Quotes of the Day:

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men, True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.” 

- Ernest Hemingway 

"Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well." 

- Dwight Eisenhower

"Instead of simply claiming to have read books, demonstrate how they have enhanced your critical thinking abilities and help you develop a discerning and contemplative mindset." 

- Epictetus.

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 20, 2023

2. China’s Hacking of Government Email Was Traditional Espionage, Official Says

3. Putin cut deal with Wagner ‘to save his skin,’ MI6 chief says in rare speech'

4. By pulling out of the Ukrainian grain deal, Russia risks alienating its few remaining partners

5. Xi hails 'old friend' Kissinger during meeting that harks back to an era of warmer ties

6. DOD Official Highlights Importance of Pacific Island Nations

7. Russia-Ukraine War: Missiles Hit Ukrainian Port City as U.N. Is Set to Discuss Russia’s Blockade

8. Pentagon AI more ethical than adversaries’ because of ‘Judeo-Christian society,’ USAF general says

9. Rich lode of EV metals could boost Taliban and its new Chinese partners

10. 3-to-5 years from now is the danger time when the US could face both China and Russia

11. Scoop! Why Ben from Ben & Jerry’s blames America for war in Ukraine

12. ChatGPT is creating new risks for national security

13. What Impact has Prigozhin's Mutiny really had on Putin?

14. US military tests new smartphone app that could help shoot down drones

15. When Failed Coups Strengthen Leaders

16. Putin is planning revenge on Wagner chief for his failed mutiny, CIA chief warns, as he warns Yevgeny Prigozhin: 'Don't fire your food taster'

17. The Parable of F-16s for Ukraine

18. We Will Never Run Out of Resources

19. CIA chief: Russia’s elite are questioning Putin’s judgment

20. Here’s how the Senate wants to boost military recruitment

21. Ukraine Situation Report: U.S. Cluster Munitions Hit The Battlefield

22. Russia-China ties deepen as Beijing buys a record amount of oil from the warring nation in the first half of 2023

23. Chinese spy balloon exposed gaps in ability to detect threats, NORAD chief says

24. Rethinking Counterinsurgent Force Design and Employment

25. Should America Reflag Ships Heading to Ukraine?

26. Cluster Bombs and the Contradictions of Liberalism

27. Is Elon laughing? Reports say Mark Zuckerberg's 'Twitter-killer' just suffered a stunning 50% collapse in daily active users after white-hot start — but here's why Musk should still worry

28. EXPLAINED: How Ukraine’s New DPICM Cluster Munitions Actually Work

29. White House says Russia is preparing for attacks on civilian ships in Black Sea

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 20, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-20-2023

Key Takeaways:

• Russian forces launched a third night of missile and drone strikes against port and grain infrastructure in southern Ukraine on July 20 following Russia’s withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative on July 17.
• The Russian military announced that it may consider civilian ships in the Black Sea en route to Ukrainian ports legitimate military targets.
• The Russian military’s intensifying strikes against Ukrainian port and grain infrastructure and threats of maritime escalation are likely a part of a Kremlin effort to leverage Russia’s exit from the Black Sea Grain Initiative and exact extensive concessions from the West.
• The Kremlin likely views the Black Sea Grain Initiative as one of its few remaining avenues of leverage against the West and has withdrawn from the deal to secure these concessions.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the front and reportedly advanced on July 20.
• The United States and European Union (EU) reiterated their long-term security commitments to Ukraine via security assistance packages and proposals on July 19 and 20.
• Wagner Group personnel are training Belarusian special forces on modern tactics at the Brest Training Ground in Brest, Belarus.
• The Wagner Group may open another base in Belarus in Gomel Oblast near Belarus’ international border with Ukraine.
• The Wagner Group reportedly suffered an 80 percent casualty rate and a 28 percent killed-in-action rate in Ukraine.
• Russian forces continued limited ground attacks on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, around Bakhmut and along the Avdiivka–Donetsk City line and advanced on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line as of July 20.
• Ukrainian forces continued limited offensive operations east of Kupyansk, near Kreminna, near Bakhmut, and along the Avdiivka–Donetsk City line and made gains near Bakhmut on July 20.
• Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations near Vuhledar, on the administrative border between western Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts, and south of Orikhiv and made limited territorial gains in western Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts and western Zaporizhia Oblast on July 20.
• Russian forces continued to unsuccessfully counterattack Ukrainian positions on the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast administrative border on July 20.
• The Russian State Duma approved amendments increasing penalties for draft dodging and for officials and legal entities that fail to assist Russian force generation efforts on July 20.
• Russian authorities continue persecution of non-Russian Orthodox churches in occupied Ukraine.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JULY 20, 2023

Jul 20, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 20, 2023

Riley Bailey, Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, Angelica Evans, George Barros, Christina Harward, and Frederick W. Kagan

July 20, 2023, 7:50pm ET 

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

Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cutoff for this product was 12:30pm ET on July 20. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the July 21 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Russian forces launched a third night of missile and drone strikes against port and grain infrastructure in southern Ukraine on July 20 following Russia’s withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative on July 17. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces launched seven Onyx cruise missiles, four Kh-22 anti-ship missiles, three Kalibr sea-based cruise missiles, five Iskander ballistic missiles, and 19 Iranian-made Shahed drones.[1] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian air defenses destroyed 18 targets, including two Kalibrs, three Iskanders, and 13 Shaheds.[2] Spokesperson of the Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Captain First Rank Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces targeted port infrastructure in Mykolaiv and Odesa oblasts and noted that the strikes mainly affected warehouses and logistics facilities.[3] Humenyuk noted that Russian “blackmail and sabotage” of Ukrainian ports started shortly after Russian began its rhetoric about its conditions for the expansion of the grain deal.[4] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces struck Ukrainian manufacturing and storage facilities in Odesa City and Chornomorske in Odesa Oblast, and fuel infrastructure facilities and ammo depots in Mykolaiv City.[5] Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces destroyed the Odesa Seaport Administration building in the center of Odesa City and noted that residential buildings were damaged by the blast wave.[6] Ukrainian sources reported that Russian missile strikes also damaged a Chinese consulate building in Odesa City.[7]

Ukrainian military officials outlined the challenge of defending against Onyx missiles and Russia’s shortage of Kh-22 missiles. Ukrainian Air Force Spokesperson Colonel Yuriy Ihnat stated that Onyx missiles fly at a speed of more than 3,000 kilometers per hour at a high altitude and then quickly change altitude to 10–15 meters above the surface when striking a target, making it difficult to detect and destroy.[8] Ihnat noted on July 19 that Russian forces are using Onyx cruise missiles that are designed to destroy targets located directly on the coastline along the sea.[9] Ihnat also stated on July 20 that Russia does not have the same ability to manufacture Kh-22 missiles that it does to produce other types of high-precision long-range missiles.[10] Ihnat noted that Russia had approximately 250 Kh-22 missiles at the beginning of the war in February of 2022 and has already used approximately 150 missiles against Ukraine.[11]

The Russian military announced that it may consider civilian ships in the Black Sea en route to Ukrainian ports legitimate military targets. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) stated on July 19 that as of midnight Moscow time on July 20 Russian forces will consider all ships en route to Ukrainian ports as potential carriers of military cargo and will consider the flag countries of such vessels as “involved in the Ukrainian conflict on the side of the Kyiv regime.”[12] The Russian MoD declared a number of sea areas in the northern and southern parts of the Black Sea “temporarily dangerous for navigation” and claimed that it issued relevant warnings to sailors in the Black Sea about the withdrawal of safety guarantees.[13] The Russian MoD specified that these naval measures are connected to the termination of the Black Sea Grain Initiative and the curtailment of the maritime humanitarian corridor in the Black Sea.[14] The announcement prompted the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (MoD) to announce on July 20 that as of midnight Kyiv time Ukrainian forces may treat all ships in the Black Sea heading to ports in Russia and occupied Ukrainian territories as military cargo vessels.[15] The Ukrainian MoD similarly stated that Ukrainian officials released relevant navigation information to seafarers.[16] US National Security Council Spokesperson Adam Hodge stated on July 20 that US intelligence indicates that Russian forces have laid additional sea mines in the approaches to Ukrainian ports.[17] Hodge added that the White House believes that Russia is engaging in a coordinated effort to justify possible attacks against civilian ships in the Black Sea and blame Ukrainian forces for the attacks.[18]

The Russian military’s intensifying strikes against Ukrainian port and grain infrastructure and threats of maritime escalation are likely a part of a Kremlin effort to leverage Russia’s exit from the Black Sea Grain Initiative and exact extensive concessions from the West. Russian President Vladimir Putin stated on July 19 that Russia is ready to return to the grain deal immediately if all previously agreed-upon conditions for Russia’s participation in the initiative are fulfilled and the parties restore the deal’s “original humanitarian essence.”[19] Putin accused Western countries of exploiting the grain deal so that European enterprises could profit at the expense of Russian businesses.[20] Putin claimed that elements of the grain deal led to a 30 to 40 percent discount on Russian grain on global markets, which caused Russian farmers to lose $1.2 billion and Russian fertilizer producers to suffer $1.6 billion in losses.[21] Putin stated that returning to the deal in its current form is pointless and called for the lifting of sanctions on Russian grain and fertilizer deliveries and the removal of obstacles for Russian banks servicing food supplies to the global market, including their connection to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) banking system.[22] Putin also called for the resumption of deliveries of components and spare parts for Russian agricultural machinery and fertilizer production, the resolution of issues with Russia ship chartering and insurance of Russian food exports, the renewal of operations for the Togliatti-Odesa ammonia pipeline, and the removal of blocks on Russian agricultural assets.[23]

The Kremlin likely views the Black Sea Grain Initiative as one of its few remaining avenues of leverage against the West and has withdrawn from the deal to secure these concessions. The Kremlin now appears to be attempting to create a sense of urgency around its return to the Black Sea Grain Initiative by conducting intensifying strikes against Ukrainian port and grain infrastructure and threatening to strike civilian ships in the Black Sea. Ukraine harvests most of it grain between July and August, and Russia’s strikes on Ukrainian port and agricultural infrastructure can further complicate Ukraine’s ability to free up space for newly harvested grains.[24] Prolonged disruptions to grain logistics in Ukraine will likely have increasingly cascading effects on grain supplies, adding to the sense of urgency that the Kremlin hopes to create.

The Kremlin routinely engages in escalatory rhetoric surrounding the West’s support for Ukraine in an effort to shape Western behavior, although Russia appears notably to be conducting these shaping efforts concerning the grain deal with kinetic operations instead of rhetoric. It is unclear to what extent Russian forces intend to strike civilian ships in the Black Sea, although the Kremlin likely believes the announcement will have a chilling effect on maritime activity in the Black Sea and create conditions reminiscent of the complete blockade of Ukrainian ports at the start of the full-scale invasion.[25] This attempt to achieve economic concessions from the West may undermine the Kremlin's international outreach efforts by threatening the food supplies of several countries that are the intended targets of the Kremlin’s outreach.[26] Russian strikes against Ukrainian port and grain infrastructure and naval posturing also continue to illustrate that the Kremlin is willing to use naval and precision strike assets to prioritize immediate economic concerns instead of operations in Ukraine that pursue the Kremlin‘s overall campaign objectives.

The Kremlin may be destroying Ukrainian port and grain infrastructure before renegotiating the Black Sea grain deal to set conditions for the export of stolen Ukrainian grain from Russian-occupied territories that could disproportionately benefit the Russian economy. Ukrainian Minister for Agrarian Policy Mykola Solskyi stated that it would take Ukraine no less than one year to restore the Chornomorsk port in Odesa Oblast, which was used for export of grain.[27] The destruction of Ukrainian port infrastructure in government-controlled Odesa and Mykolaiv oblasts may restrict Ukraine’s ability to export grain by sea even if the grain deal is renegotiated, while allowing Russia to offer grain from occupied Ukraine or Russia to fulfil the deal in the meantime.

Russia is also likely attempting to intensify divisions between Ukrainian and Central European governments as Ukraine and the West search for a way to re-route the grain exports. Senior European officials stated that the European Union (EU) is seeking to transport more Ukrainian grain via road and rail to help make up for Russia’s withdrawal from the Black Sea grain deal.[28] Five Central European countries — Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Bulgaria — called on the EU to extend the ban on grain imports from Ukraine until at least the end of the year on July 19.[29] Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki also announced on July 19 that Poland will retain its ban on Ukrainian grain exports on September 15 even if the EU does not agree to the extension.[30] Polish Agriculture Minister Robert Telus stated on July 18 that Poland is willing to facilitate Ukrainian grain transit through Poland but said that the EU will need to help to establish necessary infrastructure.[31] Telus added that Poland had only begun its harvest and noted that it cannot facilitate the extra transit immediately. Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal condemned Poland’s decision to extend the ban as an “unfriendly and populist move that will severely impact global food security and Ukraine's economy.”[32] Exports through Poland and other EU countries bordering Ukraine had previously sparked resistance from local farmers after the EU lifted tariffs and quotas on food exports from Ukraine in June 2022 as Russia blocked Ukraine from transporting grain and other goods by sea.[33] Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary announced in April 2023 bans on grain and other food exports from Ukraine to protect their agricultural sectors.[34] The European Commission later announced restrictions on the imports of Ukrainian wheat, maize, rapeseed, and sunflower seeds in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Bulgaria until June 5 as a result of farmers’ concerns in Central European countries.[35] The Kremlin may be attempting to disrupt Ukraine’s future prospects for maritime exports in an effort to sour Ukrainian relations with its Western neighbors.[36]

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the front and reportedly advanced on July 20. A Ukrainian commander operating in the Bakhmut area reported on July 19 that Ukrainian forces advanced 1.8km likely on the southern flank of Bakhmut, and Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces also advanced on Bakhmut’s northern flank on July 20.[37] Ukrainian Ground Forces Commander Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi stated that Ukrainian forces cannot rapidly advance near Bakhmut due to heavy Russian force concentrations in the area.[38] The Russian military command concentrated a high density of forces in the Bakhmut area to defend against Ukrainian attacks in the area, likely an intended effect of those attacks, though Syrskyi and other Ukrainian officials have repeatedly restated their intent to retake Bakhmut.[39] Ukrainian military officials reported that Ukrainian forces continued advancing in the Berdyansk (Donetsk-Zaporizhia oblasts border area) and Melitopol (western Zaporizhia Oblast) directions and are continuing to advance by roughly 100 meters per day south and southeast of Orikhiv.[40] Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Mykhailo Podolyak reiterated that the Ukrainian counteroffensive will be slow and difficult but will prevent Russian forces from retaking the battlefield initiative.[41] The Washington Post reported that Ukrainian forces have begun using Western-provided cluster munitions in southeastern Ukraine and assessed that Ukrainian forces will likely use them near Bakhmut soon.[42] The Washington Post, citing an anonymous Ukrainian military official, reported that Ukrainian forces are using the cluster munitions to “break up [Russian] trenches slowing down Ukrainian forces.”

The United States and European Union (EU) reiterated their long-term security commitments to Ukraine via security assistance packages and proposals on July 19 and 20. The Pentagon announced on July 19 a new $1.3 billion security package for Ukraine that includes four National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS), 152mm artillery rounds, mine-clearing equipment, and other munitions and vehicles.[43] The US package also includes electronic warfare, communications, and other security equipment. EU Foreign Affairs Representative Josep Borrell proposed a plan to EU ministers on July 20 to provide Ukraine with security assistance worth up to 20 billion euros ($22.4 billion), including weapons, ammunition, and other military aid, over the next four years.[44]

Wagner Group personnel are training Belarusian special forces on modern tactics at the Brest Training Ground in Brest, Belarus. The Belarusian Ministry of Defense and Wagner-linked sources reported on July 20 that Wagner forces began training unspecified Belarusian special forces elements at the Brest Training Ground in Brest, Belarus, and that the training will last until July 24.[45] The Wagner trainers are teaching Belarusian forces modern combined arms techniques and tactics, including using drones for tactical reconnaissance, tactical maneuvers, movement under fire, camouflage, and command and control.[46] Wagner-linked sources praised the Belarusian military and Belarusian trainees for their adeptness, agility, and flexibility in training while complaining that the Russian Ministry of Defense did not appreciate the Wagner Group due to Russian command staff’s "rigidity of thinking and bureaucratic barriers.”[47] A Wagner-linked source specifically praised Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s “old school” style and how Lukashenko managed to preserve the Soviet military’s “best traditions.”[48]

The Wagner Group may open another base in Belarus in Gomel Oblast near Belarus’ international border with Ukraine. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on July 20 that construction for another Wagner Group base in Belarus began near Naroulia Raion and that Wagner personnel surveyed land near Dyatlik, Naroulia Raion, Gomel Oblast, approximately 2km from Belarus’ border with Ukraine on July 19.[49] ISW has not observed visual confirmation of construction in this area as of this publication.

Approximately 400 Wagner convict fighters are reportedly awaiting their criminal pardon paperwork to clear in Anapa, occupied Crimea. Independent Russian investigative outlet Vazhnye Istorii reported on July 19 that about 400 Wagner convict fighters are waiting in hotels in Anapa until the Russian government approves their pardons.[50] The report states that the Wagner Group suspended its effort to recruit Russian convicts (codenamed “Project K”) and that Wagner seeks to release these convicts no later than July 29.[51] The report states that the former convicts will have the option to extend their contracts with Wagner to serve in Belarus or Africa.[52]

The Wagner Group reportedly suffered an 80 percent casualty rate and a 28 percent killed-in-action rate in Ukraine. A Wagner-linked source reportedly quoted a senior Wagner commander with the callsign “Marx,” who stated that 78,000 Wagner fighters fought in Ukraine (49,000 of whom were convicts), and that that Wagner had suffered 22,000 killed-in-action and 40,000 wounded-in-action as of Wagner’s capture of Bakhmut on May 20.[53] These figures — if accurate — indicate that the Wagner Group was likely combat ineffective after fighting in Bakhmut and that the force suffered a 79.5 percent overall casualty rate and a 28.2 percent death rate. Marx reportedly stated that 25,000 Wagner fighters are currently alive and that 10,000 of them are in Belarus and the remaining 15,000 are resting, presumably in Russia.[54]

Key Takeaways:

• Russian forces launched a third night of missile and drone strikes against port and grain infrastructure in southern Ukraine on July 20 following Russia’s withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative on July 17.
• The Russian military announced that it may consider civilian ships in the Black Sea en route to Ukrainian ports legitimate military targets.
• The Russian military’s intensifying strikes against Ukrainian port and grain infrastructure and threats of maritime escalation are likely a part of a Kremlin effort to leverage Russia’s exit from the Black Sea Grain Initiative and exact extensive concessions from the West.
• The Kremlin likely views the Black Sea Grain Initiative as one of its few remaining avenues of leverage against the West and has withdrawn from the deal to secure these concessions.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the front and reportedly advanced on July 20.
• The United States and European Union (EU) reiterated their long-term security commitments to Ukraine via security assistance packages and proposals on July 19 and 20.
• Wagner Group personnel are training Belarusian special forces on modern tactics at the Brest Training Ground in Brest, Belarus.
• The Wagner Group may open another base in Belarus in Gomel Oblast near Belarus’ international border with Ukraine.
• The Wagner Group reportedly suffered an 80 percent casualty rate and a 28 percent killed-in-action rate in Ukraine.
• Russian forces continued limited ground attacks on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, around Bakhmut and along the Avdiivka–Donetsk City line and advanced on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line as of July 20.
• Ukrainian forces continued limited offensive operations east of Kupyansk, near Kreminna, near Bakhmut, and along the Avdiivka–Donetsk City line and made gains near Bakhmut on July 20.
• Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations near Vuhledar, on the administrative border between western Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts, and south of Orikhiv and made limited territorial gains in western Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts and western Zaporizhia Oblast on July 20.
• Russian forces continued to unsuccessfully counterattack Ukrainian positions on the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast administrative border on July 20.
• The Russian State Duma approved amendments increasing penalties for draft dodging and for officials and legal entities that fail to assist Russian force generation efforts on July 20.
• Russian authorities continue persecution of non-Russian Orthodox churches in occupied Ukraine.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these 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 the Ukrainian 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 Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian forces continued limited ground attacks on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line and advanced as of July 20. Geolocated footage published on July 20 shows that Russian forces advanced across the N26 Kupyansk-Svatove highway south of Novoselivske (15km northwest of Svatove).[55] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces made marginal advances in the Serebryanske forest area (11km south of Kreminna).[56] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground attacks southwest of Masyutivka (13km northeast of Kupyansk).[57] Ukrainian National Guard Main Directorate’s Application Planning Department Deputy Director Colonel Mykola Urshalovych acknowledged that Russian forces recently attempted a limited offensive effort on the Kupyansk-Lyman line but said that Ukrainian forces repelled the Russian assaults.[58]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued limited offensive operations east of Kupyansk and near Kreminna without advancing on July 20. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group near Ivanivka (20km east of Kupyansk) and ground attacks near Bilohorivka (12km southwest of Kreminna) and Vesele (31km south of Kreminna).[59]

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian Objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations on Bakhmut’s northern and southern flanks and made limited gains on July 20. Geolocated footage indicates that Ukrainian forces have advanced in the forest area of Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut).[60] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces conducted offensive actions north and south of Bakhmut.[61] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked elements of the Russian Southern Grouping of Forces near Bilohorivka (22km northeast of Bakhmut), Klishchiivka, and Vesele (20km northeast of Bakhmut).[62] Commander of the Ukrainian 3rd Separate Assault Brigade Andriy Biletskyi reported that Ukrainian forces successfully attacked elements of the Russian 72nd Motorized Rifle Brigade (3rd Army Corps) and “Storm-Z” detachments and advanced 1,800m in the Bakhmut direction.[63] Other Russian milbloggers claimed that small Ukrainian assault groups with light armored support tried to advance near Dubovo-Vasylivka (7km northwest of Bakhmut) and that Ukrainian forces advanced towards Yahidne (immediately northwest of Bakhmut) and near the E40 (Bakhmut to Slovyansk) highway in Orikhovo-Vasylivka (12km northwest of Bakhmut).[64] A Russian milblogger claimed that heavy fighting continues near Klishchiivka where Ukrainian forces are conducting ground assaults.[65] Some Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces hold heights near Klishchiivka, whereas another milblogger claimed that Russian forces, including Airborne (VDV) units, pushed Ukrainian forces off the heights.[66] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces tried to advance in the direction of Andriivka (11km southwest of Bakhmut) and near Kurdyumivka (13km southwest of Bakhmut).[67]

Russian forces attacked Ukrainian forces around Bakhmut and along the Avdiivka–Donetsk City line but made no confirmed advances on July 20. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked Ukrainian forces near Bohdanivka (5km northwest of Bakhmut), Klishchiivka, Nevelske (14km southwest of Avdiivka), Marinka, Krasnohorivka, and Novomykhailivka (10km southwest of Donetsk City).[68] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked Ukrainian forces near Krasnohorivka.[69]

Ukrainian forces reportedly continued limited offensive operations along the Avdiivka–Donetsk City line but did not advance on July 20. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked elements of the Russian Southern Grouping of Forces near Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiikva), Krasnohorivka (23km southwest of Avdiivka), and Marinka (29km southwest of Avdiivka).[70]

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

Ukrainian forces reportedly attacked Russian positions near Vuhledar in western Donetsk Oblast but did not make confirmed territorial gains on July 20. Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked positions of elements of the Russian 36th Guards Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade (29th Combined Arms Army, Eastern Military District [EMD]) and the 155th Separate Naval Infantry Brigade (Pacific Fleet) near Mykilske (4km southeast of Vuhledar).[71] Russian sources indicated that a company-sized Ukrainian force with tank and armored vehicle support attacked Russian positions in the area.[72] ISW has previously observed elements of the 36th Separate Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade operating in the Mykilske area, and a Ukrainian military observer noted that this brigade is the 29th Combined Arms Army‘s only maneuver brigade.[73] The military observer suggested that the only reserve that the Russian military maintains in southern Ukraine consists of elements of the 29th Combined Arms Army.

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations on the administrative border between western Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts and made limited advances on July 20. Ukrainian military officials reported that Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations on the administrative border area and made unspecified gains.[74] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces attacked in the direction of Urozhaine (10km south of Velyka Novosilka) and advanced near Novodonetske (13km southeast of Velyka Novosilka).[75] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that elements of the Russian Eastern Group of Forces repelled two Ukrainian attacks near Staromayorske (10km south of Velyka Novosilka), and that the grouping eliminated a Ukrainian reconnaissance group west of Makarivka (7km south of Velyka Novosilka).[76]

Russian forces continued to unsuccessfully counterattack Ukrainian positions on the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast administrative border on July 20. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully counterattacked to regain positions north of Pryyutne (16km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[77] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful counterattacks in the direction of Novodarivka (15km southwest of Velyka Novosilka) to regain lost positions near Rivnopil (11km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[78] Russian sources indicated that elements of the 247th Guards Air Assault (VDV) Regiment (7th Guards Mountain Air Assault Division) and the “Sokol” special forces unit of the Donetsk People’s Republic’s (DNR) Internal Affairs Ministry are operating near Urozhaine and Staromayorske, respectively.[79]

Ukrainian forces made limited territorial gains in western Zaporizhia Oblast and continued counteroffensive operations south of Orikhiv on July 20. Geolocated footage published on July 20 shows that Ukrainian forces made marginal advances northeast of Robotyne (15km south of Orikhiv) and were clearing mines.[80] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces advanced in the directions of Mala Tokmachka-Verbove (9 and 22km southeast of Orikhiv respectively) and in the directions of Novodanylivka- Robotyne (5 and 15km south of Orikhiv respectively).[81] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces liberated new positions northeast of Robotyne and west of Novopokrovka (16km southeast of Orikhiv).[82] A Russian news aggregator claimed that Russian forces are successfully defending around Robotyne and that fighting is ongoing near Novopokrovka.[83] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces stopped two Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups near Charivne (18km east of Orikhiv) and Myrne (24km east of Orikhiv).[84] The Russian MoD also recognized the Russian 6th Motorized Company of the 1429th Motorized Rifle Regiment (58th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) with unspecified state awards for defending a Russian position northeast of Robotyne.[85]

Russian officials and sources accused Ukrainian forces of launching drone strikes against occupied Crimea on July 20. A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that a Ukrainian drone damaged some administrative and civilian infrastructure in Rozdolne, along the T0107 highway in northwestern Crimea.[86] The milblogger also claimed that Russian air defense and electronic warfare systems intercepted three Ukrainian drones in the area of Hvardiiske (15km north of Simferopol). Another Russian milblogger specified that Russian forces shot down the drones near the Hvardiiske military airfield.[87] Crimean Occupation Head Sergei Aksyonov also accused Ukrainian forces of drone attacks in northwestern Crimea.[88]

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

The Russian State Duma approved amendments increasing penalties for draft dodging and for officials and legal entities that fail to assist Russian force generation efforts on July 20.[89] The amendments will increase fines for non-compliance with military summonses from 3,000 rubles ($33) to up to 50,000 rubles ($553) and the fine for evading military medical examinations from 3,000 rubles to 25,000 rubles ($277).[90] The amendments increase fines for the appropriate civilians, officials, and businesses who fail to conduct military transport mobilization duties, notify or provide opportunities for summoned individuals to come to military registration and recruitment office, or provide lists of those eligible for summonses.[91] The amendments will go into effect in October, prompting Russian sources to speculate that the Kremlin intends to launch a second mobilization wave in the fall of 2023.[92] Russia would normally begin its fall 2023 conscription cycle on October 1 and may be setting conditions to ensure that there are no disruptions to the conscription effort. Russian officials could delay the fall conscription cycle as they did in the fall of 2022 following the start of partial mobilization, however.[93] A Russian hybrid force-generation campaign that attempts to simultaneously conduct the regular semi-annual conscription cycle in addition to a reserve mobilization and/or crypto-mobilization through a call-up of reservists will likely stress the Russian military’s training capacity without producing significant numbers of trained reservists in a timely fashion.

The State Duma adopted a law on July 20 that will allow Russian security forces, the Ministry of Emergency Situations, and some private security companies to stop the operation of drones in Russia. The new law will allow the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the Russian National Guard (Rosgvardia), the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the Federal Penitentiary Service, and the Ministry of Emergency Situations to stop the operation of all air, surface, and underwater drones.[94] The law will also allow employees of private security organizations who have undergone professional anti-terrorism training to stop the operation of drones as well.[95]

The State Duma also adopted an amendment on July 20 focused on creating more stringent operational security measures for the Russian National Guard (Rosgvardia). The amendment to the law “On the National Guards Troops of the Russian Federation” prohibits Rosgvardia personnel from posting photos, videos, and other information about themselves, other Rosgvardia personnel, and about Rosgvardia activities.[96] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that law prohibits Rosgvardia from publishing online materials that would reveal their units’ locations and criticized the State Duma for waiting so long to address this issue.[97]

The Kremlin-sponsored Working Group on the Special Military Operation reportedly submitted a bill to the State Duma to hold Russian military officials liable for violating measures set by state defense orders. Secretary of the United Russia Party General Council Andrey Turchak, who chairs the working group, stated on July 20 that the bill aims to hold military representatives equally responsible for violating terms of state contracts as other participants in a state defense order.[98] Turchak stated that these military representatives oversee important quality control functions for Russian weapons, ammunition, and equipment and argued that military representatives should bear equal responsibility for failing to meet deadlines.[99] The bill would pressure quality control elements of the Russian military’s logistics apparatus to either loosen standards and allow more faulty equipment to reach the front in Ukraine or intensify reviews of military products and limit supplies to the front. Turchak’s comments about deadlines suggest that the bill would pressure Russian military officials to engage in the former practice.

The Russian Navy will hold joint naval exercises with the Chinese Navy in the Sea of Japan from July 20 to 23, likely in an effort to portray Russia as an equal defense partner with China and a legitimate Pacific naval power. The Russian Pacific Fleet will send two large anti-submarine ships, two corvettes, and support vessels to conduct antisubmarine and combat exercises alongside two Chinese destroyers, two patrols ships, and supply ships.[100] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) stated that the exercises aim to strengthen naval cooperation between Russian and China and maintain stability in the Asia-Pacific region.[101]

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

Russian authorities continue persecution of non-Russian Orthodox churches in occupied Ukraine. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian authorities commandeered and are establishing a military facility at a local Evangelical Christian Baptist Church community facility in an unspecified city in southern Ukraine.[102] The Ukrainian Resistance Center noted that this church community previously helped displaced civilians from Mariupol (occupied Donetsk Oblast) during the war.[103] ISW has reported extensively on Russian kidnappings, asset seizures, and legislative measures in preventing the practice of Ukrainian religions in occupied territories.[104]

Russian federal subjects continue to sponsor the relocation of Ukrainian children from occupied Ukraine to Russia. The Kherson Oblast occupation administration amplified a report that the Kaliningrad Oblast government sponsored 160 children from occupied Kherson Oblast to go on a “vacation” in occupied Crimea.[105] The report announced that authorities will send several dozen additional children to a children’s camp in an unspecified location in the coming days, and over one thousand Kherson Oblast children to various Russian facilities during the summer.[106]

Ukrainian sources continue to report on Russian and occupation administration efforts to repopulate occupied territories with Russian citizens. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Mayar stated on July 19 that occupation authorities in Starobilsk, Luhansk Oblast are mass evicting Ukrainian civilians without Russian passports from their houses and apartments for claimed nonpayment of rent and are allocating that housing for Russian civilians.[107] Malyar also stated that the Kherson Oblast occupation administration banned Ukrainian civilians without Russian passports from returning to settlements they fled during flooding from the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (KHPP) dam destruction, instead forcing the civilians to move to Russia or occupied Crimea.[108]

Ukrainian officials reported that Russian occupation authorities continue to forcibly issue passports to local populations in occupied Kherson Oblast. The Kherson Oblast Occupation Ministry of Internal Affairs claimed that it has issued over 1.8 million Russian passports since May 2022, including 2,000 passports at a single passportization drive in Hornostaivka.[109] These numbers are highly suspect, however, given that the total prewar population of Kherson Oblast is just over one million.[110] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian occupation police raided civilian homes near Hornostaivka and forced the residents to apply for Russian passports under threat of deportation.[111] Malyar reported that Russian occupation officials are attempting to increase the number of Russian passport holders ahead of the September 2023 regional elections.[112]

Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks).

See topline text.

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, as part of ongoing Kremlin efforts to increase their control over Belarus and other Russian actions in Belarus.

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

2. China’s Hacking of Government Email Was Traditional Espionage, Official Says

China’s Hacking of Government Email Was Traditional Espionage, Official Says

The New York Times · by Julian E. Barnes · July 20, 2023

The hackers penetrated the accounts of senior State Department officials, including the U.S. ambassador to China.

Rob Joyce, director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency, said that espionage “is what nation-states do.”Credit...Demetric Blyther, via Associated Press

Reporting from Aspen, Colo.

July 20, 2023Updated 7:59 p.m. ET

The hack of Microsoft’s cloud that resulted in the compromise of government emails was an example of a traditional espionage threat, a senior National Security Agency official said.

Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, Rob Joyce, the director of cybersecurity at the N.S.A., said the United States needed to protect its networks from such espionage, but that adversaries would continue to try to secretly extract information from each other.

“It is China doing espionage,” Mr. Joyce said. “It is what nation-states do. We have to defend against it, we need to push back against it. But that is something that happens.”

The hackers took emails from senior State Department officials including Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China. The theft of Mr. Burns’ emails was earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by a person familiar with the matter.

The emails of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo were also obtained in the hack, which was discovered in June by State Department cybersecurity experts scouring user logs for unusual activity. Microsoft later determined that Chinese hackers had obtained access to email accounts a month earlier.

In a new deal with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency announced on Wednesday, Microsoft agreed to provide access to cloud computing logs to more users so they could hunt for unusual activity or potential hacks.

Hundreds of thousands of emails were compromised, but U.S. officials have described the attack as a targeted one that used a compromised security key to penetrate selected Microsoft Outlook mailboxes.

Mr. Joyce said the attackers were able to impersonate authorization to read those emails.

Speaking alongside Mr. Joyce, Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, said the attack showed the “growing sophistication” of China.

But both Mr. Joyce and Mr. Smith said the hack announced last week was less concerning than a broader breach that Microsoft, the N.S.A. and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency announced in May. In that intrusion, which affected networks in Guam and elsewhere, malware was placed inside critical infrastructure and some unclassified military systems. Such cyberweapons could be used if tensions escalate between the United States and China over Taiwan.

In the hack announced last week, U.S. officials have said Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s emails were not compromised. In a statement last week, Mr. Blinken said the incident remains under investigation.

“As a general matter, we have consistently made clear to China as well as to other countries that any action that targets the U.S. government or U.S. companies, American citizens, is of deep concern to us, and we will take appropriate action in response,” Mr. Blinken said.

Edward Wong in Washington contributed reporting.

Julian E. Barnes is a national security reporter based in Washington, covering the intelligence agencies. Before joining The Times in 2018, he wrote about security matters for The Wall Street Journal. More about Julian E. Barnes

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Official Says Hack Is Espionage By Chinese

The New York Times · by Julian E. Barnes · July 20, 2023

3. Putin cut deal with Wagner ‘to save his skin,’ MI6 chief says in rare speech'

Putin cut deal with Wagner ‘to save his skin,’ MI6 chief says in rare speech'

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/19/europe/mi6-putin-wagner-rare-speech-intl/index.html

By Nick Paton Walsh, CNN

Updated 5:15 AM EDT, Thu July 20, 2023

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Prague, Czech RepublicCNN — 

It was a rare moment when the publicly visible Kremlin matched the reality behind closed doors.

That is according to the head of Britain’s MI6, who in a rare speech in Prague, gave the first confirmation from Western intelligence that private military group Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin did indeed strike a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end his advance on Moscow during the failed rebellion of June 24. And he had, it seemed, been welcomed into the Kremlin to meet Putin days later.

The MI6 chief, known as C, also expressed some bafflement at the tremors around the Kremlin that weekend, and the speed in which loyalties were spurned and returned.

“If you look at Putin’s behaviors on that day,” Richard Moore said of June 24. “Prigozhin started off I think, as a traitor at breakfast. He had been pardoned by supper and then a few days later, he was invited for tea. So, there are some things and even the chief of MI6 finds that a little bit difficult to try and interpret, in terms of who’s in and who’s out.”

Moore also gave a rare indication of the continued health and whereabouts of Prigozhin himself, whose characteristically profane and frequent audio messages published on Telegram have recently stopped. Asked by CNN if Prigozhin was “alive and healthy,” Moore replied the Wagner leader was still “floating around,” per his agency’s understanding.

Wagner's Prigozhin apparently seen in public for first time since failed mutiny

Western intelligence agencies have been reticent to comment on the failed rebellion, for fear of providing a false backbone to Russia’s familiar excuse for internal dissent - that it is arranged and fueled by Western spies. Yet the on-camera speech provided an opportunity for Moore’s expression to convey how shocking the weakness betrayed by Putin that weekend had been.

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“He really didn’t fight back against Prigozhin,” Moore said. “He cut a deal to save his skin, using the good offices of the leader of Belarus,” he said, referring to the intervention of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko who struck the deal. “Even I can’t see inside Putin’s head,” he added. “He has to have realized, I am sure, that something is deeply rotten in the state of Denmark - to quote Hamlet - and he had to cut this deal.”

Moore added it was difficult to make “firm judgments” about the fate of Wagner itself, as a mercenary group, but they “do not appear to be engaged in Ukraine,” and that there “appears to be elements of them in Belarus.”

Wagner 'does not exist': Why Putin claims a rift in the mercenary group

Moore chose the city of Prague, which he remarked as the last European capital to have Russian tanks roll into it before Ukraine, as a venue for a speech. He began with an unusually open appeal to Russians “silently appalled by the sight of their armed forces pulverizing Ukrainian cities, expelling innocent families from their homes, and kidnapping thousands of children” to spy for the United Kingdom.

“I invite them to do what others have already done this past 18 months and join hands with us. …Their secrets will always be safe with us, and together we will work to bring the bloodshed to an end.”

It was an abnormally public appeal that fit the upended global geopolitics forged by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

While Moore maintained that China is “absolutely complicit in the invasion” because of its continued support of the Kremlin head, he added that Iran’s support for Russia has caused division in its most senior officials. “Iran is clearly keen to make as much cash as it can out of this situation,” he said. And while Iran is notably selling drones that usually hit civilian targets, he added: “It will sell anything it can spare and it thinks it can get away with.”

4.  By pulling out of the Ukrainian grain deal, Russia risks alienating its few remaining partners

By pulling out of the Ukrainian grain deal, Russia risks alienating its few remaining partners

BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published 1:04 AM EDT, July 21, 2023

AP · July 21, 2023

By pulling out of a landmark deal that allowed Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea, Russian President Vladimir Putin is taking a gamble that could badly damage Moscow’s relations with many of its partners that have stayed neutral or even been supportive of the Kremlin’s invasion of its neighbor.

Russia also has played the role of spoiler at the United Nations, vetoing a resolution on extending humanitarian aid deliveries through a key border crossing in northwestern Syria and backing a push by Mali’s military junta to expel U.N. peacekeepers — abrupt moves that reflect Moscow’s readiness to raise the stakes elsewhere.

Putin’s declared goal in halting the Black Sea Grain Initiative was to win relief from Western sanctions on Russia’s agricultural exports. His longer-term goal could be to erode Western resolve over Ukraine and get more concessions from the U.S. and its allies as the war grinds toward the 17-month mark.

The Kremlin doubled down on terminating the grain deal by attacking Ukrainian ports and declaring wide areas of the Black Sea unsafe for shipping.

But with the West showing little willingness to yield any ground, Putin’s actions not only threaten global food security but also could backfire against Russia’s own interests, potentially causing concern in China, straining Moscow’s relations with key partner Turkey and hurting its ties with African countries.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who helped broker the grain deal with the U.N. a year ago, has pushed for its extension and said he would negotiate with Putin.

Turkey’s role as a top trading partner and a logistical hub for Russia’s foreign trade amid Western sanctions strengthens Erdogan’s hand and could allow him to squeeze concessions from Putin, whom he calls “my dear friend.”

Turkey’s trade with Russia nearly doubled last year to $68.2 billion, feeding U.S. suspicions that Moscow is using Ankara to bypass Western sanctions. Turkey says the increase is largely due to higher energy costs.

Their relationship is often characterized as transactional. Despite being on opposing sides in fighting in Syria, Libya and the decades-long conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, they have cooperated in areas like energy, defense, diplomacy, tourism and trade.

Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, director of the German Marshall Fund in Ankara, said the relationship’s dual nature dates back to the sultans and czars.

“Sometimes they compete, sometimes they cooperate. At other times they both compete and cooperate at the same time,” he said.

While the pendulum seems to have swung in Ankara’s favor for now, Unluhisarcikli noted the Kremlin has a few levers to pull, such as canceling a deferment of gas payments or removing financial capital for the Akkuyu nuclear plant being built by Russia. Moscow also could hurt Turkey by restricting Russian tourists, who visit in greater numbers than any other nationality. offering a steady flow of cash.

“How much weaker the relationship gets depends on how Russia responds to Turkey getting closer to the West,” he said.

Some observers in Moscow speculate that Russia agreed to extend the grain deal for two months in May to help Erdogan win reelection but was appalled to see his pro-Western shift afterward.

Erdogan backed Sweden’s membership in NATO earlier this month. In another snub to Moscow, Turkey allowed several Ukrainian commanders who led the defense of Mariupol last year to return home. They surrendered after a two-month Russian siege and then moved to Turkey under a deal that they stay there until the end of the war.

Kerim Has, a Moscow-based expert on Turkey-Russia ties, said Erdogan had been emboldened by his reelection to pursue rapprochement with the West, appointing a “pro-Western” Cabinet and adopting a stance that was causing “discomfort” in the Kremlin.

“It’s a dilemma for Putin,” Has said. “He supported Erdogan’s candidacy but he will face a more active, pro-Western Turkey under Erdogan in the coming period.”

Moscow could try to pressure Erdogan by challenging Turkey’s interests in northwestern Syria, where Ankara has backed armed opposition groups since the start of the conflict. Even though Russia has joined with Iran to shore up Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government while Turkey has backed its foes, Moscow and Ankara have negotiated cease-fire deals.

But Russia abruptly toughened its stand this month when it vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution backed by virtually all members to continue humanitarian aid deliveries to opposition-held areas through the Bab el-Hawa border crossing with Turkey, a key lifeline for about 4.1 million people in the impoverished enclave. Moscow warned that if its rival draft was not accepted, the crossing would be shut.

The presence of 3.4 million Syrians in Turkey is a sensitive issue for Ankara. Erdogan has advocated their voluntary repatriation to parts of northern Syria under Turkish control.

Dareen Khalifa, senior analyst on Syria at the International Crisis Group, says Russia’s hard-line approach to the issue was an attempt to pressure Ankara.

“Turkey will be directly impacted by that if the mechanism ends,” he said.

Others were skeptical Russia could use the border crossing issue to strong-arm Ankara. “I do not think Russia is in a position to increase its pressure on Turkey in Syria,” Has said.

Joseph Daher, a Swiss-Syrian researcher and professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, observed that Russia could be trying to pressure the West by raising the prospect of a new wave of refugees in Europe.

Richard Gowan, U.N. director of the International Crisis Group, noted that along with the tougher stand on Syria, Russia’s “disruptive” actions included support for Mali’s push to expel U.N. peacekeepers.

“It looks like Russia is looking for ways to annoy the West through the U.N,” he told The Associated Press.

Reflecting Moscow’s increasingly muscular stand, Russian military pilots recently have harassed U.S. aircraft over Syria in incidents that added to tensions between Moscow and Washington. The Pentagon described Russia’s maneuvers as unprofessional and unsafe, while Moscow sought to turn the tables by accusing the U.S. of violating deconfliction rules intended to prevent collisions over Syria.

Amid the hardball at the U.N. and in Syria, Russia has been courting African nations with promises of support.

The Kremlin has emphasized it stands ready to provide poor countries in Africa with free grain after the termination of the Black Sea deal, and Putin is set to woo African leaders at a summit in St. Petersburg later this month. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow’s offer of free grain shipments would be on the agenda.

The Black Sea deal allowed Ukraine to ship 32.9 million metric tons of grain and other food to global markets. According to official data, 57% of the grain from Ukraine went to developing nations, while China received the most — nearly a quarter.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted that 60,000 metric tons of grain destroyed by Russia’s strike on the port of Odesa on Wednesday were bound for China.

Putin, in turn, accused the West of using the grain deal to “shamelessly enrich itself” instead of its declared goal of easing hunger. Despite such rhetoric, the Russian move won’t play well in African countries.

Even as the Kremlin tried to contain the damage to those ties, it unleashed more attacks on Odesa and other ports to thwart Ukrainian attempts to continue grain shipments. Moscow described them as " strikes of retribution " for Monday’s attack that damaged the Kerch Bridge linking Moscow-annexed Crimea with Russia.

Hard-liners in Moscow praised Putin for halting the deal, which they have criticized as a reflection of what they described as the Kremlin’s futile hope to compromise with the West.

Pro-Kremlin commentator Sergei Markov lauded the retaliatory strikes and argued that the withdrawal from the deal was long overdue.

“The grain deal’s extension led to a drop in the government’s ratings and was fueling talk about betrayal on top,” he said.

___

Andrew Wilks in Istanbul, Turkey, Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut, Lebanon and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed.

___

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

AP · July 21, 2023

5. Xi hails 'old friend' Kissinger during meeting that harks back to an era of warmer ties

Is this similar to President Carter going to visit Kim Il Sung? Will it have any positive effect for the US?

Xi hails 'old friend' Kissinger during meeting that harks back to an era of warmer ties | CNN

CNN · by Nectar Gan · July 20, 2023

Hong Kong CNN —

Chinese leader Xi Jinping hailed Henry Kissinger as an “old friend” during a meeting with the 100-year-old former US Secretary of State who is in Beijing this week for a surprise visit.

Xi met Kissinger at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, a diplomatic complex in western Beijing where Kissinger was received during his first visit to China in 1971, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

Since then, Kissinger has visited China more than 100 times, Xi noted in the meeting.

In July 1971, Kissinger became the first high-ranking US official to visit Communist China. His secret meetings with Chinese leaders paved the way for then US President Richard Nixon’s “ice-breaking” trip the following year.

In the decades that followed, US-China ties blossomed alongside their economic interdependence. But in more recent years the relationship between the world’s two largest economies has deteriorated markedly.

For Xi, Kissinger’s presence was a reminder of less rocky times.

“We never forget our old friends, and will never forget your historic contribution to the development of China-US relations and the enhancement of friendship between the two peoples,” Xi told Kissinger.

“China and the United States are once again at the crossroads of where to go, and the two sides need to make a choice again,” he said, urging Kissinger and like-minded Americans to “continue to play a constructive role in bringing China-US relations back to the right track.”

Kissinger replied that it is a “great honor” to visit China, and thanked Xi for choosing to meet him in the same building where he met Chinese leaders for the first time, according to CCTV.

“The US-China relationship is of vital importance to the peace and prosperity of both countries and the world,” Kissinger was quoted as saying, vowing to make efforts to enhance mutual understanding between the two sides.

China's late paramound leader Deng Xiaoping met with former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Beijing on November 11, 1985.

Neal Ulevich/AP

The meeting comes after Kissinger met with China’s top diplomat Wang Yi and Defense Minister Li Shangfu, who has been under US sanction since 2018 over China’s purchase of Russian weapons.

The fact that Kissinger was granted an audience with Xi is indicative of how highly he is regarded by China’s leadership.

His previously unannounced trip overlapped with US climate envoy John Kerry’s high-profile visit to Beijing, which saw US and China resume climate talks that had been frozen for nearly a year.

Noticeably, Kerry, who is also a former US Secretary of State, was not granted a meeting with Xi, despite being a serving member of President Joe Biden’s current administration and anticipation by some observers beforehand that such a face to face could be on the cards.

The visit by Kissinger, who said he was in Beijing “as a friend of China,” followed a series of trips by US cabinet officials in recent weeks, including US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

Blinken was the only US official who secured a meeting with Xi.

US officials have stressed that Kissinger is acting in his capacity as a private citizen and not as an messenger for the Biden administration.

Xi’s meeting with Kissinger is another sign that for China, unofficial people-to-people relations are becoming more important than official ones in its interactions with the US, said Suisheng Zhao, director of the Center for China-US Cooperation at the University of Denver.

Zhao described the trend as “a return to the pre-Nixon years,” before the two countries established diplomatic ties.

Last month, Xi met with American entrepreneur and philanthropist Bill Gates in his first known one-on-one meeting with a Western business figure in years.

Xi called Gates an “old friend” and stressed that he was “the first American friend I’ve seen this year.”

Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, said Xi’s meetings are chosen purposefully to send a signal to the outside world.

“The message is very clear: Xi Jinping wants to meet with the pro-China people, who are willing to speak out for China,” he said. “It is a divide-and-conquer strategy.”

Wu noted that Xi also held a surprise meeting with former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in Beijing Monday, and praised Duterte for making a “strategic choice” to improve ties with Beijing when he was leader.

In addition to who Xi chooses to meet, the setting of the meetings is also a telling sign of the relationship, Wu added.

During his meeting with Blinken in June, Xi was positioned at the head of a table where the rest of the two delegations, including Blinken, sat facing each other on either side.

On Thursday, Xi and Kissinger were seated on the same level across a small tea table in a much more cordial setting.

“The two meetings are very different,” Wu said. “The Chinese are very skilled in shaping the narrative and optics.”

CNN’s Simone McCarthy contributed reporting.

CNN · by Nectar Gan · July 20, 2023

6. DOD Official Highlights Importance of Pacific Island Nations

DOD Official Highlights Importance of Pacific Island Nations

defense.gov · by Jim Garamone

The islands nations of the Pacific play a critical role in the U.S. strategic vision for the Indo-Pacific region, said Siddharth Mohandas, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia.

Mohandas testified before the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee on the national security implications of the Compacts of Free Association with the Republic of Palau, the Federal States of Micronesia and the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Speaking alongside witnesses from the State and Interior departments, he told the committee that the compacts are proof to the nations that the U.S. commitment to them is "ironclad."

Palau Photo Op

U.S. Air Force F-35A Lighting II pilots assigned to the 419th Fighter Wing and French Air and Space Force Dassault Rafale pilots pose for a photo at Roman Tmetuchl International Airport in Koror, Palau, July 7, 2023. The multinational team arrived in Palau for Northern Edge 23-2, a multilateral exercise that enhances interoperability and cooperation and tests defensive readiness in the Indo-Pacific region.

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Photo By: Air Force photo by 1st Lt. Michelle Chang

VIRIN: 230707-F-PM638-1463R

Construction Project

Local construction apprentice Jay Eliam, left, and Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class William Mathis, assigned to Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 1, set up batter boards during a school building project on Ebeye, Marshall Islands, April 13, 2017. NMCB 1 is forward deployed to execute construction, humanitarian and foreign assistance, special operations combat service support, and theater security cooperation in support of U.S. Pacific Command.

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Congress is working to renew the compacts the United States has with these Pacific nations. The compacts are up for renewal this year.

"The compact renewal comes at a time of unprecedented U.S. commitment to the Pacific Islands," Mohandas said. He noted that last year the Biden administration released the first Pacific Partnership Strategy, which prioritized broader and deeper engagement with the Pacific Islands. It also stated that the successful conclusion of the compact negotiations is a key objective.

The compacts define the relationship between the United States and the island nations. On defense, the compact allows the U.S. to operate in, and be responsible for protecting, the nations of the vast Pacific region. Of note, citizens of the compact nations, or Freely Associated States, serve in the U.S. armed forces. In fact, the Federated States of Micronesia has a higher enlistment rate per capita than any U.S. state.

China is seeking to supplant the United States in the region and is eyeing the compact states. China's leaders seek to overturn the rules-based international order that has maintained peace in the region since World War II.

"The most comprehensive challenge we face … is [China's] coercive and increasingly aggressive effort to change the status quo of the Indo-Pacific region and the international system to align with its interests," Mohandas said. "[China] seeks to challenge U.S. alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific and leverage its growing capabilities — including its economic influence — to coerce its neighbors and threaten their interests."

The United States is pushing forward with the Pacific Partnership Strategy in conjunction with regional allies. "We have made great progress toward renewing the compact agreements, and we've appreciated recent opportunities to engage with both Congressional members and staff on the importance of the renewal," Mohandas said. "The defense rights guaranteed by the compact agreements provide security not only for the compact states, but for the broader Pacific Islands region and for the U.S. homeland, as well."

Having the compacts in place is vital to DOD's ability to deter aggression and, if necessary, prevail in conflict, ensuring peace, security and stability in the Indo-Pacific, he said.

The compacts demonstrate the United States' long-term commitment to Pacific Island partners. They also provide value across priority areas like assured access for bilateral and multilateral training, exercises and force posture.

Signaling Sailor

Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Nelson Benetmorales signals a SH-60K helicopter aboard the USNS Mercy during Pacific Partnership, a humanitarian assistance and disaster relief preparedness mission in the Indo-Pacific, in Palau, July 19, 2022.

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Satellite Setup

Marines set up satellite communication equipment during Valiant Shield in Palau, May 31, 2022. The exercise is designed to sustain joint forces through detecting, locating, tracking and engaging units at sea, in the air, on land and in cyberspace.

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"The assured access guaranteed by the compact agreements protects the strategic approaches of the United States and allows us to operate freely in critical terrain in the Pacific," he said.

There are important bases in the region thanks to the compacts, including the U.S. Army's missile defense testing site at Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands. "We have also engaged in construction of the tactical multimission, over-the-horizon radar in Palau and the Department of Defense is working towards designating further key defense posture sites in Palau as well as in the Federated States of Micronesia to facilitate agile combat employment for the U.S. Air Force," Mohandas said.

Spotlight: Focus on Indo-Pacific Spotlight: Focus on Indo-Pacific: https://www.defense.gov/Spotlights/Focus-on-Indo-Pacific/

defense.gov · by Jim Garamone

7. Russia-Ukraine War: Missiles Hit Ukrainian Port City as U.N. Is Set to Discuss Russia’s Blockade

Current time in:

Kyiv July 21, 1:13 p.m.

Moscow July 21, 1:13 p.m.

Washington July 21, 6:13 a.m.

The LatestUpdated 

July 21, 2023, 5:43 a.m. ET30 minutes ago

30 minutes ago

Russia-Ukraine War

Missiles Hit Ukrainian Port City as U.N. Is Set to Discuss Russia’s Blockade

The New York Times · by Victoria Kim · July 21, 2023

Emergency workers on Thursday at the site of a destroyed building near the Odesa Port after a Russian attack.Credit...Libkos/Associated Press

Moscow struck granaries in Odesa, continuing its apparent campaign to incapacitate Ukraine’s ability to export food by sea.

Here’s what we’re covering:

• Russia again targeted grain facilities in Odesa in overnight attacks.
• Poland will move troops toward the Belarus border in response to Wagner training.
• The failed mutiny in Russia revived questions about Putin’s rule, the C.I.A. chief says.
• Mariupol State University has graduated its newest class after fleeing its devastated home city.
• Despite grain deal collapse, Putin and Erdogan are still relying on each other.
• Wheat prices remain high as concern grows about Black Sea instability and disruption to the grain supply.

Russia on Friday extended its apparent campaign to incapacitate Ukraine’s ability to ship food, striking granaries for the fourth straight night in the port city of Odesa, hours before the United Nations Security Council was scheduled to discuss the threat to the global food supply.

The dawn missile strike on Odesa, home to Ukraine’s busiest ports, injured two people and destroyed 100 tons of peas and 20 tons of barley, according to Oleg Kiper, the head of the regional military administration. Earlier this week, Ukraine said 60,000 tons of grain waiting to be loaded onto ships had been destroyed in a strike, enough to feed more than 270,000 people for a year, according to the World Food Program.

Odesa, a key part of the multinational deal allowing Ukrainian grain to reach world markets through the Black Sea, has been repeatedly bombarded since Russia said Monday that it was pulling out of the agreement. With the deal’s apparent demise, .

The State of the War

• A Barrage on Odesa: As Moscow resumed its blockade of ships carrying food from Ukraine after ending its participation in a deal that had allowed Ukraine to export its grain by sea, the Russian military bombarded Odesa, Ukraine’s largest port, and other shipping centers.
• Wagner Mutiny: The chief of Britain’s intelligence agency, MI6, said that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had “cut a deal” with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group, to end Prigozhin’s failed 36-hour rebellion in June.
• Military Aid: The United States will send $1.3 billion in financial assistance to Kyiv in order to purchase a host of new military equipment and ammunition.
• Crimea Bridge Attack: An apparent Ukrainian strike damaged an important Russian bridge linking the occupied Crimean Peninsula to mainland Russia.

A Polish soldier standing guard at the border with Belarus in Bialowieza, Poland, earlier this month.

Poland will move military forces to its eastern border with Belarus, after Minsk said its soldiers were being trained by Wagner mercenaries near there, a Polish defense official told the country’s state news agency.

Belarus’s Defense Ministry said on Thursday that its special operations units had been training with Wagner representatives near the city of Brest, three miles from the border with Poland, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

After considering the threats posed by Wagner’s presence, the head of Poland’s defense ministry decided to move forces to the east, Zbigniew Hoffmann, an official with the national security committee said, according to PAP, Poland’s state news agency.

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The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William J. Burns, in Washington in March.

In the most detailed public account yet given by a U.S. official, the director of the C.I.A. offered a biting assessment on Thursday of the damage done to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia by the mutiny of the Wagner mercenary group, saying the rebellion had revived questions about Mr. Putin’s judgment and his detachment from events.

Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, an annual national security conference, William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, said that for much of the 36 hours of the rebellion last month, Russian security services, the military and decision makers “appeared to be adrift.”

“For a lot of Russians watching this, used to this image of Putin as the arbiter of order, the question was, ‘Does the emperor have no clothes?’” Mr. Burns said, adding, “Or, at least, ‘Why is it taking so long for him to get dressed?’”

A worker at a grain processing facility near Lviv, Ukraine, last year. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said Afghanistan, Yemen, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Liberia and Haiti will be impacted.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

Russia’s disruption of Ukraine’s grain exports exacerbates hunger in some countries facing shortages, though as long as grain prices remain relatively stable, the crisis is unlikely to become catastrophic in the short term, aid officials said on Thursday.

Moscow this week terminated a deal under which Ukraine, one of the world’s major grain producers, was able to export its food crops in the face of an effective blockade of its ports by Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

For a year, the agreement had helped to stabilize grain prices and to ease a global food shortage. But the deal’s end has already caused grain prices to rise again and there is little doubt it will continue to create instability in grain markets and supply, aid officials said.

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In the before times, there were caps and gowns and canapés, but Mariupol State University could offer only a pared-down ceremony on Thursday for the class of 2023 on its campus in exile almost 400 miles from its ravaged home city.

Of the 500 graduates, only about 60 attended here in Kyiv to collect their diplomas in person at a new university home that is a work in progress. The rest took part online if they could, scattered by war around Ukraine and abroad.

It was a bittersweet moment for the graduates of Mariupol, a city that became synonymous with the war’s brutality and devastation before falling to the Russian invasion last year. Even in virtual form, the university has offered a sense of moving toward something beyond the war, and an oasis from the cruel realities they have all seen and felt, that were never really out of mind.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Moscow in 2020. Mr. Erdogan said his country would keep up diplomatic efforts to get Mr. Putin to return to the deal.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has stood apart from his NATO allies, keeping cozy relations with President Vladimir V. Putin, making demands of his Western allies and using wartime diplomacy to raise his own stature.

Now the Kremlin has undercut him, pulling out of a grain deal that Mr. Erdogan helped broker, helping to raise his international stature and stabilize global food prices. The Russian withdrawal came just days after the Turkish leader met warmly with President Biden and said Ukraine deserves “NATO membership with no doubt,” a view that crosses the reddest of Mr. Putin’s red lines.

Russian officials have asserted that the decision to pull out of the grain agreement, which allowed exports from Ukraine through the Black Sea, was about a failure to uphold the side of the deal that benefits Russia — easing sanctions on its own agricultural exports. They also warned that the Russian military would regard any ship bound for Ukraine to be a potential carrier of military cargo.

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Grain silos, mostly unused, in Marianske, in Ukraine’s Dnipro region, last month.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

As Black Sea-bound vessels clustered in the waters near Istanbul, wheat prices remained elevated on Thursday, up 13 percent since Monday, when Russia pulled out of a wartime agreement that had been considered critical to stabilizing global food prices.

The termination of the deal, which had permitted Ukraine to safely export its grain through the Black Sea, could have significant long-term consequences for grain supplies, said Alexis Ellender, a global analyst at Kpler, a commodities analytics firm. Despite robust grain harvests from exporters including Brazil and Australia, prices could become volatile.

“By not having Ukraine there as a supplier, we’re increasing the vulnerability of the global grain market to these shocks,” Mr. Ellender said. “In the short term, supplies are good, but longer term, if we get any more supply shocks, we’re more vulnerable in terms of the global market.”

The New York Times · by Victoria Kim · July 21, 2023

8. Pentagon AI more ethical than adversaries’ because of ‘Judeo-Christian society,’ USAF general says

Pentagon AI more ethical than adversaries’ because of ‘Judeo-Christian society,’ USAF general says

defenseone.com · by Audrey Decker

Lt. Gen. Richard Moore, Air Force deputy chief of staff for plans and programs, center, speaks at a Hudson Institute event on July 20, 2023. Hudson Institute via YouTube

The path to ethical AI is a “very important discussion” being held at DOD’s “very highest levels,” says service’s programs chief.

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July 20, 2023 05:28 PM ET

• Air Force
• AI & Autonomy

By Audrey Decker

An Air Force general said the Pentagon’s code of ethics surrounding the use of artificial intelligence is better than some other countries' because of the United States’ “Judeo-Christian” foundation.

“Regardless of what your beliefs are, our society is a Judeo-Christian society and we have a moral compass. Not everybody does, and there are those that are willing to go for the ends regardless of what means have to be employed, and we'll have to be ready for that,” Lt. Gen. Richard Moore, the Air Force's deputy chief of staff for plans and programs, said Thursday at a Hudson Institute event.

“What will the adversary do? It depends who plays by the rules of warfare and who doesn't. There are societies that have a very different foundation than ours,” Moore said.

The three-star spoke the same week as experts testified on Capitol Hill about the dangers of allowing China to beat the U.S. in the race to harness the power of AI.

They also came more than a year into the brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russia, whose leaders have justified the war as a defense of Christian society.

Moore said the Pentagon’s latest budget request takes a stab at exploring ethical AI through “several forms.”

“The first one is what do we think we're allowed to let AI do, the second one is how do we know how the algorithm made decisions and do we trust it, and the third one is at what point are we ready to let the algorithm start doing some things on its own that maybe we are or aren’t comfortable with.”

The path to using AI ethically is a “very important discussion” and is being held at the “very highest levels” of the Defense Department, Moore said.

In 2019, the Defense Innovation Board advisory group issued a report that urged Pentagon leaders to strive to make their AI systems responsible, equitable, traceable, reliable, and governable.

More recently, the U.S. has begun trying to rally other nations to agree to norms affecting military uses of AI.

Patrick Tucker contributed to this report.

9. Rich lode of EV metals could boost Taliban and its new Chinese partners

Please go to the link to view the maps/graphics: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/ev-lithium-afghanistan-taliban-china/?utm

Rich lode of EV metals could boost Taliban and its new Chinese partners

By Gerry Shih and Lorenzo Tugnoli 

July 20 at 9:00 a.m.

The Washington Post · by Gerry Shih · July 20, 2023

Correspondent Gerry Shih and photographer Lorenzo Tugnoli drove 15 hours from Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, along boulder-strewn roads to the remote northeast of the country to explore its lithium industry, hiking two hours up a mountain to reach the mine shafts. Shih is The Washington Post’s New Delhi bureau chief, responsible for covering much of South Asia, and Tugnoli is a Pulitzer Prize-winning contract photographer for The Post based in Barcelona.

CHAPA DARA, Afghanistan — Sayed Wali Sajid spent years fighting American soldiers in the barren hills and fertile fields of the Pech River Valley, one of the deadliest theaters of the 20-year insurgency. But nothing confounded the Taliban commander, he said, like the new wave of foreigners who began showing up, one after another, in late 2021.

Once, Sajid spotted a foreigner hiking alone along a path where Islamic State extremists were known to kidnap outsiders. Another time, five men and women evaded Sajid’s soldiers in the dark to scour the mountain. The newcomers, Sajid recalled, were giddy, persistent, almost single-minded in their quest for something few locals believed held any value at all.

“The Chinese were unbelievable,” Sajid said, chuckling at the memory. “At first, they didn’t tell us what they wanted. But then I saw the excitement in their eyes and their eagerness, and that’s when I understood the word ‘lithium.’”

A decade earlier, the U.S. Defense Department, guided by the surveys of American government geologists, concluded that the vast wealth of lithium and other minerals buried in Afghanistan might be worth $1 trillion, more than enough to prop up the country’s fragile government. In a 2010 memo, the Pentagon’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, which examined Afghanistan’s development potential, dubbed the country the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” A year later, the U.S. Geological Survey published a map showing the location of major deposits and highlighted the magnitude of the underground wealth, saying Afghanistan “could be considered as the world’s recognized future principal source of lithium.”

But now, in a great twist of modern Afghan history, it is the Taliban — which overthrew the U.S.-backed government two years ago — that is finally looking to exploit those vast lithium reserves, at a time when the soaring global popularity of electric vehicles is spurring an urgent need for the mineral, a vital ingredient in their batteries. By 2040, demand for lithium could rise 40-fold from 2020 levels, according to the International Energy Agency.

Afghanistan remains under intense international pressure — isolated politically and saddled with U.S. and multilateral sanctions because of human rights concerns, in particular the repression of women, and Taliban links to terrorism. The tremendous promise of lithium, however, could frustrate Western efforts to squeeze the Taliban into changing its extremist ways. And with the United States absent from Afghanistan, it is Chinese companies that are now aggressively positioning themselves to reap a windfall from lithium here — and, in doing so, further tighten China’s grasp on much of the global supply chain for EV minerals.

The surging demand for lithium is part of a worldwide scramble for a variety of metals used in the manufacture of EVs, widely considered crucial to the green-energy transition. But the mining and processing of minerals such as nickel, cobalt and manganese often come with unintended consequences — for instance, harm to workers, surrounding communities and the environment. In Afghanistan, those consequences look to be geopolitical: the potential enrichment of the largely shunned Taliban and another leg up for China in a fierce, strategic competition.

Sayed Wali Sajid, a Taliban commander who serves as governor of the Chapa Dara district of Konar province, is in charge of an area rich with minerals.

Around the time Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021, a boom shook the world’s lithium market. The mineral’s price skyrocketed eightfold from 2021 to 2022, attracting hundreds of Chinese mining entrepreneurs to Afghanistan.

In interviews, Taliban officials, Chinese entrepreneurs and their Afghan intermediaries described a frenzy reminiscent of a 19th-century gold rush. Globe-trotting Chinese traders packed into Kabul’s hotels, racing to source lithium in the hinterlands. Chinese executives filed into meetings with Taliban leaders, angling for exploration rights. In January, Taliban officials arrested a Chinese businessman for allegedly smuggling 1,000 tons of lithium ore from Konar province to China via Pakistan.

Clean cars, hidden toll

A series unearthing the unintended consequences of securing the metals needed to build and power electric vehicles

Taliban leaders have paused lithium mining and trading in recent months while they seek to negotiate a concession with a foreign firm, and the Chinese are seen as leading contenders. But even after a contract is awarded, extraction may not begin for years because of the challenge of bringing lithium to market, industry experts warn. There are no paved roads linking the craggy, mineral-rich mountains of northeast Afghanistan’s Konar and Nurestan provinces to the outside world, while abundant and more accessible reserves are found in countries such as Chile and Australia.

But what is certain, according to Afghans, Chinese and Americans alike, is that Afghanistan is in the midst of a sweeping transition after decades of war. And as long as the Taliban is ostracized by the West, they say, Afghanistan will drift by necessity, if not by choice, into the embrace of China.

“In an alternate universe, our projects could’ve been generating meaningful employment and tax revenue within years that would provide an economic base and empower the Afghan people to govern themselves,” said Paul A. Brinkley, the former U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense who oversaw the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations until he left in 2011 and the office disbanded.

Instead, Brinkley said, “we’ll have Chinese companies mining lithium to feed a supply chain that will ultimately sell it back to the West, all in a world where there’s simply not enough lithium.”

A Taliban checkpoint at the entrance to the Chapa Dara district of Konar province.

No one knew its value

Nesar Ahmad Safi trundled alongside the Pech River in a battered Toyota pickup, expounding on two forces that have long shaped life in Konar province: the war — and the mines.

“The Americans called it the Valley of Death,” he said, nodding toward the broad mouth of the Korengal Valley. Next to a bend in the rushing river were the tall gray walls of Nangalam military base, once the most remote outpost in the valley, now a vestige of the U.S. presence.

An hour past the abandoned base, the valley turned steep and rocky, and the snow-dusted mountains of adjacent Nurestan came into view. Safi pointed out dozens of small shafts that pierce the hillsides like dots of ink on brown parchment. Since antiquity, the mines have been a supplemental source of income for farming families, who extract precious stones such as quartz, tourmaline and kunzite, a glassy, purplish crystal, and sell them to the bazaars of Central and South Asia.

As they dig out high-quality kunzite, miners routinely discard heaps of milky rock. Locals called it “takhtapat” — waste kunzite. But geologists know it as spodumene, lithium-bearing ore. “No one knew the value of waste kunzite until Chinese businessmen started arriving,” said Safi, the former head of a village council who now works as a representative for local miners. “They were excited, then everybody got excited.”

Last year, Safi and local Afghans recalled, some Chinese traders bought as much ore as they could, sending brimming trucks down the valley’s bomb-cratered road. Other Chinese prospectors tested the rock with handheld spectrometers and voiced doubts that the lithium content was high enough to make industrial-scale mining viable, Safi said.

In the 1960s, Soviet geologists first reported significant lithium deposits in large crystal-laced rocks called pegmatites along the Hindu Kush range. After the U.S. invasion in 2001, U.S. Geological Survey teams working as part of the Pentagon task force ventured under Marine escort to southern Afghanistan’s salt-crusted lakes, where they found lithium content so high it rivaled the brine deposits of Chile and Argentina, some of the world’s biggest lithium producers. They also estimated, using aerial surveys, that Konar and Nurestan were rich in lithium-bearing rock, but the valleys were too dangerous to visit, said Christopher Wnuk, a former USGS geologist who participated in the Pentagon study. Even today, the exact size of Afghanistan’s lithium reserves remains undetermined.

“As a geologist, I have never seen anything like Afghanistan,” said Wnuk, who now works on private-sector mining projects in Asia and Africa. “It may very well be the most mineralized place on earth. But the basic geologic work just hasn’t been done.”

Workers on a lunch break outside a mine in the Parun Valley in Nurestan province.

Even if Afghanistan’s mountains prove to hold high-quality lithium, the mines will be cost-efficient only if new roads, railways, ore-processing plants and power plants are built around them.

Not a problem, say China’s strategic thinkers.

“Afghanistan lacks an industrial base, [but] they have great mineral resources, and no Westerners can compete with the Chinese when it comes to building infrastructure and tolerating hardship,” said Zhou Bo, a retired People’s Liberation Army senior colonel who is now an international security expert at Tsinghua University.

In a rare interview, Shahabuddin Delawar, Afghanistan’s minister of mines and a senior Taliban leader, told Washington Post journalists that just 24 hours earlier, representatives of a Chinese company had been in his office presenting the details of a $10 billion bid that included pledges to build a lithium ore processing plant and battery factories in Afghanistan, upgrade long-neglected mountain roads and create tens of thousands of local jobs. His ministry identified the Chinese company as Gochin.

Delawar did not detail the timeline for awarding any mining concessions. He said a commission of senior Taliban officials led by Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy prime minister for economic affairs, “will weigh whatever good proposals we receive,” adding that the government would welcome Western and even U.S. bidders if sanctions were dropped. U.S. sanctions currently prohibit all transactions with the Taliban, with exceptions for humanitarian aid.

“We always said if the United States takes its soldiers and killing machines out of Afghanistan, it too could invest here,” he said. “The demand for oil is decreasing, but the demand for lithium is only going up. We have 2.5 million tons in Nurestan alone. Extract it, and Afghanistan can be one of the richest countries in the world.”

By 2030, when about 60 percent of all cars in China, Europe and the United States will be electric, the world is expected to face a lithium shortfall, said Henry Sanderson, executive editor of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and the author of “Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green.”

“China’s lithium sector is in a really enviable position: They dominate the processing, they’ve got the battery materials and factories, but that whole supply chain goes defunct if you don’t have raw material to feed the industrial machine,” Sanderson said. “That’s why they’re going to Afghanistan. They need to secure as much as they can.”

Workers gather scrap metal for steel production at a Chinese-owned steel mill in Kabul.

The Chinese gold rush

The first message that greets every passenger who walks out of Kabul’s international airport isn’t in English or Dari. It’s written in giant Chinese characters.

“The Belt and Road Initiative is the bridge spanning China and Afghanistan,” reads a massive billboard facing the terminal, referring to China’s global infrastructure program. “Welcome to China Town. Incubate in an industrial park. Let your investments take root.”

The billboard was erected by Yu Minghui, a fast-talking entrepreneur who hails from a village near the famous Shaolin Temple in China’s Henan province and first came to Kabul in April 2002, shortly after the U.S.-led invasion. He was 30 years old then, he said, and arrived with little more than a basic knowledge of Persian and searing ambition.

Today, Yu co-owns Afghanistan’s first steel mill and has permits for a 500-acre industrial park outside Kabul. The China Town project he advertises at the airport is a 10-story tower that Yu sees as a kind of Chinese chamber of commerce and showroom for imported goods. It sells power tools, diesel generators and even office tables that Chinese companies might need once they enter Afghanistan and start mining. In his office at China Town, Yu showcases chunks of Afghan lapis lazuli and lithium — along with his political savvy. In one framed picture, he’s striding alongside former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani’s brother Hashmat. In a more recent photo, Yu poses with a turbaned man who helped overthrow Ghani: the Taliban’s current commerce minister, Haji Nooruddin Azizi.

In late 2021, Yu recalled, he saw an influx of Chinese seeking opportunities in Afghanistan’s postwar vacuum, just as he did 20 years earlier. Within months, according to Yu and other Chinese residents, more than 300 of their compatriots had descended on Kabul. Some carried passports from Pakistan, Sierra Leone or other countries where they had immigrated to mine. Others showed up carrying a few packs of instant noodles in their backpacks, “wanting to get into the battery business,” Yu recalled.

“It felt like every Chinese wanted to come,” said Wang Quan, who has been mining gold in Afghanistan since 2017. “There were articles on the internet about how the Russians and Americans always said there was lithium here. At that time, lithium prices were truly amazing.”

Yu Minghui, a Chinese businessman who has spent many years in Afghanistan, co-owns the country's first steel mill.

Many Chinese packed into the downtown Guiyuan Hotel, which had a buzzing hot pot restaurant on the ninth floor. Yu Xiaozhang, the Chinese owner of a Kabul guesthouse, said she had three mah-jongg tables running round-the-clock in her basement. The boom even benefited the community of about 100 Afghan interpreters in Kabul who speak fluent Mandarin, thanks to the Chinese government-run Confucius Institute at Kabul University. They were enlisted to help arrange lithium purchases in Konar.

Then, late last year, the Guiyuan Hotel was struck by a bombing, which injured dozens. The Islamic State, which has targeted Chinese in Afghanistan, asserted responsibility. The attack raised new concerns about the safety of foreign businesspeople, adding to wider worries over the country’s investment climate. Soon after, the Afghan government imposed what it said was a temporary ban on private lithium sales while negotiating with mining companies and crafting new laws to regulate what had become a frenzied free-for-all.

Raffaello Pantucci, an expert on Chinese-Central Asian relations at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said the large-scale Chinese investment that the Taliban seeks may not be imminent, or transformative. In 2007, Afghanistan granted a $3 billion, 30-year lease on the Mes Aynak copper mine to the state-owned China Metallurgical Group Corp., yet little work has been done so far.

“The big Chinese companies are still very cautious,” Pantucci said. “If anything, China-Afghan economic relations will be driven not by the state, but by small private actors on the ground, just having a go.”

These days, a small, dedicated group of Chinese miners is still in Kabul waiting for the lithium trade to resume.

One of them is Yue, a gruff, chain-smoking native of Manchuria who has mined in Pakistan, Russia and Indonesia. He came to Afghanistan in late 2021 and plans to stay, he explained, because the Taliban is working hard to ensure foreigners’ security and even assigned him his own bodyguards. Afghanistan’s mineral potential is too great to walk away from, he added.

“After this many years of conflict, Afghanistan’s resources are untouched,” said Yue, who did not give his first name. “No mining licenses have really been given. There’s no place like it on Earth.”

Yue spends most days playing mah-jongg at a guesthouse, which serves Lanzhou beef noodles prepared by Afghan cooks. He’s still holding meetings with prospective investors. But mostly, he’s killing time until mining begins again.

“It won’t be frozen forever,” he said one afternoon in the courtyard of his home. “I’m happy to wait.”

A miner works in a remote, high-altitude gemstone mine in Nurestan province.

The view from behind a glacier

In the inky underground darkness, a miner pressed his diesel-powered drill against the hard earth, caking everything — hair, clothes, lips — in a layer of fine white dust. Another stooped to fill a handcart with rocks, then pushed it 70 yards along the watery shaft, back into the light.

Hussain Wafamel squatted outside, where he examined the haul.

He held up a streaky, green stone: tourmaline, the kind of gemstone he and his men were seeking. Then he picked up a white rock — takhtapat, lithium ore — and chucked it over his shoulder, sighing with regret.

Last year, after Chinese buyers first arrived, the price of lithium ore was driven up to about 50 cents a kilogram, providing a windfall, Wafamel said. It was a shame that the Taliban had cracked down on the trade, he said, because the mountains here in Nurestan were full of the stuff.

“We have an entire mine of pure takhtapat,” said Wafamel, a squat and muscular former Afghan special forces soldier who mines with six men from his old unit. “We could be extracting a ton of it a day if it weren’t banned. Instead, we have to leave it.”

A miner crouches by machinery used to power a sledgehammer and pump fresh air into a gemstone mine in Nurestan.

In some ways, the remote mine where Wafamel and his men toil day and night captures the practical challenges — and the dreams of progress — that lie in Afghanistan’s lithium wealth. His mine in the Parun Valley is hidden behind a glacier, high above the Pech River at an elevation of 12,000 feet. Outside his mine, in a cramped clearing overlooking a sheer drop, Wafamel complained about his fickle generator and his shoddy drill bits, the need to transport everything by donkey and the never-ending struggle to make ends meet.

Until two years ago, Wafamel and his team were each making $280 a month in the Afghan army, he said. They lost their jobs when the government fell. In a poor valley ringed by pine-covered mountains, where farming barely yielded enough food to keep families alive, the only option was to go to the mountains. So the men largely taught themselves what types of rock held rich veins, how to set sachets of ammonia explosives and where to drill.

“We want a bigger team and proper equipment, someone to show me how to use this,” Wafamel said, banging an oil-stained machine. “I’d be desperate for a foreign company to come.”

In recent weeks, Wafamel said, he has pleaded with government officials to allow lithium mining to resume. He said he was encouraged by their response that a deal may be signed with a foreign company, possibly this year, and optimistic that peace would engender investment. “If a villager can walk to the next province without trouble,” he said, “why wouldn’t foreigners want to invest here?”

A half-day’s drive down the mountain, not too far from the Valley of Death, Sajid, the 38-year-old Taliban commander who serves as governor of lithium-rich Chapa Dara district, was even more bullish.

Eighteen months ago, Sajid was flustered by the influx of Chinese prospectors. But these days, Sajid said, he’s “desperate” for them to return and bring jobs for locals and new infrastructure. Sitting in his compound with two captured American Humvees in the parking lot, Sajid said he was hearing promising whispers. A friend, a fellow Taliban governor, recently learned from senior officials in Kabul that a deal may be signed with Chinese investors in just a few months.

Sajid was already counting on a new asphalt road in his district. He was looking forward to new bridges.

And he relished the prospect of America losing again in his remote corner of the Hindu Kush, this time in a contest over minerals. “Sometimes I’m happy America sanctioned Afghanistan because American companies can’t invest in our lithium,” he said. “Actually, I believe it is the revenge of God.”

Mirwais Mohammadi in Chapa Dara, Pei-Lin Wu in Taipei, Taiwan, and Rick Noack in Paris contributed to this report.

About this story

Reporting by Gerry Shih. Photography by Lorenzo Tugnoli.

Design by Lucy Naland. Development by Irfan Uraizee. Graphic by Hannah Dormido. Data analysis by Steven Rich. Research by Cate Brown.

Alan Sipress was the lead editor. Editing by Courtney Kan, Vanessa H. Larson, Olivier Laurent, Joe Moore and Martha Murdock.

Additional support from Steven Bohner, Matt Clough, David Dombrowski, Stephanie Hays, Gwen Milder, Sarah Murray, Andrea Platten, Tyler Remmel and Erica Snow.

Clean cars, hidden toll

As the global demand for electric cars begins to outpace the demand for gas-powered cars, Washington Post reporters set out to investigate the unintended consequences of a global EV boom. This series explores the impact of securing the minerals needed to build and power electric vehicles on local communities, workers and the environment.

The Washington Post · by Gerry Shih · July 20, 2023

10. 3-to-5 years from now is the danger time when the US could face both China and Russia

3-to-5 years from now is the danger time when the US could face both China and Russia - Breaking Defense

RUSI’s Justin Bronk has an idea of what Europe should be doing to help the US in the Indo-Pacific, and it doesn’t include sending the Charles De Gaulle.

breakingdefense.com · by Barry Rosenberg · July 20, 2023

Members of Charlie Battery, 5th Battalion, 7th Air Defense Artillery pose with one of their Patriot missile launchers in Poland in late 2022. Photo courtesy of US Air Force.

In this Q&A with Justin Bronk, senior research fellow for Airpower and Technology on the Military Sciences team at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a London-based defense and security think tank, we discuss: a scenario when China and Russia simultaneously present challenges designed to break NATO’s Article 5; the state of European air forces in terms of future production and fleet mixture in light of Ukraine; and how the air chiefs see all-domain operations.

Breaking Defense: The threat to Ukraine is clear, but what are the threats to NATO countries? The nuclear threat has always been there, so what’s changed?

Bronk: There are two different categories. There is the inadvertent escalation threat, which is essentially nuclear. Even though neither side wants the conflict, somebody does something stupid, it escalates, we don’t find a way out of it and everything ends up nuclear, because Russia has no capacity to fight NATO conventionally, at least for now.

As long as Ukraine continues as an active conflict, Russia probably does not have the capacity to pose a conventional threat to Europe. That’s the inadvertent nuclear escalation threat.

The longer term, more serious threat for NATO is the three-to-five-year outlook with Russia. As the ongoing high-intensity conflict shakes out — whether Ukraine does extremely well in the upcoming offensive and takes back lots or even all of its territory, or if they don’t take back nearly that much or they take back some but ultimately they run out of steam — the outlook from the end of this year onwards is probably a frozen conflict one way or the other.

The problem for NATO in that context — the threat that I see that we need to be ready for — is in the three-to-five-year context. The war in Ukraine in its current form probably can’t last that long in active phase because both sides will exhaust too much of their manpower and ammunition stocks. Maybe [that’s not the case], but we’d have to have a total transformation of the industrial base for military production to support that.

Once there is some form of either essentially frozen conflict or even a Ukrainian victory, it’s unlikely that we will see Russia stop mobilizing and stop trying to recruit and retrain large numbers of new troops. Even in the scenario where Ukraine has won and the war is uneasily over, they will still feel very vulnerable. They will still feel like they’ve degraded a huge amount of their conventional military both in terms of its actual potential and its perceived potential. They will have a huge incentive to keep trying to generate a much larger standing military.

Justin Bronk is senior research fellow for Airpower and Technology on the Military Sciences team at RUSI, Royal United Services Institute.

They’ve put their industry on a war footing, or at least they’re trying to as of the back end of 2022. They’re very unlikely to go back on that either. Particularly once the shooting stops, or at least pauses for a time, China is more likely to feel able politically to openly enable them to re-arm, because China at the geostrategic level requires Russia to still pose a credible military threat in Europe to tie down at least European and ideally American military forces in Europe.

The danger is — if something happens in the Indo-Pacific, either over Taiwan, on the Korean peninsula, the South China Sea, any of these potential flashpoints — you have either an active conflict or a very serious military standoff between the US and its allies and China.

That is exactly when you would expect Russia to have its best chance, and therefore most opportunity and motivation to try and reestablish conventional deterrence against NATO by a short, sharp win, as well as break Article 5 [that calls for collective defense], which has always been their key foreign policy [goal] so that they can go back to dealing with their neighbors on a bilateral basis where Russia is big and the neighbors are small — almost back to that old Baltic scenario where the Russians don’t need to try and invade large portions of the country.

All they need to do to break NATO is to demonstrate that Article 5 is a bluff. If I were them, I would take a very small, insignificant strip of marshy forest somewhere on the border, put a couple corps of armored troops behind it and loads of air defense and say, “We’re not going any further” and insert [BS] justification.

Breaking Defense: Claims like ‘We’re protecting Russian speakers here in the area.’

Bronk: Exactly, but to do so when America is fully occupied in the Indo-Pacific. That to me is the big threat. Because not only does Russia have every incentive to do that from the perspective of a lot of the Russian security apparatus, but also China would have a strong incentive to try and push Russia to do that because they will need to divert American attention, they will need to keep European forces in Europe, they will need to basically take away the US ability to concentrate its own allied support in the Indo-Pacific.

People often ask, ‘What is the threat? Is the next big one Russia or China?’ My worry is it’s both. It’s a concurrent crisis in Europe because something has started in the Indo-Pacific. That’s where Europeans are going to have to be able to carry their own weight.

That basically requires being able to roll back the IADs. If we can roll back the integrated air defense system, then the Russian army does not pose a threat. NATO has enough tac air that that’s just not a problem if we can roll back the IADs. If NATO in Europe has that credible capability, the Russians probably won’t try. If we don’t, and currently we don’t without the US doing most of the heavy lifting, that’s much more of a problem.

Airmen with the Air National Guard Air Force Reserve Command Test Center load a Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) on a pre-block F-16 for a test launch in mid-2022. This is the first time a JASSM has been launched from a pre-block F-16, a model flown by Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve units, and could potentially be flown by Ukrainian pilots. Photo courtesy of US Air Force.

Breaking Defense: How would you describe the present state of European air forces compared to the day before Russia’s attack on Ukraine? I don’t necessarily mean in aircraft production but in how priorities have changed for future production, fleet mixture.

Bronk: You’re seeing a real split in Europe. Some countries are clearly changing their combat air procurement to specifically try and address the gaps in European ability to deter and if necessary defeat, because that’s what you need to be able to do to deter Russia in the three-to-five-year timeframe.

Those are the countries you see that are recommitting or committing newly to large numbers of F-35, or increasing their F-35 buys, and that are spending large amounts of money to order lots of standoff munitions: JASSM, JASSM-ER, AGM SLAM-ER, SPEAR 3.

In other words, they’re buying equipment that is expensive but is specifically designed to either do that SEAD/DEAD Suppression and Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses role, the destruction being the key bit, or at least to be able to operate credibly in the absence of that task being fully completed.

On the other hand, you see countries where the procurement dynamics really haven’t shifted, where, yes, there might be some attempts to plus-up procurements for a few munitions types, but broadly the focus still remains on the next generation of systems, whether that be SCAF [Système de combat aérien du futur] or Tempest GCAP [Global Combat Air Programme], which even with the best will in the world will not be available until the late 2030s at the earliest, and therefore don’t actually help with plugging any of those gaps for the next decade.

Indeed, in many cases actually hinder it because the investment that you need to put in upfront to get the ball rolling for the R&D and the initial production orders for those next-generation platforms is competing directly with the money that you would need to plus up what we currently have in order to plug the gaps.

You also see one or two examples of countries finally taking delivery of platforms that are great for supporting special forces in permissive counterinsurgency air environments, just as we’ve all stopped doing that.

Breaking Defense: Staying on the subject of deterrence, I’m hearing from some in industry — because they’re getting tasked with this — that the new definition of deterrence is replenishing American stockpiles and simultaneously having the ability to keep arming Ukraine in a high-intensity war, while at the same time developing the next generation of weaponry like hypersonics.

Bronk: Who is best at deterrence in Europe? Finland. What does Finland have? It can mobilize 270,000 troops in a week and exercises it, and has ammunition reserves for 1,000 artillery guns plus for six months of high intensity combat. They understand deterrence.

Breaking Defense: And Russia knows that.

Bronk: They understand it happens in the Russian mind because that’s who you’re deterring. So what do the Russians count? Well, they count guns, they count stores, they count tanks. Now, we might think of that as terribly outdated, but deterrence happens in their mind, not in ours.

Breaking Defense: What’s the European view of the conflict in the Indo-Pacific? Is it viewed as mainly an American/Australian problem?

Bronk: For the US, it’s the Indo-Pacific. The threat and the demand signal that they’re looking at there is just overwhelming at the moment with the resources at hand. In the US, that is driving everything increasingly in terms of whether that be current ops tempo, exercise, scheduling, threat scenarios, and certainly forward investment.

Part of that is a political demand signal that says essentially the rest of NATO needs to do more to lock down Europe if things go off in the Indo-Pacific. Because, quite frankly, even if we had forces available, if the Americans are overmatched in time and space in large parts of the Pacific, then Europeans certainly are, especially if they’re trying to project from Europe.

For example, what’s the most effective way Europe can contribute to an effective carrier battle group in the Indo-Pacific theater? It’s not by putting the Charles De Gaulle or the Queen Elizabeth there, it’s by putting the Charles De Gaulle or the Queen Elizabeth in the Eastern Med or the Gulf so that the American carrier group there can go off to the Indo-Pacific.

In terms of what I hear behind the scenes, essentially the American demand signal is: ‘Europe, you have to stand up and be able to backfill your own backyard so that we can handle the threat in the Indo-Pacific.’ And if you’ve got excess capacity after you do that, then great, by all means come out and help us in the Indo-Pacific.

I think there’s a frustration internally about the public, continued insistence from a lot of European countries of trying to send tiny force packages with huge logistical burdens to the Indo-Pacific as a, quote-unquote, warfighting capability.

There’s a huge amount of good political and diplomatic efforts that the European NATO nations can contribute to the Indo-Pacific, but in terms of warfighting capacity I think there’s a bit of US frustration there.

Breaking Defense: JADC2 for multi-domain operations and interoperability are top of mind right now in the US. How is MDO, which is known as Multi Domain Integration in the UK MoD, viewed in Europe?

Bronk: I think there’s two main overarching differences between the US and European NATO, and I’d include Canada as non-US NATO. In terms of multi-domain operations, the first difference is that the US is planning to deter. To deter it must be credibly capable of winning a war with China with capabilities and at a scale that other NATO members just don’t have and don’t face. The imperative from the American side is much more pressing and also much better defined.

The second main difference, apart from money, is that the US has vast amounts of actual real credible kinetic conventional military capability. Joining it all up, or as much of it as you can, in such a way as to make more efficient use of all the different sensors and shooters across all the domains in real time, promises a massive increase in overall capability. Because you’re essentially multiplying an enormous force and increasing its effectiveness, the return is huge.

Whereas a lot of European countries are essentially engaging with discussions, investments, and research in multi-domain operations in the hope that by doing these things on a small scale, they will somehow create capability from effectively nothing. In other words, they risk generating the enabling function without any force to enable.

Ultimately, you can have the best-connected company of soldiers and two jets in the world, and they might be phenomenally effective until they run out of ammunition, but they’re not going to amount to much.

I think that the risk for Europe is that they invest in and talk about multi-domain operations and those enabling cross-domain C2 and networking architectures as a way to avoid talking about the fact that they just don’t have enough ammo, planes, tanks, troops, bases, air defense.

breakingdefense.com · by Barry Rosenberg · July 20, 2023

11. Scoop! Why Ben from Ben & Jerry’s blames America for war in Ukraine

Every day I am grateful to live in a free country where anyone can express their idiot opinions without fear.

“I wholly disapprove of what you say - and will defend to the death your right to say it.”

- Voltaire

Scoop! Why Ben from Ben & Jerry’s blames America for war in Ukraine

Your favorite ice cream mogul is campaigning against countering Vladimir Putin's aggression.

BY NICOLAS CAMUT

IN BRUSSELS

Illustrations by hitandrun for POLITICO

Politico · July 20, 2023

Ben Cohen wasn’t talking about ice cream. He was talking about American militarism.

At 72, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is bald and bespectacled. He looks fit, cherubic even, but when he got going on what it was like to grow up during the Cold War, his tone became less playful and more assertive — almost defiant.

“I had his image of these two countries facing each other, and each one had this huge pile of shiny, state-of-the-art weapons in front of them,” he said, his arms waving above his head. “And behind them are the people in their countries that are suffering from lack of health care, not enough to eat, not enough housing.”

“It’s just crazy,” he added. “Approaching relationships with other countries based on threats of annihilating them, it’s just a pretty stupid way to go.”

It wasn’t a new subject for the famously socially conscious ice cream mogul; Cohen has been leading a crusade against what he sees as Washington’s bellicosity for decades. It’s just that with the war in Ukraine, his position has taken on a new — morally questionable — relevance.

Cohen, who no longer sits on the board of Ben & Jerry’s, isn’t just one of the most successful marketers of the last century. He’s a leading figure in a small but vocal part of the American left that has stood steadfast in opposition to the United States’ involvement in the war in Ukraine.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin sent tanks rolling on Kyiv, Cohen didn’t focus his ire on the Kremlin; a group he funds published a full-page ad in the New York Times blaming the act of aggression on “deliberate provocations” by the U.S. and NATO.

Following months of Russian missile strikes on residential apartment blocks, and after evidence of street executions by Russian troops in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, he funded a 2022 journalism prize that praised its winner for reporting on “Washington’s true objectives in the Ukraine war, such as urging regime change in Russia.”

In May, Cohen tweeted approvingly of an op-ed by the academic Jeffrey Sachs that argued “the war in Ukraine was provoked” and called for “negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.”

Ben Cohen outside the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington this month, before getting arrested | Win McNamee/Getty Images

I set up a video call with Cohen not because I can’t sympathize with his mistrust of U.S. adventurism, or because I couldn’t follow the argument that U.S. foreign policy spurred Russia to attack. I called to try to understand how he has maintained his stance even as the Kremlin abducts children, tortures and kills Ukrainians and sends thousands of Russian troops to their deaths in human wave attacks.

It’s one thing to warn of NATO expansion in peacetime, or to call for a negotiated settlement that leaves Ukrainian citizens safe from further aggression. It’s another to ignore one party’s atrocities and agitate for an outcome that would almost certainly leave millions of people at the mercy of a regime that has demonstrated callousness and cruelty.

Given the scale of Russia’s brutality in Ukraine, I wanted to understand: How does one justify focusing one’s energies on stopping the efforts to bring it to a halt?

Masters of war

Cohen’s political awakening took place against the background of the Cold War and the political upheaval caused by Washington’s involvement in Vietnam.

He was 11 during the Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Part of the reason he enrolled in college was to avoid being drafted and sent to the jungle to fight the Viet Cong.

When I asked how he first became interested in politics, he cited Bob Dylan’s 1963 protest song “Masters of War,” which takes aim at the political leaders and weapons makers who benefit from conflicts and culminates with the singer standing over their graves until he’s sure they’re dead.

“That was kind of a revelation to me,” Cohen said. Behind him, the sun filtered past a cardboard Ben & Jerry’s sign propped against a window. “I hadn’t understood that, you know, there were these masters of war — essentially I guess what we would now call the military-industrial-congressional complex — that profit from war.”

Cohen saw people from his high school get drafted and never come back from a war that “wasn’t justified.” As he graduated in the summer of 1969, around half a million U.S. troops were stationed in ‘Nam. Later that year, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched on Washington, D.C. to demand peace.

It was only much later, while doing “a lot of research” into the “tradeoffs between military spending and spending for human needs,” that Cohen came across a 1953 speech by Dwight D. Eisenhower, which foreshadowed the U.S. president’s 1961 farewell address in which he coined the phrase “military-industrial complex.”

A Republican president who had served as the supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower warned against tumbling into an arms race. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said.

“That is a foundational thing for me, very inspiring for me, and captures the essence of what I believe,” Cohen said.

“If we weren’t wasting all of our money on preparing to kill people, we would actually be able to save and help a lot of people,” he added with a chuckle. “That goes for how we approach the world internationally as well,” he added — including the war in Ukraine.

Pierre Ferrari, a former Ben & Jerry’s board member who was with the company from 1997 to 2020, said Cohen’s view of the world was shaped by the events of his youth.

“We were brought up at a time when the military, the government was just completely out of control,” he said. “We’re both children of the sixties, the Vietnam War and the new futility of war and the way war is used by the military-industrial complex and politics,” Ferrari added, pointing to the peace symbol he wore around his neck.

Jeff Furman, who has known Cohen for nearly 50 years and once served as Ben & Jerry’s in-house legal counsel, acknowledged that his generation’s views on Ukraine were informed by America’s misadventures in Vietnam.

“There’s a history of why this war is happening that’s a little bit more complex than who Putin is,” he said. “When you’ve been misled so many times in the past, you have to take this into consideration when you think about it, and really, really try to know what’s happening.”

Ice-cold activism

Politics has been a part of the Ben & Jerry’s brand since Cohen and his partner Jerry Greenfield started selling ice cream out of an abandoned gas station in 1978.

The company’s look and ethos were pure 1960s; they named one of their early flavors, Cherry Garcia, after the lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, whose psychedelic riffs formed the soundtrack of the hippy counterculture.

Social justice was one of the duo’s secret ingredients. For the first-year anniversary of the gas station shop’s opening, they gave away free ice cream for a day. On the flyers printed to promote the event was a quote from Cohen: “Business has a responsibility to give back to the community from which it draws its support.”

In 1985, after the company went public, they used some of the shares to endow a foundation working for progressive social change and committed Ben & Jerry’s to spend 7.5 percent of its pretax profits on philanthropy.

In the early years, the company instituted a five-to-one cap on the ratio between the salary of the highest-earning executive and its lowest-paid worker, dropping it only when Cohen was about to step down as CEO in the mid-1990s and they were struggling to find a successor willing to work for what they were offering.

Most companies try to separate politics and business. Cohen and Greenfield cheerfully mixed them up and served them in a tub of creamy deliciousness (the company’s rich, fatty flavors were in part driven by Cohen’s sinus problems, which dulls his taste).

In 1988, Cohen founded 1% for Peace, a nonprofit organization seeking to “redirect one percent of the national defense budget to fund peace-promoting activities and projects.” The project was funded in part through sales of a vanilla and dark-chocolate popsicle they called the Peace Pop.

It was around this time that Cohen opened Ben & Jerry’s in Russia, as “an effort to build a bridge between Communism and capitalism with locally produced Cherry Garcia,” according to a write-up in the New York Times. After years of planning, the outlet opened in the northwestern city of Petrozavodsk in 1992. (The company shut the shop down five years later to prioritize growth in the U.S., and also because of the involvement of local mobsters, said Furman, who was involved in the project.)

Cohen, with co-founder Jerry Greenfield, actress Jane Fonda and other climate activists, in front of the Capitol in 2019 | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images

Even after Ben & Jerry’s was bought by Unilever in 2000, there were few progressive causes the company wasn’t eager to wade into with a campaign or a fancy new flavor.

The ice cream maker has marketed “Rainforest Crunch” in defense of the Amazon forest, sold “Empower Mint” to combat voter suppression, promoted “Pecan Resist” in opposition to then-U.S. President Donald Trump and launched “Change the Whirled” in partnership with Colin Kaepernick, the American football quarterback whose sports career ended after he started taking a knee during the national anthem in protest of police brutality.

More recently, however, the relationship between Cohen, Greenfield and Unilever has been rockier. In 2021, Ben & Jerry’s announced it would stop doing business in the Palestinian territories. Cohen and Greenfield, who are Jewish, defended the company’s decision in an op-ed in the New York Times.

After the move sparked political backlash, Unilever transferred its license to a local producer, only to be sued by Ben & Jerry’s. In December 2022, Unilever announced in a one-sentence statement that its litigation with its subsidiary “has been resolved.” Ben & Jerry’s ice cream continues to be sold throughout Israel and the West Bank, according to a Unilever spokesperson.

Cohen himself is no stranger to activism: Earlier this month, he was arrested and detained for a few hours for taking part in a sit-in in front of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was protesting the prosecution of the activist and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.

Unilever declined to comment on Cohen’s views. “Ben Cohen no longer has an operational role in Ben & Jerry’s, and his comments are made in a personal capacity,” a spokesperson said.

Ben & Jerry’s did not respond to a request for comment.

The world according to Ben

For Cohen, the war in Ukraine wasn’t just a tragedy. It was, in a sense, a vindication. In 1998, a group he created called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities published a full-page ad in the New York Times titled “Hey, let’s scare the Russians.”

The target of the ad was a proposal to expand NATO “toward Russia’s very borders,” with the inclusion of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Doing so, the ad asserted, would provide Russians with “the same feeling of peace and security Americans would have if Russia were in a military alliance with Canada and Mexico, armed to the teeth.”

Cohen is by no means alone in this view of recent history. The American scholar John Mearsheimer, a prominent expert in international relations, has argued that the “trouble over Ukraine” started after the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest when the alliance opened the door to membership for Ukraine and Georgia.

In the U.S., this point has been echoed by progressive outlets and thinkers, such as Jeffrey Sachs, the linguist Noam Chomsky, or most recently by the American philosopher, activist and longest-of-long-shots, third-party presidential candidate Cornel West.

“We told them after they disbanded the Warsaw Pact that we could not expand NATO, not one inch. And we did that, we lied,” said Dennis Fritz, a retired U.S. Air Force official and the head of the Eisenhower Media Network — which describes itself as a group of “National Security Veteran experts, who’ve been there, done that and have an independent, alternative story to tell.”

It was Fritz’s organization that argued in a May 2023 ad in the New York Times that although the “immediate cause” of the “disastrous” war in Ukraine was Russia’s invasion, “the plans and actions to expand NATO to Russia’s borders served to provoke Russian fears.”

The ad noted that American foreign policy heavyweights, including Robert Gates and Henry Kissinger, had warned of the dangers of NATO expansion. “Why did the U.S. persist in expanding NATO despite such warnings?” it asked. “Profit from weapons sales was a major factor.”

Cohen and Greenfield announce a new flavor, Justice Remix’d, in 2019 | Win McNamee/Getty Images

When I spoke to Cohen, the group’s primary donor, according to Fritz, he echoed the ad’s key points, saying U.S. arms manufacturers saw NATO’s expansion as a “financial bonanza.”

“In the end, money won,” he said with a resigned tone. “And today, not only are they providing weapons to all the new NATO countries, but they’re providing weapons to Ukraine.”

I told Cohen I could understand his opposition to the war and follow his critique of U.S. foreign policy, but I couldn’t grasp how he could take a position that put him in the same corner as a government that is bombing civilians. He refused to be drawn in.

“I’m not supporting Russia, I’m not supporting Ukraine,” he said. “I’m supporting negotiations to end the war instead of providing more weapons to continue the war.”

The Grayzone

I tried to get a better answer when I spoke to Aaron Maté, the Canadian-born journalist who won the award for “defense reporting and analysis” that Cohen was instrumental in funding.

Named after the late Pierre Sprey, a defense analyst who campaigned against the development of F-35 fighter jets as overly complex and expensive, the award recognized Maté’s “continued work dissecting establishment propaganda on issues such as Russian interference in U.S. politics, or the war in Syria.”

Maté, who was photographed with Cohen’s arm around his shoulders at the awards ceremony in March, writes for the Grayzone, a far-left website that has acquired a reputation for publishing stories backing the narratives of authoritarian regimes like Putin’s Russia or Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. His reports deny the use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria, and he has briefed the U.N. Security Council at Moscow’s invitation.

When I spoke to Maté, he was friendly but guarded. (The Pierre Sprey award noted that “his empiricist reporting give the lie to the charge of ‘disinformation’ routinely leveled by those whose nostrums he challenges.”)

He was happy however to walk me through his claims that, based on statements by U.S. officials since the start of the war, Washington is using Kyiv to wage a “proxy war” against Moscow. Much of his information, he said, came from Western journalism. “I point out examples where, buried at the bottom of articles, sometimes the truth is admitted,” he explained.

He declined to be described as pro-Putin. “That kind of ‘guilt-by-association’ reasoning is not serious thinking,” he said. “It’s not how adults think about things.” When I asked if he believed that Russia had committed war crimes in Ukraine, he answered: “I’m sure they have. I’ve never heard of a war where war crimes are not committed.”

Still, he said, the U.S. was responsible for “prolonging” the war and “sabotaging the diplomacy that could have ended it.”

‘Come to Ukraine’

The best answer I got to my question came not from Cohen or others in his circle but from a fellow traveler who hasn’t chosen to follow critics of NATO on their latest journey.

A self-described “radical anti-imperialist,” Gilbert Achcar is a professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS University of London. He has described the expansion of NATO in the 1990s as a decision that “laid the ground for a new cold war” pitting the West against Russia and China.

But while he sees the war in Ukraine as the latest chapter in this showdown, he has warned against calls for a rush to the negotiating table. Instead, he has advocated for the complete withdrawal of Russia from Ukraine and “the delivery of defensive weapons to the victims of aggression with no strings attached.”

“To give those who are fighting a just war the means to fight against a much more powerful aggressor is an elementary internationalist duty,” he wrote three days after Russia launched its attack on Kyiv, comparing the invasion to the U.S.’s intervention in Vietnam.

Achcar said he understood the conclusions being drawn by people like Cohen about Washington’s interventions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But, he said, “it leads a lot of people on the left into … [a] knee-jerk opposition to anything the United States does.”

What they fail to account for, however, is the Ukrainian people.

“In a way, part of the Western left is ethnocentric,” said Achcar, who was born in Senegal and grew up in Lebanon. “They look at the whole world just by their opposition to their own government and therefore forget about other people’s rights.”

Cohen, with late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon in 2011 | Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Ben & Jerry’s

His point was echoed in the last conversation I had when researching this article, with Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and a former economy minister.

“It doesn’t really matter who promised what to whom in the 1990s,” Mylovanov said. “What matters is that there was Mariupol and Bucha, where tens of thousands of people were killed.”

Mylovanov taught economics at the University of Pittsburgh until he returned to Ukraine four days before Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“Things like war are difficult to understand unless you experience them,” he said. “This is very easy to get confused when you are sitting, you know, somewhere far from the facts and you have surrounded yourself by an echo chamber of people and sources that you agree with.”

“In that sense,” he added. “I invite these people to come to Ukraine and judge for themselves what the truth is.”

Politico · July 20, 2023

12. ChatGPT is creating new risks for national security

Excerpts:

This stance echoes the U.S. Defense Department’s call for an improved capability to “monitor, analyze, characterize, assess, forecast, and visualize” the information environment, as detailed in its 2016 “Strategy for Operations in the Information Environment.” To implement this, military and intelligence agencies will need specialized units dedicated to information warfare, which can provide the crucial expertise needed to interpret and act on the collected data.

The U.S. government also needs a robust warning system that simultaneously promotes truth and exposes disinformation. Timely and effective warnings can help protect the public from false narratives, significantly curtailing the impact of disinformation campaigns. The power of truth is a formidable tool in this context; it serves as an effective countermeasure against the corrosive effects of falsehoods.

Lastly, there is a need to reinforce strategic partnerships with international allies. The global nature of malign disinformation campaigns mandates that counter-efforts be equally far-reaching. These partnerships provide invaluable local knowledge and foster trust, both of which can greatly enhance the credibility of warnings and bolster societal resilience against disinformation.

ChatGPT is creating new risks for national security

c4isrnet.com · by Christopher Mouton · July 20, 2023

Large language models like ChatGPT and Claude offer a wide range of beneficial applications. However, there are significant risks associated with their use that demand a coordinated effort among partner nations to forge a solid, integrated defense against the threat of malign information operations.

Large language models can assist in generating creative story plots, crafting marketing campaigns and even creating personalized restaurant recommendations. However, they often produce text that is confidently wrong. This design has profound implications, not only for routine use of artificial intelligence, but also for U.S. national security.

AI-generated content can exhibit a phenomenon known as “truthiness” — a phrase coined by television host Stephen Colbert in the early 2000s to describe how information can feel right. This concept emphasizes that, despite lacking factual accuracy, content with a highly coherent logical structure can influence how smart, sophisticated people decide whether something is true or not.

Our cognitive biases mean well-written content or compelling visuals have the power to make claims seem more true than they are. As one scholar who has studied “truthiness” describes it: “When things feel easy to process, they feel trustworthy.”

Adversaries of the U.S. can manipulate the potential for AI models to sound “truthy” — crafting coherent, well-structured and persuasive sentences, which can mimic human writing — to gain an advantage. The internet, with its global reach, has created a potent medium for foreign interference through subversive incursions of truthiness.

State actors are leveraging digital technologies to execute hostile information campaigns, using online tools and information operations to promote their interests. State actors can manipulate cognitive fluency bias and truthiness to shape the sociopolitical arena, expanding the potential misuse of AI-driven language models for malign information operations, large-scale spear phishing campaigns and increasingly believable deepfake media.

The exploitation of cognitive fluency bias in information operations can give misinformation a deceptive veneer of credibility, contributing to the destabilization of political systems and of societal coherence.

Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, said during a May 25 speech the U.S. will “have to address in particular what we worry about most [from] foreign cyber influence operations, the kinds of activities that are already taking place by the Russian government, the Chinese, the Iranians.”

Russian hackers’ crude deepfake attempt to depict Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calling for Ukrainians to lay down their arms was easily identifiable. But it’s now evident the issue is no longer academic. The reality looms that malign videos, forged documents and counterfeit social media accounts could transition from being seen as crude to conveying a deceptive semblance of authenticity.

A surge in subversion campaigns dependent on disinformation and the heightened efforts by malign actors underscore the necessity for a strategic response from the U.S. and its allies. To combat these trends, U.S. policymakers need a comprehensive strategy, built upon vigilant monitoring, proactive warnings and international collaboration.

The cornerstone of this strategy should be the vigilant monitoring of the information environment. Strengthened by advancements in AI and machine learning, continuous monitoring is vital for the early detection and neutralization of disinformation campaigns.

This stance echoes the U.S. Defense Department’s call for an improved capability to “monitor, analyze, characterize, assess, forecast, and visualize” the information environment, as detailed in its 2016 “Strategy for Operations in the Information Environment.” To implement this, military and intelligence agencies will need specialized units dedicated to information warfare, which can provide the crucial expertise needed to interpret and act on the collected data.

The U.S. government also needs a robust warning system that simultaneously promotes truth and exposes disinformation. Timely and effective warnings can help protect the public from false narratives, significantly curtailing the impact of disinformation campaigns. The power of truth is a formidable tool in this context; it serves as an effective countermeasure against the corrosive effects of falsehoods.

Lastly, there is a need to reinforce strategic partnerships with international allies. The global nature of malign disinformation campaigns mandates that counter-efforts be equally far-reaching. These partnerships provide invaluable local knowledge and foster trust, both of which can greatly enhance the credibility of warnings and bolster societal resilience against disinformation.

Christopher Mouton is a senior engineer at the think tank Rand and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

13. What Impact has Prigozhin's Mutiny really had on Putin?

Excerpts:

Even if no one moves against him and he retains power, Putin is likely to become someone he never imagined: an enfeebled leader, labeled a war criminal, clinging to power in a country still under sanctions, and surrounded by a coterie of sycophants and officials more worried about their own futures than his.

I doubt that anyone among his followers at home and enablers abroad, if being candid, would seriously dispute that the war was a tragic miscalculation. It’s purported ideological rationales have evaporated; it is now just a contest of violence. This is tragic not only in and of itself but for what it has thrown away for Russia and for Putin. With whatever faults of governance and behavior, Putin had led Russia to influence beyond its actual weight and was treated, even if with reluctance or distaste, as an equal by most other global leaders. It is now almost impossible for him to escape pariah status and because of that, to lead Russia back to that position of influence.

Bismarck once said that the secret of politics was “to make a good treaty with Russia”. Chances are there’s not a very long line these days.

What Impact has Prigozhin's Mutiny really had on Putin?

thecipherbrief.com

July 20th, 2023 by John McLaughlin, |

John E. McLaughlin is the Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) where he teaches a variety of courses and conducts research.

McLaughlin served as Acting Director of Central Intelligence from July to September 2004 and as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence from October 2000 to July 2004. He was a US Army Officer in the 1960s, with service in Vietnam. He comments on foreign affairs in various media, testifies in Congress, and writes frequently on intelligence and foreign affairs in a variety of publications.

View all articles by John McLaughlin

CIPHER BRIEF EXPERT VIEW — Much debate is now underway about whether Russian president Vladimir Putin will sustain lasting political damage from the June 24 revolt led by Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Some analysts cautiously hint that Putin is hurt badly, many say not much, and most say it’s just too soon to tell.

To be sure, there is much we don’t know, and predicting anything in Russia is perilous business — but my long-held view is that the war from the very beginning, unleashed trends likely to loosen Putin’s grip on power. Exactly how, when and whether this happens, will be affected by many things including fortunes in the war, the condition of the Russian economy, and what support he can maintain from partners such as China. But assuming the continued deterioration that I expect, the key questions are how long it will take and what form it will take over time – an easing out or ouster, a resignation, or perhaps most likely, a weakened and ineffective leader clinging to power in a drained and dispirited nation that lacks both the power and influence it had earlier in Putin’s tenure.

The backdrop of course, is the rebellion launched on June 24 by Prigozhin. The Wagner leader briefly took over Russia’s war command headquarters at Rostov-on-Don and moved his forces to within 120 miles of Moscow. Prigozhin’s message was as important as his actions; he charged that corrupt, ambitious politicians and generals were sending young Russians to die in a war with the false rationale that Ukraine and NATO were threatening Russia.

Prigozhin’s actions threaten Putin’s reputation, authority, and fortunes at three levels: – societal, among elites, and in the Ukraine war.

At the societal level, Prigozhin’s rant unleashed what I came to think of during previous work on authoritarian societies, as a virus of truth. Much of the Russian population may be numbed by endless falsehoods spinning out of Putin’s propaganda machine. But in authoritarian societies, a person of influence saying out loud what many suspect or think but fear to say – that the war makes no sense and has been badly mismanaged — gives tacit permission to others to engage in more candid discussion than the regime permits. Ultimately, fewer people believe. (I saw this happen often in the late 1980s, as Soviet rule began to crumble in Moscow’s East European satellite states).

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This falls on fertile ground. That’s what I took from a conversation I had recently at a conference with a well-informed Russian person (the conference did not permit attribution). This person, fresh from long residency in Russia (and speaking before Prigozhin’s mutiny), estimated that at most, about 25 percent of the population supported the war, about 25 percent opposed it, and the remaining 50 percent understood that the war is wrong — but just didn’t want to think about it. ‘That 50 percent takes refuge in the government’s version without totally buying it’, my contact explained. I think the government’s post-mutiny propaganda blitz is targeted on that group. But for those who want to look away, Prigozhin’s actions focus attention in a way that nothing has before. Inevitably, Russians will discuss what he did and take positions on it.

Putin’s strategy has been to give people only two choices: silence or support. It is now much harder to enforce silence.

At the second level, that of the Russian elites, they have just seen someone with arguably elite status, challenge Putin and get away with it (at least so far). While Prigozhin has never been in Putin’s tight inner circle, he had been a close ally and supporter of the president. Exactly why Prigozhin is free to roam about unpunished and to meet with Putin remains a mystery, assuming any of this is true. Since the mutiny, the only Prigozhin sighting that has been reported has come from a grainy video seemingly out of Belarus (in which Prigozhin continues to denounce the Russian military leadership. Regarding Prigozhin’s survival, the theory that makes the most sense to me is that Prigozhin’s Wagner Group is simply too important for Putin to push aside, given its success in Ukraine and deployments in Syria, Libya, Sudan, Mali and the Central African Republic – where it generally acts on behalf of Russia’s interests.

Mapping Putin’s inner circle is difficult but reporting over years spotlights seven or eight figures, mostly former intelligence service colleagues, personal security officers, and business chiefs. None speak publicly but we are starting to see reports of insecurity and doubt at this level about Putin’s strategy — and pessimism about the outcome of the war.

The mutiny also sparked doubts among business leaders and others about whether the security services remain loyal to Putin, given their seeming inability to stop Prigozhin’s forces moving toward Moscow – and the appearance of resignation or cooperation conveyed by their posture, as Prigozhin moved into Russian command facilities at Rostov-on-Don. All of this has surely raised doubt for Putin himself about the fidelity of his support among those he needs to sustain power.

The loyalty of business and political elites to Putin has rested on the assumption that his tight vertical control of the government protects their privileges and enriches them. Prigozhin, in other statements, asserts that the regime finds a way to seize businesses and distribute the spoils among an elite group of oligarchs – a system I’ve heard described also by a Russian business person victimized by the practice. But Putin comes out of these last few weeks looking wobbly. It is simply hard to believe that the class that relies on his “system” is not shaken and anxious about the future.

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Third, Prigozhin’s rebellion will leave its mark on the war itself. From the beginning, it was clear that Russian forces suffered shortfalls in logistics, leadership, and command and control. Their weakness on these measures is one of the reasons that the Wagner Group’s strong performance in Bakhmut (one of Russia’s few clear cut victories) earned Prigozhin such credibility and influence.

But the major impact of the mutiny and aftermath on the war, is that they will further weaken the intangible but crucial factor: the will to fight.

The deficit on the Russian side is well-documented in testimony from defectors and POWs and in open source radio conversations intercepted early in the war, in which troops excoriated their commanders their training, a lack of supplies and Putin himself.

Later in the war, Russian POWs spoke of being ‘deceived’ about the justification for the war. There is no reason to think that events since then have diminished their cynicism. In fact, few things undermine an army’s morale more than evidence of division, confusion, and weakness at the top of the chain. This was seen most recently in public comments by dismissed Major General Ivan Popov, a respected and more conventional figure, who joins Prigozhin in sharply condemning senior commanders for dishonesty and politicking.

Absorbing all of this, I found myself recalling the depressing effect on soldiers in Vietnam in 1968, as we watched assassinations, protest, dysfunction, and turbulence in American politics – which made it doubly hard to understand and focus on the mission or to believe what leaders told us about that war.

In gauging Putin’s future, we are handicapped by the limited precedent for leadership change in post-Soviet Russia. In Soviet days, the communist party Politburo acted when a leader was ill or dying (Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko) or politically faltering (Khrushchev). In the Russia we’ve known since 1991, governments changed either with Boris Yeltsin’s resignation in 1999, or with a series of increasingly less fair elections. Given the electoral strictures Putin has in place, we are unlikely to see him voted out.

If the war remains disastrous for Russia, support among military and security officials at various levels might erode to the point where Putin lacks the power base essential to sustaining an autocracy. I have imagined elsewhere that a group drawn from such a cohort might act as an informal politburo and inform Putin that he should retire while he can preserve some status and take care of his family. But working against this may be the hesitancy of opponents and rivals and the tendency we’ve seen toward sycophancy among his advisors. And there is a low likelihood in modern Russia, of East European style mass uprisings.

Even if no one moves against him and he retains power, Putin is likely to become someone he never imagined: an enfeebled leader, labeled a war criminal, clinging to power in a country still under sanctions, and surrounded by a coterie of sycophants and officials more worried about their own futures than his.

I doubt that anyone among his followers at home and enablers abroad, if being candid, would seriously dispute that the war was a tragic miscalculation. It’s purported ideological rationales have evaporated; it is now just a contest of violence. This is tragic not only in and of itself but for what it has thrown away for Russia and for Putin. With whatever faults of governance and behavior, Putin had led Russia to influence beyond its actual weight and was treated, even if with reluctance or distaste, as an equal by most other global leaders. It is now almost impossible for him to escape pariah status and because of that, to lead Russia back to that position of influence.

Bismarck once said that the secret of politics was “to make a good treaty with Russia”. Chances are there’s not a very long line these days.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to [email protected] for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

14. US military tests new smartphone app that could help shoot down drones

As an aside, at some point we are going to evolve where the smartphone will be adapted as major instrument or tool of warfighting.

US military tests new smartphone app that could help shoot down drones

CARPE Dronvm was put through its paces at McEntire Joint National Guard Base and Poinsett Range in South Carolina this week.

BY

JON HARPER

JULY 20, 2023

defensescoop.com · by Jon Harper · July 20, 2023

Special task forces under U.S. Central Command tested a new smartphone app this week that could help the U.S. military crowdsource efforts to defeat enemy unmanned aerial systems.

The tool, known as CARPE Dronvm, was put through its paces at McEntire Joint National Guard Base and Poinsett Range in South Carolina, according to a Defense Department release.

The technology pursuit is being spearheaded by U.S. Air Forces Central’s Task Force 99 and U.S. Army Central’s Task Force 39, which — along with Naval Forces Central’s Task Force 59 — are experimenting with cutting-edge tech to address operational challenges facing American troops in the Middle East and elsewhere.

U.S. forces and those of its allies and partners have come under attack from drones, and they are looking for new capabilities to counter them.

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The new smartphone app was developed by MITRE Corp. with Pentagon funding. Troops can use it to take photos of drones they spot and then feed that information to air defense centers that could task weapons to shoot down the unmanned aerial systems. The concept is similar to Ukraine’s ePPO initiative that’s been used to defeat Russian drones.

“What the Ukrainians did, they built a cellphone application … that basically helps the Ukrainian military identify aerial threats. Where the citizens with a cell phone can take a picture of a UAS, a missile, [or] whatever is flying, and transmit data back to an operational center to help augment, you know, kind of radar data they may be collecting there at the Ukrainian level. So that’s kind of the concept,” Col. Ryan Stamatis, the commander of ARCENT’s Task Force 39, told DefenseScoop in an interview earlier this year.

“We’ve taken the application to ARCENT and continue to refine it and experiment with that,” he said. The ultimate aim is to “help operationalize that in a broader way across the theater, within the military and beyond.”

During this week’s test of CARPE Dronvm, soldiers used government-provided cellular devices to capture images of an unmanned aerial system and assess the app’s functionality and capability. Officials say the tech performed well.

“The CARPE Dronvm experiment, or proof of principle, was a huge success for ARCENT,” Maj. Travis Valley, a Task Force 39 operations officer, said in a statement. “This was the largest experiment ARCENT has conducted to date. We expanded the experiment footprint, covering 50 kilometers, with multiple individuals in the area using the CARPE Dronvm app. This was all to prove the CARPE Dronvm app works. It did, in fact it exceeded my expectations on the simplicity of use and the program’s drone detection ability. This has the potential as a Force Protection multiplier, adding another tool to help protect Soldiers in a deployed environment.”

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Air Force Lt. Col. Steven Norris, chief of AFCENT’s counter-drone cell, said with this type of technology “every single warfighter can help sense and warn, creating a comprehensive layered defense that will tie into our existing command and control architecture and increase awareness of threats in the region.”

defensescoop.com · by Jon Harper · July 20, 2023

15. When Failed Coups Strengthen Leaders

"That which does not kill me..."

"If you take a shot at the king,...." 

It seems to me one of the only ways for Ukraine to assure victory might be to have Putin ousted. But this makes it seem less likely.

Excerpts:

Indeed, the number of people with the power to play Prigozhin’s role might not be as high as it seems. As used in the Western media today, “Russian oligarch” is something of a misnomer. Oligarchs, in the traditional definition, have power. However, those Russians often described as oligarchs do not have power, but merely exercise delegated authority. Whether it is the siloviki (officials or those with a background in the security services), heads of state-owned enterprises (mainly technocrats), or those with limited territorial authority (such as Kadyrov), their power ultimately derives from the presidency rather than an independent base. As one analyst noted, this is true for rich businessmen as well since “wealthy Russians depend on political approval, not vice versa.” Arguably, Prigozhin signified a potential genuine oligarch thanks to his direct command of the Wagner Group, but even he is ultimately dependent on the Russian state.

Prigozhin lacked any meaningful institutional support for his effort, with no one from Putin’s inner military or intelligence circle visibly defecting. Prigozhin’s call for the sacking of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov has been ignored so far. Since the mutiny, both men have appeared on video despite hopes by Prigozhin for their immediate sacking, signaling a desire to close ranks in Moscow. Nevertheless, perceived apathy by some elites could still be punished. Furthermore, as is common after failed revolts, changes can and likely will be made. As the Council on Foreign Relations’ Thomas Graham noted, “In the aftermath of the rebellion, we should expect to see a government reshuffling. Someone will have to take the blame for not nipping the [Wagner] rebellion in the bud.”

The rhetoric by Putin about the possibility of civil war suggests that the Kremlin might be willing to take major actions in the medium to long term. While allowing Prigozhin to move to Belarus and not face any criminal charges might seem like a major climb down, it does not mean that Putin will not take further actions later. The fact that the Russian government did not use armed force to suppress the revolt but instead preferred a peaceful resolution is not a new tactic. In fact, in places such as Syria and the Central African Republic, Russian officials have repeatedly negotiated agreements with local rebels, ranging from disengagement to safe corridors. This strategy has helped Damascus and Bangui consolidate their power — often in conjunction with more brutal measures later on. Putin’s June 29th meeting with Prigozhin in the Kremlin could very well be part of such a strategy.

The hopes that the Wagner rebellion will bring down Putin seem to reflect a degree of wishful thinking that has plagued much Western coverage of Russia. Indeed, Putin’s fall has been predicted as far back as the March 2012 presidential elections. Government responses to something as unnerving as a rebellion range from the emotional to the rational, from carefully thought out to instinctive. As a result, this might well be the moment Putin makes a fatal misstep. But precedent suggests the odds are against it.

When Failed Coups Strengthen Leaders - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Naman Karl-Thomas Habtom · July 21, 2023

After the abrupt end of the aborted Wagner mutiny on June 24, Western media was ablaze with speculation that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “weakened” and “humiliated.” Some commentators went as far as suggesting that the failed uprising represented the “final chapter” of Putin’s rule.

Unfortunately for these optimists, history suggests their expectations might be misplaced. In fact, failed coups often help rulers consolidate their power. Scholars Joan Timoneda, Abel Escribà-Folch, and John Chin suggest four reasons: failed coups help identify internal threats, demonstrate the reliability of elite support, push elites to further rally around the ruler, and deter would-be challenges by revealing the strength of the incumbent leader. The experiences of coup plotters from ancient Rome to modern-day Turkey help show how all these factors can play out. Looking at past examples, alongside Putin’s ongoing response to the mutiny he faced, suggests that whatever observers might hope for, Putin could now be harder to oust than ever.

Putsches Past

A brief historical survey shows how this failed coup might help Putin and why its consequences are anything but predestined. The attempt by members of the Turkish military to remove their president in 2016 backfired tremendously. The assassination of an Austrian dictator in 1934 as part of a putsch did little to shake the slain leader’s newly established political system. Similarly, a large popular revolt in 1991 did not succeed in removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Each failed attempt to alter the status quo did not simply fail but ultimately reinvigorated the existing political structures. This could very well be the case in Russia as well.

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Here, comparativists might ask whether the events that transpired on June 23–24 really count as a coup. Much remains unknown about what happened, making categorization more complicated. So far, Wagner’s efforts appear to be a hybrid event, seeking to subvert the military chain of command (a mutiny), promising that Russia “will have a new president soon” (a coup), and, in Putin’s eyes, threatening a civil war (a rebellion). What all these definitions have in common, however, is that they seek to undermine the existing power system. In the Russian Federation, this power system is heavily centralized and inextricably tied to the presidency. This means that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s actions can effectively be analyzed as a coup attempt, even if he was serious when he said the Wagner Group “went to demonstrate our protest, and not to overthrow the government in the country.”

Seizing the Opportunity: Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Having recently won yet another election and thereby extending his twenty-year rule, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan knows a thing or two about the consequences of a failed coup. On July 15, 2016, coup plotters dropped bombs on the parliament, kidnapped the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and fired on civilians in the streets of Istanbul and Ankara. In the end, the bloodiest coup attempt in the country’s history cost the lives of 251 people while injuring more than 2,200 others.

Seven years later, however, Erdogan remains firmly in power. Instead of being weakened, the Turkish president capitalized on the moment, which he called “a gift from god.” In the nine months that followed the coup attempt, more than 113,000 people were detained with more than 47,000 arrested and charged. These figures, which later swelled to 160,000 detained and 77,000 arrested, included thousands from the police, the military, the civil service, and the judiciary. Reporters Without Borders also documented the arrest of journalists, closure or seizure of publishing houses, confiscation of passports, and cancellation of press cards.

It is not unusual for some leaders, including those like Muammar Gaddafi who came to power through a coup, to neuter their militaries in a bid to stave off future challenges. However, Erdogan chose not to follow suit. Since 2016, he has been largely unencumbered in running foreign and domestic policy. The Turkish military has intervened in Syria and Iraq while the Turkish arms sector continues to grow. For the incumbent in the Kremlin, the ability to survive a coup attempt and proceed to assert oneself militarily and confidently could be a useful precedent.

Failed Successes: Engelbert Dollfuss

On occasion, a coup attempt may achieve its goal by removing (or eliminating) a ruler while still fundamentally failing in the objective of regime change. In these cases, the survivors quickly heed the lesson that might have benefited their predecessor. In 1933, for example, the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss established a dictatorship under the banner of his Fatherland Front after declaring “the self-elimination of parliament.” He did this, in part, because he feared the electoral chances of the Austrian Nazis following their sister party’s successful takeover of Germany. In 1934, with backing from Berlin, the Austrian Nazis launched the July Putsch, in which Dollfuss was assassinated. But his death proved insufficient to achieve the Nazis’ objectives. Dollfuss was succeeded by Kurt von Schuschnigg, who managed to suppress the revolt with the aid of the police, military, and pro-government paramilitaries.

The failed putsch had the unintended effect of actually strengthening Austria’s dictatorship. The regime was barely over a year old and its constitution less than three months old when Dollfuss died. But it received a new lease on life after surviving the putsch. Schuschnigg was able to crack down even more, arresting 260 Nazis in the Viennese police force. The coup attempt backfired not just internally but also internationally. Thanks to the failure, Austria strengthened its relationship with fascist Italy, which backed Austrian independence and helped deter a direct German intervention.

This leads to a bigger point. Many observers mistakenly attribute Moscow’s every decision to Putin personally. But even if he were taken out of the picture, the complex structure that he has constructed could very well endure. Tatiana Stanovaya has argued that “the regime may prove to be more resilient, drawn-out, and potentially radical than Putin himself.” Without a complete purge of the security services, the media, and the economy, Putinism could still survive even an effective coup. There is no evidence that whoever replaces Putin would simply surrender unilaterally in Ukraine and fully withdraw instead of intensifying the conflict.

Doubling Down: The Death of Caesar

Ancient history provides similar examples. When Brutus and his confederates conspired to assassinate Julius Caesar, there was likely little doubt that the dictator would die. However, the conspirators, according to Appian of Alexandria, were “envious of [Caesar’s] great power and desiring to restore the government of their fathers.” But the belief that their deed would be popularly acclaimed proved to be dangerously naïve. Roman historian Suetonius wrote that instead, “the populace ran from [Caesar’s] funeral, with torches in their hands, to the houses of [the assassins] Brutus and Cassius.” The civil war unleashed by the murder not only resulted in the demise of Caesar’s enemies but also propelled forward key supporters like his trusted lieutenant Mark Antony and his posthumously adopted son Octavian. Ultimately, Octavian would go on to affirm Caesar’s autocratic rule when he became Rome’s first emperor under the name Augustus.

Caesar’s clemency was well known — he had previously pardoned Brutus — but this trait was not taken up by his successors, who learned from the slain leader’s mistakes. During the Second Triumvirate, Mark Antony in particular was keen to use proscription to target his enemies, famously ordering Cicero’s right hand cut off and put up for display. Later Augustus would exile those he deemed subversive. In other words, the tyranny Caesar’s assassins ostensibly feared was in fact accelerated due to their own actions.

When the Kremlin announced it would abandon criminal prosecution of participants in the rebellion and allow Wagner members to join the Russian military, return home, or move to Belarus, many observers were surprised. Since then, though, media reports suggests that the Federal Security Service is continuing its investigations. Meanwhile, state-controlled Russian media continues to discredit Prigozhin. This suggests that, even if he is not yet ready to fight on two fronts, Putin does not want to repeat the mistake Caesar made with Brutus.

Securitization: Saddam Hussein

Coups are built on the assumption that an existing government or its leader is weak. By failing, coups can inadvertently alert leaders to this weakness. Aware of an existential threat to the state or their person, these leaders may shift from worrying about things like the economy or health care to self-preservation, sacrificing the country’s interests for the sake of securitization.

After being pushed out of Kuwait in February 1991, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was suddenly confronted by a revolt that at one point left fourteen of the country’s eighteen provinces out of his control. Over the course of March, Iraqi security forces cracked down and by early April had largely squashed what remained of the uprisings. Isolated internationally, ruined financially, and weakened militarily, Saddam Hussein seemed to be out of luck. But the Tikriti managed to resist internal and external pressures for a dozen more years.

Not surprisingly, the 1990s represented a different phase in Saddam’s rule. He was now facing internal and external existential threats simultaneously during a period of relative weakness. During the 1970s, he had primarily focused on improving the country domestically, including developing Iraq’s educational and health infrastructure. During the 1980s, his focus was external, dominated by his conflict with revolutionary Iran. The 1990s, however, were almost wholly defined by concerns to the viability of his leadership. In 1998, Washington passed the Iraq Liberation Act, which made regime change in Baghdad official policy and authorized the president to provide Iraqi opposition groups with weapons and training. This failed to bring down the regime, but it heightened Saddam’s efforts to exert control during the final years of his rule.

Prigozhin’s critique of the Russian military establishment clearly resonates with some Russians, particularly those who think the war in Ukraine is not being waged either hard or effectively enough. Polling suggests that a not-insignificant portion of the general population sympathized with Prigozhin’s criticism even if they did not approve of his actions. The Kremlin now has reason and opportunity to try to address this weakness before any other challenger seeks to exploit it.

Paths for Putin

It remains to be seen what steps the Kremlin will take in order to prevent a repeat of June 24. While the mutiny came as a surprise to many, the Russian government was already — if belatedly — trying to rein in the Wagner Group. Precipitating the uprising was the Ministry of Defense’s announcement that members of private military companies would need to sign contracts directly with the ministry itself by July 1. The fallout from the putsch has complicated efforts; mutineers can now choose to go to Belarus, where a Wagner base is reportedly being constructed. On the other hand, some efforts are accelerating. Wagner’s heavy weaponry is being transferred to the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.

Comparing the Wagner rebellion with the fragmentation of the late Western Roman Empire, ancient military historian Bret Devereaux asked, “If you are a Russian oligarch right now, what lesson did you just learn about the value of having your own private army?” His question was rhetorical, suggesting every rich Russian would now want one as a tool to gain leverage with the state. But the opposite could prove truer. Prigozhin has likely ruined this possibility — or at least made it harder for any imitators to repeat his effort at armed bargaining. Moving forward, Putin would be smart to prevent any comparable entities from emerging. Other independent volunteer battalions, such as the Akhmat special forces unit led by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, are already being integrated into the Russian military.

Indeed, the number of people with the power to play Prigozhin’s role might not be as high as it seems. As used in the Western media today, “Russian oligarch” is something of a misnomer. Oligarchs, in the traditional definition, have power. However, those Russians often described as oligarchs do not have power, but merely exercise delegated authority. Whether it is the siloviki (officials or those with a background in the security services), heads of state-owned enterprises (mainly technocrats), or those with limited territorial authority (such as Kadyrov), their power ultimately derives from the presidency rather than an independent base. As one analyst noted, this is true for rich businessmen as well since “wealthy Russians depend on political approval, not vice versa.” Arguably, Prigozhin signified a potential genuine oligarch thanks to his direct command of the Wagner Group, but even he is ultimately dependent on the Russian state.

Prigozhin lacked any meaningful institutional support for his effort, with no one from Putin’s inner military or intelligence circle visibly defecting. Prigozhin’s call for the sacking of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov has been ignored so far. Since the mutiny, both men have appeared on video despite hopes by Prigozhin for their immediate sacking, signaling a desire to close ranks in Moscow. Nevertheless, perceived apathy by some elites could still be punished. Furthermore, as is common after failed revolts, changes can and likely will be made. As the Council on Foreign Relations’ Thomas Graham noted, “In the aftermath of the rebellion, we should expect to see a government reshuffling. Someone will have to take the blame for not nipping the [Wagner] rebellion in the bud.”

The rhetoric by Putin about the possibility of civil war suggests that the Kremlin might be willing to take major actions in the medium to long term. While allowing Prigozhin to move to Belarus and not face any criminal charges might seem like a major climb down, it does not mean that Putin will not take further actions later. The fact that the Russian government did not use armed force to suppress the revolt but instead preferred a peaceful resolution is not a new tactic. In fact, in places such as Syria and the Central African Republic, Russian officials have repeatedly negotiated agreements with local rebels, ranging from disengagement to safe corridors. This strategy has helped Damascus and Bangui consolidate their power — often in conjunction with more brutal measures later on. Putin’s June 29th meeting with Prigozhin in the Kremlin could very well be part of such a strategy.

The hopes that the Wagner rebellion will bring down Putin seem to reflect a degree of wishful thinking that has plagued much Western coverage of Russia. Indeed, Putin’s fall has been predicted as far back as the March 2012 presidential elections. Government responses to something as unnerving as a rebellion range from the emotional to the rational, from carefully thought out to instinctive. As a result, this might well be the moment Putin makes a fatal misstep. But precedent suggests the odds are against it.

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Naman Karl-Thomas Habtom is a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge focusing on modern military and diplomatic history, a visiting researcher at Université libre de Bruxelles, and a former guest researcher at the Swedish Defence University. He also writes widely on security policy and international affairs.

Image: The Kremlin

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Naman Karl-Thomas Habtom · July 21, 2023

16. Putin is planning revenge on Wagner chief for his failed mutiny, CIA chief warns, as he warns Yevgeny Prigozhin: 'Don't fire your food taster'

Putin is planning revenge on Wagner chief for his failed mutiny, CIA chief warns, as he warns Yevgeny Prigozhin: 'Don't fire your food taster'

• 'Putin generally thinks revenge is a dish best served cold,' William Burns said

By ELENA SALVONI

PUBLISHED: 04:04 EDT, 21 July 2023 | UPDATED: 05:38 EDT, 21 July 2023

Daily Mail · by Elena Salvoni · July 21, 2023

Vladimir Putin is the 'ultimate apostle of payback' and is likely plotting his revenge on Yevgeny Prigozhin after the Wagner group's failed mutiny, the head of the CIA has warned.

'If I were Prigozhin, I wouldn't fire my food taster,' William Burns, director of the CIA said.

The intelligence head said Wagner PMC's failed mutiny exposed 'significant weaknesses' in the Kremlin's power structure and saw Russia's justification of the war in Ukraine brought into question, with Prigozhin claiming it was built on lies.

The brief mutiny was the most direct challenge to Putin in his 23 years in power, one which Burns said the tyrant would not take lightly.

'Putin is someone who generally thinks that revenge is a dish best served cold,' Burns told the Aspen Security Forum last night, adding that he 'would be surprised if Prigozhin escapes further retribution.'

'If I were Prigozhin, I wouldn't fire my food taster,' William Burns, director of the CIA warned the mercenary chief at the Aspen Security Forum

Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin speaks inside the headquarters of the Russian southern army military command centre in the city of Rostov-on-Don on June 2

Putin seemingly cut a deal, brokered by his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko, to allow Prigozhin and his men free passage to Belarus after they stood down in their coup attempt.

But it is by no means a case of forgive and forget, with Burns claiming that Putin is simply buying time while he works out how to best deal with his treasonous former chef.

In June, the Russian leader described the Wagner Group's march on Moscow as 'a stab in the back of the troops and the people of Russia.'

'What we are seeing is a very complicated dance,' Burns said on Thursday, according to the BBC.

Burns also claimed that Russian elites are increasingly questioning Putin's judgement, particularly following the Wagner group's mutinous 24 hours in June during which they looked like they could make it all the way to Moscow.

'What it resurrected was some deeper questions … about Putin's judgment, about his relative detachment from events and even about his indecisiveness,' Burns said.

Vladimir Putin described the Wagner Group's march on Moscow as 'a stab in the back of the troops and the people of Russia.'

His comments come after the head of the UK's secret intelligence service, MI6 delivered a stark message to Putin yesterday, telling him pull out of Ukraine or risk being overthrown.

Sir Richard Moore said the only way the Russian leader could ensure his 'career stability' and save his own skin from the 'chaos replaying itself into the Russian body politic' was to withdraw Russian troops.

In a rare public address, he issued an extraordinary appeal to Russians to spy for MI6, also known as the Secret Intelligence Service. He compared the fate of their country to Shakespeare's doomed Hamlet.

'Putin cannot live through an experience where one of his closest proteges turns upon primarily on his defence minister and his chief of general staff, you have a massive blow-up in the Kremlin that leads to troops, heavily armed troops, advancing within 125km (77 miles) of Moscow.

'He has to realise, I'm sure, that something is deeply wrong in the state of Denmark, to quote Hamlet. It was pretty humiliating – he had to go and cut a deal to save his own skin.'

Daily Mail · by Elena Salvoni · July 21, 2023

​17. The Parable of F-16s for Ukraine

The Parable of F-16s for Ukraine

A case study in why Kyiv’s counteroffensive is slow, painful going.

By The Editorial Board

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July 20, 2023 6:44 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-offensive-weapons-russia-f-16s-biden-administration-mark-milley-263cf9ec?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

A U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter takes off at Jagel Air Base in Jagel, Germany, June 23 PHOTO: DANIEL REINHARDT/DPA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

U.S. officials are whispering to the press that the Ukrainians aren’t performing up to snuff in Europe’s bloodiest fighting in decades. What an unseemly exercise: The Biden crowd withholds the heavy firepower the Ukrainians need to defeat a Russian invasion, and then laments that Kyiv isn’t retaking enough territory fast enough.

The Ukrainians are struggling to break through heavily fortified Russian defenses. “It’s not quite connected trench lines like World War I,” Gen. Mark Milley said on Tuesday, “but it’s not dissimilar from that, either—lots of complex minefields, dragon’s teeth, barbed wire, trenches.” Ukrainian equipment is getting chewed up by Russian mines, and Kyiv’s troops need more help to clear the explosives.

The offensive is still in early days, and Ukraine hasn’t committed most of its troops trained by the West. But U.S. officials are telling press outlets without attribution that the Ukrainians aren’t excelling at combined arms—that is, working tanks, infantry, air power and other assets in coordination.

But no Western military would execute this offensive without controlling the skies. Ukrainian troops are vulnerable to Russian attack, and they lack the air power to support ground troops and go on offense against Russian positions without risking awful losses.

F-16 fighters would be a big improvement. Russian surface-to-air missile sites “can be lucrative targets” for F-16 pilots, as retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Bruce Wright wrote in February. Long-range precision weapons could help “destroy Russian air defense systems near the borders, and kill Russian tanks, artillery, and dug-in positions in the Eastern part of Ukraine.”

Western allies are supposed to start training Ukrainian pilots to fly the F-16 next month. But the truth is Ukraine could have had such pilots up and flying by now. The U.S. has known from the start that Ukraine’s Soviet-era jet fleet isn’t equipped to compete with Russia’s larger and more advanced force. The Ukrainians have nonetheless used U.S. anti-radiation missiles in ingenious ways, eluding Russian air defenses to achieve pockets of air superiority.

These pages suggested putting Ukrainian pilots in U.S. flight training programs in April 2022. Yet the Biden Administration hesitated about transferring even some rickety Polish MiG-29s. In February of this year, President Biden said Ukraine “doesn’t need” F-16s, only to decide three months later that the U.S. would support an allied effort to train Ukrainian pilots.

Alas, don’t assume the U.S. has the will to follow through on the jets. Gen. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, reminded reporters on Tuesday that the jets are expensive. He said a large fleet would take years—“years to train the pilots, years to do the maintenance and sustainment, years to generate that financial degree of support to do that. You’re talking way more billions of dollars than has already been generated.”

Yet offering F-16s is far less expensive than a Ukrainian defeat that draws the U.S. deeper into Europe’s problems. The F-16 is in service in militaries across the world, with a broad base of contractors that can help set up maintenance support. As with every U.S. weapon donated to Ukraine—from tanks to Patriot air defenses to Himars artillery—the Biden Administration says the systems are too complicated to offer Kyiv until one day those problems are suddenly declared to be manageable.

The bill for this indecision is coming due, and the tragedy is more Ukrainian casualties and a more fraught counteroffensive. The dithering also erodes political support at home, as more Americans start to wonder what the U.S. is accomplishing. Mr. Biden can still decide that a long, ugly quagmire isn’t what the U.S. wants in Ukraine.

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Review and Outlook: Under oath, IRS agents Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler say their attempt to investigate Hunter Biden faced unprecedented meddling from the Justice Department. Will Attorney General Merrick Garland and Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss respond? Images: Bloomberg News/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly

Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the July 21, 2023, print edition as 'The Parable of F-16s for Ukraine'.

18. We Will Never Run Out of Resources

Wishful thinking? On the other hand I do have faith in the creativity of humanity.

Conclusion:

Long before humans have extracted all the useful atoms in the Earth’s crust and oceans, we will develop the technological sophistication to obtain vastly more atoms and energy from asteroids, planets and beyond. In that future, just as has always been the case, the only bottleneck will be the rate at which new knowledge can be created. And nothing prevents us from improving that rate too. Knowledge is the ultimate resource and there are no limits on creating it.

We Will Never Run Out of Resources

The supply of minerals is theoretically finite, but human knowledge and creativity are limitless.

By Marian L. Tupy and David Deutsch

​

July 20, 

2023 11:50 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-will-never-run-out-of-resources-earth-ocean-tech-knowledge-engineering-e65f88c7?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

The world’s population has increased eightfold since 1800, and standards of living have never been higher. Despite increases in consumption, and contrary to the prophecies of generations of Malthusians, the world hasn’t run out of a single metal or mineral. In fact, resources have generally grown cheaper relative to income over the past two centuries. Even on the largest cosmic scale, resources may well be limitless.

How can a growing population expand resource abundance? Some of the ways are well known. Consider increased supply. When the price of a resource increases, people have an incentive to find new sources of it. Geologists have surveyed only a fraction of the Earth’s crust, let alone the ocean floor. As surveying and extracting technologies improve, geologists and engineers will go deeper, faster, cheaper and cleaner to reach hitherto untouched minerals.

Efficiency gains also contribute to resource abundance. In the late 1950s an aluminum can weighed close to 3 ounces. Today it weighs less than half an ounce. That smaller mass represents considerable environmental, energy and raw-material savings. Market incentives motivated people to search for opportunities or new knowledge to reduce the cost of an input (aluminum) to produce a cheaper output (a Coca-Cola can). Technological improvement drives a continual process whereby we can produce more from less.

Innovation creates opportunities for substitution. For centuries spermaceti, a waxy substance found in the heads of sperm whales, was used to make the candles that provided light in people’s homes. Long before the whales might have run out, we switched to electricity. Are you worried about having enough lithium to power all those electric vehicles on the road? Quick-charging sodium-ion batteries are already on the horizon. There is far more sodium than lithium on or near the surface of the Earth.

We’re living in an era of dematerialization. Not long ago, every hotel room in the U.S. was equipped with a thick blue copper cable to connect the guest’s laptop to the internet. Nowadays guests use Wi-Fi—no cables necessary. Likewise, the smartphone has minimized, if not eliminated, the need for paper calendars, maps, dictionaries and encyclopedias as well as for metal or plastic radios, cameras, telephones, stereos, alarm clocks and more.

Perhaps less appreciated is that apart from a minuscule amount of aluminum and titanium that we have shot into outer space, all of our material resources are still here on Earth. Vast quantities of steel may have been “used” to build our skyscrapers, and copper in power cables, but all that metal could be recovered and reassigned. During World War II, 14,000 tons of silver in the U.S. Treasury’s West Point Bullion Depository were made into silver wire for electromagnets as part of the Manhattan Project. Virtually all of it was eventually returned.

Common sense implies that since no physical resource is infinite, the cupboard will eventually grow bare. Given ever-increasing consumption, we will reach a level where all useful atoms are physically incorporated into objects that make life enjoyable. Won’t economic growth plateau or reverse course entirely at that point? You can’t have unlimited growth on a planet with a finite number of atoms. Or can you?

This argument has no bearing on any real resource issue. It invokes a hypothetical future when we are mining the Earth’s very core for rare elements and draining its oceans to sustain billions of thirsty humans. This is so far in the future as not to be relevant to any present-day policies or planning. Today, the bottleneck isn’t physical resources but knowledge of how to use them to our benefit. Not just theoretical knowledge but down-to-earth, practical engineering knowledge. We need to improve that as fast as we can.

For millennia, learned people and charlatans dreamed of transmuting elements. In 1919 physicist Ernest Rutherford achieved the first artificial transmutation by turning nitrogen into oxygen. Today, transmutation is all around us. Smoke detectors contain americium, an artificial element produced by transmutation. Nuclear physicists achieved the transmutation of lead into gold decades ago, though the process requires far too much energy to be a viable alternative to mining.

But the cost of energy is bound to fall. The sun is effectively a nuclear fusion reactor converting millions of tons of mass into energy every second. Someday soon we will be able to capture as much of that energy as we like via super-efficient solar panels. The difficulty won’t be harvesting that energy but getting rid of waste heat by radiating it into space. We may find it more convenient to make our own fusion reactors. All the elements found on Earth other than hydrogen and helium were made by transmutation in various kinds of stars. In the distant future, we could use artificial fusion not only for energy but for artificial transmutation, to make whatever elements we like. All we need is abundant energy and hydrogen, which is plentiful in the water that covers most of the Earth’s surface and is the most common element in the universe.

Long before humans have extracted all the useful atoms in the Earth’s crust and oceans, we will develop the technological sophistication to obtain vastly more atoms and energy from asteroids, planets and beyond. In that future, just as has always been the case, the only bottleneck will be the rate at which new knowledge can be created. And nothing prevents us from improving that rate too. Knowledge is the ultimate resource and there are no limits on creating it.

Mr. Tupy is a co-author of “Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.” Mr. Deutsch is author of “The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World.”

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Wonder Land: The United States is often described as a 'nation of immigrants,' but with Biden’s open river or another Trump wall, the clock on American pre-eminence could stop, as illegal immigration taints the legal path to citizenship. Images: AFP/Getty Images/Zuma Press Composite: Mark Kelly

Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the July 21, 2023, print edition as 'We Will Never Run Out of Resources'.

19. CIA chief: Russia’s elite are questioning Putin’s judgment

Some slight hope?

CIA chief: Russia’s elite are questioning Putin’s judgment

By NAHAL TOOSI and ALEXANDER WARD

07/20/2023 08:48 PM EDT

Politico

The brief mutiny led by the Wagner Group’s chief appears to have rattled those around the Russian leader, William Burns told the Aspen Security Forum.

“If I were Prigozhin, I wouldn’t fire my food taster,” CIA Director William Burns said Thursday about the head of the mercenary Wagner Group. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

07/20/2023 08:48 PM EDT

ASPEN, Colo. — Russia’s elite are showing increasing anxiety about President Vladimir Putin’s judgment, especially following a brief mutiny that appeared to catch the Kremlin off guard last month, CIA Director William Burns said Thursday.

The U.S. spy agency is trying to seize on that and other seeming cracks in Putin’s control, which the mutiny exposed, Burns added. A CIA video that has sought to recruit Russian informants was viewed some 2.5 million times in its first week.

“What it resurrected was some deeper questions … about Putin’s judgment, about his relative detachment from events and even about his indecisiveness,” Burns said in an appearance at the Aspen Security Forum.

The daylong mutiny, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the mercenary Wagner Group, was aimed mainly at Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and top Russian Gen. Valery Gerasimov, Burns said. Prigozhin had been publicly critical of such officials, and he has insisted he wasn’t targeting Putin.

But that Wagner forces were able to travel across a good chunk of Russia unimpeded was a major black eye for Putin, as was Prigozhin’s public criticisms about the rationale for the Russian war on Ukraine and the corruption of the Russian elite.

“I think in many ways it exposed some of the significant weaknesses in a system that Putin has built,” Burns said. Even aside from the mutiny, such weaknesses “were exposed by Putin’s misjudgment since he launched this invasion” of Ukraine.

That echoed comments earlier in the Aspen forum by U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly that the revolt exposed “cracks” in Putin’s regime.

There are allegations that Sergey Surovikin, another top Russian general, may have known about Prigozhin’s rebellion plans. Surovikin has not been seen in public for weeks. “I don’t think he enjoys a lot of freedom right now,” Burns said.

Putin has managed to defang Prigozhin for now, essentially exiling him to Belarus. The Russian leader is likely to try to separate Prigozhin from what he finds useful in Wagner, a force with mercenaries in many countries, Burns said.

Putin also will likely find a way to exact revenge on Prigozhin and eliminate him in the long run, said Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia.

“If I were Prigozhin, I wouldn’t fire my food taster,” Burns quipped.

POLITICO

Politico

20. Here’s how the Senate wants to boost military recruitment

ROTC and ETC.

Excerpts:

If signed into law as part of the annual defense policy bill, it could be one tool to help reverse a historic recruiting crisis that threatens to hollow the armed forces for years to come.

The proposed Enlisted Training Corps would mirror the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps units that have existed for more than 100 years at four-year colleges and universities across the country.

Here’s how the Senate wants to boost military recruitment

militarytimes.com · by Rachel Cohen · July 19, 2023

The U.S. military could soon start offering community college students a new path to enlistment, thanks to a legislative provision making its way through the Senate.

If signed into law as part of the annual defense policy bill, it could be one tool to help reverse a historic recruiting crisis that threatens to hollow the armed forces for years to come.

The proposed Enlisted Training Corps would mirror the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps units that have existed for more than 100 years at four-year colleges and universities across the country.

Just as ROTC provides students one option for commissioning as officers once they earn a bachelor’s degree, the Enlisted Training Corps would prepare students to join the enlisted force without sending them to boot camp.

ROTC isn’t completely off-limits to those pursuing an associate’s degree: For instance, 125 community and junior colleges have agreements with nearby universities that allow their students to participate in the local Air Force ROTC chapter. That can give people a head start on the full ROTC program if they transfer to a four-year school.

But community and junior colleges don’t have their own pipeline to military service — a gap that some in the Senate want to change.

“The military must provide new opportunities to expose Americans to military service,” the Senate Armed Services Committee said in a statement accompanying the draft bill. “While high school students have the option of joining a Junior [ROTC] unit, and four-year college students have long been able to enroll in the Senior [ROTC], there are no formal programs that introduce community and junior college students to the prospect of military service.”

Under the proposal, the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps would each receive $5 million to jumpstart the program at a community college or junior college. Students who take part in the Enlisted Training Corps and agree to join the military could qualify for financial assistance, lawmakers said.

Though not defined in the legislation, the program could include much of the same drills, leadership courses and basic-level military training as ROTC.

Once the new corps is up and running, the defense secretary would report back to Congress each year on the program’s progress.

The idea may still end up on the cutting room floor.

To become law, the provision must make it into the House and Senate’s joint version of the defense policy bill, passed by both chambers of Congress and enacted by President Joe Biden, and funded by an appropriations package.

The House version of the bill, which narrowly passed July 14, does not include its own provision for an Enlisted Training Corps.

The idea is one of several provisions in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s draft aimed at shoring up military recruitment.

Army, Air Force and Navy officials have all said they expect to fall thousands of enlisted troops short of their fiscal 2023 active duty recruiting goals due to a combination of a healthy private sector, a cumbersome medical processing system, a lack of interest in the military among today’s youth and a dwindling population of qualified young adults.

The smaller Marine Corps and Space Force believe they will hit their own targets by the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

In response, the Senate Armed Services Committee is encouraging the Air Force and Navy to aim for smaller workforces in fiscal 2024, rather than staff up with subpar recruits.

Its draft bill allows for 320,000 active duty airmen — 4,700 fewer than the Air Force requested — and 342,000 sailors, or 5,000 fewer than the Navy wanted.

“Legislating unreachable end strength numbers would set the military services up for failure by guaranteeing continued recruiting shortfalls, putting undue strain on recruiting forces, and ultimately compromising readiness by encouraging quantity over quality in recruiting,” the Senate Armed Services Committee said. “The committee believes that the United States military is best served by bringing in high numbers of high-quality recruits.”

Lawmakers are offering the services nearly $400 million more for recruiting activities and advertising.

They also suggest tweaking the rules around the Armed Forces Qualification Test, and tell the services that if more than 10% of recruits score lower than a 31 on that test, to create preparatory courses to improve their scores and ultimately put them in uniform.

The bill further proposes requiring secondary schools to admit military recruiters to career fairs when asked to join, and to penalize universities and colleges that don’t provide information on students to recruiters within 60 days of their request.

A briefing on the Pentagon’s approach to regional recruitment is due to Congress by March 1, 2024, as well as a briefing on its outreach to diverse student populations by Feb. 29, 2024.

And the committee requests a deeper look at the military’s recruiting waiver system, the medical standards Americans must meet to join up, and ways to change those requirements without putting the military or the recruit at risk.

Other suggestions to make the military an attractive employer include overhauling the outdated pay schedule and, potentially, covering the cost of freezing the eggs, sperm and embryos of active duty troops.

“The current economic environment and the effects of high cost inflation require a careful review of the rates of military basic pay to ensure competitiveness with the private sector, which ultimately will help address current recruiting challenges,” the committee said.

About Rachel S. Cohen

Rachel Cohen joined Air Force Times as senior reporter in March 2021. Her work has appeared in Air Force Magazine, Inside Defense, Inside Health Policy, the Frederick News-Post (Md.), the Washington Post, and others.

21. Ukraine Situation Report: U.S. Cluster Munitions Hit The Battlefield

​Cluster munitions or DPICM?

From an artillery expert.

Pah-leezzze, someone please make clear that DPICM are not “cluster bombs.” They are exactly what the acronym means. Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munition. (DPICM) is an artillery or surface-to-surface subm​unition carried in artillery shells or rockets. The rocket (203mm) or shell (155mm) disperses submunitions at an optimum altitude and distance from the desired target for dense (and deadly) area coverage. The submunitions use both shaped charges for the anti-armor role, and fragmentation for the antipersonnel role, hence "dual-purpose". They were designed to have less than a 5% failure rate, but were much higher (23%) in the First Gulf War. The Army corrected that. So, the notion that DPICM is a horrible threat to all mankind is nonsense. It’s a threat to enemy formations like the Russians. They deserve each and every one of them.

Ukraine Situation Report: U.S. Cluster Munitions Hit The Battlefield

The White House and Pentagon say Ukraine is now using donated cluster munitions and they are already making a difference.

BY

HOWARD ALTMAN

|

PUBLISHED JUL 20, 2023 8:26 PM EDT

thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · July 20, 2023

Ukraine is now using cluster munitions on the battlefield “quite effectively,” and they already having an affect on Russian forces, the White House confirmed Thursday.

"We have gotten some initial feedback from the Ukrainians, and they're using them quite effectively," White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said at a news briefing Thursday. He added the cluster munitions are having an impact on Russian defensive formations and maneuvering, Reuters reported. At the Pentagon, Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh also confirmed Ukraine is now using the cluster munitions.

The Pentagon two weeks ago announced it was sending Ukraine “hundreds of thousands” of rounds of controversial cluster munitions known as Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions (DPICMs). They are 155mm artillery munitions that contain individual submunitions, or bomblets.

The DPICMs are being provided for two main reasons, the Pentagon has previously explained. The U.S. has a large stock of them and giving some to Ukraine won’t have the same effect on supplies as the donation 155mm unitary rounds. The U.S. alone has donated more than two million of those to Ukraine.

The other main reason is that bomblets scatter over a wide area, which would help Ukraine defeat the massive amount of fortifications and trenches Russia has built up, in addition to hitting counter-battery and time-sensitive targets more efficiently.

A US Army briefing slide discussing the functioning of a more modern DPICM-XL projectile. US Army

You can read more about these munitions, what they can do, why they are controversial and Ukraine's efforts to mitigate the dangers in our story here.

Russian Telegram channels have taken note of the first uses of DPICMs cluster munitions, which they refer to as "cassettes."

"The enemy began to massively use cluster munitions on the Zaporizhzhia and [Bakhmut] fronts," said the Operation Z Telegram channel. "The footage shows the shelling of our positions with "cassettes" in the Zaporizhzhia direction. There is also evidence that the enemy is actively using them on the flanks near [Bakhmut] and on the South-Donetsk sector of the front. The soldiers report that the enemy has used them before, but in smaller numbers."

"Heavy [multiple launch rocket system] MLRS strikes and the use of cluster munitions by the enemy are seen...as a way to overcome the tactical defense of the [Russian] Armed Forces," the Colonelcassad Telegram channel wrote. "The situation requires an increase in the use of cluster munitions by our troops. They will be very effective in hitting [areas] through which the enemy is trying to advance infantry assault groups."

One well-known Russian milblogger, Mikhail Luchin - known as "Misha in Donbas" - was reportedly killed today during a cluster munitions strike, the War Gonzo Telegram channel reported.

In April, we told you how Luchin was hacked by Ukrainians, who say they charged $25,000 worth of adult toys to his credit card. The hackers claimed the Luchin was going to use the money to buy drones for Russian troops.

While Russians may complain about DPICMs, it should noted that they have been using much more dangerous cluster munitions indiscriminately throughout their so-called 'special military operation.'

This first use of DPICMs by Ukraine is only the beginning. How effective they are as the counteroffensive grinds slowly on, remains to be seen.

We will provide additional details when they become available.

Before we head into the latest from Ukraine, The War Zone readers can catch up on our previous rolling coverage here.

The Latest

On the battlefield, Ukraine continued to make incremental gains in its counteroffensive that is pushing through Zaporizhzhia and the Donbas. Here are some key takeaways from the latest Institute for the Study of War assessment:

• Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the front on July 19 and made gains in these areas.
• Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in the Kupyansk area, near Kreminna, in the Bakhmut area, and along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City front and made gains near Bakhmut.
• Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, in the Bakhmut area, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City front, and in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia oblast area. They made marginal gains along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City front and reportedly made limited advances in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia oblast area.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia area and western Zaporizhia Oblast and made reportedly made gains in both sectors of the front.

Just days after the Kerch Bridge was attacked, reportedly by Ukrainian uncrewed surface vessels, air raid sirens have gone off several times there today. It's unclear why the alarms sounded, but given that the bridge has been struck twice now since October, you can understand why folks in that part of Crimea would be nervous. The bridge, a key logistics crossing for Russia's military, has long been a stated target of Ukraine.

With tens of billions of dollars of military and humanitarian assistance pouring in from foreign donors, Ukraine has agreed to work with NATO on the launch of a Procurement Review program, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said during a press conference Thursday.

That decision was made last week, he said, during the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Reznikov noted that Ukraine already interacts directly with the NATO Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA), which “brings together, in a single organization, acquisition, logistic, medical and infrastructural capabilities, operational and systems support and services to the NATO nations, NATO Military Authorities and partner nations.”

"As part of the Procurement Review program, within nine to 10 months, NATO experts will conduct an analysis of resource provision and procurement of weapons and military equipment, assistance, training of people, and will offer, possibly, an improved modernized system," Reznikov said.

So far the U.S. has promised Ukraine 190 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles. As we recently wrote, the Oryx open source intelligence group says Ukraine has seen 15 Bradleys destroyed, 16 damaged and four damaged and abandoned. The figure could be higher, because Oryx only tabulates vehicles for which it has visual confirmation.

But just because the Bradleys are damaged doesn't mean they are out of the fight, as The Washington Post reported Thursday in a story about efforts to repair them.

"Some Bradley repairs can take just a few hours. Others need a few days. Some vehicles are labeled “donors,” meaning the Ukrainians will strip out the usable parts to install in other, less-damaged Bradleys and then fill the donor vehicle with the broken bits before shipping it off for a larger-scale repair at the facility in Poland," the publication reported. "One early limitation for how quickly the Ukrainians can fix the Bradleys and get them back on the battlefield: not enough spare parts, military personnel said."

Minefields, as we have frequently noted, have proven to be a formidable challenge for Ukraine. But one way to overcome them has been through the use of U.S.-donated M58 MICLIC (Mine Clearing Line Charge) systems, that shoot a 350-foot long line containing five pounds per linear foot of C-4 explosives. It is primarily used by Ukraine both to clear mines, but has also been used as a strike weapon, including in urban areas, to devastating effect. You can see one in action clearing mines in this video below.

But minefields are far from the only danger. Ukrainian forces have often come under fire by Russian troops using anti-tank guided missiles even before they reach the minefield. That appears to be what happened to this Ukrainian armored column near Bakhmut seen in the video below.

And finally, in the video below, you can see whey Ukraine has jumped on the Bandvagn 202 bandwagon. The Swedish tracked vehicles, originally developed by Saab for the Swedish military, come in particularly handy in Ukraine's swampy terrain.

That's it for now. We'll update this story when there's more news to report about Ukraine.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com

thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · July 20, 2023

22. Russia-China ties deepen as Beijing buys a record amount of oil from the warring nation in the first half of 2023

Russia-China ties deepen as Beijing buys a record amount of oil from the warring nation in the first half of 2023

markets.businessinsider.com · by Phil Rosen

• China imported 2.13 million barrels per day of Russian crude in the first half of 2023.
• Russia so far this year has been the top oil supplier to China, peaking at 2.57 million barrels a day in June.
• Chinese customs data implies that Russian imports have been cheaper than crude from other OPEC+ countries, per the FT.

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China imported a record amount of Russian crude oil in the first half of 2023, snapping up more than two million barrels per day from the warring nation.

Over the last six months, China imported 11.4 million barrels per day of crude, an 11.7% jump from the same time last year according to Financial Times data. Of that, 2.13 million barrels a day came from Russia, with those imports peaking to 2.57 million in June.

Meanwhile, China imported 1.88 million barrels a day from Saudi Arabia in the first half of the year, with Iraq, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Brazil falling in line afterward.

Chinese customs data cited by the FT implies that Russian barrels have come cheaper than those from other OPEC+ nations since the start of the war in Ukraine.

At any rate, Russia has had to increasingly rely on China over the last year and a half, since thousands of companies have pulled out of the country and other nations have shunned trade with Moscow. The bulk of Russia's exports are sent to China, but the reverse isn't true: Russia is far down on the pecking order when it comes to Beijing's most prominent trade partners.

"Clearly Russia is much more dependent on China to provide it with the imports and advanced manufactured products it needs, while Russian markets represent a negligible secondary opportunity for Chinese businesses," according to Yale researcher Jeffrey Sonnenfeld.

Russia's economy continues to deteriorate, with the country's central bank reporting a 93% decline in its current account surplus last quarter. But China's economy isn't exactly humming along as well as expected either. The much-anticipated post-COVID rebound has yet to materialize, and some experts don't expect it to come anytime soon.

Some strategists maintain that Vladimir Putin still holds some leverage in his dealings with Beijing. Think tank writer Mikhail Korostikov said it isn't a guarantee that the dictator becomes subservient to President Xi Jinping.

"The relationship between Russia and China is by no means perfect, but the shared interests of both countries' leaderships and the strategic logic of the confrontation with the West create a solid foundation for reasonably equal cooperation," he said. "Within that interaction, China does have a certain opportunity to turn Russia into its vassal — but, crucially, it has no compelling reasons to do so."

markets.businessinsider.com · by Phil Rosen

23. Chinese spy balloon exposed gaps in ability to detect threats, NORAD chief says

Chinese spy balloon exposed gaps in ability to detect threats, NORAD chief says

“We were not looking for a high-altitude balloon at that time,” Gen. Glen VanHerck tells NBC News’ Lester Holt. “Our radars are capable of seeing it, but we were filtering out that data.”

NBC News · by Patrick Smith

The Chinese spy balloon that flew across North America earlier this year exposed important gaps in the United States’ ability to detect airborne threats and propelled the development of new surveillance technology, the senior U.S. commander responsible for patrolling the skies told NBC News in an exclusive interview.

Gen. Glen VanHerck, head of the U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), told “Nightly News with Lester Holt” that U.S. surveillance capabilities have been strengthened with new technology since the balloon was spotted off Alaska in late January.

“We were not looking for a high-altitude balloon at that time ​​ — 65,000 feet, very slow. Our radars are capable of seeing it, but we were filtering out that data,” he said recently in a wide-ranging interview at the Colorado Springs headquarters of NORAD, which monitors the skies over the U.S. and Canada and responds to potential threats.

Watch more from the interview Thursday on “NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt” at 6:30 p.m. ET/5:30 p.m. CT.

The Biden administration was criticized for its handling of the Chinese surveillance balloon, first reported by NBC News, with some asking why it was allowed to fly over sensitive military sites in the continental United States, where it could collect valuable information about American defenses. The revelation that the Chinese were able to fly such balloons into American airspace without the U.S. military detecting them also raised questions about an intelligence failure, prompting calls for more investment in the country’s air defense and radar systems.

China initially apologized for the incident but maintained the object was a civilian weather balloon that had blown off course.

VanHerck, like other American officials, said there was no doubt the balloon was used for spying.

“We know for sure it was a spy vehicle,” he said.

VanHerck admitted that the incident, which captivated the country and sent U.S.-China relations to a new low, had been a learning experience.

“We learned significantly — I also learned I need to be able to see further, further out in the Pacific, further into the Arctic and into the Atlantic,” he said.

“And that’s what the over-the-horizon radars will give us,” he added, referring to systems that detect objects at very long distances.

VanHerck said he was first made aware of the balloon on Jan. 27 and his forces intercepted it the next day with F-22 and F-16 fighter jets, which determined it wasn’t a hostile threat.

On Feb. 2, NBC News reported that the balloon was flying over the U.S. It was shot down off the South Carolina coast two days later on the orders of President Joe Biden. The process to identify and intercept the balloon worked “exactly as it should have,” VanHerck said.

U.S. Navy sailors recover a high-altitude surveillance balloon off the coast of Myrtle Beach on Feb. 5.Petty Officer 1st Class Tyler Thompson / U.S. Navy

The balloon was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites, despite the Biden administration’s efforts to block it from doing so, two current senior U.S. officials and one former senior administration official told NBC News in April.

VanHerck added that while he knew China had a high-altitude balloon program before the incident, he wasn’t aware that multiple balloons had flown over the U.S.

Aside from being the head of NORAD, VanHerck is also ultimately responsible for the country’s homeland and maritime defense, including against ballistic missiles, and for providing support to civil authorities in responding to natural disasters, including hurricanes and wildfires.

In the event of a ballistic missile launch on the U.S., it’s his job to provide a warning in a matter of minutes.

The challenge of the job is not just the vast geography — from the North Pole to Central America — but how the nature of foreign threats are constantly evolving into scenarios that could not have existed when NORAD was founded during the Cold War, in 1958.

“Hypersonics, for example, or extremely low-radar, cross-section cruise missiles, or advanced submarines that are very quiet … those are the daunting tasks that I experience, not necessarily the size of the area of responsibility,” he said.

“Candidly, I’m most concerned about the cyber domain and our ability to understand the threats in the cyber domain that impact our power projection,” VanHerck noted.

“We learned significantly — I also learned I need to be able to see further, further out in the Pacific, further into the Arctic and into the Atlantic,” Gen. Glen VanHerck tells Lester Holt. Charles Marsh / NBC News

NBC News was also given a tour of the nearby Cheyenne Mountain Complex, which has been in use since 1966 and is designed to provide “continuity” of operations for the military and civilian authorities in the event of war.

The site has a series of blast doors that are 3 feet thick, capable of withstanding a nuclear blast. The last time the complex was closed operationally was at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

In spite of the facility’s construction during the Cold War, VanHerck said the current global climate is the most challenging and dynamic he has seen in 36 years of service.

“Two nuclear armed competitors,” he said, referring to China and Russia as current U.S. threats, which he pointed out are joined by many others: “Violent extremists out there and an unstable world” and “international norms that have served us well since the end of World War II being challenged on a day-to-day basis,” he said.

NBC News · by Patrick Smith

24. Rethinking Counterinsurgent Force Design and Employment

​This is quite a theory that I am having a hard time buying.

Excerpts:

To address the practitioner-scholar gap mentioned earlier and to underpin our suggestive quantitative findings, we develop the armored restraint theory. This theory proposes that enhanced protection provided to armored crews gives them additional time and safety when using lethal force in a direct fire engagement. We further suggest that mechanized counterinsurgents who adhere to the laws of armed conflict may be able to reduce unintentional civilian casualties compared to their dismounted counterparts.

We propose three primary mechanisms to explain how the armored restraint theory functions at the crew level and results in lower civilian casualty rates. First, US and UK armored vehicle crews in OIF had access to mechanically stabilized, precision machine guns. When engaging insurgents in a populated area, these advanced weapon systems provided increased precision and accuracy compared to the variants used by dismounted units. Second, the hierarchical decision-making within an armored crew allowed for leader verification before the employment of lethal force, potentially preventing harm to civilians. In contrast, a dismounted unit, lacking protective armor and driven by self-defense imperatives, would immediately return fire to suppress known and suspected enemy positions, potentially endangering local civilians. These risks may be amplified if the dismounted unit is forced to call in artillery or attack aviation. Finally, US and UK armored vehicles offered increased crew protection during engagements against insurgents lacking modern anti-tank guided missiles. Psychology research suggests this increased protection, along with additional decision-making time, gives armored crew members an advantage during high-stress firefights, compared to their dismounted counterparts.

Rethinking Counterinsurgent Force Design and Employment - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Ryan C. Van Wie · July 21, 2023

Ryan C. Van Wie

States rarely predict what their next war will look like. However, the choices they make regarding their military force structure have a lasting impact on their capabilities in future conflicts. This is clearly seen in the case of Russia, where systematic weaknesses in force structure, including dismounted infantry, logistics, and command and control have hindered the tactical effectiveness of Russian ground forces in their ongoing invasion of the Ukraine.

While there is consensus that force structure decisions are consequential in both conventional and civil conflict settings, there is a noticeable gap in the counterinsurgency (COIN) literature between practitioners and scholars when it comes to defining the ideal counterinsurgent force structure. On one hand, COIN practitioners in Iraq and Afghanistan found mechanized units to be critical in surgically targeting and defeating well-armed insurgents. On the other hand, some COIN scholars argue that dismounted units make superior counterinsurgents, finding that mechanized units are not ideally structured for COIN, struggle to exploit local intelligence, and have the propensity to increase civilian casualties. Resolving this analytic divergence between scholars and practitioners is important and shapes enduring deliberations on the appropriate balance between light and heavy forces.

To examine this puzzle, my co-author Jacob Walden and I explored how heterogeneous US and UK forces structures impacted counterinsurgency operations during Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) in recent articles in Small Wars and Insurgencies and the Journal of Conflict Resolution. We leveraged US and UK OIF unit rotational policies to test empirically how force structure differences impact COIN dynamics. Taken together, both articles suggest that a more nuanced view is required to properly assess how military force structure considerations impact local insurgency dynamics. Beyond focusing solely on counterinsurgent force structure (i.e., mechanization), we argue force structure should always be considered alongside force employment.

Force Structure and Civilian Casualties

In the first paper, we quantitatively evaluate how counterinsurgent force structure affects civilian casualty levels in OIF from 2004-2008. While recent studies have focused on the impact of airstrikes in causing civilian casualties, the role of ground forces in producing civilian casualties is understudied. This is problematic, because data from OIF indicates Coalition ground forces triggered 62% of government-caused civilian casualty incidents. To analyze the impact of counterinsurgent force structure on civilian casualty rates, we leveraged the Empirical Study of Conflict’s Iraq Civil War Dataset (v3) and Dr. Carrie A. Lee’s Iraq Order of Battle Dataset. Alternate would be expanding this to a sentence: “Our panel dataset captures mechanization levels down to the battalion level, within each Iraqi district, per month. Our quantitative findings suggest mechanized counterinsurgent units caused fewer civilian casualties compared to dismounted units, likely sparing hundreds of Iraqi civilians between 2004-2008.

To address the practitioner-scholar gap mentioned earlier and to underpin our suggestive quantitative findings, we develop the armored restraint theory. This theory proposes that enhanced protection provided to armored crews gives them additional time and safety when using lethal force in a direct fire engagement. We further suggest that mechanized counterinsurgents who adhere to the laws of armed conflict may be able to reduce unintentional civilian casualties compared to their dismounted counterparts.

We propose three primary mechanisms to explain how the armored restraint theory functions at the crew level and results in lower civilian casualty rates. First, US and UK armored vehicle crews in OIF had access to mechanically stabilized, precision machine guns. When engaging insurgents in a populated area, these advanced weapon systems provided increased precision and accuracy compared to the variants used by dismounted units. Second, the hierarchical decision-making within an armored crew allowed for leader verification before the employment of lethal force, potentially preventing harm to civilians. In contrast, a dismounted unit, lacking protective armor and driven by self-defense imperatives, would immediately return fire to suppress known and suspected enemy positions, potentially endangering local civilians. These risks may be amplified if the dismounted unit is forced to call in artillery or attack aviation. Finally, US and UK armored vehicles offered increased crew protection during engagements against insurgents lacking modern anti-tank guided missiles. Psychology research suggests this increased protection, along with additional decision-making time, gives armored crew members an advantage during high-stress firefights, compared to their dismounted counterparts.

Together with the quantitative findings, this causal logic helps explains how US and US armored units were associated with lower civilian casualty rates, compared to dismounted and motorized units. Marius Mehrl’s recent analysis aggregating data across numerous conflicts between 1986-2016 finds that mechanization levels are not significantly related to government-caused civilian casualty rates. It is important to note that these quantitative findings are narrowly focused on force structure’s impact on civilian casualty rates. They do not address the broader association between armored units, tactical and operational effectiveness, and counterinsurgent outcomes. Our next paper explores this question, by including counterinsurgent force employment as an important variable that was omitted from earlier analysis.

Force Structure, Force Employment, and COIN Effectiveness

In the next article, we partially reconcile divergent practitioner and scholar perspectives by considering mechanization’s ideal role in the sequential stages of a clear-hold-build campaign. We propose a new adaptive counterinsurgent force employment hypothesis that highlights the tradeoffs between higher-risk dismounted operations and the benefits of dismounted information collection, conditioned on the local insurgent strength. This hypothesis suggests that mechanized forces can provide significant benefits to counterinsurgents when clearing areas with high-strength insurgents, outweighing the befits of dismounted civilian interaction. However, following successful clearance operations, when government control is increased and insurgent strength is reduced, the need for armored protection diminishes, and information provided by civilians becomes decisive in targeting the remaining insurgents who blend in with the population. Therefore, during the hold and build stages, counterinsurgents should increasingly rely on dismounted troops.

To test our hypothesis, we explore how mechanization impacts COIN effectiveness in local contexts using case studies from the Iraq War. This conflict offers a unique opportunity to study the impact of mechanization, as US and UK light, motorized, and mechanized units regularly deployed and fought in Iraq. We explore how counterinsurgent force structure and force employment impact COIN effectiveness. Our qualitative findings in this project suggest that force employment is the critical determinant in COIN effectiveness, not force structure.

In our most prominent case, we analyze the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division’s (1/1 AD) 2006-2007 deployment to Ramadi, Iraq. Despite 1/1 AD’s heavy force structure, centered around M1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, the brigade achieved tactical COIN success through adept force employment. When 1/1 AD first arrived in Ramadi, insurgents controlled most of the city, and close to 100 insurgent attacks were recorded daily, making it one of the most violent locations in Iraq at the time. The armored vehicles of 1/1 AD played a critical role in clearing insurgents from Ramadi and repelling subsequent attacks. However, recognizing the changing conditions on the ground, the brigade adapted its approach. As 1/1 AD and Iraqi Security Forces regained local control, the brigade increased dismounted patrols and established 12 outposts throughout the city to safeguard civilians from insurgents. Over the course of 1/1 AD’s nine-month deployment in Ramadi, insurgent violence steadily declined, local control was maintained, and remaining insurgent cells were gradually targeted with the assistance of local intelligence.

Flexibility Remains Paramount

Taken together, both papers demonstrate that military force structure’s impact on counterinsurgency dynamics is more complex than previously understood. Recent research by Fausto Scarzini and Marius Mehrl complements these broad findings. This analysis is not intended to undercut the critical importance of dismounted counterinsurgents. Dismounted forces still have a vital role to play in engaging with the population, gathering local intelligence, and selectively targeting insurgents hiding amongst local civilians. Rather, our findings suggest that mechanized units can play an important, if limited, role as counterinsurgents, especially when operating in the “clear” and “hold” phases against well-armed insurgents. Furthermore, the flexibility of force employment, tailored to local conditions, appears to be more influential than force structure alone, as observed in case studies of mechanized units during OIF. Local geography, civil and economic considerations, insurgent strength, and civilian disposition are all critical factors when considering how to employ counterinsurgents, and which types of forces to employ.

Having intelligent, adaptable leaders who understand these crucial local factors and can flexibly adjust force employment is another key to successful tactical adaption. This point on leader education is particularly relevant 20 years after the start of OIF in 2003. As we reflect on the lessons learned during the past two decades, it is noteworthy that US military doctrine largely overlooks force structure considerations and fails to capture the nuanced ways in which different unit types could ideally be employed in counterinsurgency operations. For example, in DoD’s Joint Publication 3-24, Counterinsurgency, the “Employment Considerations” subsections covering “Task Organizing for COIN” and “Conventional Forces Considerations” do not consider the nuances of mechanized versus light forces. Perhaps more surprisingly, the US Army’s Field Manual 3-24 Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies, lacks a discussion on how force employment could vary based on the type of unit and their associated strengths and weaknesses.

To ensure that future generations are better equipped to confront similar challenges, it is crucial that these hard-earned lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan find their place within military doctrine. By integrating the insights gained from these experiences, we can foster a more comprehensive understanding of force structure, force employment, and what it takes to be successful in counterinsurgency operations.

Ryan C. Van Wie is a US Army Infantry Officer and previously served as an assistant professor of international affairs in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy. He holds a Bachelor of Science from the United States Military Academy and earned his Master of Public Policy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Main image: Tarmiya, Iraq (March 28, 2006) – U.S. Army Spc. Osvaldo Fernandez stands perimeter security in front of an M1114 HMMWV (Humvee) near the town of Tarmiya, Iraq during counter-insurgency operations. U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 1st Class Michael Larson

25. Should America Reflag Ships Heading to Ukraine?

Excerpts:

Ukraine’s grain exports are important to feed the world. Ukraine also has every right to export its wheat. While Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan purposely misread the 1936 Montreux Convention to deny NATO ships access to the Black Sea, there is no legal reason to deny naval vessels access to the body’s international waters, where they could escort third-nation shipping. Even if Erdogan does not play ball in pursuit of freedom of navigation, or seeks to extort further concessions, the United States could use its aerial presence in Romania to fly escort missions.

Putin does not yet systematically attack international shipping in the manner that Ayatollah Khomeini once did, but should he begin to, it is time to take a cue from Reagan and offer to re-flag third-nation cargo ships heading to Ukrainian ports. Critics of aiding Ukraine might say such a move would be reckless, but it is no more reckless than defending freedom of navigation in the Taiwan Strait. At stake is not whether a Liberia- or Micronesia-flagged tanker transits the Black Sea safely, but instead the principles that serve as the bedrock for the liberal order.

Should America Reflag Ships Heading to Ukraine?

19fortyfive.com · by Michael Rubin · July 20, 2023

According to the Open Source Intelligence Monitor, the Russian Defense Ministry has said that, beginning July 20, it will consider any ship in the Black Sea that it believes is heading to a Ukrainian port to be a “hostile military transport.” In effect, the Kremlin wants to restrict shipping in international waters.

Fear of provoking Russian President Vladimir Putin dominates thinking in the White House, and the Biden administration’s knee-jerk reaction to Russian escalation is conciliation. But to stand down in the face of threats to international shipping will not bring stability. Rather, it could set peace back decades.

U.S. presidents have long faced challenges to free passage in international waters. For seven decades, successive administrations have challenged attempts to restrict shipping, even resorting to military force to do so.

Reagan vs. Gaddafi

A half-century ago, Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya declared the Gulf of Sidra was actually a bay and claimed its entirety as Libyan waters. During both the Nixon and Carter administrations, Libyan fighter jets harassed American surveillance aircraft in this region. Soon after taking office, President Ronald Reagan ordered a freedom of navigation operation, sending two carrier strike groups into the Gulf of Sidra. On Aug. 19, 1981, two Soviet-built Libyan Sukhoi Su-22 fighters fired on U.S. aircraft, and U.S. F-14s promptly shot them down. The 1986 film “Iron Eagle” is based on the incident.

Following a series of Libyan-sponsored Palestinian terror attacks in Europe, Reagan sent three carrier strike groups into the Gulf of Sidra on another freedom of navigation operation. In January and February 1986, U.S. naval vessels crossed into waters Libya claimed as its own without incident. But when U.S. ships again crossed Gadhafi’s self-declared Line of Death in March 1986, Gadhafi sent corvettes and patrol boats to challenge U.S. forces while Libyan jets made mock runs at U.S. ships. In the skirmish that followed, Libya lost at least four boats. American forces destroyed several surface-to-air missile sites and wounded six Soviet technicians. Even at the height of the Cold War, Reagan did not allow the Soviet presence to deter him. All told, several dozen Libyans died.

Just weeks before Reagan left office, Gadhafi again tried to challenge freedom of navigation. As the USS John F. Kennedy and its escorts sailed eastward toward Haifa, maintaining a distance of 120 miles from the Libyan coast, Gadhafi ordered two MiG-23 Floggers to approach the American ships. They repeatedly challenged two American F-14s escorting the carrier. As the Libyans continued to pursue the F-14s, the American pilots received authorization to fire. They downed the Libyan aircraft, presumably killing both pilots.

Reagan vs. Saddam

The 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War was brutal, but it need never have extended beyond the two combatants. As the war dragged on, however, the Iranian government grew increasingly frustrated at the stalemate. Beginning in 1984, Iran launched the so-called Tanker War, using its navy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to target ships believed to be heading to Iraq or its economic partners. Iranian speedboats harassed tankers and laid mines in international waterways or staging points in neighboring countries’ waters. Iranian missiles struck Kuwait, and Iranian anti-ship cruise missiles posed a constant hazard.

To protect freedom of navigation, the United States reflagged Kuwaiti tankers, believing Iran would not dare attack American ships in the same way it did those of smaller countries. In this, Reagan was wrong. On April 14, 1988, the USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine forcing retaliation with Operation Praying Mantis. Reagan ordered the Navy to attack Iranian oil platforms after giving the Iranians onboard time to evacuate. Iranian leaders decided to double down on confrontation. By the end of the day, Iran had lost not only its two oil platforms, but also a frigate, a gunboat, and three speedboats. Iran avoided any direct confrontation for more than a decade.

The United States vs. China

It is one thing to stand up to Libya or Iran, but what about near-peer competitors?

Here, there is also precedent. President Dwight Eisenhower stared down China during two successive Taiwan Strait crises. Rather than abandon Taiwan, Eisenhower and his successors doubled down, at least until President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, decided to back down from support of Taiwan and woo the People’s Republic of China. To make the deal possible, Nixon withdrew forces from South Korea, and more from Taiwan, and ordered U.S. destroyers to stop patrolling the Taiwan Strait. Kissinger hinted at even more, suggesting to his Chinese interlocutors that the United States might abandon Taiwan entirely.

Congress would have none of it. In 1979, liberal Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) sponsored the Taiwan Relations Act, which both promised Taiwan military assistance sufficient to enable its self-defense, and also made clear to Beijing that the United States might respond militarily should China invade. The Act also defined Taiwan as not only its main island, but also the Pescadores/Penghu Islands, thereby recognizing Taiwan’s territorial waters through much of the Taiwan Strait.

Even as China grew more powerful and aggressive, Washington held firm. In 1996, as Taiwan prepared for its first democratic presidential elections, China sought to intimidate the island, shooting missiles with dummy warheads into the Taiwan Strait to warn voters attracted to a pro-independence candidate. President Bill Clinton responded by dispatching two carrier strike groups.

Every U.S. president since has sent carrier strike groups through the Taiwan Strait to demonstrate commitment to freedom of navigation. The same holds true for the South China Sea, where the United States refuses to imbue Beijing’s fictional Nine-Dash Line with any legitimacy.

Should the United States Re-Flag Ships Heading to Ukraine?

Ukraine’s grain exports are important to feed the world. Ukraine also has every right to export its wheat. While Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan purposely misread the 1936 Montreux Convention to deny NATO ships access to the Black Sea, there is no legal reason to deny naval vessels access to the body’s international waters, where they could escort third-nation shipping. Even if Erdogan does not play ball in pursuit of freedom of navigation, or seeks to extort further concessions, the United States could use its aerial presence in Romania to fly escort missions.

Putin does not yet systematically attack international shipping in the manner that Ayatollah Khomeini once did, but should he begin to, it is time to take a cue from Reagan and offer to re-flag third-nation cargo ships heading to Ukrainian ports. Critics of aiding Ukraine might say such a move would be reckless, but it is no more reckless than defending freedom of navigation in the Taiwan Strait. At stake is not whether a Liberia- or Micronesia-flagged tanker transits the Black Sea safely, but instead the principles that serve as the bedrock for the liberal order.

Now a 19FortyFive Contributing Editor, Dr. Michael Rubin is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Dr. Rubin is the author, coauthor, and coeditor of several books exploring diplomacy, Iranian history, Arab culture, Kurdish studies, and Shi’ite politics, including “Seven Pillars: What Really Causes Instability in the Middle East?” (AEI Press, 2019); “Kurdistan Rising” (AEI Press, 2016); “Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes” (Encounter Books, 2014); and “Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos” (Palgrave, 2005).

From 19FortyFive

The Second American Civil War Has Begun

Karine Jean-Pierre Is In Serious Trouble

The Marjorie Taylor Greene Disaster Has Arrived

19fortyfive.com · by Michael Rubin · July 20, 2023

26. Cluster Bombs and the Contradictions of Liberalism

Excerpts:

Politics is the art of the possible, of course, and sometimes moral convictions must be compromised to achieve larger aims. The United States allied with Stalinist Russia to defeat Nazi Germany, for example, and this sort of ethical expediency is widespread. As Alexander Downes shows in his exhaustive study of civilian targeting, democracies are often just as willing to kill civilians as their authoritarian counterparts, and to do so deliberately. The British waged a brutal counterinsurgency campaign during the Second Boer War, the Allied blockade in World War I starved Germany’s civilian population, and the United States and Great Britain purposely bombed civilian targets during World War II (including the use of two atomic bombs on Japan). The United States later dropped nearly 6 million tons of bombs on Vietnam during the war there (roughly three times what it had dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II), including deliberate attacks on Vietnamese cities, and its “sanctions-happy” foreign policy has harmed civilians in Syria, Iran, and elsewhere. And when liberal states (or their allies) commit war crimes or atrocities, often their first instinct is to cover them up and deny responsibility.

...

Indeed, a good case can be made that well-meaning liberal crusaders are responsible for a lot more trouble than those allegedly cold-hearted, amoral realists. As Michael Desch has argued, a broadly realist approach to world politics would produce a saner and more peaceful world, precisely because it rejects universal crusading and recognizes that other societies have values that they will want to preserve as much as we might want to spread our own. For this reason, realism emphasizes the need to take the interests of other states into account and to make prudent diplomatic adjustments as balances of power shift. This approach would have helped the United States avoid some of the counterproductive excesses of the unipolar era, mistakes that caused considerable suffering and tarnished America’s image in many places.

I should probably be more tolerant of some of my liberal antagonists. They might be loath to admit it, but their willingness to abandon their liberal convictions in the face of uncomfortable international realities is itself a powerful vindication of the basic realist perspective. It would be nice if the liberal voices who dominate U.S. foreign-policy discourse were more willing to acknowledge these lapses and less self-righteous when defending their policy recommendations. Public discourse would be more civil and productive, and the success rate of U.S. foreign policy would almost certainly improve.

Cluster Bombs and the Contradictions of Liberalism

Do liberals really believe what they say about their foreign-policy ideals?

Walt-Steve-foreign-policy-columnist20

Stephen M. Walt

By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University. FP subscribers can now receive digests of new stories written by this author. Subscribe now | Sign in

Foreign Policy · by Stephen M. Walt · July 19, 2023

The Biden administration’s controversial decision to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions is a telling illustration of liberalism’s limitations as a guide to foreign policy. The administration’s rhetoric extols the superiority of democracies over autocracies, highlights its commitment to a “rules-based order,” and steadfastly maintains that it takes human rights seriously. If this were true, however, it would not be sending weapons that pose serious risks to civilians and whose use in Ukraine it has criticized harshly in the past. But as it has on other prominent issues (e.g., relations with Saudi Arabia, the expanding Israeli oppression of its Palestinian subjects, or the commitment to an open world economy), those liberal convictions get jettisoned as soon as they become inconvenient. This behavior shouldn’t surprise us: When states are in trouble and worried that they might suffer a setback, they toss their principles aside and do what they think it takes to win.

Liberalism begins with the claim that all human beings possess certain natural rights, which should not be infringed upon under any circumstances. To preserve these rights while protecting us from each other, liberals believe governments should be accountable to their citizens (typically through free, fair, and regular elections); constrained by the rule of law; and that citizens should be free to speak, worship, and think as they wish, provided that exercising these rights does not harm others. For the record: I like these principles as much as anyone, and I’m glad I live in a country where they are (mostly) intact.

For liberals, the only legitimate governments are those that subscribe to these principles, even though no government does so perfectly. When they turn to foreign policy, therefore, liberals tend to divide the world into good states (those with legitimate orders based on liberal principles) and bad states (just about everything else) and blame most if not all the world’s problems on the latter. They believe that if every country were a well-established liberal democracy, conflicts of interest would fade into insignificance and the scourge of war would disappear. Liberals also place considerable weight on the importance of norms and institutions—which underpin the vaunted rules-based order—and frequently accuse non-liberal states of violating them with callous disregard.

This view of international affairs is undeniably appealing. Instead of seeing relations between states as a relentless struggle for power and position, liberalism offers a seductive vision of forward progress, moral clarity, and a positive program for action. It allows Americans (and their closest allies) to tell themselves that what’s good for them will be good for everyone else as well. Just keep enlarging the liberal order and eventually perpetual peace will emerge in an increasingly prosperous and just world. Moreover, what’s the alternative? Does anyone really want to defend the arbitrary exercise of power, the suppression of freedom, or the claim that powerful actors can do whatever they want?

Unfortunately, the liberal perspective suffers from at least two serious flaws.

The first problem is liberalism’s universalist pretensions. Because they are founded on the claim that every human being everywhere has certain inalienable rights, liberal states tend to be crusaders who see foreign policy as an all-or-nothing struggle between good and evil. George W. Bush trumpeted this view in his second inaugural address, when he proclaimed that the ultimate goal of American foreign policy was “ending tyranny in our world.” Why was this necessary? Because “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” If put into practice, however, this policy would guarantee unending conflict with countries that have different traditions, values, and political systems. These convictions can also encourage a dangerous overconfidence: If one is fighting on the side of the angels and swimming with the tides of history, it is easy to assume that victory is inevitable and won’t be that hard to achieve.

Moreover, if world politics is a Manichean clash between good and evil with humanity’s future in the balance, there are no limits on where you must be willing to fight and little reason to act with restraint. As Sen. Barry Goldwater put it in his unsuccessful campaign for president in 1964: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. … Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” This same mindset is present today in the overheated rhetoric of Ukraine’s loudest liberal and neo-conservative defenders, who are quick to attack anyone with a different view of the conflict as an appeaser, a defender of Russian President Vladimir Putin, or worse.

The second problem is the fragility of these liberal convictions when they are put to the test, as President Joe Biden’s decision to give cluster munitions to Ukraine demonstrates. If the (evil) enemy proves more resilient than expected and victory does not come quickly, then self-proclaimed liberals will begin to embrace policies or partners that they might shun in better times. George W. Bush may have extolled the virtues of liberty, but his administration also tortured prisoners. As the Forward has reported, a more recent case in point is the June 2023 visit to Stanford University by representatives from the Azov Brigade, a Ukrainian militia with a well-documented Nazi and white supremacist past. Putin’s claims that Ukraine needs to be de-Nazified are exaggerated, but the willingness of outspoken liberals such as Michael McFaul or Francis Fukuyama to welcome Azov representatives to Stanford shows a remarkable ethical flexibility.

Politics is the art of the possible, of course, and sometimes moral convictions must be compromised to achieve larger aims. The United States allied with Stalinist Russia to defeat Nazi Germany, for example, and this sort of ethical expediency is widespread. As Alexander Downes shows in his exhaustive study of civilian targeting, democracies are often just as willing to kill civilians as their authoritarian counterparts, and to do so deliberately. The British waged a brutal counterinsurgency campaign during the Second Boer War, the Allied blockade in World War I starved Germany’s civilian population, and the United States and Great Britain purposely bombed civilian targets during World War II (including the use of two atomic bombs on Japan). The United States later dropped nearly 6 million tons of bombs on Vietnam during the war there (roughly three times what it had dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II), including deliberate attacks on Vietnamese cities, and its “sanctions-happy” foreign policy has harmed civilians in Syria, Iran, and elsewhere. And when liberal states (or their allies) commit war crimes or atrocities, often their first instinct is to cover them up and deny responsibility.

Such behavior is no surprise to realists, of course, who emphasize that the absence of a central authority in world politics forces states to worry about their security and sometimes leads them to act aggressively toward other states because they have convinced themselves that doing so will make them safer. This familiar tendency doesn’t make it right or excuse the excesses that both democracies and autocracies sometimes commit, but it does help us understand why the distinction between “good” liberal states and “bad” autocracies is not as clear-cut as liberals maintain.

Indeed, a good case can be made that well-meaning liberal crusaders are responsible for a lot more trouble than those allegedly cold-hearted, amoral realists. As Michael Desch has argued, a broadly realist approach to world politics would produce a saner and more peaceful world, precisely because it rejects universal crusading and recognizes that other societies have values that they will want to preserve as much as we might want to spread our own. For this reason, realism emphasizes the need to take the interests of other states into account and to make prudent diplomatic adjustments as balances of power shift. This approach would have helped the United States avoid some of the counterproductive excesses of the unipolar era, mistakes that caused considerable suffering and tarnished America’s image in many places.

I should probably be more tolerant of some of my liberal antagonists. They might be loath to admit it, but their willingness to abandon their liberal convictions in the face of uncomfortable international realities is itself a powerful vindication of the basic realist perspective. It would be nice if the liberal voices who dominate U.S. foreign-policy discourse were more willing to acknowledge these lapses and less self-righteous when defending their policy recommendations. Public discourse would be more civil and productive, and the success rate of U.S. foreign policy would almost certainly improve.

Foreign Policy · by Stephen M. Walt · July 19, 2023

27. Is Elon laughing? Reports say Mark Zuckerberg's 'Twitter-killer' just suffered a stunning 50% collapse in daily active users after white-hot start — but here's why Musk should still worry

Is Elon laughing? Reports say Mark Zuckerberg's 'Twitter-killer' just suffered a stunning 50% collapse in daily active users after white-hot start — but here's why Musk should still worry

https://moneywise.com/investing/investing/is-elon-laughing-sources-say-mark-zuckerbergs-twitter-killer-just-suffered-a-stunning-50-collapse-in-daily-active-users

Threads seems to be unraveling — for now.

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By Vishesh Raisinghani

Jul. 20, 2023

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After a record-breaking launch, Mark Zuckerberg’s new app Threads has seen the numbers wane — significantly. Threads attracted over 100 million users within five days of its launch, demolishing ChatGPT’s record of fastest-growing consumer app and earning it the nickname “Twitter killer.”

However, recent data from industry sources suggest many of these users haven’t stayed active on the platform since the white-hot launch.

MORE: Mark Zuckerberg's net worth

Engagement settles lower

Active users on the new app declined by 50% from 49 million on July 7th to 23.6 million on July 14th, according to a new report by SimilarWeb. That means only a quarter of the platform comes back to check and interact on the app every day. Even Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the number of people returning to the app is in the “tens of millions.”

This means that the so-called “Twitter killer” still has plenty of work ahead of itself. Twitter is a private company that doesn’t release these numbers publicly, but the latest figures from the company’s last earnings report suggest the daily active user base stood at roughly 238 million. According to Elon Musk, that number has surged to 259.4 million recently.

Effectively, Threads has only 10% of the daily active users of its biggest rival. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean Musk will get the last laugh.

MORE: Elon Musk on the state of commercial real estate

Why Twitter should be worried

There is evidence to suggest that rivals like Threads are seeping users and engagement from the legacy social app. Web traffic to Twitter was down 5% within the first two days of Threads being launched, according to data from SimilarWeb. Although this has recovered a little since then, traffic is still 11% lower year-over-year.

The fact that a rival app captured 10% of the user base within weeks should also be a concern. Zuckerberg has a track record of successfully scaling social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp each boasts billions of daily active users.

Elon Musk recently admitted that Twitter’s revenue had dropped 50% while the company was cash flow negative due to a “heavy debt load.” Musk’s decision to scale back content moderation may have scared off advertisers, according to a Bloomberg report. Researchers have seen a significant uptick in hate speech and violent content on the site in recent months.

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban mocked Musk on Twitter by saying “Go red, no bread,” while retweeting Musk’s announcement about revenue declines.

Cuban has been a vocal critic of Musk’s policies ever since he took over the social media brand last year.

“Who he supports or denigrates is the Twitter equivalent of State intervention. He owns the platform, he can do what he chooses,” he said in a tweet earlier this year. “But it’s disingenuous to say Twitter is the home of free speech when he chooses to often put his thumb on the scale of reach.”

Cuban is an active user of both Threads and Twitter.

28. EXPLAINED: How Ukraine’s New DPICM Cluster Munitions Actually Work

EXPLAINED: How Ukraine’s New DPICM Cluster Munitions Actually Work

kyivpost.com

After months of debate and speculation the US has confirmed it will provide cluster munitions to Ukraine – the 155 mm artillery-delivered dual-purpose improved conventional munition (DPICM).

by Steve Brown | July 19, 2023, 5:13 pm |

Handout / DVIDS / AFP

In September 2022, Daniel Rice a US advisor to General Valery Zaluzhny, the commander in chief of the Ukraine Armed Forces (AFU), wrote an article advising Ukraine to request the supply of DPICM from US stockpiles. For several months the Ukrainian government echoed the requests to be supplied with cluster munitions.

At the Munich Security Conference in February 2023, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Olexandr Kubrakov, and foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, appealed for Ukraine to be supplied with cluster munitions.

Finally, on July 7 the Department of Defense (DoD) announced another round of critical security and defense equipment to Ukraine; the Administration's forty-second drawdown of equipment for Kyiv. The DoD statement said the package would provide additional air defense munitions, armored vehicles, anti-armor weapons, artillery systems and ammunition.

The statement said that, after extensive consultations with Congress, Allies and partners, this would include the “highly effective and reliable” dual-purpose improved conventional munitions (DPICM). According to media reports, Ukraine will receive a significant number of these warheads, potentially numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The nature of the munition, especially in the quantities suggested, would have a noticeable potentially game-changing impact on the battlefield.

Why did Ukraine want DPICM?

Russian occupying forces have spent months developing fortifications consisting of extensive in-depth minefields and trench lines. Ukraine’s counteroffensive has so far found progress difficult mainly because of a shortage of artillery rounds fitted with unitary high explosive warheads as trenches are built to withstand this type of indirect fire.

Artillery is essential if Russian indirect and direct fire is to be suppressed and to allow Ukrainian forces to assault Russian trenches and break the defense line. Cluster munition artillery shells will give Ukrainian artillery the ability to cover more ground and do so faster using a smaller number of total shells.

Additionally, they can be employed to deliver suppressive fire against weapons, equipment and personnel in the open. DPICM could also be used to aid Ukrainian sappers to clear the huge minefields that defend the Russian lines or even to destroy the mines if fired directly onto the minefields prior to an attack.

So, what is the DPICM, what is special about them and how do they work?

DPICM describes a general type of US munition which includes a wide range of artillery shells, rockets, and missiles loaded with submunitions. It includes shells for 105mm, 155mm, and 203mm howitzers, as well as 227mm artillery rockets that can be fired from the M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) and the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers.

Currently, the US has only agreed to provide the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) with a single type of DPICM, the 155mm artillery shells.

Western nations have transferred several different 155mm howitzers to Ukraine both towed guns, such as the US M777 and the UK-designed FH-70, and self-propelled guns, such as the US-designed M109 and the German PzH 2000. The DPICM rounds that Washington is transferring to Kyiv are fired from any of the standard NATO 155mm howitzers provided by Ukraine’s Western partners over a range of around 20-25 kilometers.

Each munition contains 88 M77 submunitions, each of which has a lethal range of about 10 square meters. This means one shell can impact an area of up to 18,000 square meters, depending on the height set for the release of the submunitions. This compares with the blast and fragmentation area from a standard high explosive 155mm artillery round of around 7,000 square meters.

Components of 155mm DPICM roundSource: US DoD / author

On arriving at the target, the 155mm DPICM shell detonates a small explosive ejection charge which forces the “piston-like” pusher plate towards the rear of the shell with enough force to overcome the separation joint at the base of the round.

This in turn allows the M77submunitions to be expelled from the rear of the shell which is rotating at high speed and distributes the M77s into a predictable pattern against the target.

Schematic of DPICM deploymentSource: US DoD (Unclassified Slide)

As the submunitions fall air resistance on the ribbon attached to them helps stabilize their position as they fall allowing the shaped charge liner cone to face downward so that when it strikes the target it does so at the optimum angle to ensure maximum penetration. The submunitions fall at a very steep, almost vertical, angle which makes them more likely to enter trenches where the fragmentation of their steel bodies acts as an effective anti-personnel weapon.

M77 submunitionsPhoto: Wikimedia / author

This generation of DPICM are second-generation developments of the original 1970s designed improved conventional munitions (ICM) which were a purely anti-personnel weapon. This iteration is much more precise, and efficient, with a much lower failure rate than its predecessors plus it now includes safety mechanisms that neutralize unexploded submunitions. Current US figures suggest an overall failure rate of less than 2.5 percent compared with those of cluster munitions deployed by Russia in Ukraine which is in excess of 30 percent.

The US Army also has an undisclosed number of M26 unguided rocket projectiles for M270 MLRS and M142 HIMARS systems in storage, which also belong to the same class of cluster munitions. This means that the range of cluster munition that could potentially be delivered to Ukraine’s Armed Forces could expand in the future, subject to political will.

A single M26 227mm artillery rocket, contains 644 M77 DPICM submunitions which can disperse them across a footprint of nearly 30,000 square meters.

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Steve Brown

After a career as a British Army Ammunition Specialist and Bomb Disposal Officer, Steve later worked in the fields of ammunition destruction, demining and explosive ordnance disposal with the UN and NATO. In 2017, after taking early retirement, he moved to Ukraine with his Ukrainian wife and two sons where he became a full-time writer. He now works as an English language editor with the Kyiv Post.

29. White House says Russia is preparing for attacks on civilian ships in Black Sea

White House says Russia is preparing for attacks on civilian ships in Black Sea

AP · by Published [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year] · July 19, 2023

U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power speaks during a news conference at the Port of Odesa, as she is joined by Ukrainian Minister of Infrastructure Oleksandr Kubrakov, center, and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink, right, in Odesa, Ukraine, Tuesday, July 18, 2023. (AP Photo/Libkos)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Days after Russia suspended participation in a wartime deal that allowed grain to flow from Ukraine to countries around the world, the White House on Wednesday warned that the Russian military is preparing for possible attacks on civilian shipping vessels in the Black Sea.

Since leaving the Black Sea Grain Deal this week, Russia has already struck Ukraine’s grain export ports in Odesa with missile and drone attacks. Some 60,000 tons of grain were destroyed in the attacks.

“Our information indicates that Russia laid additional sea mines in the approaches to Ukrainian ports,” White House National Security Council spokesman Adam Hodge said in a statement. “We believe that this is a coordinated effort to justify any attacks against civilian ships in the Black Sea and lay blame on Ukraine for these attacks.”

The Russian Defense Ministry has declared international waters in northwestern and southeastern parts of the Black Sea “temporarily dangerous” for shipping. That followed Ukraine’s pledge to continue grain shipments despite the Russian pullout from the deal.

The ministry warned it will see any incoming vessel as laden with military cargo.

Here’s the latest for Thursday July 20th: Winning ticket sold for Powerball $1b jackpot; US reaches out to North Korea about soldier; Protesters storm Swedish embassy in Baghdad; Tornado wrecks major pharmaceutical plant.

AP · by Published [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year] · July 19, 2023

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com