Quotes of the Day:
“When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with death, so that when their time comes they weep and prayer a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.Sing your death song, and die like the hero going home."
- Tecumseh, Shawnee Leader
“I was heaping scorn on an inexcusably silly idea - a practice I shall always follow. Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never settles anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk and the passenger pigeon. Violence , naked force, has settled more issues in history than any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms."
- Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
“ Nothing is falser than people’s preconceptions and ready-made opinions; nothing is sillier than their sham morality.
- Petronius, Roman courtier
1. CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades
2. The age of heroism is over in Europe: There will be no more 'guerrilla wars'
3. Russia unleashes a politics-cyber-camouflage strategy against Ukraine
4. ‘We have to show strength’: Calls grow for U.S. to deter Russian hackers
5. How Foreign Spies Infiltrate US Police
6. ‘We’ll fight to the end.’ Ukraine defiant in face of Vladimir Putin’s phoney war
7. The Putin Puzzle: Why Ukraine? Why Now?
8. Russia's Hypersonic Weapons: Nothing More Than a Paper Tiger?
9. Texas Synagogue Hostages Freed by Elite FBI Rescue Team
10. China filling US-created vacuum in Middle East: Washington-based daily
11. Vietnam And Philippines Hedging Against China And US Interests In The South China Sea – Analysis
12. Philippines to acquire 32 new Black Hawk helicopters
13. Ressa warns: PH polls could see repeat of US Capitol attack if disinformation not stopped
14. Chinese Influence Operations - A Machiavellian Moment
15. Hamas claims it discovered a dolphin assassin sent by Israel. Experts say it's plausible, but more likely propaganda
16. People who study the origins of civil wars see 'indicators' the US is on the brink of conflict, Yale historian says
1. CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades
"Shared battlespace."
CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades
The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials.
The CIA-trained forces could soon play a critical role on Ukraine’s eastern border, where Russian troops have massed in what many fear is preparation for an invasion. The U.S. and Russia started security talks earlier this week in Geneva but have failed thus far to reach any concrete agreement.
Ukrainian troops walk in a trench on the frontline with Russia-backed separatists near Avdiivka, Donetsk, southeastern Ukraine, on Jan. 8. (Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images)
While the covert program, run by paramilitaries working for the CIA’s Ground Branch — now officially known as Ground Department — was established by the Obama administration after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, and expanded under the Trump administration, the Biden administration has further augmented it, said a former senior intelligence official in touch with colleagues in government.
By 2015, as part of this expanded anti-Russia effort, CIA Ground Branch paramilitaries also started traveling to the front in eastern Ukraine to advise their counterparts there, according to a half-dozen former officials.
The multiweek, U.S.-based CIA program has included training in firearms, camouflage techniques, land navigation, tactics like “cover and move,” intelligence and other areas, according to former officials.
How to characterize the program is a matter of dispute. The U.S. over three presidents has debated whether to provide military assistance to Ukraine, and how much, with discussions often focusing on whether that help is offensive or defensive in character.
U.S. officials deny that the CIA training program is, or was ever, offensively oriented. “The purpose of the training, and the training that was delivered, was to assist in the collection of intelligence,” said a current senior intelligence official.
But just what intelligence support entails, in the paramilitary context, can be ambiguous. And how this training will be applied by the Ukrainians may change rapidly with facts on the ground.
Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces, the military reserve of the Ukrainian Armes Forces, take part in a military exercise near Kiev on December 25, 2021. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images)
The program has involved “very specific training on skills that would enhance” the Ukrainians’ “ability to push back against the Russians,” said the former senior intelligence official.
The training, which has included “tactical stuff,” is “going to start looking pretty offensive if Russians invade Ukraine,” said the former official.
One person familiar with the program put it more bluntly. “The United States is training an insurgency,” said a former CIA official, adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how “to kill Russians.”
The program, which does not appear to have ever been formally aimed at preparing for an insurgency, did include training that could be used for that purpose. Another former agency official described technical aspects of the program, like showing Ukrainians how to maintain secure communications behind enemy lines or in a “hostile intelligence environment” as potential “stay-behind force training.”
The current senior intelligence official strongly denied that the program was designed in any way “to assist in an insurgency.”
“Suggestions that we have trained an armed insurgency in Ukraine are simply false,” said Tammy Thorp, a CIA spokesperson.
Going back decades, the CIA has provided limited training to Ukrainian intelligence units to try and shore up an independent Kyiv and prevent Russian subversion, but cooperation “ramped up” after the Crimea invasion, said a former CIA executive.
Militants of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic walk at a fighting position on the line of separation from the Ukrainian armed forces near the settlement of Frunze in Luhansk Region, Ukraine Dec. 24, 2021. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)
The CIA paramilitaries in Ukraine have “a very small footprint,” said the former agency executive, and are helping train Ukrainian forces in “potential critical nodes the Russians may focus on” if Moscow seeks to push farther into the country.
Though the agency’s paramilitary resources have been otherwise stretched thin in Afghanistan and on other counterterrorism missions, the U.S.-based training program has been a “high priority” for the CIA since its Obama-era inception, said the former senior intelligence official.
The program did not require, or receive, a new presidential finding, which is used to authorize covert action, and has been run under previously existing authorities, according to former officials.
The Trump administration — partially at the urging of Congress — later expanded funding for the initiative, increasing the number of Ukrainian cohorts brought over yearly to the U.S., according to former officials.
“If the Russians invade, those [graduates of the CIA programs] are going to be your militia, your insurgent leaders,” said the former senior intelligence official. “We’ve been training these guys now for eight years. They’re really good fighters. That’s where the agency’s program could have a serious impact.”
Over the years, the CIA training programs have been “very effective,” said the former CIA executive.
It has helped “turn the tide,” said the first former CIA official, who said he or she was briefed that “gains were being made on the battlefield” as a “direct result” of the program.
Snipers in camouflage suits during The celebrations on the occasion of the 5th anniversary of the National Guard of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine. (Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Both U.S. and Ukrainian officials believe that Ukrainian forces will not be able to withstand a large-scale Russian incursion, according to former U.S. officials. But representatives from both countries also believe that Russia won’t be able to hold on to new territory indefinitely because of stiff resistance from Ukrainian insurgents, according to former officials.
Working so closely with the Ukrainians has presented unique challenges, according to former officials. For years, U.S. officials have believed that, because of Russia’s web of spies within Ukraine’s intelligence services, the program has very likely been compromised by Moscow.
Senior Trump administration officials discussed worries about Russian penetration of the program with their Ukrainian counterparts, according to a former national security official. The Ukrainians, well aware of the issue, have tried to vet the U.S.-bound trainees to weed out moles, according to former officials.
Still, Trump-era National Security Council officials established a rule not to tell the Ukrainians anything they weren’t comfortable with the Russians subsequently learning about, recalled the former national security official.
A small number of trainees in the earlier U.S.-based cohorts were sent back to Ukraine for breaking security rules, like possessing unauthorized electronic devices, according to the first former CIA official.
CIA officials also believed their trainees were being targeted by the Russians once they returned to Ukraine. “Russians and traitorous Russian loyalists within the Ukrainian security services were seeking out graduates of those classes to assassinate,” said the former CIA official.
Forensic police experts and military intelligence examine the wreckage of a car in Kyiv. The commander of Ukraine's military intelligence special ops unit colonel Maksym Shapoval was killed by a bomb attached to the bottom of his vehicle in central Kyiv. (Sergii Kharchenko/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Russian penetration of Ukrainian intelligence has been a long-standing problem for the CIA, according to former intelligence officials. For decades, the agency has tried to work only with special select Ukrainian units — some created at the agency’s insistence — that have been isolated from the rest of the country’s intelligence services in order to prevent Russian compromise, according to former officials.
Even though the CIA assumes some Russian compromise when working with the Ukrainians, the agency still believes the training program has been, on balance, highly valuable, according to former officials.
If the Russians launch a new invasion, “there’s going to be people who make their life miserable,” said the former senior intelligence official. The CIA-trained paramilitaries “will organize the resistance” using the specialized training they’ve received.
“All that stuff that happened to us in Afghanistan,” said the former senior intelligence official, “they can expect to see that in spades with these guys.”
2. The age of heroism is over in Europe: There will be no more 'guerrilla wars'
A Russian response on the Russian propaganda mouthpiece RT to the recent reports of developing resistance in Ukraine.
This is propaganda to counter the concept of unconventional deterrence. Is this an indication the Russians actually fear resistance in Ukraine?
The age of heroism is over in Europe: There will be no more 'guerrilla wars'
For all the talk of violent resistance, recent history shows talk comes cheap
By Artyom Lukin, an associate professor of international relations at Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok, Russia. Follow him on Twitter @ArtyomLukin
Speculation has run high in Western capitals in recent weeks that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could trigger a ‘guerrilla war’ with US-made weapons, creating an Afghanistan-like quagmire for President Vladimir Putin.
In reality, though, should such apocalyptic events ever transpire, an anti-Russian insurgency seems unlikely for a range of reasons – the primary one being that we live in a time when fewer and fewer people seem willing to take up arms.
The end of the age of heroes
A year ago, I wrote a piece arguing that individuals in modern post-industrial societies, be it the US, Russia, or Ukraine, increasingly shirk violence. Some may be brave and aggressive in virtual reality, but almost all become surprisingly meek when it comes to real-life, kinetic violence. One reason for this timidity is demography. Young males, driven by hormones and easily ignited by political or religious ideologies, have always been the main force fueling wars, revolutions, and insurgencies. Yet, due to society ageing, there are few youngsters left in developed nations. Similar to the rest of Europe, Ukraine is a nation that is getting older, with the median age standing at around 41.
The recent events in Belarus, Hong Kong, Russia, and the United States, where authorities swiftly put down political protests, have demonstrated that even those relatively few young men left are not willing to risk their personal safety if they are confronted with brute force. The police violence inflicted by the government of Alexander Lukashenko against protesters on the streets of Minsk was not even particularly brutal or bloody by historical standards. Still, even that moderate repression was enough to quell the Belarusian urbanites. If young men were not prepared to fight to the end against Lukashenko, why should one expect their neighbors in Ukraine to mount a life-and-death struggle against Putin?
It is utterly naive to hope, as many in the West do, that Ukraine will become “another Afghanistan or Chechnya” for Russia. Ukraine is no Afghanistan if only because modern Ukrainians are neither Pashtuns nor Chechens, who remain warrior societies. And even restive Chechnya was successfully pacified by Moscow two decades ago. Ironically, the Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov has even asked permission from his overlord Putin to annex Kiev for the Kremlin.
The war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s was the most recent major military conflict in Europe. The superior military force of NATO quickly defeated the Serbs and imposed its will on Belgrade. For all the Serbian nationalism, no Serb insurgency in the Balkans followed this. It is worth noting that in many socio-cultural aspects the Serbs resemble the Ukrainians. And I wonder if the Russian military planners have studied NATO’s experience in the Balkans to potentially apply it in Ukraine.
Another illustrative recent case in Europe is Catalonia. Madrid only had to use a relatively modest level of police coercion in the streets, as well as jailing a few Catalan leaders, to defeat the separatist movement in Spain’s wealthiest region. The Catalans might aspire to a sovereign state of their own, but they are not even remotely ready to make the painful sacrifices that a struggle for independence requires.
Guerrilla warfare and insurgencies demand heroes willing to risk their lives for a cause. A nation must be ready to pay the price in human blood. But the age of heroism is over in Europe – and it is over in other developed, post-modern, low-birth-rate societies, whether they’re in North America or East Asia.
Unlike the Afghan mujahideen or Yemen’s Houthis, contemporary Ukrainians already belong to the post-modern world. Ukraine recognized defeat in the 2014-15 war in Donbas within several months. It was not only due to the inferiority of the Ukrainian army. It was also about the level of acceptance of human losses: even a few thousand combat deaths proved unbearable for the Ukrainian society.
Is insurgency possible in a digital reality?
The level of digitalization of modern life is another factor that minimizes the risk of an insurgency. One of the first things Russian forces would probably do in Ukraine is establish control over the cell networks and internet providers. Once you control the digital infrastructure, you basically control the people of a modern society. If extra-terrestrial aliens ever decide to conquer a post-industrial nation, they may only need to overtake its telecoms and electronic networks.
It might be possible to wage an insurgency in the virtual reality of the film ‘The Matrix’. It is, however, much harder to organize a large-scale resistance movement in a real-world post-industrial environment, where individuals totally depend on mobile phones and internet access while almost every square meter is monitored by surveillance cameras. Just ask the Chinese (and the Americans) about the viability of anti-government protests in a highly wired, highly surveilled society. The Russian government is not far behind in terms of sophisticated electronic technologies of control over individuals. And where the Russians do lag behind, the Chinese might be willing to extend a helping hand.
An apathetic country
Around 24% of respondents in one recent poll in Ukraine reportedly said they would resist Russian occupation “with a weapon in hand.” Given that Ukraine’s population currently stands at around 30 million, this means a few million civilians-turned-combatants would confront the Russian forces. But how credible is it? Respondents in such polls tend to give socially approved answers. And defending your homeland is what everyone is supposed to do. However, reports from Ukraine’s conscription centers tell a different story. Even in the face of the “Russian threat,” Ukrainian boys are not eager to do their compulsory military service. They are even less enthusiastic about serving on the frontline in the east.
Rather than being energized and mobilized by the threat from Russia, the Ukrainian society looks largely apathetic. It seems like many Ukrainians just don’t care anymore. The apathy can be partially explained by the effect of Covid-19. Post-pandemic Ukraine is a fatigued and debilitated society. In this respect it is not much different from neighboring Russia and most European countries. A more important factor could be the disillusionment of many Ukrainians in their country’s politics and their political leaders. The Maidan-era euphoria is long gone.
If (and this is a very big IF) Putin does invade Ukraine, only a tiny fraction of the population in eastern and southern Ukraine – the areas with a high proportion of Russian-speakers – would be actually prepared to actively resist the Russian forces. And they stand no chance against the Russian army and special forces. Emigration, rather than fighting, would be the most likely scenario for those who refuse to accept a new reality. A few hundred thousand people might leave Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine. An absolute majority of the Ukrainians in Russian-occupied areas would remain passive and would do nothing to defend the cause of Ukrainian nationalistic democracy. And there will be quite a few who would enthusiastically collaborate with Russian-installed authorities. Western Ukraine, which is far more nationalistic and anti-Russian, might be a different story. But Russia is unlikely to move into western Ukraine anyway.
Sitting in comfortable offices in Washington, London, and Warsaw, some people may have their wet dreams about fighting Russia to the very last Ukrainian. These dreams are unlikely to come true. There are many serious risks for Moscow if it launches a massive military operation in Ukraine. But a guerrilla war and insurgency are not among them.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
3. Russia unleashes a politics-cyber-camouflage strategy against Ukraine
Conclusion:
Ultimately, what we saw on Friday was a threefold Russian effort to intimidate and demoralize Ukraine and the West simultaneously and lay the political and moral ground for a military attack on Ukraine.
Russia unleashes a politics-cyber-camouflage strategy against Ukraine
Russia appeared to unleash a three-prong strategy against Ukraine on Friday.
The first element was designed to give domestic (an underreported concern) and foreign justification to Russia's impending escalation. It came from Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who warned that the United States had not taken seriously Russian demands over NATO enlargement and the West's relationship with Ukraine. Lavrov declared, "Our patience has been exhausted. We are very patient. You know what they say about how long Russians take to harness their horses: We harness them slowly, but then it’s time to ride."
The second element of Russia's strategy appears to be a Russian plot to conduct an attack on pro-Russian interests in Ukraine. Russia would then blame this "false flag" attack on Ukrainian forces or partisans, thus giving Moscow a moral pretense to launch a re-invasion of Ukraine.
Moscow hinted that it was developing such a plot in December. As reported on Dec. 30, the U.S. and Britain have grown concerned by the deployment of boutique Russian special forces units in Ukraine. Such plots are a favorite of Russian President Vladimir Putin and are centered in the Soviet military strategy of "maskirovka," or "camouflage/masking."
The third element, designed to intimidate Ukraine and possibly to deter the European Union from joining U.S. sanctions, came with a cyberattack against Ukrainian government websites. This temporarily disabled the websites in lieu of offensive messages in Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish. The attack is unlikely to be directly traced to an SVR or GRU cyber-intelligence unit, the most capable in the Russian cyber-offensive inventory. Instead, it seems relatively simplistic, designed for short-term effect and public intimidation. Considering the obvious benefit to Russian strategic interests, it is likely that nominally private hackers associated with Russian ransomware groups were responsible. These groups operate with varying degrees of subservience to the Russian state, specifically the FSB domestic security service.
Notably, this wasn't the only Russia-related cyber incident on Friday.
In what strongly appears to be an attempt to warn the U.S. of its ability to provide either cybersecurity carrots or sticks, the FSB announced that it has spent the past two months arresting a number of hackers belonging to the REvil ransomware group. Russian state media gave the arrests heavy coverage, evincing Moscow's desire to get U.S. attention.
Ultimately, what we saw on Friday was a threefold Russian effort to intimidate and demoralize Ukraine and the West simultaneously and lay the political and moral ground for a military attack on Ukraine.
4. ‘We have to show strength’: Calls grow for U.S. to deter Russian hackers
Excerpts;
The concern is growing more urgent as tensions ramp up over the 100,000 troops that Russia has placed on Ukraine’s border, and as U.S. officials warn that Vladimir Putin’s regime may be fomenting a pretext to invade. The Biden administration has threatened to respond with sanctions that would cripple the Russian economy — a development that could in turn prompt Russia to retaliate with cyberattacks against the U.S.
One missing ingredient, some intelligence leaders say, is an explicit message from Washington about the consequences Russia would face for a cyberattack on critical targets such as the United States’ power grid.
‘We have to show strength’: Calls grow for U.S. to deter Russian hackers
01/16/2022 07:00 AM EST
Kremlin saber-rattling on the Ukrainian border is increasing worries that a confrontation could fuel cyberattacks on the U.S.
In this image provided by The White House, President Joe Biden speaks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the phone from his private residence in Wilmington, Del. on Dec. 30, 2021. | Adam Schultz/The White House via AP
01/16/2022 07:00 AM EST
Worries about a potential cyber conflict with Russia are placing a rising demand on President Joe Biden: Make it clear how the U.S. will respond if Moscow goes too far.
The concern is growing more urgent as tensions ramp up over the 100,000 troops that Russia has placed on Ukraine’s border, and as U.S. officials warn that Vladimir Putin’s regime may be fomenting a pretext to invade. The Biden administration has threatened to respond with sanctions that would cripple the Russian economy — a development that could in turn prompt Russia to retaliate with cyberattacks against the U.S.
One missing ingredient, some intelligence leaders say, is an explicit message from Washington about the consequences Russia would face for a cyberattack on critical targets such as the United States’ power grid.
“While I think the red lines have been made clear for several years now — and underscored most recently in the president’s signal to President Putin that targeting of infrastructure remains a clear red line for the U.S. — what has been less clear has been the U.S. articulation of the specific consequences for crossing those red lines,” Senate Intelligence Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) said in a statement to POLITICO.
During a meeting in Geneva last year, Biden handed Putin a list of the 16 infrastructure sectors that the U.S. has long defined as “critical,” telling him they should be off limits to cyberattacks. The sprawling list includes energy, dams, food, hospitals, financial services, communications and government facilities.
“I pointed out to him we have significant cyber capability, and he knows it,” Biden told reporters afterward. Biden added, "He knows I will take action.”
But Friday’s hack of the Ukrainian websites — which early indications linked to Russia — show that Putin may be willing to test those boundaries.
Biden needs to be willing to respond aggressively if Russia crosses the line, said Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.), chair of the House Armed Services Committee’s cybersecurity subcommittee.
“Should Russia — or the criminal hackers that Putin allows to freely operate within his borders — threaten American hospitals, utilities, or other critical infrastructure, the U.S. must consider using all instruments of state power in response to such blatant aggression,” Langevin said in a statement Thursday.
Russia and other nations including China, Iran and North Korea have not been shy in attacking U.S. companies and agencies over the past decade, penetrating targets including banks, insurance companies, the electric grid and the U.S. agency that maintains the nation’s nuclear weapons.
“I talked to a Russian friend who has connections the FSB” — Russia’s Federal Security Service — “and he said, ‘after the 2016 election interference, we kept waiting to see what the Americans would do back, and when they didn’t do anything, we decided we had overestimated the risk,’” said James Lewis, the director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“We need to rebuild that credibility,” Lewis stressed. “The Russians and the Chinese aren’t afraid of us, so why would they stop.”
Biden and his administration have taken steps to begin this effort over the past year. Biden took office as the government was still struggling to assess the full scope of the SolarWinds hack, a massive Russian espionage effort that compromised at least nine federal agencies. His first year in office also saw an unprecedented increase in ransomware attacks, many linked to Russian hacking groups, including breaches that disrupted much of the U.S. gasoline and meat supplies.
Biden’s responses included levying sanctions on Russia in April in connection to SolarWinds. The White House also hosted a virtual counter-ransomware initiative meeting in October that brought together over 30 countries to discuss ways to counter these disruptive attacks, and cybersecurity has been an ongoing topic of discussion between Washington and Moscow.
These talks may have made some headway in Moscow, with the Russian FSB announcing Friday that it had detained members of the Russian-linked REvil ransomware group and confiscated hundreds of thousands of dollars in victim payments. The group was linked to attacks on the major meat processing company JBS and the software maker Kaseya last year, and was among the groups the administration had been asking Moscow to rein in.
Later Friday, the White House said the arrested hackers also included a perpetrator of the May ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, which authorities have blamed on the Russia-based gang DarkSide.
“Everyone is thinking, how do we push back on the Russians,” Lewis said. “The Biden administration’s biggest success is in that collective effort, but I think Putin got the message on high-profile events.”
The administration is also clearly aware of the potential for Russia to use cyberattacks to retaliate against the U.S. should tensions further escalate. The FBI, CISA, and the National Security Agency put out a joint alert Tuesday underlining potential Russian threats to the nation’s critical infrastructure.
Russia has shown its ability to take down critical infrastructure in the past, particularly in Ukraine, where Moscow-linked hackers turned the lights off for nearly a quarter-million people for several hours in the winter in 2015, followed by a similar attack the next year.
John Hultquist, the vice president of Threat Intelligence at cybersecurity group Mandiant, said his company was tracking a rise in Russian-linked cyber aggression against Ukraine.
“We’ve definitely seen a lot of Russian cyber activity targeting Ukraine,” Hultquist said. “That is absolutely to be expected — they are in the middle of a very tense situation. Both sides I’m sure are collecting as much as possible.”
Lawmakers are increasingly calling for stronger deterrence against cyberattacks as well, especially as more of their constituents fall victim to ransomware attacks linked to Russian groups.
“As I’ve maintained since 2018, the U.S. should, with our allies, make clear to foreign adversaries the specific forms of response — whether those are [persona non-grata] determinations, sanctions, criminal prosecutions, or retaliatory actions — that are tied to particular violations of international cyber norms,” Warner said.
In the House, top Homeland Security Republican John Katko argued in favor of a “logical policy and a strong, steady adherence to that policy to ensure malign action is either too politically costly or operationally infeasible.”
“Threats to critical infrastructure are real and growing,” the New York Republican said. “The only way to address these threats is with a strong domestic security posture that enables us to identify the highest risks and work with the private industry to mitigate to the greatest degree.”
The congressionally established Cyberspace Solarium Commission also considered the deterrence issue as it weighed the nation’s cyber needs, eventually issuing more than 100 recommendations that led to actions such as the establishing of a national cyber director in the White House. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), a co-chair of the commission, told POLITICO last month that the “single biggest piece of unfinished business is and was the publication by the president of a clear declaratory cyber deterrent policy.”
“That hasn't happened yet,” King said during a Q&A with POLITICO. “It needs to be clear and unequivocal that, if this country is attacked in cyberspace, there will be a costly response — costly to the attacker. And so far, in our recent history, that hasn't been the case.”
Amid the Russian buildup, national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters that the administration would “respond robustly to any naked aggression that might occur.”
Still, the U.S. also has to face the risk that Russia will have a robust response of its own — such as a cyberattack — to any punishment Washington imposes for an invasion of Ukraine.
“This is one of the ways in which the Russians project power, so given our dependency on computer networks, it certainly wouldn’t be surprising to respond this way to sanctions they don’t like,” said Christopher Painter, the former coordinator for cyber issues at the State Department under both the Obama and Trump administrations.
“We have to show strength,” Painter said. “You set red lines, you say things are unacceptable, and then they flaunt it and do it, you have to respond. You can’t just sit back.”
5. How Foreign Spies Infiltrate US Police
Excerpts:
The Russian infiltration of police departments also has “organized crime purposes,” including “white slavery,” trafficking women as sex workers, especially through strip clubs. “There's one part of Florida that's just Russian town after Russian town, right? They get in as a lower level police officer or trainee or administrative aide and then, 10 years later, they're in a position of prominence.” (In 2017, a local business magazine reported, “Russia Again Tops List of Countries Searching for South Florida Real Estate.”)
As the Girgis case demonstrates, friendly but autocratic regimes, not just U.S. adversaries, are aggressive in recruiting contacts among American police departments. One tool is through “police tourism,” offering paid junkets for U.S. state and local police to tour historic sites, all the while cultivating useful contracts in a relaxed, often boozy, setting. Turkey and Egypt are particularly aggressive suitors, Figliuzzi and Evanina say.
How Foreign Spies Infiltrate US Police
The arrest in New York last week of an Egyptian-American accused of spying on exiles opposed to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s repressive regime has lifted the curtain on a “significant” but little noted national security issue: the recruitment of U.S. state and local police by foreign intelligence agencies.
Pierre Girgis, a dual Egyptian-U.S. citizen in Manhattan, worked at the "direction and control" of several Cairo agencies to advance the regime's interests in the United States from 2014 through 2019, according to a federal indictment handed down Jan. 6.
Girgis, a Capital One bank vice president who openly promoted interchanges between Egyptian officials and American police, had a secret helper, according to the Justice Department: a source in local law enforcement. FBI wiretaps overheard Girgis and Egyptian officials talking about exploiting the (unnamed) police officer for private information on anti-regime activists here.
The Girgis case is hardly atypical, law enforcement sources say. The full number and disposition of such cases in recent years was not readily available from the Justice Department, but according to former FBI counterintelligence chief Frank Figliuzzi and other former national security officials, efforts by foreign spy agencies to recruit U.S. state and local police is a persistent problem.
“Certain foreign intelligence services consistently seek to recruit American police officers for their access to non-public information” which helps them track down dissidents here, Figliuzzi told SpyTalk. “This continues to be a significant concern.”
In 2020, an NYPD officer of Tibetan descent was charged with helping China with its “intelligence gathering and repression of Chinese abroad,” particularly anti-communist Tibetans in New York and elsewhere.
Last July, five Iranian agents were charged in Manhattan with plotting to kidnap an Brooklyn-based Iranian-American journalist and human rights activist and smuggle her to Venezuela and onward to Tehran. The plotters employed unidentified “private investigators” to spy on her, the indictment said. Typically, private eyes are ex-cops with sources in their old police outfits.
“Throughout my career, local police and state police officers have been a target of numerous foreign intelligence services,” Figliuzzi said, “where they get access to nonpublic information.” The regimes’ secret police want to know “where is this dissident living? What are his family members' names? Where does he work? They’ve even perhaps paid off-duty police officers to do surveillance of dissidents.” Activists regularly report being followed around, sometimes by local police cars.
Frank Figliuzzi
Figliuzzi said he had personally encountered cases of Chinese, Cuban, Turkish and Israeli agents cultivating local American police.
“I can go back 20 years on this issue,” Bill Evanina, a former top U.S. counterintelligence and counterespionage official, also told SpyTalk. It’s not a “WMD level issue,” he said, but a worrisome national security threat.
“The Chinese have perfected it,” Evanina said, often via regular, above-board law enforcement exchanges between their police and security agencies and ours.
Evanina singled out China’s Ministry of State Security, or MSS, and its Shanghai Security Bureau, “coming over here and offering partnerships with state and local law enforcement to do training and [to] understand their systems and capabilities. And then they kind of co-opt someone who's usually in the administrative department to get access to records and data.”
Eventually, Evanina told SpyTalk, they’ll reach out to a U.S. police contact and say, “Hey, listen, uh, we're looking for a fugitive and his name is Joe Chen. And we think he might be in your state.” U.S. cops will help, he said, because they generally think any foreign counterparts are just like them—“on the up and up. They have no reason to believe otherwise.”
In 2014, China launched Operation Foxhunt, a global covert action program to track down and repatriate criminal fugitives and overseas dissidents. They are often one and the same in Beijing’s eyes. “It’s really, really bad,” Evanina said, with Chinese agents often resorting to brazen kidnappings. They look for opportunities to cultivate sources in U.S. police departments to help them track down targets.
Bill Evanina (CBS News)
Likewise, the Russians take a long range approach to penetrating our local police, Evanina said. The Russians have been “very good at seeding their people”—sons and daughters of immigrants—“in police departments in the Sun Coast of Florida, New York and D.C.,” where there are sizable Russian communities, Evanina said.
“They would love to get their hands on a defector.”
But they’re not just gathering data on enemies of the state, he said.
The Russian infiltration of police departments also has “organized crime purposes,” including “white slavery,” trafficking women as sex workers, especially through strip clubs. “There's one part of Florida that's just Russian town after Russian town, right? They get in as a lower level police officer or trainee or administrative aide and then, 10 years later, they're in a position of prominence.” (In 2017, a local business magazine reported, “Russia Again Tops List of Countries Searching for South Florida Real Estate.”)
As the Girgis case demonstrates, friendly but autocratic regimes, not just U.S. adversaries, are aggressive in recruiting contacts among American police departments. One tool is through “police tourism,” offering paid junkets for U.S. state and local police to tour historic sites, all the while cultivating useful contracts in a relaxed, often boozy, setting. Turkey and Egypt are particularly aggressive suitors, Figliuzzi and Evanina say.
Pierre Girgis
As It turns out, none other than Pierre Girgis was instrumental in organizing a 2018. junket to Egypt for about 100 NYPD and Nassau County police officers, “which allowed New York's Finest to see Egypt in a different light,” according to an effusive article in the marketing section of Ink.com. “Law enforcement,” the piece noted, “are important influencers,” who can bring home a positive view of the al-Sisi regime, which regularly rounds up and tortures civil rights activists and journalists. At least one NYPD source agreed to help Girgis track dissidents here, according to his indictment.
Junkets are “something used strategically by foreign governments to get cops to travel abroad, under the guise of ‘learning how we do law enforcement here,’ Figliuzzi said. “They’ll say, “Let's have a better relationship, a sister city relationship…and more, [with] your police.’ And we're talking about at a high level…”
“I could probably name eight countries that do this selectively,” said Evanina.
“It gets even more nefarious than that,” Figliuzzi said. Foreign security and intelligence organizations, particularly in Turkey and Israel, routinely invite senior state and municipal law enforcement officials for extended, all-paid visits, which are “designed to kind of get really close to various police chiefs throughout small-town, mid-town America and major city chiefs.” They’re also watching the Americans closely for blackmail opportunities.
“Shame on any high level police officer that doesn't understand that there's cameras in his hotel room, and that there'll be attempts to compromise him” with drugs, women or other enticements, Figliuzzi said. “That absolutely will be the case. And then they will feel beholden.”
The U.S.-based International Association of Chiefs of Police did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
The FBI has spent “two decades trying to warn state local law enforcement,” Evanina said, with the help of national law enforcement organizations. But it’s been an uphill battle, with some 18,000 police departments across the country, most with little clue to the designs of foreign adversaries or the resources to vet them. They’re easy prey for foreign agents pretending to be regular, friendly police officers.
“I can no longer count the number of chiefs of police or assistant chiefs in this country I've run into who tell me they've been to Turkey and it's a beautiful place,” Figliuzzi said, ruefully.
The same could be said for Egypt, for which, until Jan. 6, Pierre Girgis was surely at work for on more junkets for the NYPD.
Listen to the entire interview of Frank Figliuzzi on the SpyTalk
6. ‘We’ll fight to the end.’ Ukraine defiant in face of Vladimir Putin’s phoney war
Ukraine information and influence operations.
Excerpts:
Alex Kovzhun, a political strategist who advised Ukraine’s former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, said the Kremlin needed to craft a compelling narrative. “They are obsessed with their TV ratings. All of us Ukrainians are extras in their internal TV show. They are the protagonists. From time to time they change the bad guys. Ukraine is not their favourite location.”
Kovzhun added: “A fantastic postmodern storytelling device is the wink. In 2014 Putin winked when he said there were no Russian units in Crimea. It’s a conspiracy. He invites all Russian TV viewers to share in this conspiracy. He used the wink in Salisbury. Everybody knew two Russian idiots travelled there to kill Sergei Skripal, as part of a special operation.”
It is just possible, of course, that Putin’s brinkmanship is part of an elaborate bluff, the latest in a series of stress tests designed to reveal weaknesses among the west’s ruling class and America. No one – save for the man in the Kremlin – can really know. But Filimonov thinks a storm is coming. “We are convinced something will happen,” he said. “Putin needs Ukraine. An attempt to seize it is inescapable. We will fight until the end.”
‘We’ll fight to the end.’ Ukraine defiant in face of Vladimir Putin’s phoney war
Kyiv’s middle-class professionals ready to take up arms again
The mood last week in Ukraine was eerily calm, despite talk of war. The first winter snow blanketed Kyiv. Many were still celebrating Orthodox Christmas – which falls on 7 January – or had left town for the holidays. Bars and restaurants rang out with Dean Martin’s Let It Snow!, while the fir trees in Independence Square looked like a mini-Narnia.
Sure, Russia might invade at any moment. But, as Ukrainians wearily point out, the country has already been at war for eight long years, ever since Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and kickstarted a brutish conflict in the east of the country, which has claimed nearly 14,000 lives. Friday’s dawn cyber-attack on government websites was merely the latest in a series of hostile acts.
What to do in the event of a military operation by Moscow, and whether to stay, flee or fight? The consensus – at least according to surveys – is that a third of the population is ready to take up arms. In the upmarket Podil district, with its art deco mansions, a new piece of graffiti read: “Biy Moskaliv!”(“Fight Russians!”)
Sitting in a law office just across the road, Serhii Filimonov explains what he intends to do, should the Kremlin attack. “There are about 50 of us. We will meet and decide where we can best fight,” he said. His group is made up of middle-class professionals: IT staff, designers, actors, journalists. Filimonov runs a security business and starred in a film shown at Venice.
None of this is likely to alarm Russia’s defence ministry, which has sent 100,000 troops to Ukraine’s border. These include the existing front between the Ukrainian army and the Moscow-run separatist territories of Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, as well as Belarus in the north, Crimea in the south and the breakaway Russian enclave of Transnistria in the west.
But the Kyiv creatives know how to shoot. All are combat-hardened veterans of the 2014 war. Filimonov took part in the bloody battle for Ilovaysk, when the Russian army trapped Ukrainian forces, and was wounded by an enemy mortar strike. After an operation to remove shrapnel, he returned to the front, serving as a volunteer against Moscow with the Azov battalion.
“We have registered weapons. We will defend our homes,” Filimonov said. “Putin wants to go back to the borders of the Russian empire. You can see this in Belarus, Kazakhstan. Here in Ukraine he wants to create a tsarstvo – a tsardom. This is a war of civilisations. It’s the west versus Eurasia, democracy against slavery and authoritarianism. We want democracy and freedom.”
Most experts agree that Russia’s vastly superior army, air force and navy could quickly seize Ukrainian territory. But Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Kyiv’s former defence minister, says the Kremlin’s conscript-heavy military will immediately face resistance, should it try to occupy towns and cities. Volunteers such as Filimonov and small army groups will launch bloody partisan attacks. “There is definitely no panic. I don’t see any panic at all,” Zagorodnyuk told the Observer. He acknowledged Ukraine’s relative military weakness but he said Kyiv had around 500,000 soldiers including reservists. It was ready for guerrilla war “on a huge scale”, he said.
Masi Nayyem, a lawyer who founded the Podil practice, admitted he was looking forward to shooting at Russians again. In 2016 he fought with a paratrooper brigade in Avdiyivka, Ukraine’s frontline position outside rebel-held Donetsk. “In peace time you have to be serious, responsible. In war you don’t have any considerations or need to think about consequences. It’s black and white,” he said.
Talks between Russia and the US, Nato and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe ended last week in a dead end. The Kremlin has demanded assurances from the Biden administration that Ukraine and Georgia will never join Nato. In essence it wants to overturn the post-cold war order – restoring central and eastern Europe as a zone of Warsaw Pact-style Russian influence, from which Nato troops and weaponry are banned.
Ukrainian reservists train near Kiev last December. Photograph: Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA
Beneath the Kremlin’s shrill, tough-man rhetoric lies a mystery. It is unclear why Putin is moving with such strategic haste, demanding that the US and its allies rewrite international security rules in Russia’s favour. His demands are “non-starters”, as the US’s negotiator and deputy secretary of state, Wendy Sherman, put it. Putin’s possible goal, she suggested, was to establish a pretext for war.
Andrew Wilson, professor in Ukrainian studies at University College London, said the timing from the Kremlin’s perspective was opportune. Putin has jailed his chief domestic critic, Alexey Navalny, and squashed Navalny’s opposition movement. Russia was awash with cash, thanks to rising energy prices. On the international stage the Kremlin faces off against a US administration it regards as weak and indecisive.
What could happen next? “Creating a crisis to create opportunities is what they [the Russians] do,” Wilson said. He added: “I don’t think a full-scale invasion is possibility number one. The Ukrainians have pretty successfully advertised the huge cost of invasion and occupation. But Putin has to have a win of sorts, either on European security or Ukraine itself.”
All of which presents observers with a dilemma: how to report on a crisis which does not quite feel like a crisis, and appears largely to exist inside Putin’s head? It is evident that Russia’s president feels emotionally about Ukraine. Last summer he wrote a long essay stating that Ukraine and Russia were “one people”, divided by the whims of Bolshevik map-making and western meddling.
“With nothing yet happening on the ground, there’s nothing I can report to tell you something new and impactful,” Nataliya Gumenyuk, a Ukrainian journalist and author admitted, saying it was hard to make sense of a conflict in which Ukraine often appears as a bystander. She added: “We are caught in the position of waiting for the ‘worst scenario’ without a chance to influence the outcome.”
Gumenyuk said the Kremlin’s goal was to turn the clock back to the early 1970s, before the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki accords guaranteeing human rights – a mistake, in the eyes of Moscow’s current hawkish leadership. Others have argued that Putin’s preferred geo-political model goes back further, to the imperialist 19th century, when mighty great powers over-rolled lesser ones.
In an opinion piece for the New York Times the eminent Russian political scientist Lila Shevtsova said the current stand-off over Ukraine had little in common with the political deals struck at Yalta in 1945, or at the congress of Vienna in 1815. Back then, the participants stuck to the rules. “[Putin’s] aim, really, is a Hobbesian world order, built on disruption and readiness for surprise breakthroughs,” she wrote.
How a surprise breakthrough might morph into war is a topic of conversation inside the Kyiv government of comic-turned-president Volodymyr Zelensky. Little was seen of him last week. Zelensky won a landslide victory in 2019 after campaigning on a platform of peace. Faced with Russian intransigence over the fate of Ukraine’s already occupied territories, he has moved towards Nato and the west.
US intelligence agencies say the risk of invasion is “high”. Their Ukrainian counterparts think Moscow may be planning a “staged provocation”. This could take the form of an attack on Russian citizens – at the embassy or consulate perhaps – or against Russian soldiers in Transnistria. The Kremlin would blame the “attack” on far-right Ukrainian nationalists, with the incident used for propaganda and as a casus belli.
Alex Kovzhun, a political strategist who advised Ukraine’s former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, said the Kremlin needed to craft a compelling narrative. “They are obsessed with their TV ratings. All of us Ukrainians are extras in their internal TV show. They are the protagonists. From time to time they change the bad guys. Ukraine is not their favourite location.”
Kovzhun added: “A fantastic postmodern storytelling device is the wink. In 2014 Putin winked when he said there were no Russian units in Crimea. It’s a conspiracy. He invites all Russian TV viewers to share in this conspiracy. He used the wink in Salisbury. Everybody knew two Russian idiots travelled there to kill Sergei Skripal, as part of a special operation.”
It is just possible, of course, that Putin’s brinkmanship is part of an elaborate bluff, the latest in a series of stress tests designed to reveal weaknesses among the west’s ruling class and America. No one – save for the man in the Kremlin – can really know. But Filimonov thinks a storm is coming. “We are convinced something will happen,” he said. “Putin needs Ukraine. An attempt to seize it is inescapable. We will fight until the end.”
7. The Putin Puzzle: Why Ukraine? Why Now?
Excerpts:
Holding Ukraine hostage by amassing forces on its borders may have provided Mr. Putin with leverage in his effort to get the sanctions lifted. Even limited success on this front would enhance his domestic standing. But if his actions instead provoke further Western sanctions, Mr. Putin still has reason to be sanguine. He knows from past experience that markets in China, India and elsewhere, as well as investments in oil and gas infrastructure from the Middle East, can buttress the Russian economy.
As Vladimir Putin approaches his 70th birthday this year, after 22 years in power, he wants to be known as the leader who put Russia back together after the Soviet collapse. Russian TV recently aired a spate of documentaries to mark the 30th anniversary. They highlighted the chaos and poverty of the reform era of the 1990s, when people sold their belongings on the street in pitiful makeshift markets, and impoverished pensioners searched for their dinners in dumpsters. This is what the regime wants the population—especially those born after 1991—to think about the likely effects of liberalization and democracy. Better, the implicit message holds, to stay the course with Putinist autocracy and keep Russia stable, but not free.
As analysts and decision-makers try to make sense of Mr. Putin’s next moves in the Ukraine crisis, they would do well to understand that his primary vista from the Kremlin is a few hundred yards out the window and down the Russian street.
The Putin Puzzle: Why Ukraine? Why Now?
Even dictators have domestic political considerations, and Putin has a long history of using an aggressive foreign policy to bolster his standing in Russia.
In talks with President Joe Biden and in a draft treaty, Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued an extraordinary list of demands as conditions for drawing down his forces. Among these are guarantees that NATO will never expand to include Ukraine and Georgia. Mr. Putin has also called for “security guarantees” from NATO and for the U.S. to declare that it will never put missiles on or near Russian borders. This past week, Russian officials met with counterparts from the U.S., NATO and Ukraine in discussions aimed at averting an armed conflict.
Mr. Putin knows full well that his demands are excessive. They are also unnecessary to guarantee Russian security, since there is no threat to Russia in Ukraine from the U.S. or NATO. NATO is not currently offering membership to Ukraine and hasn’t come close to doing so since 2008. The number of NATO troops in rapid reaction forces in Eastern Europe and the Baltics—deployed at the request of those countries’ leaders after Russia seized Crimea in 2014—is so small that the Russian military could easily overwhelm them; they are largely a symbolic deterrent. As for armaments, the only country to have installed missile systems of any sort in Ukraine in the last decade is Russia, in Crimea.
All of this, to say nothing of the formidable risks involved in his brinkmanship, must be obvious to Mr. Putin. So then why, over the last few months, has he manufactured an international crisis by continuing to gather troops and equipment on the border with Ukraine? What could he possibly be thinking?
“Russia’s saber-rattling abroad over the last 12 months has coincided with its most sweeping domestic crackdown since the Soviet era. ”
Domestic political considerations are plainly a central concern for Mr. Putin and may help to explain the mercurial Russian leader’s otherwise inexplicable behavior. Even dictators have detractors who must be appeased, co-opted or erased, so it’s worth noting that Russia’s saber-rattling abroad over the last 12 months has coincided with its most sweeping domestic crackdown since the Soviet era.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, his wife Yulia (in hat) and opposition politician Lyubov Sobol take part in a march in memory of murdered Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov in Moscow, Feb. 29, 2020.
Photo: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP/Getty Images
In August 2020, the opposition figure and anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent that the Soviet Union once developed as a chemical weapon. Two independent United Nations experts later determined that only the Russian security services could have carried out this poisoning. Mr. Navalny flew to Germany for treatment, then returned to Russia in January 2021.
At the time of the attempt on his life, Mr. Navalny was on probation, having been convicted on politically-motivated charges of embezzlement. When he returned to Russia, he was arrested and jailed on the grounds that he had failed to check in with his parole officer while he was in a coma. At the same time, his Anti-Corruption Foundation released a video on YouTube detailing Mr. Putin’s construction of a lavish villa on the Black Sea. The combination of Mr. Navalny’s arrest and the revelations in the video touched off street protests against Mr. Putin across Russia.
The demonstrations met with a spate of arrests—first of protesters, then of protest organizers. Mr. Navalny’s organization was banned as an extremist group, and leading members of the activist’s inner circle were imprisoned or went into voluntary exile for fear of arrest. Eventually, anyone who so much as “liked” one of Mr. Navalny’s tweets on social media faced the threat of criminal charges and even imprisonment.
Protestors face off with law enforcement during a rally in support of Navalny in Moscow, Jan. 31, 2021.
Photo: Maxim Shemetov/REUTERS
The country held a national election for parliament in September 2021. The proceedings were so rife with fraud that even the Communist Party of the Russian Federation—until that point the “loyal opposition”—cried foul. But the state had a useful tool at its disposal: a law on “foreign agents” that was enacted in 2012, essentially for use as a bludgeon against domestic opposition groups. Three months after the election, the country’s ministry of justice used the law to force the permanent closure of Russia’s oldest human rights organization, Memorial, which was originally founded with the assistance of Mikhail Gorbachev in order to record Stalin-era crimes against humanity.
Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, Russia has now fallen to its lowest ebb in terms of social and political rights. Even the surviving small pockets of independent media must tread carefully. Indeed, shortly after Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2021 for his “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression” in Russia, Mr. Putin threatened to brand the paper a foreign agent.
How does this domestic clampdown help to explain the growing crisis on the Ukrainian border? Mr. Putin has a history of using foreign policy to improve his domestic standing when he has felt his status slipping.
“Putin may hope that provoking a diplomatic crisis will win back the popularity he saw when Russians rallied around the flag in 2014.”
In 2014, the diplomatic and military crisis that he sparked over Ukraine boosted not just his notoriety abroad but his popularity at home. According to the Levada Center—Russia’s last remaining independent polling agency, branded a foreign agent a few years ago—Putin’s approval ratings shot up from 65% in January of that year to 80% a few weeks after the invasion of Crimea that February. They topped out close to 90% once the U.S. and Europe began imposing sanctions on Russia, strengthening Mr. Putin’s claims at the time that Russia was under siege by the West.
Since then, under the crushing weight of the Covid-19 pandemic, Mr. Putin has seen his ratings fall back to earth, hovering between 59% and 65% as Russian society has been pummeled by wave after wave of infections. Mr. Putin may hope that provoking a diplomatic crisis (though not a full-fledged war) will win back the popularity he saw when Russians rallied around the flag in 2014.
Ukrainian protesters smash a statue of Lenin with a sledgehammer during the Revolution of Dignity in Kyiv, Dec. 8, 2013.
Photo: Efrem Lukatsky/Associated Press
Why would a dictator worry about his approval ratings? As a personalistic autocrat, Mr. Putin is most concerned with the durability of the regime he has constructed during more than two decades in power. To the extent that he believes in anything, it is not an ideology; rather, it is his own almost divine right to rule (and own) the Russian state. In 2014, Vyacheslav Volodin, who was then Mr. Putin’s deputy chief of staff and is now the chairman of the Duma, proclaimed, “There is no Russia today if there is no Putin… an attack on Putin is an attack on Russia.”
Mr. Putin also believes in the supremacy of the Russian state. Society serves the state, not vice versa—and so, logically, the person who controls the state must also control society. From this perspective, the state must work to temper domestic discontent, whether by ensuring steady improvements in people’s living standards or, failing such progress, by repression. The autocrat must calibrate just how much repression to administer to guarantee social compliance, and over the last year, Mr. Putin evidently has decided it is necessary to ratchet up measures against his critics.
As for elections, they should “look right” for the sake of regime legitimacy, but they cannot determine who governs in practice. Their outcomes must be controlled. If the talented and highly educated Russian population were allowed to decide who governs and how, its demands for rights and representation could overturn the system that Mr. Putin has built. As he said in 2020, he must act as “guarantor of the country’s security, domestic stability and…evolutionary development—because we have had enough revolutions. Russia has fulfilled its plan when it comes to revolutions.”
What does any autocrat truly fear? Being strung up from a light post by his own people. This is the calculus that brings us to Ukraine. Kyiv represents a threat to Putin’s cronyistic autocracy not because it might become a NATO member or host American missiles on its soil one day, but because it is struggling to be what Mr. Putin’s Russia is not: a free, democratic society that could serve as an example to an increasingly restive segment of the Russian population. Mr. Putin insists that Russia must be a stable autocracy—and yet there on his border sits a rebuke in the form of Ukraine, an increasingly stable democracy with a similar demography and at least partially shared history.
Most Ukrainians continue to value democracy, whether or not they are satisfied with the imperfect one in which they live. In a 2019 Pew Survey, 74% of them agreed that “voting gives people like me some say about how government runs things” (the same figure as in the U.S.), and 79% had a favorable opinion of the European Union. Only 11% of Ukrainians indicated confidence in Mr. Putin, in contrast to the 66% who expressed confidence in Germany’s then-chancellor, Angela Merkel. For its future, Ukraine is clearly looking west, not east to Russia.
Ukraine’s struggle to break free of Russian influence threatens to stoke a domestic legitimacy crisis for Mr. Putin’s regime. In recent months, polls in Russia have shown that trust in Mr. Putin has declined to its lowest level in a decade. In the summer of 2021, polling by the Levada Center indicated that 48% of Russians 18 to 24 years old wanted to emigrate permanently, a desire shared by almost a third of those 25 to 39. Such expressions of discontent cannot please Mr. Putin, but they do explain why he would crack down so ferociously on independent media and activists like Mr. Navalny for exposing official incompetence and corruption.
Mr. Putin may also see the current moment as an opportune time for nationalistic grandstanding on the world stage. The Covid-19 pandemic has furnished a continuing global distraction, the U.S. is preoccupied with its own polarized politics, and the Biden administration would clearly rather focus its attention on China. To audiences at home receiving no consistent counter-narrative, Mr. Putin can present himself as Russia’s bulwark against an invasive, aggressive West. And the strategy appears to be working to some degree. Last month, polls showed that a majority of Russians (66%) blamed NATO, the U.S. and Ukraine for current tensions, while only 4% blamed Russia.
Mr. Putin must also worry about keeping the members of his own inner circle happy, lest some of them band together to depose him. Sanctions against Russia—responding first to the incursion into Ukraine, then to interference in the U.S. presidential election, and later to cyber-attacks on U.S. companies and government agencies—have not devastated the country’s economy by any means, but some of the measures target Mr. Putin’s cronies, interfering with their ability to use assets they hold abroad, pay for their children to attend private schools in the UK or travel to their villas in France, Greece and Spain. The second thing an autocrat fears is being ousted by those closest to him (witness the events in Kazakhstan this month).
Putin confers with General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff of Russia’s armed forces, in Moscow, Dec. 21, 2021.
Photo: Sergei Guneyev/Sputnik/Kremlin Pool/Associated Press
Holding Ukraine hostage by amassing forces on its borders may have provided Mr. Putin with leverage in his effort to get the sanctions lifted. Even limited success on this front would enhance his domestic standing. But if his actions instead provoke further Western sanctions, Mr. Putin still has reason to be sanguine. He knows from past experience that markets in China, India and elsewhere, as well as investments in oil and gas infrastructure from the Middle East, can buttress the Russian economy.
As Vladimir Putin approaches his 70th birthday this year, after 22 years in power, he wants to be known as the leader who put Russia back together after the Soviet collapse. Russian TV recently aired a spate of documentaries to mark the 30th anniversary. They highlighted the chaos and poverty of the reform era of the 1990s, when people sold their belongings on the street in pitiful makeshift markets, and impoverished pensioners searched for their dinners in dumpsters. This is what the regime wants the population—especially those born after 1991—to think about the likely effects of liberalization and democracy. Better, the implicit message holds, to stay the course with Putinist autocracy and keep Russia stable, but not free.
As analysts and decision-makers try to make sense of Mr. Putin’s next moves in the Ukraine crisis, they would do well to understand that his primary vista from the Kremlin is a few hundred yards out the window and down the Russian street.
Dr. Stoner is the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University and the author of “Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order,” published last year by Oxford University Press.
8. Russia's Hypersonic Weapons: Nothing More Than a Paper Tiger?
Perhaps this applies to north Korea as well.
Excerpt:
In other words, operational doesn’t necessarily mean effective, but to be clear, fielding these advanced weapons remains a significant source of international prestige and diplomatic leverage.
Russia's Hypersonic Weapons: Nothing More Than a Paper Tiger?
Russia’s Hypersonic Weapons, Explained: Currently, only two nations in the world possess operational hypersonic weapons, China and Russia. It’s important to remember, however, that “operational” is a subjective term. Russia, perhaps more so than any other nation, has a long history of claiming military capability they’ve yet to truly master. Likewise, many experts remain skeptical about the targeting capabilities of China’s hypersonic anti-ship weapons, even if the missiles themselves are indeed capable of flying at sustained hypersonic speeds.
In other words, operational doesn’t necessarily mean effective, but to be clear, fielding these advanced weapons remains a significant source of international prestige and diplomatic leverage. On the world’s stage, most nations are left having to assume these systems can perform as advertised, in order to plan accordingly in the event that they do.
“I have always said and can repeat it now that leading military countries of the world will of course possess the same weapons that Russia has today. I mean hypersonic weapons,” said Russian president Vladimir Putin in an address from December 12, 2021.
“But since 2018 [when Russia unveiled its new hypersonic weapons], nobody else has developed this weapon yet. They will do it eventually but I think that we will be able to impress our partners by the fact that when they obtain this weapon, we will highly likely have means to counter it.”
Hypersonic weapons Russia has in service
Avangard
Type: Hypersonic Glide Vehicle
Claimed Top Speed: Mach 20-27
Warhead: Nuclear (2 megatons)
Range: 3,700+ miles
The Avangard is a hypersonic glide vehicle that entered into operational service in December of 2019. It can be carried to the peak of its flight path aboard a series of Russian ICBMs, including the nation’s newest and most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile, the RS-28 Sarmat. The Avangard glide vehicle has no onboard method of propulsion, and relies on reentry for its high velocities, but is claimed to have dynamic maneuvering capabilities in flight to avoid intercept.
Kinzhal
Type: Air-Launched Ballistic Missile
Claimed Top Speed: Mach 4-10+
Warhead: Nuclear (up to 500Kt) or Conventional
Range: 900-1250 miles
The Kh-47M2 Kinzhal (Russian for Dagger) entered operational service in 2017, though this weapon is an unusual one for this list. Rather than using a scramjet for propulsion like hypersonic cruise missiles or using a glide vehicle to manage reentry, the Kinzhal achieves hypersonic velocities through nothing but sheer brute force. In effect, the Khinzhal it little more than a modified version of the ground-launched 9K720 Iskander, a short-range ballistic missile, with a new guidance system designed specifically for air-to-ground operations.
The Kinzhal can maneuver at all stages of its flight path, with some speed claims exceeding Mach 12, making it a very difficult weapon to intercept.
Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran who specializes in foreign policy and defense technology analysis. He holds a master’s degree in Communications from Southern New Hampshire University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Corporate and Organizational Communications from Framingham State University. This first appeared in Sandboxx News.
9. Texas Synagogue Hostages Freed by Elite FBI Rescue Team
Kudos to HRT. It is great to see the successful outcome of a hostage situation.
Texas Synagogue Hostages Freed by Elite FBI Rescue Team
All four people held captive, including the synagogue’s rabbi, are safe and unharmed; authorities say the hostage taker is dead
WSJ · by Konrad Putzier and Dan Frosch
Matt DeSarno, special agent in charge for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Dallas Field Office, said the bureau had dispatched its specialized hostage rescue team from Quantico, Va., to the scene on Saturday.
Matt DeSarno, special agent in charge for the FBI’s Dallas Field Office, said that there didn’t appear to be any ongoing threat.
Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
The situation, which began Saturday morning during services when police got reports of a gunman entering Congregation Beth Israel near Fort Worth, showed signs of progress Saturday afternoon when a male hostage was released uninjured. After hours of negotiations, the FBI rescue team breached the synagogue, freeing the remaining three captives. Officials didn’t say how the hostage taker died.
“It’s very likely this situation would have ended very badly early on in the day had we not had professional consistent negotiation with the subject,” Mr. DeSarno said, adding that there didn’t appear to be any ongoing threat.
Mr. DeSarno said law-enforcement had identified the hostage taker, but didn’t release his identity. He said the man “was singularly focused on one issue, and it wasn’t specifically related to the Jewish community.”
The hostage taker Saturday claimed to law enforcement that he was the brother of a Pakistani woman convicted in 2010 of trying to kill U.S. Army soldiers, according to a law-enforcement official. The man demanded that the woman, Aafia Siddiqui, be released from prison, the official said.
The man also claimed to be armed and in possession of explosives, the official said.
Law enforcement didn’t say whether the man was armed.
Ms. Siddiqui is serving an 86-year sentence in a Fort Worth federal prison for the attempted killing of FBI agents and soldiers at an Afghan police compound in 2008.
Marwa Elbially, an attorney for Ms. Siddiqui, said the hostage taker wasn’t Ms. Siddiqui’s brother and condemned his actions.
Ms. Siddiqui and her family “don’t accept or condone any type of violence to anybody. We are hoping and praying that this ends peacefully and that the police are able to take this individual into custody. This has absolutely nothing to do with her or her family,” Ms. Elbially said.
Some 200 law-enforcement officers had rushed to the scene of the hostage situation, authorities said, with several different SWAT teams working on the situation through the day before the elite FBI team took over.
Colleyville is a city in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area of around 30,000. Congregation Beth Israel is a Reform Jewish congregation and was founded in 1999, according to its website.
In a statement late Saturday, President Biden thanked law-enforcement members who worked on the rescue, adding: “Let me be clear to anyone who intends to spread hate—we will stand against anti-Semitism and against the rise of extremism in this country.”
WSJ · by Konrad Putzier and Dan Frosch
10. China filling US-created vacuum in Middle East: Washington-based daily
A view from Iran responding to an article published in The Hill. The comments section to this is quite "interesting."
China filling US-created vacuum in Middle East: Washington-based daily
Saturday, 15 January 2022 4:56 PM [ Last Update: Saturday, 15 January 2022 6:04 PM ]
Chinese and Syrian businessmen shake hands behind their national flags during a meeting in Beijing, China, on May 8, 2017 to discuss reconstruction projects in Syria. (File photo by Reuters)
China has been filling the vacuum that the United States is creating in the Middle East, an American newspaper argues, after the government of Bashar al-Assad announced that Syria has joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
In an article published on Friday, The Hill made a reference to Syria’s announcement, saying it coincided with a joint statement by China and the [Persian] Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) calling for a strategic partnership that would include an eventual free trade area.
The article said Washington’s primary concern in the Middle East appears to be a revival of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the 2015 Iran agreement, which was abandoned by the US in 2018 under former US president Donald Trump’s administration.
“Beyond reaching a renewed nuclear arrangement with Iran, the Biden administration has made it clear that East Asia and Europe are its priority concerns. And both China and regional actors have not failed to take notice,” it said.
The Hill further said the GCC states are increasingly uneasy about America’s reliability and will be even more so if Washington reaches an agreement with Iran and the remaining parties to the JCPOA to rejoin the deal.
The Biden administration must cease to signal that the Middle East somehow has become a lower priority for the United States, the article said, insisting that China’s increasing influence in the Middle East will have “serious repercussions” for America’s national security.
On January 12, Syria officially joined the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), months after President Assad met with his Chinese counterpart in Beijing, where they discussed Syria’s gaining membership in the BRI.
The deal will help Syria expand its cooperation with China and other countries and rebuild itself in the aftermath of a decade-long war that was coupled with US-led economic sanctions. It will also enable Damascus to circumvent the effects of harsh US sanctions on the country, particularly the so-called “Caesar Act” sanctions.
“China can play an important role in weakening the impact of the Caesar sanctions,” Joshua Landis, head of the Middle East department at the University of Oklahoma, has said in an interview with The Cradle.
“In Iran, China has done this,” Landis explained. “Iran’s oil exports, which were devastated by sanctions, have begun to grow again, largely because China is purchasing Iranian oil again. China is the workshop of the world so it can supply most of the goods that Syria needs.”
He added, “China is also strong enough to thumb its nose at US sanctions. As the US increasingly forbids US companies from dealing with Chinese firms, China has greater incentive to punish the US by breaking sanctions on countries like Iran and Syria.”
Meanwhile, Iran and China have also signed a landmark 25-year agreement in defiance of the US’s unilateral sanctions to strengthen their long-standing economic and political alliance.
The deal, announced in March last year, officially documents the Sino-Iranian Comprehensive Strategic Partnership that had been announced during a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to boost economic cooperation between the two countries for the next 25 years, and paves the way for Iran’s participation in the Belt and Road Initiative, a massive infrastructure project stretching from East Asia to Europe.
Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:
11. Vietnam And Philippines Hedging Against China And US Interests In The South China Sea – Analysis
Excerpts:
The US has great concern over Chinese assertiveness in South China Sea. More than one trillion trades of the US passes from South China Sea. The US does not want that China dominates this place. This is the reason that the US emphasizes in freedom of navigation. The US, Japan and the European countries are deeply dissatisfied over the rising power of China in South China Sea. They consider that China will create obstacles in freedom of navigation whereas the US wants to protect it. China has not shown any gestures that it will stop the passages for other countries in South China Sea. According to the UNCLOS, no state can face any obstacle from other state in international water. Exclusive Economic Zone of 200 nautical miles comes under the sovereignty of a state and other part of the sea is the part of international sea and international sea is the subject of international law (Kuok, 2016). The US Freedom of Navigation Operation (FONOP) has conducted six operations in South China Sea against the Chinese claim of Spratly and Paracel Island. China has responded aggressively to the US FON in Chinese territories. China claimed that the US is involved in FON in its territory without its permission. It also claims that this US behavior is the obvious violation of the Chinese sovereignty and violation of the international law (Panda, 2017).
The US has also deployed its military in Pacific region to contain China in order to secure it from establishing hegemony. There are 40,000 the US troops in Japan. 16,000 US troops are deployed in this area of the second Place of Japan which is called Afloat. 28,500 US troops are deployed in South Korea. There are only 500 rotational US troops in Philippines. A Strategic place called Guam contains 4,500 US troops. Singapore and Malacca Straits are strategically important places and the US has deployed four Littoral Combat Ships near Singapore. There will be 2,500 troops in Darwin in Australia. The US and Australia are discussing a plan to deployed a large number of US navy troops in Perth and also want to establish naval bases in Perth.
Vietnam And Philippines Hedging Against China And US Interests In The South China Sea – Analysis
South China Sea is situated in the western edge of Pacific Ocean (Ma, 2016). It is the busiest sea for trade and multiple activities of the regional as well as other regional countries. Chinese claimed that China had ruled in South China Sea with Paracel and Spratly Islands from 200 BC (Rachel, 2013). British were the first who initiated navigation and geo-survey of the islands of the South China Sea in 1762-1802 and 1805 and published the map of the South China Sea with its different features. It was Richard Spratly who visited Spratly Islands of South China Sea near Philippines in 1843 and gave his name to these islands. British did not show interest in these islands because these islands have no attraction and economic charm in those days (Buszynski, 2015). China and Vietnam have conflict over Paracel and Spratly Islands in the SCS whereas Philippine, Malaysia and Brunei have claim over Spratly Islands due to the part of their Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). China claims that this sea has remained in effective control of Chinese government from Han dynasty (206 BC to 9 AD) till 1933 when France intervene and occupied the Spratly Island. China got control over Spratly and Paracel Island after the Second World War (Shicun, 2013).
After France withdrawal from the Indochina region in 1950s, China occupied half of the Paracel Island on the other hand South Vietnam sent its troops and got control over remaining Paracel Island. The US left the Vietnam in 1973 and the very next year China attacked other remaining Paracel Island and got control over whole Paracel archipelago in South China Sea. Further, China was getting forward to the direction of the Spratly Islands in 1980s and occupied six features of islands in 1988 with collision to Vietnamese troops. China continued its slow and steady strategy in South China and occupied Philippines controlled Mischief Reef in 1995 and got control over Scarborough Shoal in 2012. China initiated the construction of artificial islands in 2014 in order to strengthen its position in these islands (Japan Ministry of Defense, 2016).
Vietnamese and Philippines Hedging against China
China’s last thirty years economic progress has converted China into strong military power. China will make utmost effort to establish its hegemony in Asia whereas the US will try to contain China with the help of Chinese neighbors. This will lead to massive military and security competition between the US along with its East Asian allies and China (Mearsheimer, 2010). If China becomes like Hong Kong then it will be really hard to prevent the world from Chinese military power (Kaplan R. , 2012). Chinese hegemonic intentions are comprising to make Taiwan its part and bring South China Sea and Senkaku or Diaoyu islands in East China Sea under its sovereignty. China also wants to push back the US to western hemisphere. It wants to control over the western pacific (Mearsheimer J. , 2001).
There is another view that the rise of China will not be peaceful as Germany, Japan and the US fought First and Second World Wars and became hegemonic powers on the behalf of war. Similarly, China is challenging the US hegemony in the East Asia region and it shall cause a war between China and the US in order to change the status quo (Layne, 2008). China will rise as an aggressive power and the rise of China can cause war in order to establish its hegemony.
China considers the US as an aggressive hegemonic state because it fought six consecutive wars during the era of 1989 to 2011, two times against Iraq, two times against Serbia and attacked Afghanistan and Libya (Mearsheimer, 2012). During Korean War, the US did not fight with North Korea but with China. There is a point that the US has never fought against the USSR but has experience to fight with China from 1950 to 1953 during Korean War. China always considers the US as an aggressive state and dangerous foe (Mearsheimer, 2010).
There is also a different opinion that China will rise as a peaceful power and it cannot cause any trouble for world. It is fact that rapid economic growth of China is an open threat for the US hegemony and western democratic and liberal system. China wants to establish its hegemony over smaller countries and its neighbors. Roy suggests that first China should increase the standers of its peoples. China should establish its military for defensive purpose. World especially the US should not feel any danger from China (Roy, 2013).
China and Vietnam has complex relations due to its geographical proximity and economic interdependence. Vietnam’s communist Party Central committee announced its foreign policy regarding China in 2013 in which Vietnam adopted that it would treat China as its ideological and economic partner. Although Vietnamese claim over Paracel and Spratly islands would remain as critical part of the both countries relations (Hiebert M. , 2015). Same case is happening in the relations of China and Philippines. Philippines is near to western democracy and has strong influence of the US on its political and economic affairs. China is the largest trading partner of the Vietnam. Volumes of trade between both countries are 98 billion dollars (Sieren, 2017).
Vietnam has taken this issue in international forums and gained support of world powerful states like India, Japan, Russia and the US. Vietnam is balancing itself through modernization of its army, navy, air force and the coast guards. Vietnam is also engaging defense and security alliances with the US for the sack of balancing the power of China in South China Sea. The US has lifted the arm embargo from Vietnam for normalizing the relations of both countries. First time in the history of the Vietnam, the US and Vietnam has conducted the joint exercises and rescue operations in sea as well as in air in April 2014. Vietnamese navy is gradually gaining power and modernizing and enhancing its capacity to face the Chinese navy. Vietnam will operate six Russian advanced Kilo class submarines in 2017. These submarines will equipped with land attack missiles which can hit the Chinese submarines. Vietnam’s air force has got a 36 Su-30 MK2 fighter jets and Russia made air craft for Vietnam due to enhancing its power against China. Vietnam also raised its voice in Association of the South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) forum and showed its concerns regarding the Chinese assertiveness in South China Sea. Vietnam persuaded these countries that the aggressive behavior of China could also cause a threat for other neighboring countries. Vietnam has further option to take China in court under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) like Philippines (Hiebert M. , 2015).
Investment of China has caused to strengthen and the growing of the economy of Vietnam. It also caused to fulfill the gap of unemployment in this country.
- Vietnamese strong economy has built the internal power of Vietnam. Economic strength can be utilized in order to make strong Vietnamese military which provide a mean to hedge China with the help of Chinese investment.
- This economic integration also caused to minimize the tension of South China Sea dispute and strengthen the bilateral relations. Both countries will prefer their economic ties and try to solve the disputed matters through table talk.
- Strong economic ties caused to improve relations on the base of economic stacks. In this regard stakeholders would not intend to create negative relations with each other. In this way such economics ties caused to increase peace and stability between two countries (Hiep, 2013).
Vietnam’s strong economic relations with China shows strong and close economic relations with China and involvement of Chinese stacks and benefits with Vietnam on the other hand the involvement of the US and Japan being largest exporters after China shows the behavior of Vietnam which is following hedging strategy against China through regional and extra-regional actors.
Vietnam has established its strategic partnership with many power full countries. Followings are the detail of Vietnam’s strategic partnership with other countries; Strategic Partnership of Vietnam and Russia established in 2001, India 2007, South Korea 2009, Japan 2006, the UK 2010, Spain 2009, Germany 2011, France, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand in 2013 and China 2008. Vietnam has executed comprehensive partnerships with Australia in 2009 and the US in 2013. These all countries are the most influential countries of world institutions like, UN Security Council, ASEAN, G8, G20 etc. (Hiep, 2013, p. 357). These alliances would secure Vietnam from any Chinese aggression.
Spratly Islands (Kalyan Islands Group) are the part of Philippines territory. KIG is the part of Philippines Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) under UNCLOS 1982 (Palma, 2009). Philippines has filed a case against China and its historical claim of nine dash lines in International court of Tribunal in Hague in 2013. Court has given decision in favor of Philippines on 12 July 2016 but China has rejected the decision and remained adamant in its claim (France-Presse, Agence, July 8th, 2016). Philippines and Chinese relations worsen due to Philippines case and the ongoing problem in Scarborough Shoal and Chinese construction of new islands. This was the scenario when Philippines new president Rodrigo Roe Duterte took charge on 30 July 2016 (Philippine History, 2017) and initiated new strategy that is called strategic hedging. Although Philippines previous governments have close economic and political relations but current government is leading in this respect. Philippines started to engage China with a huge trade volume. Politically, Philippines has come closer to China (Shead, 2017). Although Philippines has weak military but it seems to be developed it’s military with the coordination of the US, Russia and other countries. Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) is the most important agreement signed between two parties on 28 April 2014 (Soliven, 2016). Philippines has good position in ASEAN and it is third largest country in economic term in ASEAN region (Business World Online, 2015). Philippines has great military alliance with the US and its defense is largely based on the US military agreements and assistance. These are political, economic and military tools which Philippines is using against China.
The US interests in the South China Sea
The Geo-strategic position and bundle of resources are the main reason that China is very conscious to control this region whereas other regional actors like Vietnam, Philippine, Malaysia and Brunei are also active for sovereignty over these islands due to geo-proximity and resources. The US as the global hegemon has become the part of this game and wants to get its part from these resources. This is the reason that it has established strong alliances with other stack holders against China and also provoking Japan, Australia and India against China due to this regional dispute. The SCS is important for the US for three purposes; first it secures the US trade and military, second, it is check to restrain and contain the Chinese hegemony in the East Asia region (Mustajib, 2016), third, it is necessary for the protection of the US allies like Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan and ASEAN member countries. On the trade basis, the SCS is the passage of the 5 trillion annual ships (Robinson, 2018) and ships related to the US trade and military activities are worth 1.2 trillion dollar trade with East Asian countries (Mustajib, 2016).
The US has great concern over Chinese assertiveness in South China Sea. More than one trillion trades of the US passes from South China Sea. The US does not want that China dominates this place. This is the reason that the US emphasizes in freedom of navigation. The US, Japan and the European countries are deeply dissatisfied over the rising power of China in South China Sea. They consider that China will create obstacles in freedom of navigation whereas the US wants to protect it. China has not shown any gestures that it will stop the passages for other countries in South China Sea. According to the UNCLOS, no state can face any obstacle from other state in international water. Exclusive Economic Zone of 200 nautical miles comes under the sovereignty of a state and other part of the sea is the part of international sea and international sea is the subject of international law (Kuok, 2016). The US Freedom of Navigation Operation (FONOP) has conducted six operations in South China Sea against the Chinese claim of Spratly and Paracel Island. China has responded aggressively to the US FON in Chinese territories. China claimed that the US is involved in FON in its territory without its permission. It also claims that this US behavior is the obvious violation of the Chinese sovereignty and violation of the international law (Panda, 2017).
The US has also deployed its military in Pacific region to contain China in order to secure it from establishing hegemony. There are 40,000 the US troops in Japan. 16,000 US troops are deployed in this area of the second Place of Japan which is called Afloat. 28,500 US troops are deployed in South Korea. There are only 500 rotational US troops in Philippines. A Strategic place called Guam contains 4,500 US troops. Singapore and Malacca Straits are strategically important places and the US has deployed four Littoral Combat Ships near Singapore. There will be 2,500 troops in Darwin in Australia. The US and Australia are discussing a plan to deployed a large number of US navy troops in Perth and also want to establish naval bases in Perth.
*Nabel Akram, Master of Philosophy in Political Science
12. Philippines to acquire 32 new Black Hawk helicopters
Philippines to acquire 32 new Black Hawk helicopters
With the purchase, the defense department seeks to boost its disaster response capabilities. The first five units are expected to be delivered in 2023.
MANILA, Philippines – The Philippines is buying 32 S-70i Black Hawk helicopters from Poland-based Sikorsky Aircraft subsidiary PZL Mielec to beef up its existing fleet of 12, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said on Sunday, January 16, as it seeks to boost its disaster response capabilities.
Lorenzana said a notice of award was issued on December 28 for the purchase of brand new helicopters under a project that comes with logistics support and a training package for pilots and maintenance crew at a cost of P32 billion ($624 million).
The contract was now being drafted, with the delivery of the first five units expected in 2023, Lorenzana said on Facebook. The remaining ones will be delivered in three batches, 10 units in 2024, 10 units in 2025, and 7 units in 2026, he said.
“The lack of transport planes and helicopters have never been more acute during the pandemic and in the aftermath of Typhoon Odette (international name Rai),” Lorenzana said.
“This was exacerbated by our aging Hueys that have become uneconomical to maintain.”
Typhoon Odette, last year’s 15th and deadliest typhoon to hit the Philippines, left more than 400 people dead and caused widespread damage in central and southern regions of the country in December.
The United Nations’ Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on Sunday said in a statement that hundreds of thousands of people still needed food and clean water, shelter and protection support, one month after the world’s second deadliest disaster of 2021 hit the Philippines. – Rappler.com
13. Ressa warns: PH polls could see repeat of US Capitol attack if disinformation not stopped
Ressa warns: PH polls could see repeat of US Capitol attack if disinformation not stopped
MANILA, Philippines – Press freedom and democracy icon Maria Ressa warned senators that the Philippines could potentially undergo post-election violence like the attack in the United States Capitol in 2021 if the government will keep allowing lies to fester on social media.
The Rappler CEO explained how the web of lies that led to supporters of former US president Donald Trump storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021 actually started two years earlier, through election conspiracy theories of the pro-Trump “Stop The Steal” group.
In the run-up to the 2020 US presidential elections, these lies were seeded into online groups then eventually, mainstream media. When Trump himself later claimed he did not lose to his victorious opponent Joe Biden, the flames of disinformation online eventually exploded into real world violence.
Now, Ressa said, imagine what could happen in the Philippines, where it has become part and parcel of post-election seasons for losing candidates to claim they were cheated.
“So think about it like this: How many times have Filipino politicians, candidates who have lost elections, said that they were robbed? That’s kind of pretty normal in the Philippines. But now, put it in the age of disinformation, if you have an expert who knows how to do this, it can lead to violence,” said Ressa.
“So disinformation is directly connected to elections, which is directly connected to national security,” she added.
About 20% of these women journalists had been abused offline in connection with the online attacks they experienced.
“I just want to emphasize that online violence is real world violence,” Ressa said.
Comelec ‘hack’ report seeding distrust ahead of May polls
Bringing the issue closer to home, Ressa raised red flags over a report saying a group of hackers allegedly breached the Commission on Elections (Comelec) online servers months before Filipinos are set to elect their next president.
She said this so-called Comelec “hacking” is seeding distrust of the country’s electoral process.
Ressa pointed out that known fake news peddlers are among those amplifying the alleged data breach, which the Comelec is now investigating. Poll body commissioner Rowena Guanzon already denied such hacking actually happened.
Several politicians running in May, among them Senate constitutional amendments panel chair and vice presidential aspirant Kiko Pangilinan, already told Comelec to validate the report and make sure to protect the integrity of the polls.
“I think in the last two days, I think, Mr. Chair, you released a statement about the potential Comelec hack, that Comelec says didn’t happen but is being broadcast by some other candidates and known disinformation influencers as a way to already begin to seed distrust of our electoral process. And I’ll leave it with that. There are no guardrails for this,” said Ressa.
14. Chinese Influence Operations - A Machiavellian Moment
This is from October but I think it is just online this week (or at least it is the first I have seen of it).
The summary below alone is very useful. I imagine the entire report will be very valuable to all those who study influence operations.
CHINESE INFLUENCE OPERATIONS
A Machiavellian Moment
(PDF file)
English translation of the October 2021 edition
654 pages
For a long time, it could be said that China, unlike Russia, sought to be loved rather than feared; that it wanted to seduce and project a positive image of itself in the world, or to inspire admiration. Today, Beijing has not renounced to seduce, nor its overall attractiveness and its ambition to shape international standards, and it is essential for the Chinese Communist Party not to lose face. And yet, Beijing is also increasingly comfortable with infiltration and coercion: its influence operations have become considerably tougher in recent years and its methods are resembling more closely the ones employed by Moscow. This is a “Machiavellian turn” inasmuch as the Party-State now seems to believe that “it is much safer to be feared than to be loved,” in the words of Machiavelli in The Prince. This is a clear Russification of Chinese influence operations.
This report delves into this evolution, with the ambition to cover the whole specter of influence, from the most benign (public diplomacy) to the most malign methods, that is, interference (clandestine activities). To do that, the report is divided into four parts: successively laying out the main concepts; the actors implementing these operations, including the Base 311 of the People’s Liberation Army; the actions conducted by Beijing toward the diasporas, the media, diplomacy, economy, politics, education, think tanks, and in terms of information manipulations – some levers among others; then, several cases are studied (Taiwan, Singapore, Sweden, Canada, the operations that targeted Hong Kong protestors in 2019, and the one that branded the Covid-19 as an American fabrication in 2020). The conclusion returns to this “Russification”, which has three components: Beijing is inspired by Moscow in several ways, there are obviously differences between the two, and there is also a certain degree of cooperation. Finally, the report assesses the effectiveness of this new Chinese posture, which can boast some tactical successes, but constitutes a strategic failure.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
For a long time, it could be said that China, unlike Russia, sought to be loved rather than to be feared; that it wanted to seduce, project a positive image of itself in the world, and arouse admiration. Today, Beijing has not given up on seduction, on its attractiveness, and on its ambition to shape international norms. Not “losing face” remains very important for the CCP. And yet, Beijing is also increasingly comfortable with infiltration and coercion: its influence operations have been considerably hardened in recent years and its methods increasingly resemble Moscow’s. The Party-State has entered a “Machiavellian moment” in the sense that Beijing now appears to believe that, as Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, “it is better to be feared than loved.” This evolution shows a “Russification” of Chinese influence operations. And our report analyzes this evolution, with the ambition of covering the entire spectrum of its tools of influence, from the most benign (public diplomacy) to the most malign – which means interfering in other countries’ affairs (clandestine activities). To do so, our analysis proceeds in four parts, successively presenting the concepts, actors, actions pertaining to this moment, and it ends with several case studies.
1. The concepts that are important to understand Chinese influence operations include the
“United Front” – a CCP policy that consists in eliminating internal and external enemies, controlling groups that could defy its authority, constructing a coalition around the Party to serve its interests, and projecting its influence abroad – and the “Three warfares,” which represent the core of China’s “political warfare,” i.e. a form of non-kinetic proneness to conflict aimed at overcoming an opponent without a fight through the creation of an environment favorable to China. A wartime and peacetime undertaking, it encompasses public opinion, psychological, and legal warfare (the latter being close to what is called “lawfare” in English).
A Soviet concept is also useful to describe Beijing’s repertoire: “active measures,” which includes disinformation, counterfeiting, sabotage, discredit operations, destabilizing foreign governments, provocations, false-flag operations and manipulation aimed at weakening social cohesion, the recruitment of “useful idiots,” and the creation of front organizations.
2. The main actors implementing Chinese influence operations are emanations from the Party, the State, the Army, and the companies.
Within the Party, this includes the Propaganda Department, which oversees ideology, controls the entire media spectrum and all the cultural production in the country; the United Front Work Department (UFWD), with its twelve offices reflecting its main targets; the International Liaison Department (ILD), which maintains relations with foreign political parties; the 610 Office, which has agents across the world acting outside any legal framework to eliminate the Falun Gong movement. The Chinese Communist Youth League (CYL) should also be included in this group, serving at once as a link toward young people, as an incubator for future Party executives, and as a force that can be mobilized when needed – even if it is not a formal structure of the Party but rather a mass organization.
Within the state, two bodies in particular are involved in influence operations: The Ministry of State Security (MSS), which is the main civilian intelligence agency, and the Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO), in charge of the propaganda aimed at Taiwan.
Within the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the Strategic Support Force (SSF) is at the forefront, especially through its Network Systems Department. It has the resources and is entrusted with missions in the informational domain. More precisely, the principal actor identified in this domain is Base 311, headquartered in Fuzhou, which is dedicated to the implementation of the “Three Warfares” strategy. It also operates media companies as civilian covers and a fake hotel to hide a training center.
Finally, public and private companies play an important role in collecting the data needed to decide who should be targeted by influence operations, when, and how. Infrastructures are particularly useful in data collection – buildings and submarine cables for instance – as are new technologies: digital platforms such as WeChat, Weibo and TikTok, companies like Beidou and Huawei, and databases that provide insight into what researchers call China’s “techno-authoritarianism” or “digital authoritarianism” are all used to prepare and feed influence operations abroad. The Joint Staff Department of the Central Military Commission, which has apparently inherited intelligence missions previously entrusted to the former 2APL, should also be included in this list. However, due to insufficient sources, this institution is not covered in the report.
3. The actions carried out by Beijing in its influence operations abroad pertain to two main and non-mutually exclusive objectives: first, to seduce and captivate foreign audiences by crafting a positive representation of China, which can be illustrated by four specific narratives (the Chinese “model,” its tradition, benevolence, and strength); and then, and above all, to infiltrate and coerce. Infiltration aims at slowly penetrating the opposing societies to hamper the very possibility of an action contrary to the Party’s interests. Coercion corresponds to the progressive enlargement of the Chinese “punitive” or “coercive” diplomacy toward a policy of systematic sanctions against any state, organization, company, or individual that threatens the Party’s interests. Both are generally carried out via a web of intermediaries. Overall, these practices target the following categories:
- Diasporas, with the dual objective of controlling them – so that they do not represent a threat for the Chinese power (Beijing carries out a transnational campaign of repression which, according to the NGO Freedom House, is the “most sophisticated, global, and complete in the world”) – and mobilizing them to serve its interests.
- The media, as Beijing’s explicit goal is to establish “a new world media order.” Indeed, the government has invested €1.3 billion annually since 2008 to impose a tighter control over its global image. The major Chinese media outlets have a global presence, in several languages, on several continents, and on all social networks, including those blocked in China (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram), and they invest large amounts of money to augment their digital audience artificially. Beijing also seeks to control the Chinese-language outlets abroad, which has proven so successful that the CCP now effectively enjoys a near-monopoly among them, and it also seeks to control the mainstream media. Finally, the Party-State is interested in controlling the containers, exerting its influence over each step along the global information supply chain, targeting televisions, digital platforms, and smartphones.
- Diplomacy, with a focus on two aspects. First, influence over international organizations and norms: Beijing deploys classic diplomatic resources along with clandestine influence operations (economic and political pressure, cooptation, coercion, and corruption) to strengthen its influence. Second, the so-called “wolf-warrior” diplomacy: it refers to more aggressive postures adopted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ spokespersons and a dozen diplomats. These attacks take both classic and relatively new forms, notably relying on the use of social networks and on an uninhibited recourse to invective, admonition, even intimidation. Overall, this aggressive turn of the Chinese diplomacy has proven counter-productive and it has largely contributed to the abrupt deterioration of China’s global image in recent years. This evolution is probably sustainable for the actors involved, as the objective is less to conquer the hearts and minds than to please Beijing.
- The economy: an economic dependence is often the first lever China uses. Economic coercion then takes very different forms: a ban from the Chinese domestic market, embargos, trade sanctions and restrictions on domestic investment, quotas imposed on regions highly dependent on Chinese tourists, or mass boycotts. Besides, Beijing increasingly imposes censorship as a prerequisite to access its domestic market; many companies end up bowing under pressure.
- Politics, with the goal of penetrating target countries to influence public policymaking mechanisms. Maintaining direct relationships with political parties and influential political figures allows the Party-State to infiltrate the target countries, to gather official and unofficial support there, and to circumvent eventual blockages within the governments by using opposition or “retired” public figures. Beijing also interferes with elections (over the last decade, China may have interfered in at least 10 elections in 7 countries).
- Education, via universities first and foremost, which are one of the main targets of the Party’s influence efforts. Its principal levers are: financial dependence, leading to self- censorship in the universities; surveillance and intimidation of Chinese students, university instructors and administrators on foreign campuses; imposed modifications in course content, teaching materials, or programmed events; and shaping Chinese Studies, by encouraging self-censorship and punishing critical researchers. The Party-State also uses universities to acquire knowledge and technology, via legal and overt means, such as joint research programs, or illegal and covert actions, like theft and espionage. In a context of civil-military fusion, certain joint programs or researchers holding positions in dozens of Western universities involuntarily aid Beijing build weapons of mass destruction or surveillance technologies which are used to oppress the Chinese population. On this topic, several scandals broke out in public in 2020 and 2021. Finally, there is another important actor of Chinese influence in education tied to the universities: the Confucius Institutes and Classrooms that have opened all around the world and which, under the guise of teaching Chinese language and culture, have heightened the dependency, or subjection, of certain universities to China, damaged academic freedom. They may have occasionally been used for espionage.
- Think tanks: the Chinese strategy in this domain is two-pronged. Beijing seeks to establish overseas branches of Chinese think tanks, and to take advantage of local relays that may themselves be think tanks, with three possible scenarios: occasional partners acting as amplifiers on local markets of ideas, circumstantial allies that spread the Party’s narratives, and accomplices that share a common worldview and convergent interests with the CCP.
- Culture: first via the production and export of cultural products, such as films, TV series, music, and books – all powerful tools of seduction. Influence can also be exerted on foreign cultural productions, especially filmmakers, with the example of Hollywood: to avoid upsetting Beijing and hence maintain an access to the enormous Chinese domestic market, many American movie studios censor themselves, cutting or modifying movie scenes. Some are even overzealous, casting Chinese characters for the “good” roles. Being denied access to the Chinese market is almost certain for any artist who criticizes the Party-State. Via other types of pressure, Beijing also hopes to encourage artists to modify their work or, for those exhibiting elsewhere in the world, to simply stop, or even to do the work of Chinese censors.
- Information manipulation, resorting to fake accounts on social networks to spread the Party’s propaganda in the media, trolls and astroturfing (to simulate spontaneous popular movements), and to numerous “internet commentators” (falsely labeled the “50 cent army”) that are paid to “guide” public opinion. Generally controlled by the PLA or the CYL, trolls defend, attack, stir controversy, insult, or harass their targets. Another way to simulate authenticity is to have content published by third parties in exchange for money (content farms, purchase of messages, of influence over an account, of an account or a page, or recruitment of “influencers”). Since 2019, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube no longer refrain from identifying coordinated campaigns originating in China. Hence, tens of thousands of fake accounts have been suspended: some had long been “dormant,” others had been bought or stolen, most of them amplifying Chinese propaganda and attacking the United States (in Chinese and in English). Some accounts have profile pictures generated by artificial intelligence – a now regularly-observed practice in Chinese operations on social networks. Additionally, an important aspect of these campaigns is that they do not simply defend China: the promotion of the Chinese model goes hand in hand with the debasement of other models, especially liberal democracies, as Russian influence operations have done for years. The PLA is at the heart of these maneuvers, using social networks to conduct “open” influence operations and circulating propaganda on the one hand, often aiming at deterrence and psychological warfare; and to conduct clandestine and hostile operations against foreign targets on the other hand.
- Other levers: Beijing also uses citizen movements in its influence operations – especially separatist (New Caledonia, Okinawa) and pacifist groups (No Cold War) – Chinese tourists, influencers (including Western YouTubers), and foreign academics, as well as hostages, since Beijing has deployed a “hostage diplomacy.”
4. The case studies are introduced in concentric circles. Taiwan and Hong Kong constitute the first front in Beijing’s “political warfare”: they are outposts, training grounds, “R&D labs” for Chinese operations which are subsequently refined and applied to other targets worldwide – not unlike what Georgia and Ukraine meant for Russian operations. A first widening of the circle of Chinese operations targeted Australia and New Zealand. A second step was to aim for the rest of the world, particularly – but not exclusively – Europe and North America. This part introduces four cases – Taiwan, Singapore, Sweden, and Canada – and two operations, which targeted Hong Kong protestors in 2019 and framed the Covid-19 as an American creation in 2020.
Finally, the conclusion comes back to this notion of a “Machiavellian moment” in two steps. First, to confirm that there has indeed been a “Russification” of Chinese influence operations since about 2017: the parallel had already been made in 2018 during the Taiwanese municipal elections, and later during the 2019 Hong Kong crisis; but the world only became aware of the problem in 2020 with the Covid-19 pandemic. The three components of this Russification are then laid out: Beijing draws inspiration from Moscow on several levels (the existing Chinese military literature acknowledges that, for the PLA, Russia is a model to emulate on such operations). Yet, differences obviously remain between the two, and there is also a certain degree of cooperation.
Last but not least, the conclusion seeks to assess the effectiveness of this new Chinese posture and concludes that, if it brought certain tactical successes, it has been a strategic failure overall, China being its own worst enemy in terms of influence. The abrupt degradation of Beijing’s reputation since the arrival of Xi Jinping, particularly in the last couple of years, confronts China with a growing unpopularity problem that may indirectly come to weaken the Party, including vis-à-vis its own population.
15. Hamas claims it discovered a dolphin assassin sent by Israel. Experts say it's plausible, but more likely propaganda
Hamas claims it discovered a dolphin assassin sent by Israel. Experts say it's plausible, but more likely propaganda.
A Hamas spokesperson released a video saying the militant group had discovered an Israeli killer dolphin.
Hamas, Getty Images
- Hamas claims to have discovered a dolphin fitted with a gun-like device off the coast of the Gaza Strip.
- A spokesman for the militant group alleged that Israel had trained it to target Palestinian combat divers.
- Experts told Insider that the claim should be viewed skeptically, even though dolphins are sometimes used by the military.
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A spokesman for the Palestinian Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, claimed in a video on Monday that the militant group had discovered an Israeli assassin dolphin off the coast of the Gaza Strip.
—Joe Truzman (@JoeTruzman) January 10, 2022
The spokesperson alleged that Israel's military had trained the dolphin to chase and kill Hamas's frogmen, per the Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds.
The spokesman said that one Hamas fighter, Israel killed during the conflict in May, found a gun-like device attached to the aquatic mammal, The Jerusalem Post reported. He did not specify when the operation took place.
Hamas claims to have found a gun-like device on the beak of a dolphin.
Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas
Experts told Insider that while dolphins can and have been used for military exercises, this most recent claim of a sea-faring assassin should be viewed with skepticism.
"Hamas has definitely put out a lot of propaganda and, if you like, not entirely honest media in the past," said HI Sutton, a defense analyst who writes for the US Naval Institute during an interview with Insider. "So there's always a chance that it's made up."
'There's a propaganda war going on'
Gervase Philips, a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, whose research focuses on animals in human conflict, told Insider he agrees.
"My own position is that, theoretically, this is possible, but I am very, very skeptical," he told Insider. "There's a propaganda war going on," Phillips said, agreeing with the notion that Hamas's claim should be questioned.
This isn't the first time that Hamas has accused Israel of using dolphins to target them, offering scant evidence to back the claims.
In 2015, it claimed to have captured a dolphin being used as an Israeli spy. Per Al-Quds, it was reportedly equipped with a spy camera and turned into a "murderer" by Israeli security forces. No photographic evidence of the alleged marine secret agent was ever released, according to BBC News.
But while animal-related conspiracy theories about Israel might sound fantastical, it is a fact that some nations have used marine mammals in warfare.
The US Navy has a marine mammal program
The US and Russian militaries have, historically, trained sea creatures. Little is known about the Soviet-era or modern Russian program, Phillips said, leading to "all kinds of rumors circulating," but the existence of the US Navy Marine Mammal (NMMP) Program is well-publicized.
After the program became de-classified in the early 1990s, the public learned that the NMMP trains bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions to perform protection, mine detection, and object recovery. The US Navy insists that it has never trained marine mammals to attack people or ships because dolphins cannot discern between enemy and friendly vessels or divers.
Phillips added that it is "impractical" — and potentially "catastrophic" — to use dolphins in murder missions because they have minds of their own.
"Behavioral scientists have this tendency to talk of animals as programmable platforms as if they were machines or a form of AI," he told Insider. "But they are not artificial — they are sentient creatures with a will of their own and there is always an element of the unpredictable about them."
Sutton said that while the dolphins are unlikely to be doing the killing themselves, it is "not that far-fetched" to suggest that militaries could be using them to attach markers to targets with a view to them being captured or taken out by humans.
The gun-like device, which the Hamas spokesperson showed in the video, is more likely "a marker buoy," said Sutton, but could also be "a pinger or an acoustic device.
HI Sutton's model of the alleged gun-like device on a dolphin.
Israel has not publicly disclosed whether it has a marine mammal military program. The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to Insider's request for comment on the existence of the program or the alleged discovery of a killer dolphin.
—Israel ישראל (@Israel) January 12, 2022
But a tweet shared Wednesday on Israel's official Twitter account appears to make light of the situation. The tweet consisted solely of eight dolphin emojis.
16. People who study the origins of civil wars see 'indicators' the US is on the brink of conflict, Yale historian says
Article and transcript below.
People who study the origins of civil wars see 'indicators' the US is on the brink of conflict, Yale historian says
An explosion caused by a police munition is seen while supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump gather in front of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, U.S., January 6, 2021.
Photo by Leah Millis/Reuters
- Yale history professor Timothy Snyder spoke with Insider about the future of American democracy.
- Snyder said factors like polarization and alternative realities indicate the US is close to conflict.
- But Snyder said he thinks it's even more likely that the US could cease to exist.
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Though the idea of another civil war in the near future seems far-fetched to many Americans, people who study such conflicts might disagree, according to Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale University.
Snyder, an expert on the rise of authoritarianism, discussed the future of American democracy in an interview with Insider during which he said he fears the US might not survive if former President Donald Trump runs again in 2024.
Insider asked Snyder how he feels about people invoking the Civil War when discussing the current state of affairs.
"First of all, I just want to say that, for the people who actually study the origins of civil wars, not just in the US, but as a class of events, America doesn't look good right now," Snyder said.
He cited the high degree of polarization, beliefs in alternative realities, and the celebration of violence, pointing to some who praised the actions of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teen who killed two people at a racial justice protest in Wisconsin in 2020. (A jury acquitted Rittenhouse, who said he acted in self-defense.)
"Those social scientists who actually work on this topic — neutrally — see indicators in the United States, which suggests that we are on the brink of some kind of conflict," Snyder said.
Snyder said it is "very possible" that the US could install a president in 2025 who technically loses the election by a clear margin. He said with "a few gimmicks" a candidate that loses the popular vote and loses the electoral college could become president.
"A few states just have to withhold their electoral votes; the House of Representatives then votes, according to state delegations; the Supreme Court then blesses the whole configuration; and then all of a sudden you have an installed president of the United States," Snyder explained.
In that scenario, it's possible the US ends up with a civil war. But Snyder said he thinks that scenario would more likely lead to the dissolution of the US.
"It's a kind of conflict that ends with governors seeking some kind of safe haven for their states. It's a kind of conflict that ends with Americans moving from one part of the country to another to be with people with whom they feel safer," he said.
"It's the kind of conflict that ends with some kind of basic political reconstruction, where the US as we know it doesn't have to exist."
Yale history professor Timothy Snyder told Insider he fears American democracy may not survive another Trump campaign
Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale University specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe and the Holocaust, speaks at Oslo Freedom Forum 2019 on May 27, 2019 in Oslo, Norway.
Julia Reinhart/Getty Images
- Timothy Snyder is a history professor at Yale University and an expert on the rise of authoritarianism.
- Snyder is the author of "The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America," among other books.
- He spoke to Insider about what he sees as grave threats to democracy in the United States.
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Timothy Snyder does not want to be a downer, he says, but he is not feeling too optimistic about America these days. A history professor at Yale University, and the author of a series of books on authoritarianism and the road to tyranny, he looks at the United States these days and wonders if the country as we know it will still exist in a few years.
In a recent article — marking one year since a former president, who lost an election, sought to thwart the peaceful transfer of power — Snyder painted a grim scenario where something like the January 6 insurrection had succeeded. How would the country, and the rest of the world, react to the installation of a leader who clearly did not win?
In an interview with Insider, Snyder discussed Donald Trump, democracy, and what he fears could happen come 2024.
It's been a year now since the January 6th insurrection. What do you think the state of American democracy is? Are we on firmer ground now, a year out?
Well, I mean, obviously things could be worse. The January 6th insurrection a year ago could have succeeded. We could be living in a country that is wracked by civil and indeed violent conflict after Donald Trump succeeds in, at least temporarily, staying in power, thanks to some kind of conspiracy of his supporters, the Department of Justice, supporters in Congress and so on, right? So things could be worse. And I wouldn't wanna deny that.
Unfortunately, that scenario is not one that is just in the rearview mirror. It's also one that is right in front of us. The problem with a failed coup, which is what January 6th, 2021, is, is that it is practice for a successful coup. So what we're looking at now is a kind of slow-motion practice for a repetition of all of that, but this time with the legal parts of it more fully prepared. What I'm afraid of is that now, in the shadow of a big lie — namely, that Trump actually won — the states are preparing the legal steps that will enable Trump to be installed as president the next time around. And that in turn will lead to a terrible sort of conflict, the kind that we haven't seen before.
Some people look at January 6th and they see that — as bad as it was — it did not succeed, obviously. And, in fact, the leading players were kind of bumbling, right? I think that some have dismissed January 6th as a foolish stunt that got out of hand, but that never stood a chance of succeeding. I guess maybe you could both agree with that, but also think that's something that could be a lesson for them going forward.
Let me try a comparison. If you think that democracy just succeeded on January 6th, sort of on its own strength, then you're missing the backdrop. In the course of the year 2020 there were a lot of important individuals and institutions, ranging from civil society to business, who were aware that there was some possibility that Trump would go for it, even if he lost, and were making preparations for that all year long. Without those preparations, it's very likely that Trump would have succeeded, or at least he would've come close enough to succeeding that we would be in terrible, bloody chaos for a very long time.
It's like you're imagining an athlete winning a gold medal in the Olympics and thinking, 'Okay, that guy never actually practiced. He just showed up that day, in Tokyo, and won the medal'. The reason why democracy succeeded in 2021 is that a lot of people put in a lot of hard work ahead of time. And if it's going to keep succeeding, a lot of people are going to have to keep doing a lot of hard work. That attitude, that things just kind of happened because they happened — if we have that attitude, we're not going to put in the work and we're going to have this problem a second time around.
The second thing to say about that is that, sure, sometimes coups fail, and when they fail the people who carry them out look foolish. But we're kind of in a strange spot in the US. Normally when you try a coup and you fail, you face some kind of consequence, right? In an authoritarian regime, your political life is terminated in some unpleasant way. In a democratic regime with a rule of law, you face legal consequences.
We in the US are in this weird middle state, where you can try to carry out a coup, and pretty obviously break the law in all kinds of ways, and nevertheless, you can kind of just hang out and remain in politics. We're in a very awkward place, a strange place, where this sort of thing can repeat itself,
Are you encouraged at all by the work of the January 6 committee and also the charges that the Department of Justice unveiled, where they've actually started charging people with seditious conspiracy?
I hate to always be negative, and I won't be, but let me just start with a proviso. It's really too bad that, thanks to the archaic institution known as the filibuster, we don't have a bipartisan January 6th committee. We did have majorities in both the house and the Senate for something like that, but nevertheless, it doesn't exist. And that's a shame because democracy depends upon reflection and self-correction, and the January 6th committee is about reflection and self-correction, and so it's too bad that it couldn't have been done in the broadest way possible.
That said, the work that it's doing is incredibly important. Democracy depends upon facts. Democracy depends upon knowing what's going on, operating in the shadow of a big lie, as a lot of us are doing — and even those of us who don't believe in the lie have to deal with it all the time — is incompatible with democracy. Myths and personality cults, and massive doses of self-deception, are incompatible with democracy. Figuring out just what happened, step by step, is compatible because it gives us that chance to reflect and to improve and to move on. So the work that the January 6th committee is doing is absolutely indispensable.
I was going to ask you about the Democrats' response in January 6th, but actually your response there makes me want ask you about the Republicans' response. Because does the Democrats' response even matter if one of the major political parties is completely behind what you call 'the big lie'? There was a brief moment, after January 6th, where it seemed like the leading members of the Republican Party were going to break from Donald Trump and his claims. But it definitely seems like that's a way to get yourself kicked out of the party these days.
To answer your literal question, it does of course matter what the Democrats do. It matters whether they try to figure out the truth. It matters whether they dig in and do the hard work of having to challenge their colleagues in the Senate, in the House, which of course is not that pleasant for the Democrats. That all matters very much because, without a legal and historical sense of the events of January 6th, we're not going to be able to keep going as a democracy. All of that baggage, from the Civil War forward that we don't clean up, just stands in the way of a democratic future. So it does matter what the Democrats are doing.
The Republicans are facing a different kind of problem than the Democrats. Their problem is that, if they don't stand up to the big lie, and to the big liar himself, then they are doomed to become an authoritarian party. The logic of the big lie is such that, since you're claiming that the other side cheated you are then going to cheat yourself. You're basically promising your supporters that you're going to cheat. You're telling your supporters that a vote for us is not really a vote to try to win an election, a vote for us is just to kind of get us vaguely close enough that we can then fix the election, thanks to voter suppression and voter subversion and all the things that we're preparing now. So the Republicans face this very different ethical situation, which is that the longer they operate within the shadow of the big lie, the more they're gonna be remembered by posterity as a party that became authoritarian and possibly broke the system.
I think, by the way, that a good number of them realized that. I think, by the way, that a good number of them are trying to find some way to get out from under this. And I hope that I hope that more of them find the courage to try to do so.
Do you agree with the assessment that this is the worst crisis for democracy since the Civil War?
I think we're in the same territory as the Great Depression and the Civil War. And those were moments when the United States was very lucky with its leaders. I mean, it's no coincidence that we tend to remember Lincoln and Roosevelt as the presidents that stand out. I would add the Great Depression to that because I think the Great Depression was also a moment when it could have all gone south. But yes, we're on historically dangerous territory.
Obviously, when people refer to the Civil War, I mean, one response to that can be that that's, you know, hysterical, right? We don't appear to be on the verge of a violent conflict between two heavily armed sides. So how do you see that playing out? Where could this lead?
First of all, I just want to say that, for the people who actually study the origins of civil wars, not just in the US, but as a class of events, America doesn't look good right now, with its high degree of polarization, with its alternative reality, with the celebration of violence — the example of Kyle Rittenhouse. Those social scientists who actually work on this topic — neutrally — see indicators in the United States, which suggests that we are on the brink of some kind of conflict.
You're asking me about my scenario? My scenario is not very complicated. My scenario is that if, as is very possible, we install a president in January 2025 who has lost by a clear margin — let's say 10 million popular votes, and let's say 89 electoral votes — it's not very difficult in that situation for the loser to become the winner, thanks to just a few gimmicks. A few states just have to withhold their electoral votes; the House of Representatives then votes, according to state delegations; the Supreme Court then blesses the whole configuration; and then all of a sudden you have an installed president of the United States.
I think by 2025 it's going be very hard for a lot of Americans to accept something so blatantly undemocratic, the more so since people will have known that this kind of plot was in the works for several years. So my scenario is at that point you would then have uncertainty as to who the President of the United States actually was — uncertainty among the population and also uncertainty within the institutions of government, both bureaucracy, the civil administration, but also unfortunately the armed parts of the government: the armed forces, the national guard.
So that's the scenario. It's not very complicated. And unfortunately, it's the kind of thing that one has seen in other countries. And it's not really all that implausible.
Speaking of other countries, what parallels can you draw, with the caveat that we know history doesn't repeat, exactly? What do you see as analogous to the situation that the United States finds itself in today?
There are all kinds of comparisons. History doesn't repeat, but it does instruct. And it also instructs the people who are trying to undermine the rule of law. An easy, contemporary example is Hungary. Hungary is a place where, legalistic step by legalistic step, the spirit and reality of democracy and the rule of law were removed, such that Hungary, although it still has elections, is a country, which you can't really characterize as a functioning democracy. That is the road that we are on. And that is a model, not a historical one, but a contemporary one for a lot of Republicans right now. Hungary's going to be more and more present — in fact, it's already been present, for example, on Tucker Carlson — as a kind of positive ideal for rule: an authoritarian regime, on the basis of a minority and kind of ritual elections.
Going back a few years: Russia. Russia pioneered what's called the 'administrative resource.' That is, you have elections, but the elections are arranged in such a way that you know who's going to win. And you can't really point to exactly where things went wrong because they went wrong at a whole bunch of different levels at the same time. But nevertheless, your guy always wins. We're moving in that direction. We're moving towards the administrative resource.
A more distant historical parallel: the failed democracies of the 1920s and 1930s. A similarity there is that, thanks to obstreperousness and complicated parliamentary rules, laws weren't passed and people all over Central and Eastern Europe began to think that parliament, or what we call Congress, is just not very important. It would be better to have a strong leader. Someone who at least reflects our mood. Someone who can get things done. As it becomes difficult for our Congress to pass laws, and as Republicans deliberately, of course, make it difficult for our Congress to pass laws, that kind of sentiment is also building in the US.
Where do you trace the beginnings of guess what you would call the Republicans' weakening commitment to democracy? Is it the rise of Donald Trump and his personality call and his unique characteristics? Is he a product of a conservative movement that had been, for years, kind of slowly moving away from the idea of democracy as a value?
You have to go way back in US history. There's always been a party which wanted to suppress the votes of all of Black people and call that democracy. For a long time, that was the Democratic Party. They switched, after civil rights in the sixties, and it became the Republican party. But this is kind of the original sin of American democracy — that we've always had a political party which wants to suppress votes and game the system.
I think there are three recent developments, though. One is the surgical precision by which we now carry out gerrymandering, which means that the Republican Party, in particular, is playing only to the loudest voices in its own choir and is ever less representative of the general public. The second change is social media, within which I would include also foreign interventions in our social media. Social media is a bit like a gerrymandering of the brain. It allows voters to collect themselves into clusters and not have contact with anyone else. And that radicalizes things.
And then the third is, I mean, give credit where credit is due: the personality cult of Donald Trump. The Republicans have not had a figure like this before, who is willing to call them out on their own hypocrisies, basically to expose them nakedly for the worst things that they do, as opposed to the values that some of them still would like to express in politics. They've never had a kind of cult of personality like this, where everything was out in the open. That creates a new kind of popularity. I think it'll be hard for Republicans to rally around, at this point, someone else to carry out a second coup, partly because I think no one has both the combination of a sheer indifference to ethics and the popularity that Mr. Trump has at this moment.
It sounds like you're saying if in 2024 the Republican nominee were Ron DeSantis or Tucker Carlson, who seem to have the same political values — Tucker Carlson, as you mentioned, openly admires [Hungary's] Viktor Orbán — that the threat to democracy would be greatly diminished, which seems to reduce the threat to the person of Donald Trump.
I wouldn't want to say it's a good situation to have a whole cast of characters who want to come to power under the cover of a big lie, using non-democratic means. That's still not a good situation that we have a DeSantis or a Carlson or a Josh Hawley or possibly a Ted Cruz — that we have a whole list of people who'd be willing to come to power that way. That's not a good situation. But, at the moment, it's Mr. Trump who captures the imagination of a lot of the American electorate. To carry out a coup of this kind, you've gotta get close enough to make it plausible. And you have to have somebody who's absolutely ruthless. And I think he remains, therefore, the best of the worst, or the worst of the worst, depending upon how you want to look at it.
I want to ask you about President Biden. Obviously, he's given a couple of speeches recently that have explicitly labeled not just Donald Trump but the Republican Party as a threat to democracy. How do you grade his response to January 6th?
It's a tough time right now for Mr. Biden in public opinion. I think he has been put in a very difficult situation — in a way, an historically unprecedented situation. With the exception, we just don't have presidents coming to power at a time when the existence of the republic has been challenged. And unlike Lincoln, Biden, can't begin from the position of some kind of clear victory. That is to say, the people who oppose American democracy are still out there in the field. Mr. Trump is in Florida doing his thing, every day. And there's no clear way to remove them from the picture.
So he has to be president, and he has to do the normal things that a president does, which is try to get laws passed. And he has to, simultaneously, embody the values of our democratic Republic. It's a tough combination. Because he'd like to be able, I think, to stand above all of this. And then, after a year, it's become clear that he just can't. I think all of these attitudes have been correct. I just think it's unfortunate — going back to the comparison to FDR, unlike FDR he doesn't have big majorities in his first term. If he had big majorities, a lot of the stuff that we're talking about would be moot. We would have a bipartisan investigation. A lot more laws would've been passed.
And above all, we'd already have electoral reform, which is the single most important thing: making it easier for Americans to vote would be good, not only for the whole system, it would also be good for the Republicans because it would force the Republican closer into the role of being a party which has to seek votes, has to care about public opinion, has to represent people, rather than the worst parts of a system. If Biden had a bigger majority, then all that stuff would've already happened. I think he's come to power at a really uninviting time. His first year has been, let's say a lot better than we think — it's been a lot better than the atmospherics would suggest.
President Biden's approval rating, some polls suggest, is in the 30s and Democrats look like they're on the verge of losing their majority in the House and their 50-50 control of the Senate. Polls also suggest that a large majority of the public is concerned about the state of democracy. They do not particularly like Donald Trump. Yet they seem ready to return the Republican Party — a party that's committed to Donald Trump and his lies about the 2020 election — to power. How do you reconcile all that?
I think there are several things going on there. One, just lots of people, regardless of party commitment, don't see the kind of legalistic threat building up to a second coup attempt or an installation of a president. In early 2020, and this is perfectly understandable, people don't necessarily see that the combination of voter suppression and vote subversion and a candidate who's going to break all the rules in a few years that this — that this combined with Republican victory in both the House and the Senate makes the end of democracy in the US, unfortunately, conceivable. People don't see that because it's a complicated institutional story and people would prefer to vote in 2022 on the stuff they're thinking about in 2022. That's understandable, but it's really unfortunate.
The second thing, which is going on here, is that there's a kind of irony in our system, which is that Democrats tend to trust the very institutions that Republicans are corrupting. Republicans are the ones who, if you poll them, are more likely to say somebody's gonna fix the election. Democrats just aren't worried enough about this because they tend to believe the institutions are going to work, that everybody will come together, etcetera. And so I think it's hard in particular for Democrats to think, okay, it's 2022, we have to vote like hell because otherwise we're going to have Trumpland — in a worse version — two years down the line.
And then the third thing that's going on is just people are sick of COVID. People are sick of living unusual lives. People are sick of all these restrictions on them, understandably. And people are going to vote their mood. That's just the way democracy is.
The things that we're talking about, we should talk about and try to get them across, but there's also just this basic matter that people are unsatisfied with COVID. And Republicans know this and they're trying to keep COVID going as long as possible because they think it favors them. And they're probably right. People want to go back to normal life and until they go back to normal life, it's hard to have a normal election where the kinds of things we're talking about will get to the surface.
Let's revisit this scenario where Trump and the Republican Party have claimed victory and have had some legal cloaking of this claim that has installed the loser of the election in power. You talked about competing allegiances among, perhaps, different branches of the military. It would be a very unclear situation of who, legally, different institutions in the United States should be pledging allegiance to.
How do you see that playing out a year later? If Trump is in there as a minority, loser-president, seen as illegitimate by 55% of the American public, what's that look like for him and for the rest of the country?
I mean, look, god forbid, I don't want all this to happen. And I think there's time to prevent it from happening. But I don't think the scenario that you're talking about is the one that we have to worry about. I think the scenario we have to worry about is that there isn't a US at that point. The kind of conflict that begins January 20, 2025, isn't the kind of conflict that ends with one president being just unpopular, or even seen as illegitimate. It's a kind of conflict that ends with governors seeking some kind of safe haven for their states. It's a kind of conflict that ends with Americans moving from one part of the country to another to be with people with whom they feel safer. It's the kind of conflict that ends with some kind of basic political reconstruction, where the US as we know it doesn't have to exist.
That's the thing I think that people have the hardest time getting through their minds. Like the US, as we know it, doesn't have to exist. It's built upon these constitutional foundations, which are very flawed and which are now being intensely abused. If those constitutional foundations lead to something which is broadly unacceptable, we're going to be in unknown territory, which can go to unknown places. But it's very often the thing that you take for granted the most, like the existence of your own country, which is the thing that you should be paying the most attention to.
That's a lesson which the Soviets learned in 1991, right? It's 30 years since the Soviet Union came to an end. We can look back at that and say, 'aha, it came to an end because it was a flawed communist system.' And sure, that's true. But we didn't expect it to come to an end, and they didn't expect it to come to an end. The fundamental lesson there is that big, powerful systems that you don't think can come to an end can come to an end if you don't get a hold of the internal problems — what they used to call the internal contradictions. We have some internal contradictions. We say we're a democracy, but we're becoming ever less so in practice. And if we don't get a hold of that, the system as we know it may not continue at all.
That's what I'm worried about, sincerely. And I like to think — maybe I'm naive — that if folks on both sides of the aisle, Republicans, Democrats, and others, could imagine themselves into a 2025 where the existence of the country is actually in doubt, if we could think ourselves forward to that, and then think back to where we are now, it might moderate things that we're doing.
My basic feeling is that the Republicans are right to think they can game their way to power. But by the time they game their way to power, it's not clear that there will be anything to have power over. And I don't think they've thought their way through to the end of that. And I think they need to, and everyone needs to, so that we can, you know, so that we can operate in such a way where at least our republic is still around a few years from now,
To clarify that: you're thinking less that scenario where it's a shooting war between the army and the navy or competing factions in the military, and more like what we've kind of seen with blue states and climate change, for example, under Trump, where they kind of announce we have our own foreign policy, and we're actually going to band together and pursue our own policies. Speak directly to us, not Washington, DC. That's not America.
I think some combination of that is what we're talking about. The more you get into details, the more you're going to be wrong, because the details won't be exactly what we think. In that scenario, I think Trump is president of something, but I'm not sure he governs from Washington, DC, and I'm not sure the thing that he runs is called the United States of America.
In that scenario, he and the Supreme Court get to get to run something, but I'm not sure it's most of the country at that point. The military, you know, is subordinate to civilian command, which is a proud tradition that we have, but it's not clear who the civilian commander actually is, that's a real problem. And if there are conflicting orders coming down, or if different commanders within our armed forces are giving conflicting orders, then you have a situation where either you're going to have a literal civil war or people are going say, 'Hey, the way to prevent violent conflict is to have some kind of peaceful separation along some kind of lines.' That will suggest itself. The model that I have in mind now is Yugoslavia.
It all seems wild and science-fictiony at this point, but if you reason your way through to 2025 with an installed president, and you don't see some scenario like this, you must be thinking, 'Okay, Trump can get installed and nobody will care.' And I just don't think that's plausible. I just don't think the combination of Trump himself — who's wildly unpopular along among a lot of people and who has already effectively announced that his policies next time around will be still more radical — and installation will be accepted by Americans and American institutions. That's a step that I can't make mentally. I don't see how installing Trump won't lead to a major challenge to the existence of the republic.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
