” and unlike anything in recent memory.
The heads of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the NSA, according to the Washington Post, “hinted at their intelligence successes.” Defense Intelligence Agency head Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier said the intelligence sharing was “revolutionary in terms of what we can do,” according to the Post. Paul Nakasone, director of the NSA, testified that “he had not seen a better sharing of accurate, timely and actionable intelligence in his 35 years of service,” according to the Post.
When I asked Budanov about what the US and its allies were sharing, his first response was, “It’s our secret approach.”
Then he relented. A little.
“I can say only the cooperation with the British, US, and other special services and intelligence agencies are at a very high level,” he said.
“How much are you providing them?” I asked.
“It’s also a closed information,” he said.
The Road Ahead
Despite its human and cyber intelligence coups, Budanov is realistic about his nation’s fight against a belligerent with far more troops, aircraft, armor, and other means of conducting modern warfare.
I asked him whether Ukraine was winning, Russia was losing, or if this deadly onslaught has bogged down into a stalemate.
“I can tell you for now, it’s absolute war,” he answered. “We can see quite unrealistic wish of the Russian leadership to capture Kyiv in the first three days.”
Just two days into their war, Russia realized things weren’t going as well as they hoped, Budanov told me.
“So they made a plan called D-plus 30 and D-plus 60,” he said, explaining those numbers coincided with Russian expectations for how it would be doing one month, and then two months, into their war.
“We can say that we survived the first period,” Budanov said. “And they failed.”
When I asked him how he obtained those plans, Budanov laughed.
“It’s our secret,” he said.
A Ukrainian soldier on the front line, near Kyiv on March 20, 2022. Photo by Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty Images
And with those secrets, Budanov expressed cautious optimism about the future.
“As we can see the steps and we can see what they are doing, we hope we can say that D-plus 60 will be unsuccessful as well,” Budanov told me. “We believe that this. We see that the plus-60 plan will fail.”
The Russians, he said, are not helping themselves.
Budanov offered up the example of ongoing battles near the Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine near the border with Belarus, that has been subjected to intense Russian bombardment.
“For the 10th time they come there,” Budanov said. “And for the 10th time, we destroy them. We destroy their artillery and rockets. Why they are doing this, I don’t understand myself. Chernihiv is just one example. There are many others.”
That ongoing battle, said Budanov, highlights how Russia’s war machine is not as vaunted as once believed. And that has led to Russian commanders needlessly sacrificing their troops.
“As we can see, the second army in the world is not that powerful as everybody saw it as the beginning,” he said. “And that’s one of the factors why they [move] their forces so irrationally.”
Russia’s losses, he said, continue to mount.
“Despite considerable superiority in armaments, despite the complete supremacy in the air, they are suffering considerable losses,” Budanov said. “Their morale is going down. It’s very low. The military leadership of Russia is seeing their losses, they throw new forces into combat. The commanders don’t have enough time to plan the operation. So they throw their people for destruction and we destroy them.”
While the “simple soldiers” see this, Budanov said leaders in their command are being increasingly risky as they “become more and more furious” about the continuing setbacks.
On Friday, a senior defense official at the Pentagon told reporters in a daily briefing that has in recent weeks morphed into a Groundhog Day-like accounting of Russian war efforts: No real advances anywhere in the country.
Instead, the official pointed out, Russia is setting up defensive positions near Kyiv as the Russian Ministry of Defense announced its forces were prioritizing efforts in the Donbas.
In its latest “war bulletin” issued Saturday morning and shared with Coffee or Die, Ukraine claims it has captured 1,000 Russian troops.
Budanov said many of those troops offer a dire view of Russia’s efforts.
“When I talk to many captives, we hear absolutely frank answers,” he said. “They don’t know what is happening and what they are doing here. We cannot call them highly motivated. I would say that’s the main reason for our success.”
But there are other factors.
Foreign Troops
Among them, Budanov said, are those who answered Zelenskyy’s call for foreign fighters, as well as indigenous guerrilla fighters conducting irregular and unconventional war on Russian troops.
Both efforts, he said, are under the control of his directorate.
Soldiers with the Ukrainian 4th Rapid Reaction Brigade pose with a Ukrainian flag after retaking the Hostomel Airport northwest of Kyiv, preventing a larger airborne assault. Photo from 4th Rapid Response Brigade Facebook.
Friday, I asked how those forces were doing.
Their first employment was in Moshun, a small village north of Kyiv, he said.
“It was the hardest spot for much of the period of time during this war,” Budanov said. “Then we deployed them in Irpin, near Kyiv. As you can see, Moshun is completely liberated and Irpin is almost liberated. We can see that the experience of their employment is quite positive and successful.”
MiGs, And What It Will Take
Ukraine’s current successes have inspired a global following. I asked Budanov to give me a candid assessment of how long he really thinks Ukraine can hold out, given the overwhelming resources Russia still has left, and Ukraine’s current troop levels and armaments, which are being greatly augmented by a flow of smaller weapons like the man-portable anti-armor Javelin, Stinger anti-aircraft systems, Switchblade drones, and other items like those included in the most recent $800 million aid package ordered by US President Joe Biden.
His answer was both stoic and realistic.
“We stand and we can stand as long as possible and we are ready for that,” he told me. “We will liberate the whole of Ukraine and also the temporary occupied territories.”
But not without more help, he said.
“First of all, we need the armament support,” Budanov said. “We need serious armaments, not small arms. We need combat aviation, not the fourth generation. We need very serious air defense systems and anti-missile systems and artillery systems of 155 mm or larger. That is our main request. That’s what we need most. If you were held to small arms and light armaments, we won’t be able to solve any problems in this war.”
Without that equipment, he told me, “it won’t stop the progression of Russia.”
A Polish Air Force MiG-29 “Fulcrum,” from the 23rd Tactical Air Base at Mińsk Mazowiecki in eastern Poland. US Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Jarad A. Denton.
Budanov was particularly keen on so-called “fifth-generation” fighter aircraft.
“We don’t need poorly outdated aircraft of the fourth generation,” he said. These include Su-27s and MiG-29s, both of which are currently flown by both Russia and Ukraine.
Budanov justified his request by saying, “because our enemy Russia has most of its combat aviation of the fourth generation plus” — MiG-35s and Su-30s — “we won’t beat them numerically. We can beat them with quality.”
In the past, US officials have expressed skepticism that Ukraine pilots can operate unfamiliar American planes, like the A-10 Thunderbolt II attack planes that were recently a hot topic for possible transfers to Ukraine.
I asked Budanov if Ukrainian pilots — who have shown great skill and fortitude fighting a much larger enemy armed with much better aircraft — could operate far more advanced fifth-generation jets.
His answer was a mix of incredulity and insult.
“Do you think that I can simply answer your question?” he queried. “Do you think that our pilots are not at the same level as the pilot operating F-22? Our pilots who operate outdated aviation and they managed to hit and destroy the aviation that’s generation four plus plus. They can be trained and be able to do this.”
When I told Budanov about the skepticism of some in the Pentagon about the ability to operate and maintain such aircraft, he had an answer.
“My response is that they’re mistaken,” he said. “Absolutely, our pilots are ready to operate them.”
A Ukrainian soldier stands near the front lines outside of Kyiv on March 17, 2022. The head of the country’s defense intelligence service says Ukraine has sources in the Kremlin. Photo by Jariko Denman/Coffee or Die Magazine.
And keep them flying?
“So our strategic partners and allies first of all should help with the maintenance and supply of this machine,” he said. “And with our common efforts we will be able to beat the enemy.”
I put the question about Ukraine’s ability to fly and maintain fifth-generation aircraft to the senior US defense official briefing reporters Friday.
“I’m not aware of any requests from the Ukrainians for fifth-generation fighter aircraft,” the official told me, pointing to a readout of a call that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had with Reznikov Thursday.
“That topic did not come up,” the official said. “So that’s the first I’m hearing of this.”
I pushed the official on whether Ukraine’s pilots can fly fifth-generation jets.
“I don’t know what the skill sets are of the Ukrainian pilots,” the official told me. “I know that they’re flying old, ex-Soviet aircraft and fighter bombers. That’s what they’re trained on, that’s what they fly. They don’t have Western, fifth-generation aircraft in their inventory, but I can’t speak for the skill sets of each and every pilot. I don’t know.”
Budanov has no doubt about the skill of Ukraine pilots and said his nation will prevail regardless.
But he said an influx of updated arms will speed up the process.
“We will beat Russia in any case,” he said. “When we get this equipment, we will defeat them quicker. It’s going to help us to save lots of civilian lives.”
The young leader of his embattled nation’s defense intelligence agency remains grateful for the help that has been provided.
“I would like to thank you very much for your not being indifferent and for coming to help us in these difficult times,” he said in a message to the US and allies. “We will always remember this. But please, we need real help.”
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11. Zelensky opens the door for Ukraine neutrality in Russia peace deal
It will be the first time in history that a "neutral" country will be able to remain "neutral" will have proven superior military capabilities to defend itself from an aggressor who was once a world power. No one will mess with Ukraine in the future after they defeat Russia.
Zelensky opens the door for Ukraine neutrality in Russia peace deal
Axios · by Julia Shapero · March 27, 2022
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine is prepared to discuss adopting a neutral stance as part of a peace deal with Russia, according to Reuters.
Be smart: Ukraine would not be able to join NATO if it adopted a neutral stance. Zelensky made the remarks during a 90-minute video call with Russian reporters, which Russian authorities had warned Russian media to refrain from participating in, per Reuters.
- The Ukrainian president spoke Russian throughout the call.
Driving the news: A neutral stance would have to be guaranteed by third parties and put to a referendum, Zelensky said in remarks aired on Sunday.
- "Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are ready to go for it. This is the most important point," Zelensky said.
- Zelensky said he denied other Russian demands, like the demilitarization of Ukraine.
Be smart: Ukraine had previously sought to join NATO, and approved an amendment to its constitution in 2019 that added membership in the European Union and NATO as strategic goals for the country.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin has strongly opposed Ukraine joining NATO.
Axios · by Julia Shapero · March 27, 2022
12. Biden’s Putin remark pushes U.S.-Russia relations closer to collapse
Let's keep a clear head on this. Biden's remarks are not the cause for the collapse of relations. Putin's war is the cause.
Biden’s Putin remark pushes U.S.-Russia relations closer to collapse
President Biden’s declaration that Russian leader Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” threatens to push deeply strained U.S.-Russia relations closer to collapse, former officials and analysts said, with potentially serious implications for Washington’s ability to help steer the war in Ukraine to an end and avoid a wider conflict.
The remark — an off-the-cuff coda to an address in Poland this weekend — injects a stark new element of personal animus into the standoff between the world’s biggest nuclear powers. It capped earlier statements in which Biden has gone well beyond official formulations — calling Putin a “killer,” “butcher” and “war criminal.”
Samuel Charap, a Russia expert at the RAND Corporation, said the administration’s attempts to walk back the suggestion of a U.S. goal of regime change would do little to alter views in Moscow because Putin has long believed the United States is out to replace him and presidential statements have traditionally been seen as official policy.
“It exacerbates existing threat perceptions regarding U.S. intentions,” he said. “They might just be much more inclined to do hostile things in response even more than they already are. That is the challenge.”
Biden’s speech came at the conclusion of a European visit designed to prepare allies for a prolonged campaign of economic punishment targeting Russia, requiring difficult political and financial decisions from leaders on the continent, as Putin’s invasion stalemates in the face of Ukrainian resistance.
Biden’s speech at a castle in Warsaw, which came hours after an emotional encounter with Ukrainian refugees, was intended to telegraph Western resolve against Russia’s actions and, more broadly, the forces of autocracy worldwide. It echoed moments in which U.S. leaders have cast their standoff with Moscow in sweeping, moral terms, including Ronald Reagan’s 1983 address depicting the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”
U.S. officials said a day after the speech that they had no specific expectations about Russian retaliation and downplayed the significance of the president’s remark in light of recent U.S. actions that have already antagonized Moscow, including unprecedented financial sanctions and more than $2 billion in security aid for Ukraine over the last month.
Last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced an official assessment that Russian forces are committing war crimes in Ukraine, raising the possibility of U.S. backing for an eventual war crimes trial targeting Putin, as his military’s commander in chief.
Russia’s initial response to Biden’s statement was relatively muted, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying of Putin’s political future: “That’s not for Biden to decide. The president of Russia is elected by Russians.”
But the remark is sure to reaffirm the Russian leader’s long-standing conviction that the United States would like to push him from power. That notion dates back at least to 2011, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested Russian elections had been rigged, and Putin, serving as prime minister at that time, accused the United States of fomenting protests against the vote.
“Putin has been paranoid about the West seeking ‘regime change’ against his government for a long time,” said Michael McFaul, who served as U.S. ambassador in Moscow during the Obama administration.
Analysts said that any Russian response was most likely to come in the diplomatic realm, where a steady stream of actions has already narrowed the channels the two countries use to communicate. Just last week, the Kremlin notified the State Department that it was moving to expel an additional tranche of American diplomats in Moscow, in a move that pushes the U.S. mission there closer to having to shut down. Also this month, the Kremlin summoned Washington’s ambassador, John Sullivan, to reprimand him over Biden’s “war criminal” remark.
If Moscow decided to throw out the remaining U.S. diplomats, it would mark a diplomatic low that was avoided even during the worst moments of the Cold War. When Soviet leader Joseph Stalin expelled U.S. Ambassador George Kennan in 1952 for likening conditions in Moscow to what occurred in Nazi Germany, the U.S. Embassy remained open.
Biden has not spoken to Putin since the Russian leader launched his invasion on Feb. 24; neither has Blinken talked to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Recent efforts by Pentagon leaders to reach their Russian counterparts have likewise been rebuffed, raising concerns about military miscalculation.
Russia also has the potential to resort to a less visible response. The White House has issued a stepped-up warning about the potential for Russia to mount cyberattacks. If such an action occurs, it would be difficult for American officials to know whether it was taken as a calculated response to Western sanctions or out of pique over Biden’s comment.
Biden’s declaration has also deepened questions about the United States’ ability to facilitate a peaceful end to the conflict, which has already unleashed a wave of more than 3 million refugees and exacted a brutal price on civilians remaining in Ukraine.
While the United States has no direct mediation role between Kyiv and Moscow — as France, Israel, Turkey and other countries seek to advance avenues for diplomacy — its role as NATO’s most powerful member and the orchestrator of Western sanctions means that a full U.S.-Russian rupture could have far-reaching effects. Experts pointed out that an eventual peace deal would likely require presidential communication between Washington and Moscow.
French President Emmanuel Macron suggested that Biden’s comment did not sit well with all leaders in Europe. “If we want to do that, we can’t escalate either in words or actions,” he said of the odds for diplomatic success.
In Washington, the remark was likewise met with Republican criticism. Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho), ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called it a “horrendous gaffe.”
“I think most people who don’t deal in the lane of foreign relations don’t realize that those nine words that he uttered would cause the kind of eruption they did,” Risch said on CNN. “Anytime you say, or even as he did suggest, that the policy was regime change, it’s gonna cause a huge problem.”
Some former officials said they expect minimal effect on Putin’s calculus in Ukraine, which is predicated primarily on Putin’s sense of Russia’s national interest and his need to avoid a humiliating military defeat.
“He will escalate or not based on his assessments of fighting on the ground,” McFaul said.
Daniel Fried, a retired diplomat who served as the State Department’s top diplomat for Europe, said that American “solicitude for Putin’s feelings” hadn’t succeeded in altering the Russian leader’s actions in the past.
“Given what Putin is doing, I think Biden was right to call it out,” he said. “He wasn’t making an operational policy statement. He was making a moral one, and there’s a difference.”
John Hudson in Jerusalem and Paul Sonne contributed in Washington contributed to this report.
13. Analysis | Social media wasn’t ready for this war. It needs a plan for the next one.
But as citizens and users and consumers of social media we all have to do better of protecting ourselves from the evil that is propagated on various platforms. We need individual responsibility first and foremost and not companies or the government trying to think for us. That said, there is an important role for both corporate responsibility and government oversight. But we as users and consumers need to drive that.
We are going to learn a lot from Ukraine and Putin's War.
Analysis | Social media wasn’t ready for this war. It needs a plan for the next one.
Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter are hastily rewriting their rules on hate, violence, and propaganda in Ukraine — and setting precedents they might regret
A month ago, praising a neo-Nazi militia or calling for violence against Russians could get you suspended from Facebook in Ukraine. Now, both are allowed in the context of the war between the two countries. Meanwhile, Russian state media organizations that once posted freely are blocked in Europe on the platform.
The moves illustrate how Internet platforms have been scrambling to adapt content policies built around notions of political neutrality to a wartime context. And they suggest that those rule books — the ones that govern who can say what online — need a new chapter on geopolitical conflicts.
“The companies are building precedent as they go along,” says Katie Harbath, CEO of the tech policy consulting firm Anchor Change and a former public policy director at Facebook. “Part of my concern is that we’re all thinking about the short term” in Ukraine, she says, rather than the underlying principles that should guide how platforms approach wars around the world.
Moving fast in response to a crisis isn’t a bad thing in itself. For tech companies that have become de facto stewards of online information, reacting quickly to global events, and changing the rules where necessary, is essential. On the whole, social media giants have shown an unusual willingness to take a stand against the invasion, prioritizing their responsibilities to Ukrainian users and their ties to democratic governments over their desire to remain neutral, even at the cost of being banned from Russia.
The problem is that they’re grafting their responses to the war onto the same global, one-size-fits-all frameworks that they use to moderate content in peacetime, says Emerson T. Brooking, a senior resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. And their often opaque decision-making processes leave their policies vulnerable to misinterpretation and questions of legitimacy.
The big tech companies now have playbooks for terrorist attacks, elections, and pandemics — but not wars.
What platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok need, Brooking argues, are not another hard-and-fast set of rules that can be generalized to every conflict, but a process and protocols for wartime that can be applied flexibly and contextually when fighting breaks out — loosely analogous to the commitments tech companies made to address terror content after the 2019 Christchurch massacre in New Zealand. Facebook and other platforms have also developed special protocols over the years for elections, from “war rooms” that monitor for foreign interference or disinformation campaigns to policies specifically prohibiting misinformation about how to vote, as well as for the covid-19 pandemic.
The war in Ukraine should be the impetus for them to think in the same systematic way about the sort of “break glass” policy measures that may be needed specifically in cases of wars, uprisings, or sectarian fighting, says Harbath of Anchor Change — and about what the criteria would be for applying them, not only in Ukraine but in conflicts around the world, including those that command less public and media attention.
Facebook, for its part, has at least started along this path. The company says it began forming dedicated teams in 2018 to “better understand and address the way social media is used in countries experiencing conflict,” and that it has been hiring more people with local and subject-area expertise in Myanmar and Ethiopia. Still, its actions in Ukraine — which had struggled to focus Facebook’s attention on Russian disinformation as early as 2015 — show it has more work to do.
The Atlantic Council’s Brooking believes Facebook probably made the right call in instructing its moderators not to enforce the company’s normal rules on calls for violence against Ukrainians expressing outrage at the Russian invasion. Banning Ukrainians from saying anything mean about Russians online while their cities are being bombed would be cruelly heavy-handed. But the way those changes came to light — via a leak to the news agency Reuters — led to mischaracterizations, which Russian leaders capitalized on to demonize the company as Russophobic.
After an initial backlash, including threats from Russia to ban Facebook and Instagram, parent company Meta clarified that calling for the death of Russian leader Vladimir Putin was still against its rules, perhaps hoping to salvage its presence there. If so, it didn’t work: A Russian court on Monday officially enacted the ban, and Russian authorities are pushing to have Meta ruled an “extremist organization” amid a crackdown on speech and media.
In reality, Meta’s moves appear to have been consistent with its approach in at least some prior conflicts. As Brooking noted in Slate, Facebook also seems to have quietly relaxed its enforcement of rules against calling for or glorifying violence against the Islamic State in Iraq in 2017, against the Taliban in Afghanistan last year, and on both sides of the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020. If the company hoped that tweaking its moderation guidelines piecemeal and in secret for each conflict would allow it to avert scrutiny, the Russia debacle proves otherwise.
Ideally, in the case of wars, tech giants would have a framework for making such fraught decisions in concert with experts on human rights, Internet access and cybersecurity, as well as experts on the region in question and perhaps even officials from relevant governments, Brooking suggests.
In the absence of established processes, major social platforms ended up banning Russian state media in Europe reactively rather than proactively, framing it as compliance with the requests of the European Union and European governments. Meanwhile, the same accounts stayed active in the United States on some platforms, reinforcing the perception that the takedowns were not their choice. That risks setting a precedent that could come back to haunt the companies when authoritarian governments demand bans on outside media or even their own country’s opposition parties in the future.
Wars also pose particular problems for tech platforms’ notions of political neutrality, misinformation and depictions of graphic violence.
U.S.-based tech companies have clearly picked a side in Ukraine, and it has come at a cost: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and now Google News have all been blocked in Russia, and YouTube could be next.
Yet the companies haven’t clearly articulated the basis on which they’ve taken that stand, or how that might apply in other settings, from Kashmir to Nagorno-Karabakh, Yemen and the West Bank. While some, including Facebook, have developed comprehensive state-media policies, others have cracked down on Russian outlets without spelling out the criteria on which they might take similar actions against, say, Chinese state media.
Harbath, the former Facebook official, said a hypothetical conflict involving China is the kind of thing that tech giants — along with other major Western institutions — should be planning ahead for now, rather than relying on the reactive approach they’ve used in Ukraine.
“This is easier said than done, but I’d like to see them building out the capacity for more long-term thinking,” Harbath says. “The world keeps careening from crisis to crisis. They need a group of people who are not going to be consumed by the day-to-day,” who can “think through some of the strategic playbooks” they’ll turn to in future wars.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have embraced the concept of “misinformation” as a descriptor for false or misleading content about voting, covid-19, or vaccines, with mixed results. But the war in Ukraine highlights the inadequacy of that term for distinguishing between, say, pro-Russian disinformation campaigns and pro-Ukrainian myths such as the “Ghost of Kyiv.” Both may be factually dubious, but they play very different roles in the information battle.
The platforms seem to understand this intuitively: There were no widespread crackdowns on Ukrainian media outlets for spreading what might fairly be deemed resistance propaganda. Yet they’re still struggling to adapt old vocabulary and policies to such distinctions.
For instance, Twitter justified taking down Russian disinformation about the Mariupol hospital bombings under its policies on “abusive behavior” and “denying mass casualty events,” the latter of which was designed for behavior such as Alex Jones’ dismissal of the Sandy Hook shootings. YouTube cited an analogous 2019 policy on “hateful” content, including Holocaust denial, in announcing that it would prohibit any videos that minimize Russia’s invasion.
As for depictions of graphic violence, it makes sense for a platform such as YouTube to prohibit, say, videos of corpses or killings under normal circumstances. But in wars, such footage could be crucial evidence of war crimes, and taking it down could help the perpetrators conceal them.
YouTube and other platforms have exemptions to their policies for newsworthy or documentary content. And, to their credit, they seem to be treating such videos and images with relative care in Ukraine, says Dia Kayyali, associate director for advocacy at Mnemonic, a nonprofit devoted to archiving evidence of human rights violations. But that raises questions of consistency.
“They’re doing a lot of things in Ukraine that advocates around the world have asked them for in other circumstances, that they haven’t been willing to provide,” Kayyali says. In the Palestinian territories, for instance, platforms take down “a lot of political speech, a lot of people speaking out against Israel, against human rights violations.” Facebook has also been accused in the past of censoring posts that highlight police brutality against Muslims in Kashmir.
Of course, it isn’t only tech companies that have paid closer attention to — and taken a stronger stand on — Ukraine than other human rights crises around the world. One could say the same of the media, governments and the public at large. But for Silicon Valley giants that pride themselves on being global and systematic in their outlook — even if their actions don’t always reflect it — a more coherent set of criteria for responding to conflicts seems like a reasonable ask.
“I would love to see the level of contextual analysis that Meta is doing for their exceptions to rules against urging violence to Russian soldiers, and to their allowance of praise for the Azov battalion” — the Ukrainian neo-Nazi militia that has been resisting the Russian invasion — applied to conflicts in the Arab-speaking world, Kayyali says. “It’s not too late for them to start doing some of these things in other places.”
14. Oft Forgotten But Critical Elements of Ukrainian Resistance
Good to see someone writing about the Two SOF trinities:
1. Irregular warfare, unconventional warfare, and support to political warfare
2. Influence, governance, and support to indigenous forces and populations
The author provides important insights. I hope advisors to the Ukraine government are helping them think through these issues even as they fight for their survival.
Oft Forgotten But Critical Elements of Ukrainian Resistance - War on the Rocks
The Ukrainian military has fought tenaciously to stop Russia’s advance into large population centers, as the current siege of Mariupol illustrates. Western countries are delivering a torrent of weapons, ordnance, and other military aid to Ukraine. Countries around the world have signed on to severe economic sanctions against Russia. President Volodymyr Zelensky continues to rally the population from Kyiv, despite looming encirclement and repeated attacks.
Still, Russian forces are slowly advancing. Ukrainian citizens are already being brought into the fight to resist Russian forces, and their role becomes even more important in the parts of Ukraine falling under Russian occupation. Insurgency and civil resistance are likely to play a critical role as the war drags on, especially if Russia is able to occupy larger portions of Ukraine.
While Ukraine’s armed forces are proving themselves capable, no resistance can succeed without an effective auxiliary and underground. The civil element will be essential in the current conflict. Ukraine’s special operators and armed guerillas will be removed from the battlefield quickly if they lack safe havens to rest and refit, or to communicate securely with and take direction from Ukraine’s government — whether it remains in Kyiv, displaces to western Ukraine, or moves into exile.
I’ve spent the last eight years as a civil affairs officer with assignments in U.S. Special Operations Command. That means I focus on the relationships between military and civil actors in pursuit of political objectives — and in my case, usually in Europe, where NATO allies and other partners have adjusted to the increased threat posed by Russia since its 2014 seizure of Crimea. As such, I have been looking at unfolding events in Ukraine with no shortage of professional and personal interest. While Western military aid to Ukraine is critical, the outcome of this war might hinge on whether Ukraine can establish and maintain an auxiliary and underground to continue the struggle against Russian occupation forces.
Transition from War to National Resistance
In urban combat, the defender typically has the advantage. The relentless grind of liberating Mosul in 2016 (nine months and estimates of up to 11,000 civilian deaths) or Raqqa in 2017 (five months and estimates of 1,600 civilian deaths) from a determined defender is sobering. These battles, however, occurred under a coalition that attempted to minimize civilian casualties. Russia’s tactics in the ongoing siege of Mariupol, as well as its tactics in past wars, point towards a different way of war: Moscow intends to bombard Ukrainian cities into submission with artillery and missile strikes. Further, U.S. officials have warned that Russia may be considering using chemical weapons, which would be a tragically effective means of subduing cities. This does not bode well for the valiant efforts of Ukraine’s armed forces to defend population centers through conventional means. Moreover, prolonged combat is likely to significantly attrit Ukraine’s most capable special operations forces, who cannot be easily replaced.
Russia already occupies Ukrainian cities in the country’s south and east. As Michael Kofman discussed in a recent episode of the War on the Rocks podcast, Ukrainian military units might soon be forced to withdraw from the east to avoid envelopment by advancing Russian forces from the south and east. Over the coming weeks, many more Ukrainians who are unable to flee are likely to find themselves behind the front lines, living under Russian occupation. However, this only changes the character of resistance in a specific area, not its nature, as conventional force-on-force combat will be replaced by violent and non-violent resistance. Resistance forces will likely shift to keeping enemy forces off balance and preventing political consolidation of their geographic gains. While the main armed forces of Ukraine continue to take defensive actions along the front lines, surviving territorial defense forces, special operations units, and guerrilla elements in occupied territory will continue to ambush and harass the occupier. An effective resistance will incorporate multiple networks in addition to an armed guerrilla element. The citizens currently banding together to fashion Molotov cocktails and block approaches to their cities will contribute to a national resistance effort as part of the auxiliary, shadow government, or underground.
Resistance Elements
While most observers tend to focus on the pointy end of resistance — military elements — to be effective, a resistance movement must be able to provide direction to its disparate elements while retaining operational security and resilience in the face of determined efforts by occupying intelligence services. This means an underground, shadow government, and auxiliary are critical, as well as an overt political element (if permitted by the occupier in some form). It is therefore vital that policymakers have a close understanding of what these involve.
Underground
The underground is the active, day-to-day leadership of the resistance, and will often form as cells to operate in urban areas. It conducts both political and military actions, from intelligence and counterintelligence, to running media networks, to sabotage. The underground will maintain communication with the legitimate national government, recruit and train new members, and organize finances for the resistance. It will also work to get information in and out of the occupied territory, helping to sustain effective information operations.
Auxiliary
The auxiliary describes citizens who remain in place after occupation and provide part-time support, often providing information on adversary activities or undertaking small tasks. Their networks of patriotic individuals can report on troop movements, support information operations, or help with logistics for operations. The auxiliary also provides the underground leadership with an excellent way to vet recruits for reliability before assigning them more sensitive tasks.
Public Component
The public component is overt and political, operating in the occupied area to serve as the public face of resistance. Its activities are limited by what the occupier is willing to permit, such as opposition political parties or patriotic civic leaders left in position from before the conflict. They can seek to negotiate with occupying forces, communicate with the government-in-exile, and rally nonviolent resistance. Russian occupation forces are unlikely to tolerate much overt opposition, however. Recent incidents involving disappearances of civic leaders indicate that the occupying force will coerce them, and if necessary replace them. In Ukraine, a public component to resistance inside occupied territory may be a less active element.
Shadow Government
Making the resistance organization effective will involve a tradeoff between control and survivability. Greater centralization makes the organization more vulnerable to collaborators, technical surveillance, and other enemy action. Too little, however, and the various cells in occupied territory cannot combine efforts or effects. Currently, Ukrainian resistance can afford to be more centralized, but in some parts of the country this is likely to change. Inside occupied territory, a shadow government provides clandestine governance, serving as the link between the population and the legitimate government-in-exile. This can greatly increase popular support for the resistance, assisting in recruiting for the other elements.
Legitimacy
The existence of a legitimate national government, whether in unoccupied territory or in exile, is invaluable to a resistance movement. Acting in service of a recognized government not only increases political legitimacy, but it can also help to set limits of acceptable resistance behavior, increasing adherence to the rule of law. Russia appears to have anticipated this challenge, preparing a “kill-or-capture” list of Ukrainians who may lead resistance efforts. However, the initial combat and guerrilla activity will lead resistance groups to identify leaders who can assume positions of greater responsibility in the network, provided that they can maintain sufficient operational security to evade capture. While Ukraine may not have had time to identify the leaders of its various cells before the crisis, these individuals will need to establish communications with the shadow government to ensure that their activities accord with the national government’s resistance concept.
Making Resistance Happen
The war in Ukraine is highly likely to lead to an increased focus on resilience and resistance across and beyond the continent. Ukraine boasts a population of over 40 million people and is the largest country in Europe. Occupying the entire country will prove immensely difficult, and any force attempting to do so would likely focus on major population areas, lines of communication, and areas of economic significance. Russia’s estimated 200,000 troops committed to Ukraine are five times below the generally accepted 25 soldiers to 1,000 population ratio for a counterinsurgency, and that doesn’t take into account the forces dedicated to continued combat operations along the front lines. Russia’s National Guard, or Rosgvardiya, is likely to serve as the occupying security force in Ukraine. Its forces have capabilities similar to conventional motor rifle units, focus on internal dissent, and report directly to Putin. The spaces behind the front lines of Russian conventional forces, but beyond the control of Rosgvardiya units, will provide ample opportunity for resistance activity, including training, medical treatment, and logistical support. Guerrillas may find operating in garrisoned urban areas with enemy intelligence threats difficult, so the auxiliary and underground can take the lead there.
Outside Support
The United States may find itself asked to assist partners in implementing resistance beyond the delivery of armaments. In order to best enable the Ukrainian people to resist, policymakers need a working understanding of what the U.S. military can offer. The U.S. armed forces have more experience of training foreign soldiers than midwifing a robust and survivable resistance network, but the renewed demands of great-power competition have shifted more resources and attention to the latter. Recently, U.S. forces have partnered with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to support their continued efforts to prepare for any crisis that may threaten their sovereignty. Since 2015, Special Operations Command Europe also supported the Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine with trainers for the Ukrainian special operations assessment, selection, and qualification process.
I recently spent seven months through mid-January 2022 overseeing the civil-military support elements operating in Europe. These teams worked closely with various military and civil actors to enhance national resilience in the face of persistent Russian coercion. The civil affairs units tasked to operate as civil-military support elements focus on supporting governance and civil network development, especially those networks that play an outsized role in promoting resilience before a crisis. Such volunteer organizations bring together patriots who can prepare themselves and their communities to support the government, becoming an integrated part of the nation’s plan — either as the underground or auxiliary — well before a crisis. And during conflict, providing governance becomes a contest: An active shadow government that acts on behalf of the legitimate national government, discouraging collaboration with the occupiers, may help to prevent Russia from firmly consolidating control of cities like Mariupol.
Special Forces detachments, Navy SEALs, and Marine Raiders are well suited to increasing a partner’s special operations or guerrilla capability to respond to crisis or aggression. As trainers, they can make partnered special operations units more lethal and survivable individually, as well as more integrated with the territorial defense forces that become part of the guerrilla element in an occupation. The ability to threaten the enemy’s rear or logistics is invaluable, and can be accomplished by elements too small to allow an occupier to easily mass combat power against them.
Psychological operations teams bring the ability to inform and influence the adversary, friendly populations, or outside observers. Preparing resistance elements for this task is especially important today when the world follows conflicts via social media. The importance of information in galvanizing support and degrading the aggressor’s information warfare is readily apparent, after weeks of extensively reported aggression and civilian suffering led to crushing sanctions and other responses — responses considered too extreme to garner necessary support only days prior to Russia’s invasion. Degrading Russian morale while bolstering Ukraine’s will to resist will require effective information operations inside occupied territory, a role usually filled by parts of the underground with auxiliary support. Ukraine’s ability to control the narrative while garnering international support, as noted by Stephen Kotkin, is “a fabulous thing to have in place.”
All the necessary elements for a successful resistance exist in Ukraine but bringing them together requires coordination: A state’s resistance groups should not exist in stovepipes. Meeting requests from allied nations for support will require a corresponding U.S. policy that prioritizes interagency and international cooperation to avoid stovepipes of its own. Bordering and nearby countries play decisive roles in routing outside support to the legitimate government. When it comes to identifying potential safe havens, refugee support plans, or staging points to send aid into a crisis-struck country, continuing to work with allies will improve the eventual response.
Finally, and relatedly, in using special operations capabilities American policymakers should learn from two starkly different force employments. First, beginning with recent events, Kofman noted that one reason that Russian elite units performed so poorly is that they were not employed to fight in ways that comported with their training and unique capabilities. America’s special operations forces offer niche and specialized capabilities that have become even more niche and specialized, in some cases, in the last decade. Policymakers should play to the advantages of these units if they choose to use them, rather than fighting against those comparative advantages. Second, during America’s war in Afghanistan, different special operations communities did not always integrate effectively in a way that combined their effects. There are many reasons for this, but one plausible cause was a lack of top-down alignment between different levels of command. Today, the National Security Council ought to ensure that the secretary of defense, the Joint Staff, European Command, and Special Operations Command Europe are in close alignment on strategy, the specifics of this mission, and who is leading at relevant levels.
Restoring Sovereignty
Barring a negotiated settlement or Russian political calculation that continued occupation is not in its interests, the likelihood of a protracted conflict is high. Mobilizing a resistance movement that encompasses all elements of Ukrainian society will be invaluable in reestablishing its sovereignty. If Ukraine’s national government can continue to lead the resistance from outside of occupied territory, it will sustain international support and give Ukraine a decisive edge in the battle of wills between the occupier and the occupied. The civil component of the resistance will be especially valuable to draw in the population at large, reinforce national identity, and frustrate Russian efforts to exert political control. The lessons learned from Ukraine’s resistance efforts will also influence preparation in other countries that face a similar threat, which may mean that other nations will not have to put their planning to the same desperate test.
Maj. Walter Haynes is assigned to the 92nd Civil Affairs Battalion. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official policies or positions of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense or any of its components, or any part of the U.S. government.
15. A Proxy War in Ukraine Is the Worst Possible Outcome — Except For All the Others
Like democracy as a form of government? (note attempt at humor)
But we cannot let fear of escalation (which is a valid fear) "self deter" us from taking necessary action.
Excerpts:
Finally, a proxy war strategy in Ukraine can generate leverage at the bargaining table. Sponsoring proxies can often enhance a state’s leverage in negotiations, and by helping Kyiv impose heavier costs on the Russian military, the West is strengthening Zelensky’s hand. The shape of any political settlement between Russia and Ukraine will depend in part on battlefield conditions, and the thousands of Western antitank-weapons and antiaircraft-missiles flowing into Ukraine can help pressure Putin to scale back his political goals and make the necessary concessions; they can help him conclude that the costs of continued fighting outweigh the costs of a diplomatic settlement.
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinds on, the West needs to be clear-eyed about the situation it confronts. It is currently waging a proxy war with Russia — one that poses very real risks of escalation. Western policymakers should not deceive themselves about just how ugly proxy wars tend to be. As it continues to back Ukrainian forces, the Biden administration should continue to carefully calibrate its support against the risk of a wider war, especially as arms supply routes become more limited. It should be prepared to rein in the activity of local allies, if necessary. And at some point, its leverage may help bring about a settlement, one that will require bitter compromises but that may be the only way to preserve an independent Ukraine, end the suffering caused by the war, and lower the risk of a wider conflict. Ultimately, the only options worse than a proxy war are a cheap Russian victory in Ukraine — or a direct confrontation between Russia and the United States.
A Proxy War in Ukraine Is the Worst Possible Outcome — Except For All the Others - War on the Rocks
“We will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine,” U.S. President Joe Biden tweeted earlier this month. Biden was referring to a direct military confrontation between the United States and Russia, and in that regard he has been true to his word. But in another respect his statement obscured an important truth: The United States and its European allies are already in the midst of a full-blown proxy war with Russia.
In the month since Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, Western nations have flooded Ukraine with more than 17,000 anti-tank weapons and thousands of anti-aircraft missiles. While imposing punishing sanctions on Russia’s economy, they have pledged billions of dollars in military assistance to Ukraine, including Switchblade drones first fielded in Afghanistan by U.S. special operations forces.
U.S. policymakers have so far wisely refused to transfer fighter jets to Ukraine or impose a no-fly zone to ground Russian warplanes. But alongside weapons intended to kill Russian soldiers and destroy Russian planes, they are reportedly providing reconnaissance data to Ukrainian forces. British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, meanwhile, has declared that she “absolutely supports” British citizens who want to volunteer to fight in defense of Ukraine. Last week, after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress by video, he was greeted by calls of “Slava Ukraini!” — “Glory to Ukraine!”
This is what a proxy war looks like. For now, the mood in Western capitals remains confident and emotionally charged after Russia’s disastrous start to its reckless military campaign. But Western policymakers should not delude themselves about the strategy they are pursuing. Proxy wars — even strategically successful ones — are ugly, violent affairs that incur an inherent risk of escalation. They are rarely as quick or as cheap as they initially seem, and they rarely play out without serious unintended consequences. A proxy war in Ukraine may be unavoidable. It may even be the West’s best option. But policymakers should be clear-eyed about the risks they face.
The Return of Great-Power Proxy Wars
Proxy wars occur when a state attempts to shape the outcome of a conflict in another country by providing material assistance to one or more of the belligerents while limiting its own direct participation in the fighting. States turn to proxy warfare for several reasons. They use proxies because of their perceived military value — superior knowledge of the local terrain or population, for example, or specific tactical and operational capabilities. They use them to minimize costs, measured in blood or treasure, and mitigate risks of escalation. And they use them to avoid political and legal constraints, such as those imposed by war-weary publics and domestic and international law. Proxy wars, in other words, represent an appealing combination of low costs, high benefits, and plausible deniability. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower declared in 1955, proxy wars represent “the cheapest insurance in the world.”
Little wonder, then, that states have often turned to proxy wars to achieve their strategic ends. During the Cold War, the United States supported more than two dozen insurgencies fighting Soviet-backed governments. The Soviets did much the same. China, for its part, backed various rebel groups engaged in “wars of national liberation,” from Guinea-Bissau to Oman to Laos. Since 1945, nearly half of all rebel groups have received support from foreign states, typically in the form of military assistance — there have been over 900 instances of security assistance from third parties to combatants in wars.
And proxy wars are becoming only more frequent: Over the past two centuries, the probability that a group would receive outside assistance has risen from around one-in-five to around four-in-five. Nuclear weapons may make hot conflicts between great powers less appealing, but they do much less to disincentivize less visible and extreme forms of violence. Great-power competition has always gone hand-in-hand with proxy wars of various kinds; there is little reason to expect this time to be any different, although U.S. national strategic documents have tended to downplay this reality. “It is hardly an exaggeration,” writes the political scientist Daniel Byman, “to say that all of today’s major wars are in essence proxy wars.” The war in Ukraine is no exception.
More Expensive Than It Looks
The appeal of proxy warfare is thus not hard to understand. But it comes with inherent limitations. In proxy wars, state sponsors seek to wage war on the cheap. But to reap that benefit, they must sacrifice some control. And this loss of control generates strategic risks. Support from a great-power patron, for example, may embolden proxies to take excessive risks, potentially triggering unwanted escalation — a classic example of bad incentives known as moral hazard. Proxies can use the flow of aid for their own ends, diverting resources to favored constituencies and using troops trained and armed by foreign patrons for unintended purposes. Weapons provided to proxies are difficult to track and easily diverted. Local partners always have their own goals, which may or may not align with those of their Western backers.
At worst, proxy wars can entangle sponsors in wars they were seeking to avoid. In the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, miscalculations may lead to escalation, especially if Ukrainian fighters operate out of external sanctuaries in neighboring countries — Russia has already launched airstrikes against bases in western Ukraine just eleven miles from the border with Poland. For the United States and its allies, waging indirect war against Russia is less risky than initiating direct hostilities, which is what the imposition of a no-fly zone would almost certainly entail. But none of these options are risk-free.
Even if the West avoids getting further entangled in Ukraine and even if Ukrainian forces comply with the West’s preferences, the outlook for a proxy war is grim. Foreign interventions tend to increase the duration of hostilities, as well as the risk of conflicts recurring in the future. Any Ukrainian insurgency in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine will be violent, protracted, and politically messy. The logic of insurgency tends towards the brutal application of violence. And supporting an insurgency in Ukraine may well entail supporting — indirectly or otherwise — noxious forces within Ukrainian society for the purpose of defending Ukrainian independence. Long insurgencies rarely empower moderates. Any support to the Ukrainian resistance will necessitate ugly tradeoffs and marriages of convenience, and on timescales that many Western governments do not yet seem prepared to seriously contemplate. In other words, a proxy war in Ukraine, even in some of the more optimistic scenarios, will be terrible, above all for the Ukrainians.
Lesser Evil
But it may still be the best option available. From the moment Putin launched his catastrophic war of choice, the West has had no good options. There is no zero-risk, zero-cost policy on offer. And one of the few options riskier than a proxy war in Ukraine may well be a cheap Russian victory there, which would represent Putin’s fourth successful military adventure in a row. After all, before Russia’s current stumbles in Ukraine, the New York Times declared that “There is no world leader today with a better track record when it comes to using military power” than Putin. The more costly the Ukrainians can make Putin’s invasion, the easier it will be to deter further Russian aggression in Europe and prevent a wider conflagration. And for now at least, Western and Ukrainian interests align in ways that offer an unusual opportunity for efficient aid that can make a real military difference.
As well as deterring Putin from targeting other neighboring countries, the costs imposed on Russia by an ongoing proxy war in Ukraine can demonstrate to Russian elites that Putin’s imperial fantasies are just that — fantasies. The provision of weapons and material support can help to weaken Putin’s domestic base of support, bleed Russia’s military budgets dry, and degrade Moscow’s ability to project power overseas.
Finally, a proxy war strategy in Ukraine can generate leverage at the bargaining table. Sponsoring proxies can often enhance a state’s leverage in negotiations, and by helping Kyiv impose heavier costs on the Russian military, the West is strengthening Zelensky’s hand. The shape of any political settlement between Russia and Ukraine will depend in part on battlefield conditions, and the thousands of Western antitank-weapons and antiaircraft-missiles flowing into Ukraine can help pressure Putin to scale back his political goals and make the necessary concessions; they can help him conclude that the costs of continued fighting outweigh the costs of a diplomatic settlement.
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinds on, the West needs to be clear-eyed about the situation it confronts. It is currently waging a proxy war with Russia — one that poses very real risks of escalation. Western policymakers should not deceive themselves about just how ugly proxy wars tend to be. As it continues to back Ukrainian forces, the Biden administration should continue to carefully calibrate its support against the risk of a wider war, especially as arms supply routes become more limited. It should be prepared to rein in the activity of local allies, if necessary. And at some point, its leverage may help bring about a settlement, one that will require bitter compromises but that may be the only way to preserve an independent Ukraine, end the suffering caused by the war, and lower the risk of a wider conflict. Ultimately, the only options worse than a proxy war are a cheap Russian victory in Ukraine — or a direct confrontation between Russia and the United States.
Sam Winter-Levy is a Ph.D. student in politics at Princeton University and the editorial director of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, a joint venture of the Modern War Institute at West Point and the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project.
16. China’s Plan for Digital Dominance
Conclusion:
There is a clear and pressing need for an expanded research agenda on Digital China. We must not only analyze its ambitions, but tally the resources being put into it, as well as assess its likely success in achieving the Communist Party’s stated objectives. We must also begin to understand its likely impact on the global standards of digital technologies and on our own national economies and societies. And ultimately, as we have sought to do when faced with the dangers of other historic authoritarian challengers, we must rise to the occasion and find ways to outcompete and outlive it. This begins with our own understanding of Digital China, of New Type Infrastructure, and of the Communist Party’s vision for the governance and control of data.
China’s Plan for Digital Dominance - War on the Rocks
Digital transformation is all the craze in China. Even the venerable Kweichow Moutai distillery now talks of the new digital processes necessary to brew a smarter liquor. But all of this only reflects the popularization of a long-running Communist Party initiative of far greater strategic significance. Over the past two decades, General Secretary Xi Jinping has been at the center of party efforts to create a comprehensive digital strategy of immense proportions, known as Building Digital China (建设数字中国), or more often simply Digital China. While sounding much like an industrial strategy, Digital China is never described as such internally. In broadest terms, it is a major strategic decision made by Xi Jinping in the aftermath of the 18th Party Congress in 2012 to digitally transform the nation. For the more technically minded, it is the overall strategy for national informatized development in the new era. Although mostly unknown in the West, Digital China has enormous implications for China’s developmental path, great-power competition, and the norms that will undergird the international system for decades to come.
As a concept personally tied to Xi, one might argue that not only has he made Digital China a key to national success, but that Digital China has also contributed to his individual success, as the concept has tracked his rise for more than two decades. Xi first adopted the precursor concept of Digital Fujian from a local academic while serving as deputy party secretary and governor of that province in 2000. It was originally conceived as a simple effort to use new and emerging digital technologies to improve local governance and improve economic efficiency — in essence, China’s first experiments in e-government. Xi Jinping’s Digital Fujian would evolve and expand over the next 20 years before finally reemerging as the party’s vision for a fully informatized Digital China: a sharp weapon that empowers the nation (improved national competitiveness) and a spring rain that benefits the people (improved operating efficiency of society).
New Type Infrastructure
Surprisingly, a strategic initiative of this size and scope has progressed mostly unnoticed in the West. Perhaps more surprising, even the most concrete elements of the strategy remain obscure outside China. At the onset of the pandemic, Xi Jinping directed the Communist Party to accelerate an infrastructure campaign of epic proportions in support of Building Digital China. This campaign, known in China as New Type Infrastructure (新型基础设施), is to receive an estimated 17.5 trillion yuan (nearly $2.7 trillion) over five years exclusively for the purpose of digitally transforming traditional infrastructure and building new digital infrastructure. As outlined in April 2020 by the National Development and Reform Commission, the state’s top macroeconomic planning authority, New Type Infrastructure falls into multiple levels and categories including the construction of an industrial internet, the building of a national dual gigabit network (integrated 5G mobile and fixed gigabit optical), the building of a satellite internet network, as well as the recent official launch of nationally integrated system of big-data centers. More broadly, Beijing describes the campaign as becoming the key support and important material guarantee for a new revolution in science and technology and a new round of industrial transformation. Simply stated, this plan is a pivotal part of China’s effort to dominate the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Beijing also believes that the technology, manufacturing, and domestic subscribers arising from New Type Infrastructure will drive mutually reinforcing growth in China’s international trade and inward investment, a competitive trajectory and exemplar of the Communist Party’s new dual-circulation economic strategy. Xi introduced building a new development pattern based on dual circulation between domestic and international markets at a Politburo meeting in May 2020. Designed to respond in the short term to structural changes impeding China’s economic development, principally COVID-19 and barriers to high-technology imports, the pattern calls for a primary focus on the innovative expansion of China’s domestic economy, which in a hardening external environment would also serve as the principal driver for China’s continued access and expansion into international markets, in effect dual circulation. Former Vice Commerce Minister Wei Jianguo went so far as to describe New Type Infrastructure as core to building the dual-circulation new development pattern and further linked Xi’s vision to accelerate New Type Infrastructure construction using the strategic window opened by the COVID-19 pandemic to the origins of the dual-circulation concept itself.
Building Digital China
Digital China, like all of the country’s national-level strategies in general, is built on Communist Party decisions, objectives, missions, projects, and priority areas of action — to name just a few. New Type Infrastructure is one of Digital China’s major missions, one of three focused specifically on developing core technologies. To use Communist Party nomenclature for strategy construction, building a National Information Infrastructure System, composed of New Type Infrastructure’s three main directions — information infrastructure (信息基础设施), integrated infrastructure (融合基础设施], and innovative infrastructure (创新基础设施) — is a major mission designed to support national informatization. To borrow Western nomenclature for strategy construction, New Type Infrastructure is simply one of the means, or in this case one of the system-level technical resources, required for Building Digital China. Two other system-level technical means are also required. The second major technology mission, closely tied to the New Type Infrastructure mission, is the elevation of the nation’s Information Technology Industrial Ecosystem (信息技术产业生态体系). Elevating this ecosystem, which will provide the traction for national informatization, parallels Xi’s drive to increase China’s innovative capabilities, and overlaps with two key focus areas, mastering core technologies and collecting cyber talent, from one of Digital China’s cornerstone strategies: cyber great power. The third major technology mission is the development of a Data Element Resource System (数据要素资源体系), a system described as core to the nation’s informatization effort and the focal point for the party’s overwhelming interest in data governance and control. Together, these three missions will supply the technical and systemic means, however difficult to achieve, that have been deemed necessary to realize Xi’s digital vision for the nation.
While the technical missions of Digital China are grand, the socioeconomic and geopolitical scope of Digital China is breathtaking. Marxist theorists routinely characterize the developmental components of Digital China, or to borrow Western strategy nomenclature once again, the ways of Digital China, as nothing less than the digital transformation of China’s path to national rejuvenation. As recently as the 14th Five-Year Plan, released just one year ago, Digital China’s five ways were mapped to the Communist Party’s five-sphere integrated plan (五位一体), the overall plan for building socialism with Chinese characteristics. Significantly, each of the traditional spheres was also digitally transformed for coordination and advancement under Digital China: digital economy, e-government, digital culture, smart society, and digital ecology. In short, achieving national informatization, the primary objective of Building Digital China, has become fundamental, guiding work necessary to achieve the national rejuvenation of a modern, socialist great power. Geopolitically, Digital China’s success would now be measured, among other markers, by a fully informatized smart society acting as a developmental model globally and a digital rule-setter internationally. A successful Digital China will also stand as a digital great power with global dominance in multiple strategic domains including cyber, manufacturing, transportation and logistics, and science and technology. In short, Communist Party leaders see Digital China as a transformative-competitive win-win.
In a paper to be published soon by the Texas National Security Review, my co-author, John Hemmings, and I draw from the two-decade trail of Communist Party commentary, government documents, and state-run media reports to outline the history, structure, and objectives of Digital China, its technology missions including New Type Infrastructure, as well as the developmental and geopolitical ends it is designed to achieve. While we note that there is already notable literature in the West on Chinese industrial and technology policies and their ideological underpinnings, we make what we think are two original contributions to the literature. The first of these is that there is an overall strategy driving a coordinated party approach to interrelated technology projects like artificial intelligence, societal programs like smart cities, and national strategies like digital economy, and so on — that it is called Digital China — and that it has gradually and almost imperceptibly become the party’s voice and strategy to drive Xi Jinping’s decades-old vision for digital transformation. The second argument is that the Communist Party’s approach to technology has been framed by Marxist thought — not incidentally, but deliberately. The governance and control of data within an informatized system is a key focal point of Digital China. But this new approach to data also required using historical materialism to justify an ostensibly Marxist economic system that had elevated data, not labor, as the key factor of production. In December 2017, Xi Jinping was the first party leader to publicly describe data as the key factor of production in a digital economy, effectively rewriting Marx’s labor theory of value at the highest level. The idea would churn in the party system until April 2020 when the Central Committee and State Council jointly published an opinion on the market allocation of factors of production, specifically adding data as a new factor of production for the first time, joining Marx’s labor, land, capital, and technology.
Challenges and Implications
Much (and perhaps most) of the original source material on Digital China remains untranslated. This may explain, in part, why these two concepts, Digital China and New Type Infrastructure, remain obscure outside China, particularly when both are a near continuous presence in China’s state-run media and the subject of repeated public education campaigns for party cadre and Chinese citizens. We believe part of the problem is also due to the evolutionary nature of Chinese strategy development, with key concepts and terminology morphing and continuing to morph as Communist Party knowledge, experimentation, and comfort deepens. Just as important perhaps is the sheer difficulty of Chinese technical translation, particularly with writers who are often more theorist than engineer taking the lead. Finally, there is evidence of obfuscation and mistranslation of key Digital China concepts in the official English-language translations of government documents. Although perhaps reflecting only inattention by translators, we believe the evidence points elsewhere. All of these challenges to analysis outside China point to our first recommendation: the overwhelming importance of a coordinated, multinational approach to translation and analysis on the topic of Digital China and all its subcomponents, a library of documents that would overwhelm any single translation effort and fracture any possibility of corporate analysis and understanding. The time to start this is now.
Concurrently, we can also begin to try to model the downstream implications for liberal democracies that would flow from a fully successful Digital China. By party definition, Digital China will increasingly drive Beijing’s competitive strategy against the United States and its partners. The across-the-board transformation of Beijing’s manufacturing industries, its society, governance model, and innovation are couched in terms of domestic and geopolitical outcomes. The United States and its partners — though weary of decoupling from what might become the world’s largest economy — must weigh the interests from a democratic and geopolitical perspective. One clear challenge even now is how new disruptive technologies — like artificial intelligence and informatized societies — are empowering innovative attempts at authoritarianism. While Digital China includes industrial goals, there is also clear party direction to transform society and the ways that Chinese citizens are governed by the party. This is not simply perfecting tools that already exist. Instead, this is developing innovative new tools that will be tested as pilot projects in localities across China. While not all the ideas will be bad, it is clear that all of them will be executed through the lens of an authoritarian system.
A second implication arises from the first: As China is — by many calculations — predicted to surpass the United States in any number of measures (or come close to surpassing the United States) in coming decades, democratic nations are confronted by the possibility of the world’s first authoritarian hegemonic power. Technologies associated with Digital China, their manufacture and standards, and how they integrate data into forms of control, should be of immense concern to those states that continue to prize political and individual rights. Digital China’s technology projects are highly integrated at both the national and the global level, and Beijing intends to export its technical standards, its network architecture, and the governance model implicit in those. As an early indicator, Beijing has already expressed interest in the gradual deployment of data centers in support of Digital China’s industrial internet to countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative. As mentioned earlier, the Communist Party’s approach to data is both Marxist and authoritarian in nature and exerts a sort of totality of control over individuals that could ultimately impact nations enticed by Digital China’s New Type Infrastructure.
What’s Next?
Following the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, General Secretary Xi Jinping made a major strategic decision to launch Building Digital China with a focus on the future. This entails the construction of major digital infrastructure networks across the nation as well as a nationwide system to govern and control data. Its intent is growing China’s digital economy, strengthening and informatizing its governance, updating and promoting its manufacturing, bolstering its innovative ecosystem, and enabling its leadership to shape global digital governance. With New Type Infrastructure as a primary technology mission, Digital China has incrementally become China’s overall strategy for national informatization, evolving from its humble roots as a provincial-level strategy in the early 2000s. Now, it is openly linked to Xi Jinping, facilitating his national economic strategies both digital and dual circulation, as well as transforming China’s path to national rejuvenation. The question, of course, for liberal democracies will be how much it fuels China’s own rise to hegemonic status in the international system and the downstream consequences this might have on their own national interests.
There is a clear and pressing need for an expanded research agenda on Digital China. We must not only analyze its ambitions, but tally the resources being put into it, as well as assess its likely success in achieving the Communist Party’s stated objectives. We must also begin to understand its likely impact on the global standards of digital technologies and on our own national economies and societies. And ultimately, as we have sought to do when faced with the dangers of other historic authoritarian challengers, we must rise to the occasion and find ways to outcompete and outlive it. This begins with our own understanding of Digital China, of New Type Infrastructure, and of the Communist Party’s vision for the governance and control of data.
Let’s begin now.
David Dorman is a retired U.S. government China specialist. He has served as a professor at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies, director of the China Strategic Focus Group at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, executive director of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, senior professional staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, foreign-policy advisor to U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel, and as a China program manager at the National Security Agency. He holds a Ph.D. in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland at College Park.
17. The Ukrainian Exodus
Yes a lot has to be done for the overall refugee situation. I think from the reports we are seeing that Europe is treating the Ukrainian refugees well and better than other refugees from other countries and regions.
All the moral, legal, and practical issues aside, I think one thing that is different about the Ukrainian situation is that I believe most people expect the Ukrainians will return to their country after they defeat the Russians. I think this is probably why the US is taking such a relatively small number of refugees. It will be easier for Ukrainians to return from Europe than from the US.
The Ukrainian Exodus
Europe Must Reckon With Its Selective Treatment of Refugees
March 28, 2022
Russian forces continue to grind through Ukraine, shelling cities and killing civilians in the thousands. Nearly four million Ukrainians have fled for Poland, Slovakia, and other neighboring countries. The speed and scale of the Ukrainian exodus makes it the biggest and fastest displacement of people in Europe since World War II. And it has upended many assumptions about refugees, including the view that forced displacement is a challenge contained to the “global South.”
Europe now hosts more refugees than any other region in the world. The oft-cited UN figure that 85 percent of the world’s refugees are in low- and middle-income countries no longer holds. The Ukraine crisis reveals that recent dislocations of people—for instance, the waves of refugees predominantly from the Middle East who reached Europe in 2015 and 2016 and the record numbers of asylum seekers from Central America arriving at the U.S. border in the past few years—are not an aberration. Forced displacement will be a defining challenge of the twenty-first century everywhere. That reality has profound implications for how Europe aids refugees. The continent can no longer act just as a distant donor of humanitarian and development aid; now, it must develop the capacity to welcome large numbers of refugees, no matter where they are from.
The European Union’s process for dealing with asylum seekers has long been unfit for purpose. Its so-called Dublin system allocates primary responsibility for refugees to the first country they arrive in. This requirement has historically placed disproportionate responsibility on frontline Mediterranean states such as Greece and Italy. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia were the main countries responsible for blocking reform of the Dublin system in 2016. Now that they are in the eye of the storm, and their publics are demonstrating extraordinary acts of solidarity with Ukrainian refugees, these eastern European countries may be willing to embrace reform. The EU has temporarily provided a limited form of sanctuary for people arriving in Europe during a mass influx, allowing refugees from Ukraine to remain for at least three years. Even in the United Kingdom, which has lurched toward ever more draconian asylum policies in the wake of its departure from the European Union, tens of thousands of people have offered their homes to Ukrainian refugees and pushed the government to soften its initially hard-line visa restrictions for them.
These acts of generosity and solidarity offer an opportunity for European leaders to push refugee policies in a fairer direction, one that can better accommodate people coming from outside Europe, as well. Six years ago, millions of refugees arrived in Europe from Syria and other war-torn countries. The initial welcome they received gave way to a harsh backlash and rising nationalism. That need not happen again.
SILVER LININGS
The scenes of everyday humanitarianism taking place across Europe should be celebrated. Empty strollers left for arriving mothers at a railway station in Poland, people driving across the continent to offer free rides to refugee families, and drop-off donation points in almost every European city—solidarity with the plight of Ukrainians has been unprecedented. But these scenes stand in contrast to how Europeans have responded to other refugees in recent years. African asylum seekers traveling across the Mediterranean continue to brave the risk of drowning only to face detention and deportation. Ukrainians have been welcomed with open arms in Poland, whose border guards attacked refugees from the Middle East when they tried to cross from Belarus last year.
The discrepancy in the treatment of refugee populations is contrary to the spirit of international refugee law, which upholds the right of refugees to seek asylum anywhere in the world without discrimination. It also points to a more insidious problem. The American writer Moustafa Bayoumi, among other observers, has described European media coverage of the Ukraine war as racist, privileging the plight of white, Christian refugees over those fleeing persecution and war in Africa and the Middle East. This selective empathy is hardly a new phenomenon. At the end of the Cold War, critics decried the “myth of difference” implicit in Western policies to refugees and asylum seekers: western European and North American countries were happy to take in people fleeing from the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries but less interested in accepting those from the countries of the global South.
European solidarity with the plight of Ukrainians has been unprecedented.
This hypocritical approach to refugees is not only the province of the West. Countries such as Kenya have embraced refugees from South Sudan, for instance, while treating those from Somalia with hostility. The challenge lies in encouraging countries to embrace a more generous, universal approach to refugees. On occasion, the acceptance of particular groups can help broaden refugee policy. The United States’ experience of receiving hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees after the fall of Saigon in 1975 contributed to its adoption of the 1980 Refugee Act, which created a systematic procedure for admitting refugees and opened the door wider for other groups, such as those fleeing the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Europe’s generally positive experience of protecting Bosnian and Kosovar refugees in the 1990s led to progressive innovations in European asylum policy, such as the Temporary Protection Directive, which lets governments grant displaced persons certain rights and the ability to stay in Europe for a limited period of time. The Ukraine crisis led the EU to trigger this directive for the first time since its creation in 2001.
Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, spoke hopefully when he said in early March that solidarity could be “the silver lining of this crisis, that Europe understands that any country can become the recipient of large numbers of refugees and need the help of others.” But it is not magical thinking to imagine that the influx of Ukrainian refugees could lead European countries to establish a fairer and more comprehensive asylum system. Newly arrived refugees and their diasporas could lobby for more progressive policies. Media narratives could warm to the plight of refugees and encourage political leaders to seize the moment to push new legislation. Opportunities for interactions between citizens and refugees may change old attitudes among the public. Indeed, the crisis may have already dragged Europe back from the precipice of ending asylum altogether, reminding countries that had adopted restrictive policies, such as Denmark and the United Kingdom, that their publics still want to give sanctuary to those in need.
The opposite, however, could also be true. Solidarity with Ukrainians could be short-lived. Across Latin America, initial solidarity with the region’s more than four million Venezuelan refugees ebbed in 2019 as the realities of competition for employment and public services began to bite. Europe has seen past examples of backlash against eastern European migrant workers; the French fretted about an invasion of “Polish plumbers” in 2004 and the United Kingdom refused to extend the right of freedom of movement to Bulgarian and Romanian workers after their countries joined the EU in 2007. The British politicians who campaigned successfully for Brexit in 2016 often invoked the specter of eastern European migrants squeezing out British workers. European societies may be welcoming Ukrainian refugees now, but a backlash always looms around the corner.
REFUGEES AS A BOON, NOT A BURDEN
Millions have already left Ukraine, and that number will keep climbing as the war persists. If Kyiv falls, the ensuing exodus may be enormous, with millions more crossing the border and remaining indefinitely in Europe. Such an outcome could lead to between seven and 15 million people leaving Ukraine. Even in the most optimistic scenario—a negotiated peace or an outright Ukrainian victory—it will be a long time before most of the millions of Ukrainians already elsewhere in Europe will be willing and able to return home. The weight of such staggering numbers alone, however, will not dictate policy changes. Europe’s political leaders will.
Europe has so far responded well to the influx of Ukrainians, but it needs to start making long-term plans beyond this emergency phase. Aiding the enormous numbers of people forced to flee Ukraine will require all 27 member states of the EU to step up; Europe cannot simply free-ride on the likes of Poland, which currently hosts around 60 percent of Ukrainian refugees. European countries will need to commit both to receiving refugees and to funding their care.
First, EU leaders should devise a relocation scheme that distributes refugees equitably across the continent, matching refugees’ destination preferences with the capacities of receiving regions. In September 2016, the EU agreed to a relocation scheme for 160,000 Syrian refugees to be shifted around the continent from Italy and Greece. However, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, among others, prevented it from being fully implemented, insisting that the program violated their national sovereignty. That obstinacy appears all the more shortsighted now as millions of Ukrainians pour into eastern Europe.
An Iraqi child near the Polish-Belarussian border in the Grodno region of Belarus, November 2021
Kacper Pempel / Reuters
Second, EU countries will need to share the financial burdens of such initiatives in order to meet the vast costs of delivering the necessary public services. These states should contribute to broader refugee settlement efforts on the basis of their ability to pay, while leaders in Brussels and across Europe should also raise funding from international financial institutions and from countries outside Europe—especially the United States, which has an interest in averting the growth of populist nationalism in eastern Europe.
These resources should be directed both to refugees and the residents of receiving regions in order to win long-term support for refugee integration policies. Such investment can create better housing, schools, hospitals, and jobs that benefit residents and refugees alike. In that sense, Europe needs to take a leaf out of the playbook usually prescribed to low- and middle-income counties in Africa and Latin America when they take on refugees: to create shared development-based opportunities for refugees and hosts, such as those in place in Colombia and Uganda that provide large numbers of refugees the opportunity to work.
Several of the main refugee-hosting countries in eastern Europe have high unemployment, strong nationalist parties, and economies that will be adversely affected by both the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Avoiding polarization and a backlash requires their citizens and governments to perceive refugees as a benefit rather than a burden. Indeed, research on public attitudes toward refugees in Europe suggests that the perception that they contribute positively to the economy is key to their acceptance. Moldova—a country of just 3.5 million people that is now hosting nearly 400,000 Ukrainians—suffers from high youth unemployment, has lost the ten percent of its trade that was with Russia and Ukraine, and is in a precarious strategic position sitting outside of NATO and the EU. To continue offering sanctuary to refugees, it will need the United States and the rest of the international community to help demonstrate through aid and investment that refugees can be an economic boon.
Germany’s relatively successful experience of integrating the one million Syrians who arrived in the mid-2010s is a helpful guide. Berlin invested massively in vocational education, language training, and job creation schemes. Within five years, more than half of the working-age asylum seekers who had arrived since 2013 were employed. Of course, the arrival of so many newcomers did provoke a backlash, propelling the far-right, anti-immigrant party Alternative for Germany. Tellingly, the areas of Germany that were most susceptible to the AfD’s brand of populist nationalism were not those that experienced the highest levels of immigration but those affected by deindustrialization and high levels of structural unemployment, such as the region of Lower Saxony. To head off nativist upswellings of this kind, governments should invest in all regions, not just the ones that will host large numbers of refugees.
LASTING CHANGE
A more fundamental transformation remains possible. European leaders could translate this moment of solidarity into lasting legal and policy change at a pan-European level. The refugee crisis of 2015–16 led to the broad recognition that the EU’s framework for dealing with migrants was fundamentally broken, but European countries struggled to determine what framework should replace it.
They found a compromise solution in the European Commission’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum, released in 2020. The agreement offered wide-ranging recommendations for reforms, including for the European Council to consider overhauling the Dublin system. The pact also called for the “fair sharing of responsibility and solidarity,” urging member states to create a system of “flexible contributions” when it comes to receiving refugees and paying for their care. Although vague, some of these ideas offer a basis for the EU to reconsider how its member states share the responsibility for refugees.
The war in Ukraine could force between seven and 15 million people to leave the country.
The EU still needs to devise policies for mass influxes of the sort that occurred in 2015 and 2016 and is happening now. The Temporary Protection Directive does offer a blueprint for how countries should treat refugees and it removes the burden on member states of determining the legal status of each individual refugee. But it does not specify how European countries should share the responsibilities of coping with a mass influx. Establishing a clearer framework for responsibility sharing would also enable politicians to better defend their own commitments to refugees, reminding their populations that all countries are taking in their fair share of people in need.
At the same time, Europe needs new mechanisms for responding to the spontaneous arrival of asylum seekers because until the current crisis, the only viable route for most refugees to reach Europe was through the use of criminal smuggling networks. And Europe should urgently update how it supports refugees in other parts of the world, including through an EU-wide resettlement scheme and more coherent policies relating to humanitarian and development financing for refugee-hosting countries outside the EU.
The Ukraine crisis is a rare chance for Europe to create refugee policies fit for the twenty-first century. The continent’s leaders failed to capitalize on the public solidarity toward refugees in the second half of 2015. They cannot afford to miss that opportunity again. Both Ukraine’s refugees and the future of asylum in Europe depend on it.
18. Operation ‘brain drain’: Help Russian talent flow west
A creative idea from Dr. Eberstadt.
Operation ‘brain drain’: Help Russian talent flow west
March 25, 2022
The Ukraine invasion has triggered migration flows from two countries — not just one. Putin’s war has created a huge Ukrainian refugee crisis, but it is also triggering an exodus from his own country: a flight of disaffected, highly trained Russian talent.
The latter presents the US and her Western allies with an extraordinary strategic opportunity. America and Europe should actively welcome in Russia’s finest — millions of them, if possible — before we lose the chance.
The Ukrainians who are fleeing west to escape to the Russian army’s carnage and terror are mainly ordinary women and children. But the new migration out of Russia is very different. These are mainly of younger middle-class Russians, appalled by Putin’s war and alarmed by the dark new turn of events in their homeland.
Refugees fleeing from Ukraine are seen after crossing Ukrainian-Polish border due to Russian military attack on Ukraine. Medyka, Poland on March 24th, 2022. Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto
These men and women are arriving daily in Istanbul, Helskini, Tbilisi, Yerevan, and the Baltic countries: wherever visa regulations permit their entry on a one-way ticket out. Numbers on this outflow from Russia are still iffy, but the totals are already sizeable. The University of Chicago’s Konstantin Sonin guesstimates that 200,000 Russians fled their country in just the first 10 days of the war alone. But the tally is steadily growing, and a report yesterday suggested that 50,000 to 70,000 of them are IT workers.
It would be a mistake — a serious blunder — for Western leaders to ignore these émigrés, dismissing them as products of conflict. Rather, it is in our common Western interest to welcome them, and to encourage more to leave. A mass movement of highly trained manpower out of Russia and into the West — if allowed to take place — will strengthen and enrich America and her allies, even as it undermines the foundations of national power for the Kremlin.
The men and women choosing to leave Russia today are not at all “typical,” randomly selected Russians. They tend to be highly educated — usually with university degrees, or more. Many have technical backgrounds — in science, computing, engineering, and math. Most of them speak English, often with impressive fluency.
Moreover, these émigrés consider themselves part of a common civilization they share with us. They generally regard themselves as what Russians call “humanists,” what we might call “European liberals.” They shrink from oppressive Great Russian nationalism. They want no part of the Kremlin’s adventures. There are millions more very much like them, still residing within Russia, but without a true home.
Even before the Ukraine invasion, opportunities for this stratum of professionals were already unnaturally limited and constricted, thanks to the stifling “business climate” in Putin’s petro-kleptocracy. Now — given the prospect of severe and indefinite Western sanctions — the economic outlook for Russia’s intelligentsia has become that much more miserable. And the war also promises to usher in a whole new wave of internal repression and strictures to erase any hint of domestic opposition to Putin’s absolute authority.
No matter the course of the Ukraine war, growing numbers of highly cultivated and talented Russians will want to make their way abroad to start a new life. We should not only tolerate this prospective wave of immigration, but enthusiastically abet it with generous visa and asylum policies — remember the case of Albert Einstein fleeing Nazi Germany — to welcome them to the free world.
Do not forget: Receiving countries in the West have benefitted palpably from previous waves of migration from Russia and its Soviet predecessor.
In Israel, the migrants who arrived after the Cold War provided much of the scientific and technological know-how for the high-tech, “start-up nation” boom. In the US, Soviet and Russian émigrés famously upgraded American university math departments and research labs — but the Fields Medals and patent awards were only the pinnacle of broader and greater contributions to knowledge creation, material advance, and prosperity generation. Recent Soviet and Russian waves of educated émigrés have thrived in Europe (and the rest of the OECD) as well — their migration all the more opportune given the shrinking workforces in many of these countries.
There is every reason to expect that the next wave of high-skill, high-talent migrants from Russia will likewise integrate and achieve when it arrives in the West.
A Russian talent exodus will confer not only economic benefits on the West, but strategic ones. Putin’s pool of talented manpower is limited, and relatively fixed. The greater the scale of the talent losses, the higher those ultimate costs for the Kremlin.
We cannot know whether the Kremlin will countenance such an exodus, or for how long. So there is a certain urgency to this matter. Details can be settled in due course — what must be settled now is the determination and resolve to take in Russian talent. There will be a time for these émigrés to compete for placement — and to be competed over. But the chance to resettle this promising population may prove fleeting — and they will not be the only losers if we fail to seize it.
Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute
