Quotes of the Day:
"Supporting Ukraine's struggle for peace is not only a moral duty of all democracies, of all European forces. It has to be the defense strategy of every civilized state."
- Volodymyr Zelenskyy
"Wisdom consists of the capacity to confront disturbing ideas, even intolerable ideas, with equanimity."
- Leo Rosten
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
- Voltaire
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 9 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. 1st US ambassador to Ukraine: 'I think we handled it wrong from the get-go'
3. Romney Was Right About Putin
4. Opinion | How Do We Deal With a Superpower Led by a War Criminal?
5. Nine ways Russia botched its invasion of Ukraine
6. Russia lost the battle for Kyiv with its hasty assault on a Ukrainian airport
7. Destroyed Armored Vehicle In Ukraine Gets The "Wolverines!" From 'Red Dawn' Treatment
8. An American’s search for meaning in Ukraine’s foreign legion
9. Finland is hurtling towards NATO membership
10. What Vladimir Putin misunderstood about Ukrainians
11. Terrorism, Ukraine, Taiwan and the Outsourcing Wars
12. Biden’s Choice: Win or Lose in Ukraine? by Bing West
13. Inside the covert network sending arms and drones to Ukraine forces
14. The Real Collapse Of The USSR Is Taking Place Only Now
15. Does the New U.S. National Defense Strategy Make Any Sense?
16. The Untold Story of the Afghan Women Who Hunted the Taliban
17. The AP Interview: Zelenskyy seeks peace despite atrocities
18. In Africa, U.S.-Trained Militaries Are Ousting Civilian Governments in Coups
19. Russia is Turning into North Korea
20. Intel: Putin may cite Ukraine war to meddle in US politics
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 9 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 9 (Putin's war)
Frederick W. Kagan, George Barros, Kateryna Stepanenko, and Karolina Hird
April 9, 4:30 pm ET
Special Edition: Russian Military Capabilities Assessments
The Russian military is attempting to generate sufficient combat power to seize and hold the portions of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts that it does not currently control after it completes the seizure of Mariupol. There are good reasons to question the Russian armed forces’ ability to do so and their ability to use regenerated combat power effectively despite a reported simplification of the Russian command structure. This update, which we offer on a day without significant military operations on which to report, attempts to explain and unpack some of the complexities involved in making these assessments.
We discuss below some instances in which American and other officials have presented information in ways that may inadvertently exaggerate Russian combat capability. We do not in any way mean to suggest that such exaggeration is intentional. Presenting an accurate picture of a military’s combat power is inherently difficult. Doing so from classified assessments in an unclassified environment is especially so. We respect the efforts and integrity of US and allied officials trying to help the general public understand this conflict and offer the comments below in hopes of helping them in that task.
We assess that the Russian military will struggle to amass a large and combat-capable force of mechanized units to operate in Donbas within the next few months. Russia will likely continue to throw badly damaged and partially reconstituted units piecemeal into offensive operations that make limited gains at great cost.[1] The Russians likely will make gains nevertheless and may either trap or wear down Ukrainian forces enough to secure much of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, but it is at least equally likely that these Russian offensives will culminate before reaching their objectives, as similar Russian operations have done.
The US Department of Defense (DoD) reported on April 8 that the Russian armed forces have lost 15-20 percent of the “combat power” they had arrayed against Ukraine before the invasion.[2] This statement is somewhat (unintentionally) misleading because it uses the phrase “combat power” loosely. The US DoD statements about Russian “combat power” appear to refer to the percentage of troops mobilized for the invasion that are still in principle available for fighting—that is, that are still alive, not badly injured, and with their units. But “combat power” means much more than that. US Army doctrine defines combat power as “the total means of destructive, constructive, and information capabilities that a military unit or formation can apply at a given time.”[3] It identifies eight elements of combat power: “leadership, information, command and control, movement and maneuver, intelligence, fires, sustainment, and protection.”[4] This doctrinal definition obviously encompasses much more than the total number of troops physically present with units and is one of the keys to understanding why Russian forces have performed so poorly in this war despite their large numerical advantage. It is also the key to understanding the evolving next phase of the war.
US DoD statements that Russia retains 80-85 percent of its original mobilized combat power unintentionally exaggerate the Russian military’s current capabilities to fight. Such statements taken in isolation are inherently ambiguous, for one thing. They could mean that 80-85 percent of the Russian units originally mobilized to fight in Ukraine remain intact and ready for action while 15-20 percent have been destroyed. Were that the case, Russia would have tremendous remaining combat power to hurl against Ukraine. Or, they could mean that all the Russian units mobilized to invade Ukraine have each suffered 15-20 percent casualties, which would point to a greatly decreased Russian offensive capacity, as such casualty levels severely degrade the effectiveness of most military units. The reality, as DoD briefers and other evidence make clear, is more complicated, and paints a grim picture for Russian commanders contemplating renewing major offensive operations.
The dozens of Russian battalion tactical groups (BTGs) that retreated from around Kyiv likely possess combat power that is a fraction of what the numbers of units or total numbers of personnel with those units would suggest. Russian units that have fought in Ukraine have taken fearful damage.[5] As the US DoD official noted on April 8, “We've seen indications of some units that are literally, for all intents and purposes, eradicated. There's just nothing left of the BTG except a handful of troops, and maybe a small number of vehicles, and they're going to have to be reconstituted or reapplied to others. We've seen others that are, you know, down 30 percent manpower.”[6] Units with such levels of losses are combat ineffective—they have essentially zero combat power. A combination of anecdotal evidence and generalized statements such as these from US and other NATO defense officials indicates that most of the Russian forces withdrawn from the immediate environs of Kyiv likely fall into the category of units that will remain combat ineffective until they have been reconstituted.
Reconstituting these units to restore any notable fraction of their nominal power would take months. The Russian military would have to incorporate new soldiers bringing the units back up toward full strength and then allow those soldiers time to integrate into the units. It would also have to allow those units to conduct some unit training, because a unit is more than the sum of individual soldiers and vehicles. The combat power of a unit results in no small part from its ability to operate as a coherent whole rather than a group of individuals. It takes time even for well-trained professional soldiers to learn how to fight together, and Russian soldiers are far from well-trained. The unit would also have to replace lost and damaged vehicles and repair those that are reparable. The unit’s personnel would need time to regain their morale and will to fight, both badly damaged by the humiliation of defeat and the stress and emotional damage of the losses they suffered. These processes take a long time. They cannot be accomplished in a few weeks, let alone the few days the Russian command appears willing to grant. Russian forces withdrawn from around Kyiv and going back to fight in Donbas in the next few weeks, therefore, will not have been reconstituted. At best, they will have been patched up and filled out not with fresh soldiers but with soldiers drawn from other battered and demoralized units. A battalion’s worth of such troops will not have a battalion’s worth of combat power.
The Russian armed forces likely have few or no full-strength units in reserve to deploy to fight in Ukraine because of a flawed mobilization scheme that cannot be fixed in the course of a short war. The Russians did not deploy full regiments and brigades to invade Ukraine—with few exceptions as we have previously noted. They instead drew individual battalions from many different regiments and brigades across their entire force. We have identified elements of almost every single brigade or regiment in the Russian Army, Airborne Troops, and Naval Infantry involved in fighting in Ukraine already. The decision to form composite organizations drawn from individual battalions thrown together into ad hoc formations degraded the performance of those units, as we have discussed in earlier reports.[7] It has also committed the Russian military to replicating that mistake for the duration of this conflict, because there are likely few or no intact regiments or brigades remaining in the Russian Army, Airborne Forces, or Naval Infantry. The Russians have no choice but to continue throwing individual battalions together into ad hoc formations until they have rebuilt entire regiments and brigades, a process that will likely take years.
Reports of Russian efforts to mobilize new conscripts for current operations are also somewhat (unintentionally) misleading. Russia is well into its annual spring conscription phase that normally pulls around 130,000 young men into training for their one year of compulsory military service.[8] The Russian military has also launched several other efforts to recruit new contract (professional) soldiers and to expand its reserve pool, as we have reported elsewhere.[9] The US DoD official speaking on April 8 noted that the Russians appear to be trying to draw 60,000 reservists back to the force.[10] The official noted, “it remains to be seen how successful they'll be on this and where those reinforcements would go, how much training they would get.” This caveat is very important. Russia has likely already exhausted the pool of reservists whose initial conscript service and youth render them most likely to be effective in combat, as we have previously reported. The new batch of reservists are older, meaning that they are further away from their experience with military units and that their military skills and habits are likely seriously degraded.[11] The Russians should in principle take many weeks or months to retrain these reservists before integrating them back into combat units to fight. If they do not do so, then these reservists will likely add relatively little effective combat power to the units they join. The conscripts currently undergoing basic training are even further away from offering any significant boost in effective available combat power.[12] Rushing them to front-line units within the next few months will make them simply cannon fodder. The Russians cannot expect to benefit from the roughly 200,000 conscripts and reservists they are currently mobilizing until late summer or fall at the earliest. If they send those people to fight sooner than that, they will suffer disproportionate casualties while adding little to the effective strength of any units they join.
The Ukrainian government and military appear to share the general assessment offered above. Oleksiy Arestovich, chief advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, claimed on April 9 that the Ukrainian military has destroyed 20 BTGs and rendered 40 more combat ineffective.[13] We cannot track individual BTG effectiveness that precisely, but this estimate that approximately one-third of the 180 BTGs Russia has available in and around Ukraine are combat ineffective is consistent with what we have observed.
Ukrainian officials also report that Russian recruitment and mobilization efforts are going poorly. Arestovich noted that Russian attempts to recruit young men into contract service are “going badly too.”[14] Ukrainian military intelligence reported on April 9 that it has data showing very little interest among Russians in voluntarily joining the Russian military. Fewer than one percent of citizens in Ekaterininburg, Russia, were even willing to discuss signing up.[15] The sample size is small (397 candidates), but the picture is consistent with previous reporting. The Russian effort to attract young men into professional reserves (the BARS program) had already been failing even before the war began, as we have previously reported.
Morale is a key element of combat power, and consistent reports indicate that the morale even of elite Russian units remains very low. A Russian Telegram channel reporting on Pskov, the home of the elite 76th Guards Airborne Division, noted on April 7 that a growing number of paratroopers are refusing to fight.[16] It claimed that many paratroopers have submitted resignation papers, which commanders are refusing to accept. Some soldiers’ families have reportedly appealed to Russian courts to force the Russian military to accept the resignations. The channel claimed on April 6 that 60 paratroopers had refused to fight and were dismissed.[17] The head of the Russian human rights organization Agora reported on April 8 that members of Russia’s National Guard (Rosgvardia) have refused to go to Ukraine or, having gone and come out, are refusing orders to return to the fight.[18] Ukrainian military intelligence (GUR) additionally claimed on April 9 that Russian soldiers have been injuring themselves to avoid having to return to combat.[19] The GUR reported on a transcript of a call it claims to have intercepted from a Russian officer to his wife complaining of lack of food, predicting that the war will not go well, and expressing the hope that he will live to draw his pension.[20] The GUR also reported that an elite Russian SPETSNAZ unit that had fought in Syria refused to continue fighting in Mariupol after suffering 30 casualties between April 2 and April 4.[21] We have previously reported other instances of Russian soldiers and units refusing orders to fight or return to Ukraine after being pulled back.[22]
Most of these reports are anecdotal and unconfirmed, but the picture they paint is coherent and accords with the observable performance of the Russian military in Ukraine to date. The Russians technically have enough healthy soldiers with weapons to pose a significant threat to eastern Ukraine, and they may wear down the Ukrainian defenders by sheer weight of numbers, although likely at a hideous cost. But all indications are that the effective combat power of Russian reinforcements that might go to eastern Ukraine will be a small fraction of what the number of soldiers and units would indicate, and the outcome of the fight is therefore far from clear. It is important to avoid allowing the shorthand DoD briefers and others understandably use to describe available Russian forces to lead to exaggerated estimates of the actual military capabilities of Russian forces.
The Russians are apparently attempting to resolve one of the problems from which their initial invasion suffered by making Southern Military District Commander General Alexander Dvornikov the single overall commander of operations in Ukraine.[23] At least two and possibly three officers had previously commanded separate axes, with Dvornikov responsible for the south and east while Western Military District Commander General Alexander Zhuravlyov commanded the north. Eastern Military District Commander Colonel General Alexander Chaiko may have commanded the troops drawn from his military district who attacked down the west bank of the Dnipro River, although we have no confirmation of that hypothesis. The lack of a single overall commander clearly hindered the cooperation of Russian forces operating along various invasion axes. The designation of Dvornikov as the overall commander makes sense now given that the announced Russian main efforts are almost all in his area of responsibility.
This simplification of the Russian command structure may not resolve all of Russia’s command problems, however. Most of the reinforcements flowing into the Donbas region are drawn from other military districts, for one thing.[24] The active Russian offensive drive from Izyum to the southeast relies on the concentration of Russian forces around Kharkiv that draws in turn on the logistics hub of Belgorod in Russia—both in areas nominally under Zhuravlyov’s control. Russian forces will likely continue to struggle to establish coherent and efficient command and control arrangements for the foreseeable future.
Russian forces continued offensive operations in Mariupol, along the Izyum-Slovyansk axis, and around Rubizhne and Popasna in the last 24 hours but made few gains.
Key Takeaways
- Russia is unlikely to be able to mass combat power for the fight in eastern Ukraine proportionate to the number of troops and battalion tactical groups it sends there.
- The Russian military continues to suffer from devastating morale, recruitment, and retention problems that seriously undermine its ability to fight effectively.
- The outcome of forthcoming Russian operations in eastern Ukraine remains very much in question.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
ISW has updated its assessment of the four primary efforts Russian forces are engaged in at this time:
- Main effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate supporting efforts);
- Supporting effort 1—Kharkiv and Izyum;
- Supporting effort 2—Southern axis;
- Supporting effort 3—Sumy and northeastern Ukraine.
Main effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate main effort—Mariupol (Russian objective: Capture Mariupol and reduce the Ukrainian defenders)
Russian forces continued offensive operations to complete the seizure of Mariupol in the last 24 hours but appear to have made few gains.[25]
Subordinate main effort—Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces concentrated on attacking Rubizhne, Popasna, and Severodonetsk in the past 24 hours, although they did not make significant territorial gains.[26] Elements of the 423rd Motorized Rifle Regiment and 13th Tank Regiment, both of the 4th Guards Tank Division of the 1st Guards Tank Army (Western Military District) were reportedly observed near Severodonetsk.[27]
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv and Izyum: (Russian objective: Advance southeast to support Russian operations in Luhansk Oblast, and fix Ukrainian forces around Kharkiv in place)
Russian forces continued to mass around Kharkiv likely in preparation to support the offensive southeast of Izyum toward Slovyansk.[28] The Ukrainian General Staff reported on April 9 that two Russian BTGs deployed from Belgorod to the Kharkiv Shevchenkivskiy area on April 8 and that the Russians used electronic warfare measures to disrupt cellular service in order to conceal their movements.[29]
Russian forces conducted a limited attack near Izyum on April 8 but made little progress, according to the Ukrainian General Staff.[30]
Supporting Effort #2—Southern axis: (Objective: Defend Kherson against Ukrainian counterattacks)
There was no significant activity reported on this axis in the past 24 hours.
Supporting Effort #3—Sumy and Northeastern Ukraine: (Russian objective: Withdraw combat power in good order for redeployment to eastern Ukraine)
There was no significant activity reported on this axis in the past 24 hours.
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces will renew offensive operations in the coming days southeast from Izyum, possibly diverting first to the southwest to avoid Ukrainian defensive positions, in an effort to reach and seize Slovyansk.
- Russian forces will continue efforts to complete the seizure of the remaining areas of Mariupol city that Ukrainian forces hold.
- Russian forces may conduct attacks to seize Rubizhne, Popasna, and Severodonetsk in the coming days, although they may wait for reinforcements and for Russian troops to complete the encirclement of this area along the Izyum-Slovyansk-Debaltseve road.
[6] Senior Defense Official Holds a Background Briefing > U.S. Department of Defense > Transcript
[10] Senior Defense Official Holds a Background Briefing > U.S. Department of Defense > Transcript
[13] https://t dot me/stranaua/35692
[14] https://t dot me/stranaua/35692
[16] https://t dot me/guberniaband/3158; https://t dot me/guberniaband/3152; https://t dot me/guberniaband/3153
[17] https://t dot me/guberniaband/3158; https://t dot me/guberniaband/3152; https://t dot me/guberniaband/3153
[18] https://t dot me/pchikov/4812
[23] Latest Russia-Ukraine war news: Live updates - The Washington Post
2. 1st US ambassador to Ukraine: 'I think we handled it wrong from the get-go'
A lot of criticism to go around to all administrations. This really illustrates our sustained naivete about Putin and Russia. Sadly it is only Senator Romney (2012 presidential candidate) who may have read the writing on the wall.
1st US ambassador to Ukraine: 'I think we handled it wrong from the get-go'
CNN · by Analysis by John Harwood, CNN
(CNN)Ukraine's first President, waiting to see America's 41st, chatted with a White House press aide -- in Ukrainian. George H.W. Bush's deputy secretary of state didn't need to hear more.
That's how Popadiuk, born in Austria to displaced Ukrainians who then immigrated to America, in 1992 became the first US ambassador to Ukraine following the breakup of the Soviet Union. The experience placed him on the ground floor of relations between the two nations over three decades preceding today's allied efforts to help Ukraine fend off Russian aggression.
And he offers a blunt verdict on the US government's performance during that time: "I think we handled it wrong from the get-go."
Read More
That's not a partisan statement. Popadiuk spent his career not as a political appointee but as a foreign service officer. He has a quintessentially American story.
His family, assisted by a Catholic charity, ended up in Brooklyn after a brief stint on an Iowa farm. In 1959, when Popadiuk was 9 years old, an immigration official handed him a citizenship certificate for his adopted country just before Thanksgiving.
"He said, 'Do you like turkey?' " Popadiuk recalls with a chuckle. " 'You're an American.' "
A Ph.D. in international affairs and a foreign service exam later, he wound up detailed to a nonpolitical job in President Ronald Reagan's White House. Press secretary Larry Speakes ended up making Popadiuk his deputy for international affairs, a job he held into the next administration until Bush sent him to Kyiv.
After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the US lavished diplomatic attention on Russia to encourage economic modernization and security cooperation from its former Cold War adversary. Former Soviet republics such as Ukraine, Popadiuk says, didn't get nearly enough
As ambassador, he initiated discussions over what became known as the Budapest Memorandum. Under its terms, Ukraine surrendered a large nuclear arsenal within its borders in return for security assurances from Russia, the US and Britain.
Ukraine's concession was less than met the eye, since Russia had retained the nuclear launch codes for those weapons. But Popadiuk says the fledgling government in Kyiv should have gotten more US economic and military aid.
Other errors followed, flowing largely from the impulse to maintain a positive US-Russia relationship. President George W. Bush, who famously said he had peered into Vladimir Putin's soul, reacted cautiously to Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia. President Barack Obama, who sought a "reset" with the Kremlin, did the same after Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine.
"Both administrations fell short in realizing the threat," Popadiuk concludes.
But Popadiuk doesn't think Trump's presidency fundamentally affected Putin's calculations. Nor does he blame President Bill Clinton's support for expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to include Ukraine, among other nations in Eastern Europe.
Russia's historic desire to control Ukraine, he explains, runs deeper than any of those developments. That's why he faults President Joe Biden, who released so much accurate intelligence about Putin's intention before the war, for not acting on it by preemptively providing more military aid.
"If you knew they were going to attack Ukraine, why didn't you give them everything they needed ahead of time?" Popadiuk says. "We needed to get ahead of him."
The bravery of Ukraine's soldiers and ineptness of his own appear to have caught Putin by surprise. So has the unity that Biden and his European counterparts have maintained.
But Popadiuk says the allied response remains too constrained by fear of nuclear escalation. NATO hasn't transferred old Soviet fighter jets to Ukraine, for example, to avoid the possibility of Russia attacking the transfer and compelling a NATO response.
"We've let Putin define the rules of the game," he explains, rather than making the risk of a catastrophic exchange the Russian leader's burden.
Russia's attacks on Ukrainian civilians have grown more savage as its military falls short of its objectives. Last week brought a missile strike at a train station in Kramatorsk, on top of attacks on hospitals and executions on the streets of Bucha.
The more they happen, the stiffer the test of allied resistance to direct confrontation with Russia through steps such as a NATO-imposed no-fly zone.
"There's got to be a red line for the West," says Popadiuk. The objective is imposing a price high enough to shift Putin's cost-benefit analysis.
An ugly end is already assured. Distasteful as it would be, he fears halting the conflict will eventually require recognizing Russian control over Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine.
At 71, Popadiuk is long removed from any active role in foreign policy. He retired ten years ago as diplomat-in-residence at the George H.W. Bush Foundation, which like Bush's presidential library is at Texas A&M University.
What Popadiuk knows for certain is that, whatever America and its European allies do, Ukrainians won't stop defending their country.
"This is about a cultural war of survival for Ukrainians," he says. "If there's one standing, that fight's going to go on."
CNN · by Analysis by John Harwood, CNN
3. Romney Was Right About Putin
Just to give Senator Romney his "I told you so."
Romney Was Right About Putin
A conversation with the Republican senator about Russia’s threat to the world, the members of the GOP who praise Putin, and how this conflict ends
By McKay Coppins
On October 22, 2012, Mitt Romney sat across a table from President Barack Obama for the final debate of the presidential election. The theme of the night was foreign policy. Obama’s campaign had been working all year to cast Romney as out of touch and inexperienced, and when the moment came, the president deployed what seemed like a devastating putdown.
“A few months ago, when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia. Not al-Qaeda. You said Russia,” Obama told him. “And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”
In the days that followed, Obama’s allies repeated the talking point. Romney was ridiculed for his preoccupation with Russia and accused of having an outdated Cold War mentality that made him unqualified for the presidency. Nearly a decade later, with Russia carrying out a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, some are offering mea culpas—and wondering whether they should have paid closer attention to Romney’s warnings about Russia.
When I spoke with Romney, who now serves as a U.S. senator from Utah, on Saturday night, he didn’t seem especially interested in taking a victory lap. But he did express frustration that the past several presidential administrations have not taken the threat posed by Russia seriously enough. We also talked about how the United States should be aiding Ukraine, the Republicans who praise Putin, Donald Trump’s role in the crisis, and how Romney sees it ending.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
McKay Coppins: During the 2012 election, you identified Russia as America’s No. 1 geopolitical foe and were mocked for it by President Obama, then–Vice President Joe Biden, and many commentators. You were repeatedly accused of having an outdated Cold War mindset. Do you believe you understood something about Russia and its ambitions that they didn’t?
Mitt Romney: You know, it’s hard for me to believe that they didn’t realize that I was right at the time, because it was so obvious. Russia was supporting all of the dictators in the world, whether in Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea. They were opposing us at the UN whenever a critical measure came forward. They were our geopolitical adversary … And if anybody didn’t see that, who was watching carefully, I find it hard to believe.
I guess politics can be blinding. My guess is the Obama team thought that would be politically advantageous to say, and the compliant media picked up the message and drove it home as hard as they could … I mean, I think it was The New York Times that said, “This proves Romney is unqualified to be president.” Like, oh my goodness, guys. Come on. Who do you think was our geopolitical adversary back in 2012? I’d love to know what their suggestion was. Clearly, today, China is a greater threat to our security and our economic vitality. But they weren’t a geopolitical player in the sense that Russia was back in 2012.
The reality is President Obama’s underestimation of Russia’s intent, Vladimir Putin’s intent, is only magnified by what happened over a couple of decades. It’s not just Obama. We’ve seen this for many years. We had not sufficiently responded to villainy in the past, whether in Georgia, Ukraine, with the Crimea, with Syria, and with assassinations. We’ve downplayed those things and somehow pretended that if we just reset, that everything would be fine. President Trump invited Russian ambassadors and foreign ministers to the White House as soon as he got there. He said, “Why don’t we have Russia brought back into the G7?”
It’s this blindness to reality that sometimes accompanies politics that, I think, has been most unfortunate.
Coppins: Do you think Putin has been emboldened by this mindset taking hold, at various points, in both major political parties in the U.S.?
Romney: There’s no question in my mind that we have been naive as a nation over the past couple of decades with regard to Russia’s intent and Putin’s plans. Putin has seen us reduce our military footprint in Europe, pull out of Afghanistan in a disastrous way, slow-walk getting defensive arms to Ukraine. And he recognizes that, you know, we don’t have the kind of posture of strength to deter a committed adversary.
Coppins: What’s interesting is that since 2012, a lot of people in American politics have effectively switched sides on this issue. You’ve had people like Madeleine Albright publicly apologize for criticizing your position on Russia. This week, Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu said you were right about Russia. Your name was trending on Twitter as people discussed your warning about Russia. Do you feel vindicated?
Romney: I’m pleased that more people recognize how great the peril is of an emboldened Russia. But I don’t think that, by any means, I was the only person who saw Russia’s intent. I remember John McCain said he looked into Putin’s eyes and saw the KGB. I mean, there are many, many people who saw Putin for what he was.
Coppins: Meanwhile, there is a vocal segment of the Republican Party now that has been downplaying the severity of what Russia is doing. Some are even celebrating Putin, or talking about him as a strong leader. There’s also a general movement toward isolationism among certain members of your party. What do you make of this phenomenon?
Romney: Well, I think you’re seeing a fringe of our party that still admires Putin. But the larger group that was celebrating his audacity has, from what I can tell, changed their pleadings and are suddenly coming to the support of Ukraine. And perhaps that will continue. I imagine that this isolationism and this hero worship of an authoritarian like Putin is coming face to face with the new world of media, where everybody has a cellphone, and people are seeing real human beings suffer. And they recognize, this is not a war. It’s not a battle between two militaries. This is a brutal invasion of a free democratic people by an authoritarian thug, and there’s no justification for it. And its brutality and vile nature is able to be seen by people all over the world.
And it’s shaping public opinion quickly. So I think those that thought they could isolate us from the reality and say, “Oh, it’s 6,000 miles away, what do we care?”—when you see mothers and children and women in the street holding Molotov cocktails against tanks, it’s hard to argue, “This doesn’t matter to me.”
Coppins: That brings us to the present situation. If you were president of the United States right now, what would you be doing differently?
Romney: First, let me just step back and just say that I think the Biden administration was wise to bring in the allies, to let them see the classified information about what Russia was doing, and to acquaint the world with our intelligence assessments. I think that was a very wise move, and has made it harder for Putin, and has made the ultimate cost for Putin a great deal greater. At the same time, I think the administration should have been much more aggressive in sending defensive weapons to Ukraine. The fact that there are not huge stockpiles of anti-aircraft missiles, anti-tank weapons, grenade launchers—I just find that to be extraordinarily disheartening.
So I give the administration credit for the action taken in the past several weeks. But I’m critical of the continuation of under-arming Ukraine during this president’s term, and in the terms of the prior presidents, both Trump and Obama. And as you recall, President Trump withheld funding and arms to Ukraine in order to get an investigation into the Bidens. It’s unthinkable that this has been the posture of our country.
Coppins: You voted to impeach President Trump for that, and were famously the only Republican senator to do so. Is there a through line that connects your approach to Putin and Trump? They’re obviously different, but both have authoritarian personalities.
Romney: I doubt I’m unique in that regard, but I have a very sensitive antenna toward those who promote authoritarianism. The default setting in world history is authoritarianism. Freedom is a rare appearance on the historical map of the world, and requires extraordinary, extraordinary vigilance and effort to preserve it. And when I see leaders here or elsewhere moving toward authoritarianism, it sets off alarm bells. Because I do read history. The history of the world is strongmen lying to people, gaining power over them through the use of force, and oppressing others for centuries.
I must admit, I listen to some in my party who are arguing for authoritarianism and I think, Well, Biden’s in charge now. Do you want him to be an authoritarian? Do you want him to close down Fox? Do you want him to take away your rights for free speech? Or do you only want authoritarianism if you’re in charge? Maybe recognize that the other party has the majority in the country right now. They have the majority; we don’t. Be careful what you wish for. Because if we installed authoritarianism in our country today, it would not be a happy day for those of you who are arguing for it.
Coppins: How do you see this war in Ukraine ending?
Romney: There are different scenarios. One is that the Ukrainians fight bravely on and Russia tires of the conflict and pulls back but says it won its objective to save face. That’s what I hope for.
Another is that I think Russia is expecting that they will install a puppet government, and that they’ll be able to leave. I don’t think that’s a real scenario, because I don’t think the Ukrainians will put up with it. If they install the puppet government, I think Ukrainians will go to the streets and tear down the seat of government brick by brick if they have to.
Coppins: Are you surprised by the fierce resistance that we’ve seen from Ukrainians?
Romney: President [Volodymyr] Zelensky is one of the most courageous people of our century. He is the face of good and Putin is the face of evil. Zelensky is on the streets in Ukraine, wearing battle fatigues, ready to fight for his country. And Putin is sitting behind this massive table in this huge white room; it looks like a mausoleum where honesty and honor went to die. Putin is becoming smaller and smaller on the world stage. He’s being diminished. I hope and pray Zelensky survives, but I know that there’s a substantial risk he doesn’t. This is one of the great heroes of my lifetime.
I’m convinced that ultimately good will succeed. I don’t see a scenario where Putin is able to put in a henchman to run Ukraine and everything goes swimmingly for him. I hope that the Ukrainians are able to fight him off.
4. Opinion | How Do We Deal With a Superpower Led by a War Criminal?
Strength, determination, resolve.
All people have the right to self determination of government, including the Russian people.
Excerpts:
And it promises only to get worse before it gets better, because Putin is now like a cornered animal. He not only got so much wrong in his Ukraine invasion; he produced the opposite of so much he was aiming to achieve, making him desperate for any war achievement, at any price, that can obscure this fact.
...
But if it leads to someone better, someone with just minimal decency and an ambition to rebuild Russia’s dignity and spheres of influence based on a new generation of Tchaikovskys, Rachmaninoffs, Sakharovs, Dostoyevskys and Sergey Brins — not yacht-owning oligarchs, cyberhackers and polonium-armed assassins — the whole world gets better. So many possibilities for healthy collaborations would be resurrected or forged.
Only the Russian people have the right and ability to change their leader. But it will not be easy because Putin, an ex-K.G.B. officer — surrounded by many other former intelligence officers who are beholden to him — is nearly impossible to dislodge.
But here is one possible scenario: The Russian Army is a prideful institution, and if it continues to suffer catastrophic defeats in Ukraine, I can imagine a situation where either Putin wants to decapitate his army’s leadership — to make them the scapegoats for his failure in Ukraine — or the army, knowing this is coming, tries to oust Putin first. There never has been any love lost between the Russian military and the K.G.B./S.V.R./F.S.B. security types surrounding Putin.
In sum, having the Russian people produce a better leader is a necessary condition for the world to produce a new, more resilient global order to replace the post-Cold War order, which Putin has now shattered. What is also necessary, though, is that America be a model of democracy and sustainability that others want to emulate.
When Ukrainians are making the ultimate sacrifice to hold onto every inch and ounce of their newly won freedom, is it too much to ask that Americans make the smallest sacrifices and compromises to hold on to our precious democratic inheritance?
Opinion | How Do We Deal With a Superpower Led by a War Criminal?
Thomas L. Friedman
How Do We Deal With a Superpower Led by a War Criminal?
April 10, 2022, 6:00 a.m. ET
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It is hard to believe, but now impossible to deny, that the broad framework that kept much of the world stable and prospering since the end of the Cold War has been seriously fractured by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In ways we hadn’t fully appreciated, a lot of that framework rested on the West’s ability to coexist with Putin as he played “bad boy,” testing the limits of the world order but never breaching them at scale.
But with Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, his indiscriminate crushing of its cities and mass killings of Ukrainian civilians, he went from “bad boy” to “war criminal.” And when the leader of Russia — a country that spans 11 time zones, with vast oil, gas and mineral resources and more nuclear warheads than anyone else — is a war criminal and must be henceforth treated as a pariah, the world as we’ve known it is profoundly changed. Nothing can work the same.
How does the world have an effective U.N. with a country led by a war criminal on the Security Council, who can veto every resolution? How does the world have any effective global initiative to combat climate change and not be able to collaborate with the biggest landmass country on the planet? How does the U.S. work closely with Russia on the Iran nuclear deal when we have no trust with, and barely communicate with, Moscow? How do we isolate and try to weaken a country so big and so powerful, knowing that it could be more dangerous if it disintegrates than if it’s strong? How do we feed and fuel the world at reasonable prices when a sanctioned Russia is one of the world’s biggest exporters of oil, wheat and fertilizer?
The answer is that we don’t know. Which is another way of saying that we are entering a period of geopolitical and geoeconomic uncertainty the likes of which we have not known since 1989 — and possibly 1939.
And it promises only to get worse before it gets better, because Putin is now like a cornered animal. He not only got so much wrong in his Ukraine invasion; he produced the opposite of so much he was aiming to achieve, making him desperate for any war achievement, at any price, that can obscure this fact.
Putin said he had to go into Ukraine to push NATO away from Russia, and his war has not only reinvigorated what was a stagnating Western military alliance, it has also guaranteed NATO’s solidarity and weapons modernization for as long as Putin is in power — and probably another generation after that.
Putin said he had to go into Ukraine to remove the Nazi clique ruling in Kyiv and bring both the Ukrainian people and their territory back into the arms of Mother Russia, where they naturally belonged and, in his imagination, longed to be. Instead, his invasion has made Ukrainians — even some formerly pro-Russia Ukrainians — bitter enemies of Russia for at least a generation and supercharged Ukraine’s desire to be independent of Russia and embedded in the European Union.
Putin thought that with a blitzkrieg takeover of Ukraine he would earn the proper respect from the West for Russia’s military prowess — ending the insults that Russia, with an economy smaller than the state of Texas’, was just “a gas station with nukes.” Instead, his army has been exposed as incompetent and barbaric and needing to enlist mercenaries from Syria and Chechnya just to hold its ground.
Having gotten so much wrong, and having launched this war on his own initiative, Putin has to be desperate to show that he produced something — at least uncontested control of eastern Ukraine, from the Donbas region, south to Odesa on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and connecting with Crimea. And he surely wants it by May 9, for Moscow’s giant annual Victory Day parade, marking Russia’s victory over the Nazis in World War II — the day when the Russian military recalls its greatest glory.
So, it appears that Putin is gearing up for a two-pronged strategy. First, he’s regrouping his ravaged forces and concentrating them on fully seizing and holding this smaller military prize. Second, he’s doubling down on systematic cruelty — the continued pummeling of Ukrainian towns with rockets and artillery to keep creating as many casualties and refugees and as much economic ruin as he can. He clearly hopes that the former will fracture the Ukrainian Army, at least in the east, and the latter will fracture NATO, as its member states get overwhelmed by so many refugees and pressure Kyiv to give Putin whatever he wants to get him to stop.
Ukraine and NATO, therefore, need an effective counterstrategy.
It should have three pillars. The first is to support the Ukrainians with diplomacy if they want to negotiate with Putin — it’s their call — but also to support them with the best weaponry and training if they want to drive the Russian Army off every inch of their territory. The second is to broadcast daily and loudly — in every way we can — that the world is at war “with Putin” and “not with the Russian people” — just the opposite of what Putin is telling them. And the third is for us to double down on ending our addiction to oil, Putin’s main source of income.
The hope is that the three together would set in motion forces inside Russia that topple Putin from power.
Yes, that is a high-risk-high-reward proposition. Putin’s downfall could lead to someone worse at the helm in the Kremlin. It could also lead to prolonged chaos and disintegration.
But if it leads to someone better, someone with just minimal decency and an ambition to rebuild Russia’s dignity and spheres of influence based on a new generation of Tchaikovskys, Rachmaninoffs, Sakharovs, Dostoyevskys and Sergey Brins — not yacht-owning oligarchs, cyberhackers and polonium-armed assassins — the whole world gets better. So many possibilities for healthy collaborations would be resurrected or forged.
Only the Russian people have the right and ability to change their leader. But it will not be easy because Putin, an ex-K.G.B. officer — surrounded by many other former intelligence officers who are beholden to him — is nearly impossible to dislodge.
But here is one possible scenario: The Russian Army is a prideful institution, and if it continues to suffer catastrophic defeats in Ukraine, I can imagine a situation where either Putin wants to decapitate his army’s leadership — to make them the scapegoats for his failure in Ukraine — or the army, knowing this is coming, tries to oust Putin first. There never has been any love lost between the Russian military and the K.G.B./S.V.R./F.S.B. security types surrounding Putin.
In sum, having the Russian people produce a better leader is a necessary condition for the world to produce a new, more resilient global order to replace the post-Cold War order, which Putin has now shattered. What is also necessary, though, is that America be a model of democracy and sustainability that others want to emulate.
When Ukrainians are making the ultimate sacrifice to hold onto every inch and ounce of their newly won freedom, is it too much to ask that Americans make the smallest sacrifices and compromises to hold on to our precious democratic inheritance?
5. Nine ways Russia botched its invasion of Ukraine
The incompetence demonstrated by this list is simply unbelievable. It is hard to believe any military and national security apparatus could be this inept.
Nine ways Russia botched its invasion of Ukraine
April 8, 2022 at 2:51 p.m. EDT
CORRECTION
An earlier version of this article misstated the ratio of soldiers to population an invading force should have. It is 20 soldiers for every 1,000 of a country’s population, not every 100,000. The article has been corrected.
The ineptitude displayed by the Russian military in its initial attempt to overrun Ukraine has astounded military professionals. The world’s second-most-powerful army has bungled almost every move since the first hours of the invasion. Now, seven weeks into a war that Russia as well as the West had expected would last only days, the Ukrainians have the momentum. They have forced the Russians to make a humiliating retreat from the north of the country and stalled or reversed Russian advances on most other fronts.
As Russia refocuses its energies on capturing Ukraine’s eastern region, the crucial question will be whether its military can redress the mistakes of the early assault. Here are nine of the most important mistakes identified by military experts.
1
Misjudging the Ukrainians
The biggest mistake of all was to underestimate both the will and the capacity of the Ukrainians to resist. Russia had planned for a swift and easy victory, expecting its troops to be greeted as liberators. Instead, the Ukrainians fought back ferociously, aided by weaponry from the West.
And it wasn’t just the army that fought back. Ordinary civilians also seized the initiative to thwart Russian advances, such as those in the farming town of Voznesensk who picked up hunting rifles and hurled bricks to help halt Russian soldiers along the southern coast.
Many of the setbacks Russia encountered sprang from this initial miscalculation — but not all.
2
Not preparing their troops
Testimonies of captured Russian soldiers suggest many troops had not been told they would be invading Ukraine. Some said they were told they were participating in a military exercise, others that they were being sent just to the eastern Donbas region. That meant they were psychologically unprepared to be shot at and blown up, as happened almost instantly, which took an immediate toll on troops’ morale, noted Jack Watling of the London-based Royal United Services Institute.
The enormity of the casualties Russia subsequently suffered has only exacerbated the low morale, he said. NATO put the number of Russian dead at 15,000 over two weeks ago, more than in the Soviet Union’s decade-long war in Afghanistan. Ukrainian officials say they have collected 7,000 Russian corpses from the battlefield, though Russia maintains it has lost only 1,351 soldiers.
3
Invading without enough supplies — or the right supplies
Russian units seemed wholly unprepared for the conditions and circumstances they encountered. Units expecting to roll unopposed into Kyiv and other cities brought just two weeks of supplies, and those quickly ran out. Videos quickly emerged showing Russian soldiers stranded on roadsides next to their vehicles because they had no fuel and hungry soldiers looting stores and stealing chickens.
Surprisingly, those troops also lacked some of the key tools of modern warfare, such as night-vision equipment, said John Spencer, who chairs the Urban Warfare Studies program at the Madison Policy Forum. Ukrainians have such equipment and were able to control the night, launching attacks and ambushes under cover of darkness against an enemy unable to see them.
Russia might not even have enough regular weapons to equip all the forces it is sending into battle. Some newly drafted soldiers on the eastern front have been issued rifles first developed in the 19th century and out of production for decades, according to witnesses quoted in a Reuters report.
4
Not recognizing their poor logistics
Military experts describe a massive logistical failure: When troops ran out of food and other supplies after the initial plan went wrong, their superiors had no plans for resupply. Tanks stalled, and the poorly maintained trucks that were then sent lost tires or broke down, contributing to the infamous 40-mile convoy-turned-traffic jam.
“Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics” is an oft-repeated cliche in military circles — and one that the Russians appear not to have heeded. The myriad elements behind the logistics failure are laid out in this detailed account by Washington Post reporters Bonnie Berkowitz and Artur Galocha.
Troop movement and Russian-held areas in Ukraine
March 10
Feb. 24
Two weeks later, the quick operation Russia had expected was stalled. Its troops had been unable to enter into Kyiv or Kharkiv, and advances on the eastern front were very slow.
As they invaded Ukraine, Russian troops entered the country from the north, east and south. They moved quickly toward Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson.
BELARUS
RUSSIA
Sumy
Kyiv
Kyiv
Lviv
Kharkiv
UKRAINE
Mariupol
Odessa
Kherson
ROMANIA
Black
Sea
March 23
April 4
One month into the war, Russian troops had gained little ground beyond some areas in northeast Ukraine. Critically, they had failed to take Kyiv.
After Russia announced it would focus its forces on eastern Ukraine's Donbas region, the retreat of troops from other parts of the country revealed the horrors inflicted there.
Kyiv
Kyiv
Sources: Institute for the Study of War, AEI's Critical Threats Project, Post reporting
THE WASHINGTON POST
5
Failing to take out Ukraine’s air defenses
Military experts had expected a Russian bombing campaign to take out Ukrainian air-defense systems, bases and planes before troops would be sent across the border. Instead, the troops surged in without air support.
Perhaps this also can be explained by commanders’ initial miscalculation that they would encounter little resistance. But it confounds military observers that the Ukrainian air force is still flying, seven weeks on.
6
Attacking on too many fronts
The largest force assembled in Europe since World War II proved too small to fight — let alone hold — the vast arc of territory that Russia attempted to seize. The initial invasion was launched on four fronts: the north toward Kyiv; the northeast toward Kharkiv; the east; and the south from the annexed peninsula of Crimea.
Once the first push ran into resistance, the troops found themselves strung out along the country’s borders, stretching already inadequate supply lines. According to the “force ratio” rule used by military tacticians, an invading force needs 20 soldiers for every 1,000 of a country’s population. For a country the size of Ukraine, that calculation means 880,000 troops, as Michael Clarke, a visiting professor in the war studies department at King’s College London, told the Times of London. The United States invaded Iraq with a force ratio of 7, going up against a far less capable army than that of Ukraine. Russia invaded Ukraine with a force ratio of 4.
7
Using unsecured communications
Astonishingly, the Russians embarked on a major war using cellphones and old-fashioned radios to communicate. The Ukrainians were able to intercept messages regarding Russian movements on the battlefield and lie in wait for them with ambushes. At least some of the seven generals killed on the battlefield died because the Ukrainians intercepted messages about their locations, according to a Western official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive subjects.
8
Proceeding without clear lines of command
Russia’s highly centralized military does not empower troops on the ground to make decisions or issue orders, experts say. Troops that quickly ran into difficulty were unable to shift gears to adjust to their new circumstances because they had to await orders from superiors in Moscow (over unsecured lines, as just noted).
Unlike U.S. and other Western militaries, the Russian military does not have noncommissioned officers. Troops are left floundering when their original orders don’t pan out, retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, told CNN.
9
Failing to have a Plan B
The Russians clearly weren’t prepared for a scenario in which they encountered resistance. When they did, they had apparently made no backup plan. Instead, troops pressed ahead as originally ordered, driving into ambushes and steadily getting killed by the Ukrainians. Armored convoys were dispatched without infantry support, making them easy targets for Ukrainians armed with portable antitank weapons such as the U.S.-supplied Javelins.
Overall, the entire plan was poorly conceived from the outset, from the size of the force to its preparedness and its ability to adapt to changing circumstances, military experts say. “The incompetence in planning command, control & communication (C3) is staggering,” Hertling said in a tweet.
6. Russia lost the battle for Kyiv with its hasty assault on a Ukrainian airport
But the capital's airport is a logical objective in most any campaign.
But the fundamental factor for defeat of the Russians and success of the Ukrainians rests in the human domain: e.g., the will to resist by the entire society. This will carry the Ukrainians far but they still need sustained supplies and advanced weapons to allow them to conduct offensive operations. We need a strong (ironclad?) commitment by the US and NATO to support and sustain the Ukrainian ability to conduct offensive operations. That could be very importance for supporting the psychological warfare campaign of Ukraine and the free world and it will also provide support to the Ukrainian position when they enter into ceasefire negotiations with Russia to stop the Russian aggression..
Excerpts:
Russia’s failure to take the capital came down to a series of misjudgments and strategic errors: an emphasis on vulnerable armored columns, inadequate use of air power, an attack plan that overstretched supply lines, and — most significantly — a clear miscalculation of the Ukrainians’ ability and determination to resist.
Russia lost the battle for Kyiv with its hasty assault on a Ukrainian airport
HOSTOMEL, Ukraine —
Days after Russian forces retreated from Kyiv, the northern outskirts of the Ukrainian capital are littered with the charred remains of blown-up and abandoned Russian tanks, armored personnel carriers and other equipment.
The debris is a stark testament to an assault that was meant to oust the Ukrainian government but became a humiliating blunder for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Russia’s failure to take the capital came down to a series of misjudgments and strategic errors: an emphasis on vulnerable armored columns, inadequate use of air power, an attack plan that overstretched supply lines, and — most significantly — a clear miscalculation of the Ukrainians’ ability and determination to resist.
But experts say there is one place, more than anywhere else, where Putin’s vision of a lightning strike victory ran aground: Antonov Airport.
A Ukrainian serviceman walks by the destroyed Antonov An-225, the largest aircraft in the world.
(Vadim Ghirda / Associated Press)
This sprawling cargo airport and military base 15 miles northwest of downtown Kyiv was supposed to be the principal staging ground and logistics hub for a battle-defining Russian thrust into the heart of the capital.
The Ukrainian government was supposed to fall and President Volodymyr Zelensky was supposed to be killed, captured or forced into exile. Experts said that Putin probably planned to install a puppet leader.
The thinking was that a hasty collapse of the central government would trigger deep disarray in Ukrainian units fighting in the east and the south, possibly resulting in a broad surrender.
“They needed to get into the middle of Kyiv as quickly as possible and raise the Russian flag over a government building,” said John Spencer, a retired U.S. Army major who now chairs urban war studies at the Madison Policy Forum think tank in New York. “At that point you’ve won the war. Yes, you may start the greatest insurgency in history. But you’ve won the war.”
Parts of destroyed aircraft at the Antonov Airport in Hostomel, Ukraine.
(Felipe Dana / Associated Press)
He said capturing the airport was “critical” to the Russian strategy. Antonov has a long runway, ideal for flying in supplies and troops on heavy transport planes.
“You need airfields to bring in force, to bring in tanks, engineers, the necessary armor,” Spencer said.
Unlike the United States in its 2003 assault on Baghdad, Russia launched its ground assault immediately, without first pounding military bases, command and control structures and other strategic sites from the air. There was no shock and awe. That decision continues to baffle many.
“We all expected that Russia would do several days of airstrikes, precision missile strikes, that kind of thing — ‘softening up,’ so to speak,” said Dmitry Gorenburg, an analyst with CNA, a think tank in Arlington, Va. “But then they launched a ground operation rather than waiting a few days. I’m not sure why they were in that kind of hurry.”
Russia did expend plenty of air power in its assault on the airfield.
On the morning of Feb. 24 — the first day of what Putin called his “special operation” — low-flying Russian Mi-8 assault helicopters appeared over the airport and began firing rockets. Plumes of smoke rose from the airfield. Russian paratroopers ferried in by helicopter were soon redirecting civilian traffic outside the airport gates.
A satellite photo of the Antonov Airport, which was supposed to have been the principal staging ground and logistics hub for a Russian thrust into the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. But those plans failed in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance.
(Maxar Technologies)
By all accounts, attempting to grab the air base at the very outset of the war made a lot of sense, helping to complement a prospective pincer movement on the capital with nearby motorized columns.
“The initial idea was that cargo planes with paratroopers and vehicles would land here and it should have been an entry point to Kyiv,” said Denys Monastyrsky, Ukraine’s internal security minister, speaking to reporters Friday.
Once the airfield was secured, Russia “could start pouring in a lot of other troops, and start manning checkpoints in the middle of Kyiv,” said Jonathan Eyal, associate director of the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London. “If you think about it, had they succeeded, I think the war may have gone very differently.”
A day after the initial attack, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a Russian defense ministry spokesman, announced that Moscow had sent 200 helicopters to take control of the airfield.
In fact, authorities here said fighting at the airport continued for days, and Ukrainian forces shot down several helicopters, even as Moscow ferried in wave after wave of paratroopers.
Weeks of fierce combat transformed the airport into a dystopian post-battle debris field, strewn with spent ammunition, rockets, Russian ration boxes, gas masks, and burned and tattered uniforms.
The most conspicuous monument to the fighting is the smashed hulk of an Antonov An-225.
The six-engine behemoth, long the world’s largest aircraft, is known in Ukrainian as Mriya, or Dream, and was a source of intense national pride. No more.
A Ukrainian serviceman touches the nose of the Antonov An-225 destroyed in fighting at the Antonov Airport in Ukraine.
(Vadim Ghirda / Associated Press)
The plane looks like it was gouged by a giant can opener, its fuselage sheared in a blackened jumble of wires and metal, the yellow and blue Ukrainian colors still visible outside the cockpit.
Russia finally secured the airfield, but its forces remained under constant fire, according to Ukrainian officials.
Russia was never able to land large transport aircraft to reinforce besieged forces here and elsewhere in the Kyiv area. Rather than thrusting forward to the heart of the capital, Russian troops at the air base were stuck fighting for their survival.
“That was a turning point,” Eyal said.
With Zelensky and the Ukrainian government still in power, Russian attack columns — lacking anticipated resupply and reinforcement — got bogged down in the capital’s dense northern suburbs.
Ukrainian troops used Western-provided Javelin portable antitank systems and Turkish-supplied drones to pick off the Russian armor, much of which is now rusting away in the suburbs of the capital.
Moscow somehow didn’t anticipate the effect of the sophisticated equipment, and training, that Ukrainian forces had received from the West in recent years. Experts said that Russia’s multi-pronged attack across several fronts was clearly undermanned against a well-armed opponent.
“They tried to do too much,” Gorenburg said. “If they had focused on one objective, like taking Kyiv, they might have done better.”
A Ukrainian serviceman uses his weapon to hold up a Russian beret he retrieved from a destroyed Russian military vehicle at the Antonov Airport.
(Vadim Ghirda / Associated Press)
Putin may have more success as his troops shift their efforts to the east, where pro-Russia separatists have been fighting for years. But Russia’s retreat here has also bolstered Ukrainian confidence that its troops can hold off, and even defeat, its colossal adversary.
Such a notion would undoubtedly draw derision from Putin. The Russian leader has long questioned Ukraine’s status as an independent state, publicly declaring its territory, and people, as an extension of historic Russia.
In the view of some, it is Putin’s distorted view of Ukraine that may have led him to misjudge what it would take to win this war — and to disregard the notion that Ukrainians would staunchly resist the Russian onslaught.
“I think the bottom line, the essence of the story, is that Mr. Putin believed the nonsense that he was spouting, which is that Ukraine is a fake state hijacked by a small clique — and the moment you put a finger on it the entire thing would collapse like a house of cards, with the Ukrainian president running away ” Eyal said. “Everything else followed this original error.”
On the streets of Kyiv, where the retreat was greeted with relief and pride, many agree: Putin underestimated people’s willingness to stand up to Russian force.
“I can’t get inside Putin’s head, but I think that, yes, he really expected to take Kyiv in like three days,” said Vitalii Hemych, 28, a restaurant owner. “But our nation is now united. That is the main reason why his plan failed.”
Special correspondent Ilona Shubovych in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, contributed to this report.
7. Destroyed Armored Vehicle In Ukraine Gets The "Wolverines!" From 'Red Dawn' Treatment
Someone may be conducting strategic influence. And they may understand one of the many target audiences.
If this was done by rank and file Ukrainian soldiers or resistance/territorial defense forces it shows the extent of US popular culture but also that those on the ground have an innate grasp of influence operations. Of course this could have been photoshopped in by someone who is really thinking about psychological operations. One way or another this is propaganda and it will be interesting to see the effect it has (of course by writing the article below and me sending it out, it is having a propaganda effect whether deliberate or by chance).
Excerpts:
Of course, we do not know who graffitied the word "WOLVERINES" to the side of the BMP-2 in Ukraine. The film itself was extremely popular worldwide, making $38 million at the box office way back in the mid-1980s and inspiring a 2012 reboot, starring Chris Hemsworth, which traded the Soviets and their allies as the invading forces for North Koreans.
The spray-painted BMP-2 serves as yet another strange sight in a bizarre conflict, albeit one in which the Ukrainians have truly earned the right to call themselves "Wolverines!"
Destroyed Armored Vehicle In Ukraine Gets The "Wolverines!" From 'Red Dawn' Treatment
There are certainly parallels to what is going on in Ukraine today and the 1984 film "Red Dawn" beyond the graffiti.
Oleg Tolmachev via Twitter
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A photo of damaged Russian armor in Ukraine, spray-painted with the word "WOLVERINES" in English, has begun to circulate on Twitter. The image, which readers can see at the top of this post, is a direct callback to the 1984 film "Red Dawn," but the parallels between the photo and the pop-culture hit go beyond just the graffiti.
Scott Detrow, NRP White House correspondent currently covering events in Ukraine on the ground, initially drew attention to the graffitied armor on the morning of April 7th, but was unable to take a clear picture of it. By that afternoon, an image of the armor (verified by Detrow) was provided by Oleg Tolmachev, a U.S. citizen (born in Belarus) who moved to Ukraine in 2020. Tolmachev is the head of production at Naftogaz, a Ukrainian oil and gas company, and has been documenting the impact of Russia's war in Ukraine on social media.
The damaged armor pictured is a BMP-2 Fighting Vehicle, a Soviet-era infantry combat vehicle fielded in the early-1980s. As its main armament, the BMP-2 sports a single 30mm gun in a turret on top of the vehicle. Although the precise location of the BMP remains unknown, Tolmachev confirmed the armor had been spotted somewhere west of Kyiv.
Starring Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, and Lead Thompson, "Red Dawn" centers on a fictional Soviet invasion of the United States (supported by Cuba and Nicaragua.) Playing on fears in the Cold War context of the mid-1980s, the film follows a group of high school students living in Calumet, Colorado, hell-bent on defending their hometown at all costs. The group's high school mascot, a wolverine, provides the name for their insurgent force. In the clip below, readers can see the spray-painted "Wolverine" logo depicted in the film.
In an extended version of the above clip, readers can see the "Wolverine" logo spray-painted onto various enemy military vehicles as depicted in the film (clearly imitated on the damaged BMP-2.)
The cry "Wolverines!" and the crudely spray-painted moniker has become a part of pop culture, often used comedically as a symbol by those resisting a greater power.
Parallels between "Red Dawn" and Russia's present invasion of Ukrainian are obvious for those who have seen the film. It's the bravery, and ultimately the sacrifice, of the resisters to Soviet aggression such as the "Wolverines" who turn the tide of the conflict. Local, everyday people make the difference by taking the fight directly to the Russians.
Of course, we do not know who graffitied the word "WOLVERINES" to the side of the BMP-2 in Ukraine. The film itself was extremely popular worldwide, making $38 million at the box office way back in the mid-1980s and inspiring a 2012 reboot, starring Chris Hemsworth, which traded the Soviets and their allies as the invading forces for North Koreans.
The spray-painted BMP-2 serves as yet another strange sight in a bizarre conflict, albeit one in which the Ukrainians have truly earned the right to call themselves "Wolverines!"
Contact the editor: Tyler@thedrive.com
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8. An American’s search for meaning in Ukraine’s foreign legion
Quite a story.
Excerpts:
But King’s motivation for wanting to help Ukrainians went beyond humanitarianism. He’s convinced that Putin’s invasion marks the beginning of a greater global plot by Russia, Iran and Turkey to overrun Israel. This scheme was foreshadowed in the Bible, he claims: a passage in Ezekiel 38 portends an epic conflict sparked by a man called Gog (Vladimir Putin, in King’s reading) from a land called Magog (Russia) which will mark the end of days.
He has other eccentric theories. Who was responsible for 9/11? It was an inside-job. Fluoride in the American public water system? A government ploy to stop you remembering your dreams. The American corporate elite? Secretly controlled by a cult in India. King harvested some of these views from YouTube pastors and provocateurs; others are of his own making. All of them contributed to feelings of disillusionment and isolation that ultimately pushed him to Ukraine.
By his own admission, David King wasn’t always “this crazy”. He used to think about the world much as others did. Born in 1981 in a small town in Colorado, at 16 he became a father. A year later, like two uncles before him, he joined the armed forces, serving in the US Air Force for a paycheque more than anything else. By 1999 he was married with two kids and a third on the way, and had pivoted to the army.
An American’s search for meaning in Ukraine’s foreign legion
David King wanted to escape a life derailed by conspiracy theories
Heavy-set and garrulous, David King stood out from the other foreign volunteers at the Cicada Hotel in Korczowa, a town on the Polish-Ukrainian border. Wearing camouflage fatigues, he was sipping from a bottle of beer and smoking a cigarette, waiting for a bus that would take him 30km east to the Ukrainian foreign legion barracks at Yavoriv in western Ukraine.
In early March, King closed his bank accounts in Louisiana, cancelled his credit cards and mobile-phone plan, sold his phone and truck and bought a one-way ticket to Warsaw. King is a Christian – he told me so within minutes of us meeting – and, on the face of it, he just wanted to help. Photos of ragged women and children “broke his heart”. Zelensky’s call for volunteers “was like nothing I’d ever heard before – a foreign leader asking the world for help like that”. When he arrived in Ukraine, King was moved by the sight of miles of refugees, and by the pets some left behind. He sent me photos of stray dogs “aimlessly roaming the streets looking for their humans”.
But King’s motivation for wanting to help Ukrainians went beyond humanitarianism. He’s convinced that Putin’s invasion marks the beginning of a greater global plot by Russia, Iran and Turkey to overrun Israel. This scheme was foreshadowed in the Bible, he claims: a passage in Ezekiel 38 portends an epic conflict sparked by a man called Gog (Vladimir Putin, in King’s reading) from a land called Magog (Russia) which will mark the end of days.
King’s motivation for wanting to help Ukrainians went beyond humanitarianism
He has other eccentric theories. Who was responsible for 9/11? It was an inside-job. Fluoride in the American public water system? A government ploy to stop you remembering your dreams. The American corporate elite? Secretly controlled by a cult in India. King harvested some of these views from YouTube pastors and provocateurs; others are of his own making. All of them contributed to feelings of disillusionment and isolation that ultimately pushed him to Ukraine.
By his own admission, David King wasn’t always “this crazy”. He used to think about the world much as others did. Born in 1981 in a small town in Colorado, at 16 he became a father. A year later, like two uncles before him, he joined the armed forces, serving in the US Air Force for a paycheque more than anything else. By 1999 he was married with two kids and a third on the way, and had pivoted to the army.
King liked the army’s sense of discipline and patriotism. After 9/11 he wrote a poem called “My Brothers” that was published in the Army Times: “It’d make you tear up if I found you a copy”. The highlight of his time in the forces was learning to fly helicopters. When he talks about this, his eyes light up and his Midwestern drawl becomes bouncier. “The helicopter is the most complicated machine ever invented by man,” he likes to say. “And I’m a fucking badass pilot.”
He went down internet rabbit holes, “seeking the truth” about who really controlled America
But almost as soon as he’d got his pilot’s licence, King had to leave the army. In 2004 he divorced his wife, who, King says, was deemed incapable of looking after their three children, meaning that he was awarded sole custody. The army didn’t make it easy to be a pilot and a single parent: King says he was effectively forced out. As he left his base in Alabama, he recalls looking into the sky and seeing helicopters whirring above him. It was a painful feeling, like “watching another man rail your wife”.
King drifted for several years. Searching for flying jobs, he found a promising opportunity at a company called “Pilot” in Florida. The name was misleading: the vacancy was for a general manager at an interstate truck stop. King thought he might as well take the job, which involved overseeing a petrol station and a few restaurants. Despite a shaky start (“I didn’t even know the difference between gross and net [profit]”), King worked there for four years before leaving to manage a bunch of hardware stores across Florida and the Midwest.
Noisy neighbours David King, an American former pilot who went to join Ukraine’s foreign legions (opening image). A sign outside the Russian embassy in Warsaw, Poland’s capital. It reads: “Embassy non grata” (top). In Warsaw, locals have put up posters to support Ukraine (bottom)
Though his career was stable, his personal life continued to unravel. He’d married again, to a woman he met online, but their relationship collapsed: “I came to believe she wanted me dead,” says King. He started spending more time online and went down internet rabbit holes, “seeking the truth” about who really controlled America. Knowing “secrets” gave him confidence at a time when he felt powerless in his personal life.
Then he found the chance to fly again. In the late 2010s, King worked in Afghanistan as a commercial pilot, carrying everything from troops to post to ammunition. He liked the work and it paid well. But going to Afghanistan was “disheartening”: after more than a decade of liberation from Taliban rule, the Afghans were still selling their children into slavery, “burning goat shit” to stay warm, baking bricks for pitiful wages and getting lung cancer in their teens. The war, he decided, was a gigantic financial boondoggle: Afghanistan had never posed a threat to American national security (“You really believe that three guys in a cave pulled off the greatest attack in military history?”). He reckoned the occupation was helping no one but American companies like the one he worked for.
By the time he came back from Afghanistan, King says he was at “the point of suicidal depression”. He fell deeper into the conspiracy vortex, looking for answers about how the world was run. King is self-deprecating about his beliefs; he knows most are weird, some downright offensive. He says he’s even tried to dislodge some of them himself, “but there were always facts in the way to support what I was being told”. Take the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, he says: chief executives and politicians really did hang out with a billionaire sex trafficker.
After he came back from Afghanistan, he fell deeper into the conspiracy vortex
As King’s disdain for globalisation and elites intensified, so, he says, did his wife’s contempt for him. Desperate to get away, he went to Louisiana to fly medical helicopters. He was “living out of a bag”, staying in hotel rooms. Then King had something of an epiphany: not only was his marriage probably over, his theories had become “too fantastical”, and had driven most of his friends and family away. King realised it was time to close a dark chapter of his life, though he wasn’t sure what was coming next. Early in the new year, he embarked on an eight-week road trip across the West Coast in his pickup, sleeping in a tent, seeing old friends, his son and, for the first time, his granddaughter.
It was then that events in Europe caught his attention. King, who for all his self-deprecation clearly finds comfort in his “crazy” theories, may like to cite Ezekiel 38 as his reason for going to Ukraine. But I suspect, deep down, that it was simpler than that. The war, he admits, offered him an escape: the chance at long last to find a “cause worth fighting, and maybe even dying, for”.
The most striking thing about King is the way he speaks about military matters. As he outlines his approach to combat, he seems thoughtful, reasonable, careful. He says he wants to know about his enemy before he confronts it. How many are there? What’s their equipment like? What’s the best way to take their position – and what do we do from there?
In Ukraine, David King encountered what he calls an “operational morass”. He had flown thousands of miles to help, but there was virtually no order to anything he saw when he got there. When he arrived at the base at Yavoriv, he found it odd that the Ukrainians had no apparent command structure. He asked a colonel for a pair of socks; the colonel claimed he didn’t have the authority to hand them out. “The titles that they have – colonel, lieutenant colonel, major – seem to be just for pay,” he says.
Ukraine offered him, at long last, a “cause worth fighting – and maybe even dying – for”
On King’s second day in Yavoriv, he and dozens of other foreign fighters were told that they would be bussed to Kyiv to sabotage Russian supply lines. It struck King as a good strategy so he took it upon himself – as someone with both managerial and military experience – to start building teams. He organised the foreigners by their motivation. Were they in Ukraine to make money, to kill Russians or (like him) to help Ukrainians? Then he divided them by their skill sets. Did they know how to work explosives? Were they quick on their feet? Were they skilled with a gun?
King surrounded himself with a “high-speed team” to “go in slick, hit supply lines, blow up bridges”. There was a former marine from Texas, who he’d met on the train from Warsaw to the border, two Brits who were experts at detonating roads, a French Foreign Legionnaire (“the gunner”), an American who’d spent time in jail for burglary, three Koreans (“warriors”). They packed some rifles and ammunition into a bus and headed east for Kyiv. Not long after they left, the barracks at Yavoriv were pulverised by cruise missiles, resulting in dozens of casualties.
The other frontier David King with other foreign fighters
Approaching Kyiv from the south, King says that it didn’t look like the city he’d seen being bombarded on the news. It was more or less a normal place, save for the plumes of smoke rising from its suburbs. But the mission, it turned out, was “a lie”: there never had been any sabotage work. “As soon as we got to Kyiv, we were told: ‘Everyone is infantry.’”
They were taken to the ninth floor of a hotel where the power had been cut to prevent it from becoming a target. “The Ukrainians seemed to have watched a movie somewhere where you need to have ‘light discipline’,” King says, referring to strategic blackouts to deter air strikes. “But the rest of the city still had electricity. So we were the only dark anomaly…we stuck out like a sore thumb.” There was a medical facility in the hotel that King believed had been used for liposuction operations; when King and the foreigners from Yavoriv attempted to turn it into an emergency clinic, he claims they were angrily rebuffed.
“As soon as we got to Kyiv, we were told: ‘Everyone is infantry’ ”
King and others were given bowls of starchy quinoa. Then the Ukrainians started handing them bloodied suits of body armour. “And it was like, wait a minute, where are the guys who were once wearing this? Are they still out there, injured?” The foreigners were informed that they were to head to a village north of Kyiv that had recently been overtaken by Russian forces. Their task was to retake it. A Ukrainian commander took out his smartphone and scrolled to the location on a map.
King baulked at the idea. How many troops were in the village? What was their armament? How quickly could they be reinforced? Where were their weaknesses? No one seemed to have thought any of it through. “You don’t just show a picture on your cell phone of a village the Russians had captured and tell 20 guys to go take it,” King says. At that point he got a taxi to Lviv in western Ukraine. From there, he eventually hitched a lift back to Poland with a group of humanitarians.
The Texan marine – who was middle-aged and asked not to be identified – stayed on in Kyiv. We’d met at the Cicada Hotel and had kept in touch over text messages. He was softer-spoken than King, with an almost business-like demeanour. While the other volunteers around him were posing for photos, swapping arrival stories and drinking beer, he’d refrained.
I asked him whether the Ukrainian front really was really so disorganised. He said it was, and blamed some of the chaos on the contingencies of conflict. But he suspected that some of what King thought was incompetence was deliberate: the Ukrainian army “holds back info because they don’t trust us”. It was widely apparent that there were Russians in the ranks of Ukraine’s volunteers, feeding information to higher-ups.
“You don’t just show a picture on your cell phone of a village the Russians had captured and tell 20 guys to go take it”
The way to gain trust, wrote the Texan, was by “showing up” – that is, killing Russians. “It’s like a video game,” he added. “You need to level with these guys by showing that you’re here to work.” I asked him what the fighting was like. Initially, he said, there was a lot of sitting around. “We – at least Western dudes – don’t understand. We’re used to streamlined logistics, lots of information, planning, sand tables, briefs, training, rehearsals and so on. This is ‘sit around until it’s time to load up and go fight’. Very different. Took a while to adapt.”
The next time I met David King he was far from the Kyiv front, back in Warsaw, exhausted and distraught by what he’d witnessed in Ukraine. As we wandered Warsaw’s streets, past pastel-coloured shopfronts and heaving Catholic churches, he dipped his feet into new conspiratorial currents, like a comedian testing fresh material. “Pope Francis is a demon-possessed satanist,” he said. “And a globalist, too.”
He had no money and was looking to set up a GoFundMe page to raise the funds for a plane ticket home. I asked him if he was worried about what to do next. No, he said. His life had become a series of meanderings and retreats and fumbled adventures, and his trip to Ukraine had turned out to be no different. “I have decided to go back to the States to see if I can find ‘Home’ again…” he wrote to me in his last email. ■
Alexander Clapp is a journalist based in Athens. You can read the rest of our coverage of the war here
PHOTOGRAPHS: AYMAN OGHANNA
9. Finland is hurtling towards NATO membership
Blowback and unintended effects for Russia?
Excerpts:
For most of its history, NATO shared only 196km of border with Russia, in the uppermost fringes of Norway. When Poland joined NATO in 1999 that rose to 428km, thanks to its border with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. And after the accession of the three Baltic states in 2004, the shared frontier leapt to 1,233km. If Finland takes the plunge in the coming weeks, as it is likely to, the common border will more than double at a stroke (see map).
That has implications for both sides. A country that has prized stable relations with Russia for 74 years would face a new and sustained level of threat, as Mr Niinisto warned recently. But Russia, too, would have to reconsider the security of the Gulf of Finland and the strategic ports around Murmansk. The irony is that a war launched by Vladimir Putin ostensibly to keep NATO at bay, in Ukraine, looks set to bring the alliance closer than ever before.
Finland is hurtling towards NATO membership
The NATO-Russia border would double at a stroke
Apr 8th 2022
EVEN AS RUSSIAN troops were massing on Ukraine’s borders in January, Sanna Marin, Finland’s prime minister, insisted that it was “very unlikely” her country would join NATO during her time in office. Less than three months and one invasion later, Finland is hurtling towards membership. On April 2nd Ms Marin told Finns that the country would have to reach a decision “this spring”. As she explained, “Russia is not the neighbour we thought it was.”
Finland, after two grinding wars with the Soviet Union, and unlike most of eastern Europe, kept its independence and democracy through the cold war. The price of doing so was neutrality. Finland bought arms from both East and West, but stayed out of alliances. That arrangement, and the way in which Soviet pressure distorted Finland’s domestic politics, became known by the pejorative term Finlandisation. When the USSR was dissolved, Finland, along with Sweden, took the leap of joining the European Union, binding it closer to other European countries. And after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, both countries intensified joint exercises and other forms of co-operation with NATO.
Russia’s attack on Ukraine has now tipped the scales. When your correspondent visited Helsinki in February, a week before the invasion, official after official emphasised the conservatism of Finnish policy. “We’re still far from a national consensus,” said one, adding that it was unclear whether support for a NATO bid would gather steam. “Do we just have a national awakening?” he mused. In fact, that is largely what has happened.
In 2019 just over half of Finns were opposed to NATO membership. On February 28th, four days after the invasion, the polls showed majority support for the first time. The latest, on March 30th, revealed 61% in favour, 16% against and 23% undecided. That includes majorities among supporters of all parties, except the Left Alliance. And it is widely accepted that if Sauli Niinisto, Finland’s popular president, were to give his formal endorsement, support would grow further.
Both Ms Marin and Niinisto are keeping silent for now, to allow a political process to play out. “April, May and June are important—and in many ways historic—months in Finland,” says Henri Vanhanen, a foreign-policy expert and adviser to the centre-right Kokoomus party. A government report setting out the changes in Finland’s security position since the Russian invasion is due to be published on April 14th.
Parliament will then debate the issue. After that, a second government report could make a formal recommendation on NATO membership. A special parliamentary monitoring group, made up of party leaders and committee chairs, will play a key role in signalling the political consensus. A committee of government ministers and Mr Niinisto will take their cue from that. The final call remains with parliament, though whether it will need a two-thirds majority depends on its constitutional committee.
A decision is widely expected to come before a NATO summit in Madrid on June 29th, and perhaps as soon as early May. The two main governing parties, Ms Marin’s Social Democrats and the Centre party, have previously been split on NATO. But a consensus is forming rapidly: of 200 lawmakers, 96 are now in favour of membership and just 14 against, according to Helsingin Sanomat, a newspaper. “It's been the Finnish people in the lead,” says Elina Valtonen, an MP and vice-chair of Kokoomus, whose pro-NATO position has driven it to unprecedented popularity in the polls (elections are due by next April). “I'm pretty confident that we will be filing the membership agreement…in a few weeks’ time,” adds Ms Valtonen.
For Finland, which shuns dramatic change, that is lightning-fast. One reason for that is concern about the country’s vulnerability during a membership bid. On March 12th Russia’s foreign ministry said that Finnish membership would have “serious military and political consequences”, including “retaliatory measures”. Hints of those may already be appearing. On April 8th a Russian plane reportedly violated Finnish airspace, and the websites of the country’s foreign and defence ministries were hit by crude cyber-attacks (which may have been related to a speech by Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, to Finland’s parliament on the same day). To limit opportunities for Russian meddling, Mr Niinisto has said that a national referendum on NATO will not be necessary.
Once a bid goes in, Finland would be especially vulnerable: subject to Russia’s ire, but not yet covered by NATO’s Article Five mutual-defence clause. One answer to that is to move fast. On April 3rd Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general, said that Finnish or Swedish accession could be done “in a relatively quick way”. No one, not even Viktor Orban’s pro-Putin government in Hungary, is expected to veto it. Mr Stoltenberg has also hinted at interim security guarantees. He was “certain”, he said on April 6th, that “we will find ways to address concerns…regarding the period between the potential application, and the final ratification.”
In practice integrating either country would not be hard. Both are as close to NATO as it is possible for a non-member to be. Mr Vanhanen says that NATO officials have told him that Finland is in fact more “NATO interoperable”—capable of conducting joint operations alongside other allies—than some actual members. A special procedure designed in 2014 and activated for the first time after Russia’s invasion means that Finnish and Swedish envoys now sit at the North Atlantic Council, the alliance’s decision-making body, for every meeting relating to the crisis. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Mr Stoltenberg’s predecessor, has said that an application “could be approved more or less overnight”, though some officials say that is a slight exaggeration.
Yet in Sweden, the debate is moving more slowly. Sweden’s main governing party, the Social Democrats, is opposed to NATO membership. As recently as March 8th Magdalena Andersson, the prime minister, said that a membership bid would “destabilise the current security situation in Europe”. However, the country has had a parliamentary majority in favour of NATO since December 2020. The latest poll, on April 1st, also showed a majority of the public (51%) in favour for the first time, up from 42% in January; opposition fell from 37% to 27%. General elections are due in September.
In the past, Swedes worried that a solo NATO bid would leave Finland dangerously exposed. Now it is Finns who wonder whether Sweden will keep pace. The two countries’ armed forces have become intertwined in recent years. They sent a joint brigade to a NATO exercise in March (an earlier joint Finnish-Swedish air exercise is pictured above). It is natural that Finland is ahead, says Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister, given its tangles with Russia: “They have a tradition of thinking more deeply about security issues than we do, for fairly obvious reasons.” But Mr Bildt is confident that, just as Finland caught up with Sweden when both countries joined the EU in parallel in 1995, Sweden will make up the ground. “For me, it is inconceivable that we would end up in a situation where the two countries come to different conclusions.”
For most of its history, NATO shared only 196km of border with Russia, in the uppermost fringes of Norway. When Poland joined NATO in 1999 that rose to 428km, thanks to its border with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. And after the accession of the three Baltic states in 2004, the shared frontier leapt to 1,233km. If Finland takes the plunge in the coming weeks, as it is likely to, the common border will more than double at a stroke (see map).
That has implications for both sides. A country that has prized stable relations with Russia for 74 years would face a new and sustained level of threat, as Mr Niinisto warned recently. But Russia, too, would have to reconsider the security of the Gulf of Finland and the strategic ports around Murmansk. The irony is that a war launched by Vladimir Putin ostensibly to keep NATO at bay, in Ukraine, looks set to bring the alliance closer than ever before.
10. What Vladimir Putin misunderstood about Ukrainians
Excerpts:
In this war, Ukrainians are showing that they can resist one of their most frequent and violent abusers, the Kremlin. Among the friends I speak to there’s a sense that they are fighting not just against this invasion, but for all the other times Ukraine has been violated. Putin himself referred to the invasion as a rape: “You sleep my beauty, you’re going to have to put up with it anyway,” he told a stunned press pack during a session with the French president, Emmanuel Macron. In Lviv today you see posters of a woman in Ukrainian folk costume pushing a gun into Putin’s mouth: “I’m not your beauty,” she says.
We presented our latest research in Kyiv on Wednesday February 23rd. I joined over Zoom, and saw the sense of dread and anger settle over the room of bright young things. The next day the Russian tanks rolled in, scattering our team. Some have become temporary refugees. The journalists are reporting from the front lines. Others have taken up arms. Denys Kobzyn, our lead sociologist in Kharkiv, sent me a selfie with a machine gun draped over his shoulder.
Our work hasn’t stopped. We’re planning a multimedia oral-history project, to record people’s testimony of the bombings, the rape of women and the attacks on refugees, so that when the cameras leave we can still help Ukrainians to tell their story – in war-crimes tribunals, in films and plays, in books and exhibitions.
A curious answer emerged from our research last year about “what unites Ukrainians”. When we asked people when they felt most proud to be Ukrainian, they almost always remembered a moment of international recognition when they felt that Ukraine had been noticed. Often these were tiny things: a Ukrainian child winning an international maths competition; a foreigner mentioning to them on holiday that they knew where Ukraine was.
At the time I thought this yearning was essentially about identity, a desire to be known. In Zabuzhko’s “Fieldwork of Ukrainian Sex”, the heroine travels from one international literary seminar to the next, impelled to prove that Ukrainian is a living language, and exhausted by the need to constantly answer the question “Ukraine? Where’s that?” Now I realise this desire to be seen is not just about identity; it’s also about security. Being seen by the world means that there is less chance that you will get killed. ■
What Vladimir Putin misunderstood about Ukrainians
Russia’s president thought Ukraine would fold when invaded. History shows its people come together in adversity
Before the invasion, did you struggle to understand Ukraine? Could you place it on a map or picture its people? Perhaps it existed on the periphery of your imagination, a bleak suburb of Greater Russia, which Vladimir Putin claims doesn’t really exist. You wouldn’t be alone. Until recently I had little comprehension of the country – and I was born there.
It’s easy to see why Ukraine confuses people. To the uninformed outsider, it confounds all ideas of what makes a nation. Most people are casually bilingual. It contains many histories simultaneously: the Russian, Soviet and Austro-Hungarian empires, Poland, Romania and, of course, Ukraine itself. This lattice of historical narratives has made many in the West feel as though the country is not quite real.
Now people are more clued up. The world has found its hero nation. Its Jewish president, a one-time comedian who matured into a younger, more empathetic Churchill. The elderly women taunting Russian soldiers. The hipsters picking up machine guns. The distraught yet articulate mothers with their sparkling children sheltering underground. The beauty blogger on Instagram bombed in a maternity ward.
Ukrainians have reminded us what freedom means – a word that for many in rich democracies had long ago curdled into platitudes. The resilience of the population has impressed the West and surprised the Kremlin. It shouldn’t have. For the past few years I’ve been trying to unlock the secret of Ukrainian identity by talking to Ukrainians. Through my research project, Arena, based originally at the LSE and now at Johns Hopkins University, I’ve worked with Ukrainian journalists and sociologists to find ways of strengthening democracy. My team has interviewed thousands of adults across the country. Our fieldwork shows that the response to Russia’s invasion has deep roots in Ukrainian history.
I was born in Kyiv in 1977 to Ukrainian parents. My family was exiled from the Soviet Union when I was nine months old, after my father, a poet, was arrested by the KGB for the heinous crime of distributing copies of books by Solzhenitsyn and Nabokov to friends.
Yet I never thought of myself as particularly Ukrainian. I grew up in London speaking Russian and was regarded as “the Russian” by my schoolmates. I first visited Ukraine when I was 18, and I was astounded: the sweeping Soviet avenues backing into hills with wild woods; the smells of beer and pyrizhky (stuffed buns) wafting between pastel-coloured, art-nouveau apartment blocks; the river so broad it feels almost like a sea. Kyiv is a city of shrugs that never takes itself too seriously. It is made for strolling through and kissing in. People switch languages so rhythmically your ears are lulled by sing-song waves of Russian and Ukrainian. When I visited in the fourth week of the war, the city was empty. The tension was occasionally torn by the scream of sirens. But it was more beautiful than ever. The elegant buildings were easier to see in absence of people and cars, and the threat of imminent destruction made the streets seem all the more precious.
In 2014 Putin’s forces invaded and occupied the country’s easternmost fringe, after the Maidan unseated as president his kleptocratic ally Viktor Yanukovych. Putin claimed that he was defending ethnic Russians. It felt like an attack not just on my friends, family and a country I had been getting to know, but also on a cosmopolitan way of living and thinking.
My work turned towards Ukraine and the Kremlin’s information war. The Russian government’s aim was to divide and weaken the country in order, it now seems clear, to prepare the ground for invasion. Russian state media, online troll farms and, perhaps most perniciously, the gaggle of immensely rich pro-Russian oligarchs combined to undermine democratic reforms, smear the West and fracture Ukraine’s sense of unity.
As we were pursuing our research, through polling, focus groups and in-depth interviews, the Kremlin’s secret services were conducting theirs, looking for Ukraine’s vulnerabilities. We always felt like we were in a race to understand Ukrainians better. Our team started by trying to understand their attitudes to history. To validate his invasions, Putin has called the Ukrainian government “Nazis” and described the invasion as an act of “denazification”. The slur is absurd but also strategic. Some prominent Ukrainian nationalists sided with the Nazis in the second world war because they thought Hitler would grant Ukraine independence; a number of them were comfortable with the Nazis’ anti-Semitism. When Hitler betrayed them, many turned on the Germans and fought against both them and the Soviet Union. In Soviet post-war propaganda, Ukrainian nationalists were caricatured as the fascist enemy of the good Soviet citizen. Anyone who grew up steeped in that milieu is receptive to this framing.
The lattice of historical narratives has made many in the West feel as though the country is not quite real
Putin and his supporters have tried to split the country between a supposed pro-Soviet east and pro-nationalist west. However, our polling found this split to be a mirage. There were at least four distinct groups. The Ukrainians who were most pro-Soviet were older, often pensioners, and less educated, living largely in rural areas in the south and east of the country. A tiny proportion of the population, less than 5%, approved of Stalin (the equivalent figure in Russia is 70%). The memory of the Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made famine which killed roughly 4m Ukrainians in 1932-33, still burns.
Another group was younger and better educated, and lived in large cities in the south and east such as Odessa and Kharkiv. The attitude of these people to the Soviet Union was more nuanced. Although they were critical of its repression, they tended to be nostalgic for the supposed social “values” of the communist past and harboured negative attitudes towards Ukrainian nationalists who fought against the Red Army in the second world war.
The group that most disliked the Soviet Union were the educated middle classes in cities in central and western Ukraine. Comprising a third of the population, these people were more likely to admire Stepan Bandera, a leader of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the second world war who first sided with the Nazis and then fell out with them.
Bandera is, to put it mildly, a complex figure. He was inspired by Italian fascism but spent most of the war imprisoned by the Nazis. Many of his supporters during the second world war were ardent anti-Semites. Paradoxically we found that today, liberals who believed that anyone could be Ukrainian regardless of their background thought of him in the most positive light. They admired him for standing up to the tyrants of Moscow, rather than for his ethno-nationalist beliefs.
The splits were typical of the divide between liberal cities and the socially conservative countryside found in many European countries – but they did not equate to political preferences. The vast majority of people across Ukraine had a similar vision of the future: they wanted a culture of inclusive nationalism within the European Union.
When we put Soviet nostalgics in a room with Ukrainian patriots, there were plenty of disagreements over whether it was right to tear down Soviet-era statues or whether Bandera was an admirable figure. Yet we also found that people were quick to accommodate each other’s perspectives. “If someone needs a statue of Bandera, let them have one,” a woman from eastern Ukraine told us.
Ukrainians are not just fighting against this invasion, but all the other times their country has been violated
Both groups seemed aware that politicians were always trying to split the country and were wary of being manipulated. “There is no separation, we are united. We are just separated by an information war,” said one contributor. We held our focus groups just after Volodymyr Zelensky was elected in April 2019: he drew on dissatisfaction with the politics of polarisation to win a resounding 70% of the vote. His TV career evoked Soviet-era acting styles and comedy references, but he had a capitalist appreciation for entrepreneurship. During the campaign, Zelensky was accused by opponents of being ideologically vague and reluctant to talk about history. Perhaps this was part of his attraction: he embodied a profound Ukrainian tradition of knowing how to get along with people whose story differs from your own.
Our research showed that Ukraine had a culture of live and let live. The supposedly pro-Russian cities of Kharkiv and Odessa pride themselves on their cosmopolitanism. In the west, apparently nationalist cities such as Lviv have always echoed with a cacophony of tongues and churches. Ukrainians are accustomed to switching between codes and languages. They are united by knowledge of their differences.
When we began talking about more recent history, disagreements about statues of Lenin and second-world-war partisans rapidly melted away. Participants tried to find the words to describe life in the late Soviet period: their experiences of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl; memories of seeing relatives sent off to war in Afghanistan; the economic deprivation and confusion of the 1990s. The struggle to make sense of these events was hard, because people often avoided discussing them. “My family hasn’t talked about it [the Soviet period] at all,” one participant admitted. People would sometimes switch to the passive as they spoke, a sign of how little agency they felt about their country’s recent history, using such phrases as “when independence happened to us”.
Ukrainians have been oppressed by the Habsburgs, the Russian Empire, the Poles, the Nazis and the Soviet Union. Even Czechoslovakia once snaffled a slice of western Ukraine. Ukrainian oligarchs have acted like another set of exploitative colonisers since independence in 1991. In the 20th century alone, some 14m people are believed to have been killed in Ukraine through purges, famine and the Holocaust. Timothy Snyder, a historian, calls this region the “Bloodlands”. The term “genocide” was invented by a lawyer from Lviv.
“The Ukrainian choice is the choice between a non-existence and an existence that kills you”, wrote Oksana Zabuzhko in “Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex” (1996), a novel about how trauma is passed down from generation to generation. The protagonist is a Ukrainian writer caught in an abusive love affair. “We were raised by men fucked from all ends every which way,” she writes. This, in turn, leads to a pattern of abusive relationships where self-loathing men take their anger out on women. It’s an allegorical work: the couple’s relationship represents a country where the history of oppression permeates everything from art to relationships.
National myths coalesce around a collective: the Cossacks, bands of self-governing warriors who roamed the steppe
That history of violence and humiliation has led Ukrainians to think conspiratorially. Over two-thirds of people we talked to for our study reckoned that “secret organisations” greatly influence political decisions. Such attitudes are understandable but damaging. Even in the days leading up to February 24th, many members of the Ukrainian elite thought that American warnings of an imminent Russian invasion were secretly a means to push the country into making concessions. They didn’t take Putin’s intentions seriously until the last minute.
Because rulers have historically been colonising powers, Ukrainians have little trust in government. Zelenksy’s popularity began to drain from the moment he came to power (before the war his approval rating was just 30%). This lack of respect for authority means that Ukrainians can energetically overthrow rulers, as they did in 2004 and 2014. But it also makes it hard to build an effective bureaucracy. The state is seen as something that needs to be avoided or that can be used for personal gain. Corruption is the grease that makes things work. Courts are captured by anyone who can pay. This attitude infuriates reformers and western donors like the EU. Even when the government does manage to build new infrastructure, people talk about these achievements as though they happened almost magically. Ukrainians simply can’t conceive of the state doing anything successfully.
The Russian secret services seem to have thought this mindset was a fatal weakness: according to the Royal United Services Institute, a British think-tank, the Kremlin based its invasion plans on surveys that predicted Ukrainian support for the government would collapse after an invasion. But there is a flipside to all this distrust. People have learnt to rely on each other. Ukrainians pride themselves on resilience and cunning. They have always found ways to self-organise. Trust in civil society, in local churches and small-business associations is high. There are also less savoury associations: football hooligans, petty gangsters and far-right militias who formed regiments to fight in the Donbas after 2014. Calamity has forced people to club together. “Disaster and grief unite us,” people would say when we asked. Many of our interviewees spoke about how, in 2014, activists took it upon themselves to feed, clothe and provide transport for Ukraine’s decrepit army.
Ukrainian myths of national identity coalesce around a collective: the Cossacks, bands of self-governing warriors who roamed the steppe. A recent successful film told the story of how Ukrainian Jews and Crimean Tatars created underground networks to help each other in the second world war, to fight first the Nazis and then the KGB. One of the most popular Christmas films in Ukraine is “Home Alone”, which has a narrative that resonates with Ukraine’s story: a small country abandoned by the world’s parents, always attacked by bigger powers and having to improvise self-defence with anything that comes to hand.
In this war, Ukrainians are showing that they can resist one of their most frequent and violent abusers, the Kremlin. Among the friends I speak to there’s a sense that they are fighting not just against this invasion, but for all the other times Ukraine has been violated. Putin himself referred to the invasion as a rape: “You sleep my beauty, you’re going to have to put up with it anyway,” he told a stunned press pack during a session with the French president, Emmanuel Macron. In Lviv today you see posters of a woman in Ukrainian folk costume pushing a gun into Putin’s mouth: “I’m not your beauty,” she says.
People would switch to the passive as they spoke about the country’s recent history, a sign of how little agency they felt
We presented our latest research in Kyiv on Wednesday February 23rd. I joined over Zoom, and saw the sense of dread and anger settle over the room of bright young things. The next day the Russian tanks rolled in, scattering our team. Some have become temporary refugees. The journalists are reporting from the front lines. Others have taken up arms. Denys Kobzyn, our lead sociologist in Kharkiv, sent me a selfie with a machine gun draped over his shoulder.
Our work hasn’t stopped. We’re planning a multimedia oral-history project, to record people’s testimony of the bombings, the rape of women and the attacks on refugees, so that when the cameras leave we can still help Ukrainians to tell their story – in war-crimes tribunals, in films and plays, in books and exhibitions.
A curious answer emerged from our research last year about “what unites Ukrainians”. When we asked people when they felt most proud to be Ukrainian, they almost always remembered a moment of international recognition when they felt that Ukraine had been noticed. Often these were tiny things: a Ukrainian child winning an international maths competition; a foreigner mentioning to them on holiday that they knew where Ukraine was.
At the time I thought this yearning was essentially about identity, a desire to be known. In Zabuzhko’s “Fieldwork of Ukrainian Sex”, the heroine travels from one international literary seminar to the next, impelled to prove that Ukrainian is a living language, and exhausted by the need to constantly answer the question “Ukraine? Where’s that?” Now I realise this desire to be seen is not just about identity; it’s also about security. Being seen by the world means that there is less chance that you will get killed. ■
Peter Pomerantsev directs the Arena project at Johns Hopkins University and is the author of “This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality”. You can read the rest of 1843 magazine’s coverage of the war, here
ILLUSTRATIONS: NOMA BAR
11. Terrorism, Ukraine, Taiwan and the Outsourcing Wars
Quite a thesis by this author.
Conclusion:
America can reclaim its industries or be forced to fight foreign wars to protect its outsourcing.
The outsourcing wars have already killed over ten thousand Americans. And as they escalate into potentially direct confrontations with China and Russia, not to mention Iran and Pakistan, they could easily kill tens of millions. If we want to stop the wars, we have to stop funding Chinese, Russian and Islamic imperialism with our wealth and our industries.
The only way to bring the troops home is to bring the industries and resources home.
Terrorism, Ukraine, Taiwan and the Outsourcing Wars | FrontpageMag
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
In the 90s, Russia was a spent force. The consensus was that free enterprise had defeated Communism. And it had. Russia isn’t fighting for Communism, but for market dominance.
A generation later we’re watching what may be the largest outsourcing war of a new century.
Russia, like China, rebooted its economy by exploiting the growing desire of western liberalism to accommodate environmentalists and socialists by offshoring their ‘dirty’ industries.
The United States outsourced its manufacturing to China which took on everything from making dollar store trinkets to recycling our used soda bottles while our elites focused on preparing the populace for the “jobs of the future” that would all involve using a computer. Now the PRC has a rising middle class and America has a falling one. China is building entire new cities for its middle class while the American middle class can no longer afford to buy a house or a car.
Europeans outsourced the responsibilities of powering their cities and heating their homes to Russia. While they tinkered with windmills and solar panels, Russia built an energy monopoly. Now it’s expanding its monopolistic control the way that most powers and empires used to.
Russia may want all or part of Ukraine for nationalistic reasons, but, more importantly, because of pipeline routes and energy reserves. The underlying motive for this war is gas and the European nations decrying the invasion were the ones who provided the motive for the war.
The PRC may also be obsessed with claiming Taiwan because of its nationalistic One China program, but the island refuge also possesses TSMC, the world's largest semiconductor foundry which dominates chip manufacturing. If China were to take Taiwan and then help North Korea swallow up South Korea, the PRC and its allies would control over 80% of global semiconductor contract manufacturing. And that would provide China with a virtual monopoly on the future.
The Clinton administration’s vision of a world in which the dirty work of manufacturing could be outsourced to China because we would all be working on computers is colliding with the reality that Communist China is bent on controlling the tech industry. China manufactures 90% of laptops and 70% of the smartphones that we use. Solidifying control over Hong Kong and then taking Taiwan is Xi’s equivalent of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with tech instead of energy.
Western imperialism once sought to monopolize control over international resources. And then the nations that had once colonized America, Africa, and parts of Asia decided that imperialism was a bad thing and that it ought to be replaced by an international system in which some of those colonized nations would be offered the opportunity to meet the needs of the West in exchange for limited profit margins. Generations of liberal diplomats foolishly thought that such a system would be sustainable and that the wealth would not be used to build new empires.
But that’s exactly what happened.
The flow of oil money into Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, and Iraq was used to finance everything from the Islamization of Pakistan to the Iran-Iraq War, the Jihad against Israel, the attacks of September 11, the Arab Spring, and numberless other expansionistic wars and conspiracies.
All of these are ultimately aimed at building a Caliphate, an Islamic empire, that would reclaim the old glories of the Mohammedan conquests. They appear so chaotic and scattershot because, unlike Russia and China, there isn’t a single imperial entity, but a hundred aspiring ones all of whom, like ISIS, claim that they have the blueprint for a single unified Ummah.
The common denominator is that the vast majority of Islamic terrorism is financed by oil money.
China and Russia, likewise, had no interest in playing second fiddle to America or Europe. They used the influx of money to expand control over resources and rebuild their old empires.
American and European elites had become finicky about dirty work. The added cost of leftist policies, whether labor or environmental, made it easier to turn over the problem, whether it was making overpriced sneakers, hardware, or providing reliable energy to former enemies. Even the most socialist leaders had come to think of the world as a set of commodity exchanges. They outsourced the dirty work and salved their conscience by financing some local NGOs.
That’s how we ended up with the War on Terror, now the Ukraine war, and quite possibly a Taiwan war before too long. Western nations may have decided to abandon imperialism, but all they did was outsource it to the Muslim world, to Russia, and China who are happy to take it on.
Outsourcing has a high cost and not just in the human rights abuses that Western companies like to ignore. The plight of women dying in Vietnamese sweatshops or African 8-year-olds working on cocoa plantations has evolved into regional and even global wars.
Two decades into the new century, we are in the middle of two outsourcing wars. Is there any doubt that as China, Russia, and the Muslim world strive to reclaim their empires using the consumer spending and energy needs of Western nations, that these will not be the last wars?
Or that if we continue to outsource our industries, we will also be outsourcing our future?
Empires and poor nations outsource vital resources and industries. We can either build empires, grow poor, or become self-sufficient. What we cannot do is try to have an empire that can sustain global supply chains and give us favorable access to resources without the imperialism.
That is a foolish post-war fantasy that had us playing the American grasshopper to China’s ant.
America can be self-sufficient to a large degree, but there’s no evading the price that we pay for the lives that we want to live. We will have to come to terms with ugly realities about human nature, politics, and dirty work. Because there’s more than one kind of dirty work out there.
The green fantasy in which we can leave behind pollution and unsightly factories by embracing solar panels, electric cars, and products with green labels is a lie. Green products are no cleaner, they’re just marketed that way. Behind the scenes there are still strip mines, grimy factories, and exploited workers because it takes even more dirty work to make something look shiny and clean.
Outsourcing has come to mean paying China, Russia, and the Muslim world to allow our elites to live in a fantasy world. That has devastated the American working class far more than all the pollution in the world could. And it has unleashed a series of wars which are only beginning.
It’s all a question of what sort of dirty work we’re comfortable with.
Will American elites reconcile themselves to factories and offshore oil rigs or to foreign wars? Or will they go on pretending that there is some magical clean solution to the dirty realities of life?
America can reclaim its industries or be forced to fight foreign wars to protect its outsourcing.
The outsourcing wars have already killed over ten thousand Americans. And as they escalate into potentially direct confrontations with China and Russia, not to mention Iran and Pakistan, they could easily kill tens of millions. If we want to stop the wars, we have to stop funding Chinese, Russian and Islamic imperialism with our wealth and our industries.
The only way to bring the troops home is to bring the industries and resources home.
12. Biden’s Choice: Win or Lose in Ukraine? by Bing West
Conclusion:
Pundits have proclaimed that the reinvigoration of Europe in solidarity with America marks a new epochal beginning. The passage of time should not alter the constancy of NATO. The first Cold War persisted for four decades and did not impede the growth of wealth and freedom in the West. The second Cold War will persist for decades to come. But Like Stalin, Mao, and Castro, Putin may die of natural causes while still in power. Sanctions must remain imposed without surcease to punish Russian aggression and restrict its military resurgence. Resolve is the long-term test facing the West.
Biden’s Choice: Win or Lose in Ukraine?
by Bing West
Thursday, April 7, 2022
Thursday, April 7, 2022
Image credit:
Poster US 2330, Poster collection, Hoover Institution Library & Archives.
Image credit:
Poster US 2330, Poster collection, Hoover Institution Library & Archives.
In 1940, President Roosevelt, faced with a reluctant public and Congress, employed bold stratagems to deliver military aid to beleaguered England. Today, President Biden, faced with a pro-military aid public and Congress, resists giving heavy arms to Ukraine. Ukraine is requesting those weapons (MiGs, artillery, armored vehicles) to retake territory. Biden refuses to deliver them. This must change.
“What is NATO doing? Is it being run by Russia?” a frustrated President Zelenskyy asked on 26 March, “Ukraine needs tanks, planes, anti-aircraft-defense and anti-ship missiles. Our allies have these resources, but they prefer to allow them collect dust in their warehouses. We are only asking for 1 per cent of what NATO has, nothing more.”
In early March, Poland offered thirty MiG 29s. Secretary of State Blinken gave the request a “green light.” In response, Putin off-handedly threatened nuclear retaliation. President Biden then vetoed the MiG 29s. His timidity is cast into sharp release when compared to Russia during the Vietnam war. In 1966, America’s nuclear superiority was overwhelming: the US possessed 5,000 nuclear warheads versus 550 in the Soviet Union. The Soviets felt the only stable nuclear situation was one in which one side had clear superiority over the other. They knew they were on the losing side in any escalation, but they were unfazed. They supplied North Vietnam with the heavy arms to kill thousands of American soldiers and secure a victory for North Vietnam.
Unlike President Biden, the Soviets didn’t flinch. They provided hundreds of Russian-made MiGs, which engaged our jets in air-to-air combat; Biden won’t green light thirty MiGs for Ukraine. About 3,000 Soviet advisers were stationed inside North Vietnam, with many operating its air defense systems. Bizarrely, our military brags that it is not training Ukrainians, not even inside Poland. The Soviet Union provided North Vietnam with 2,000 tanks and 7,000 artillery pieces. Our troops on muddy outposts like Khe Sanh and Con Thien were shelled day and night by Russian artillery. Today, Russian artillery is hammering Ukrainian cities, but the White House will not transfer artillery to Ukrainians. Similarly, anti-ship missiles have been withheld, because sinking Russian ships would inflict too high a cost.
The nuclear balance of terror has shifted since the Vietnam War. Such is the specter of the nuclear threat that no nation will fight alongside Ukraine. Unfortunately, the refusal to provide Ukraine with heavy arms to defend its own territory is setting a terrible precedent. It provides a persuasive rationale for many nations to acquire nuclear weapons. An aggressor with nuclear weapons can invade another country without fear of a conventional counter-offensive into his homeland. Conversely, a defender armed with nuclear weapons is less apt to be invaded in the first place.
“NATO doesn’t want to admit us,” Zelenskyy said. “I think it’s a mistake because if we join NATO, we make NATO much stronger.”
But that is not going to happen, precisely due to Russia’s nuclear arsenal. So where does this leave Ukraine? Two months ago, Biden believed his threat of economic sanctions would deter Putin. When his threat failed and Putin invaded, Biden later contradicted himself, claiming sanctions cannot deter an aggressor. It’s hard not to conclude that Biden and his advisers had expected a swift Russian victory, with the West indulging in rhetorical outrage while quickly returning to post-war trade and relationships. But Ukraine did not crack.
Retired U.S. Army General Jack Keane claims the White House is now encouraging Ukraine to quickly “make a deal” with Moscow. After talking with Biden for many hours over the past month, Zelenskyy is now publicly skeptical about the resolve of the American president.
“I don’t know if President Biden is fearing President Putin. … I cross my fingers that this will never happen,” Zelenskyy said, “If this process continues to be delayed, people will begin to ask the question. Maybe there is some game behind it.”
Zelenskyy distrusts the White House, suspicious that behind his back the White House is playing a devious “game.” Without heavy arms, Ukraine cannot retake territory. A ceasefire in place in the immediate future would reward Putin with Ukraine’s energy resources in the east.
President Biden is leaking credibility. His offer to admit 100,000 or three percent, of the more than three million Ukrainian refugees will be viewed in Ukraine and Poland as an empty gesture. Since Kabul fell eight months ago, not one of the tens of thousands of Afghans awaiting clearance has been admitted to the U.S. Yet each month 100,000 illegal immigrants enter via our non-existent southern “border.” Poland and Ukraine will soon grow cynical about refugee aid, with America resented as the prototypical rich uncle who expects praise for parsimonious aid.
At no point has President Biden declared that his objective is a fully independent, democratic Ukraine. He has never uttered the word victory. Biden should take two steps forward as a leader. First, declare he no longer is vetoing MiGs, artillery, and anti-ship missiles. He should say, “America will provide Ukraine weapons to fight offensively as well as defensively. NATO warships will also insure the safe passage of Ukrainian grain exports from Odesa.”
With the proper arms, Ukraine can seize back territory lost, while battering Russian forces and increasing its leverage for negotiations. But military support for Ukraine won’t end in a year and perhaps not for a decade. As Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have shown, wars sputter on much longer than its initiators envision.
Second, escape from the trap set by Secretary of State Blinken. “This is already a strategic defeat for Vladimir Putin,” Blinken has said. “If it (Ukraine) concludes that it can bring this war to an end…and that requires the lifting of sanctions, we’re going to look at that. The purpose of the sanctions is not to be there indefinitely. It’s to change Russia’s conduct. And if, as a result of negotiations…we achieve that, then at some point the sanctions will go away.”
It is time for Blinken to go away. His position is that sanctions will cease as soon as there is an iron-clad guarantee Putin will not again invade. Putin will offer such guarantees in triplicate, as would any tyrant. “For God’s sake,” Biden has said, “this man cannot remain in power.” Biden cannot remove Putin; he should remove Blinken. Like Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin in 1938, our Secretary of State today is pursuing is a humiliating defeat for the West. Blinken in effect has assured Putin that he cannot lose. Having destroyed Ukraine, Putin eventually will agree to a ceasefire that includes some agreements he will display as a victory trophy to the Russian people. With the sanctions lifted, money will flow in to replenish his military treasure chest. Once rearmed, a smoldering Putin will be empowered to lash out again, choosing the time and venue.
Having correctly called Putin a war criminal and butcher, Biden cannot return to the status quo ante proposed by his Secretary of State. Blinken is offering Putin a strategic victory by promising that “at some point the sanctions will go away.” Instead, Russia must be expelled from the ranks of nations that believe in secure borders and the dignity of man. The credibility of the West is at stake.
Pundits have proclaimed that the reinvigoration of Europe in solidarity with America marks a new epochal beginning. The passage of time should not alter the constancy of NATO. The first Cold War persisted for four decades and did not impede the growth of wealth and freedom in the West. The second Cold War will persist for decades to come. But Like Stalin, Mao, and Castro, Putin may die of natural causes while still in power. Sanctions must remain imposed without surcease to punish Russian aggression and restrict its military resurgence. Resolve is the long-term test facing the West.
13. Inside the covert network sending arms and drones to Ukraine forces
Citizens trying to make it happen. But is this enough to give Ukraine an offensive capability and be able to generate the historical three to one advantage to conduct offensive operations in battles of annihilation rather than battles of attribution?
I like the Defense Minister’s request: “weapons, weapons, weapons.”
But sadly all war is governed by politics.
A key point I am making is that when you shift to offense you need sufficient mass. One of the basic theories of war that has borne out throughout history is that you need a three to one advantage in mass to have a chance at being successful in the offensive, all things being relatively equal. That is the math problem I am talking about. It takes offense to win but you need sufficient mass on a conventional battlefield and if the Russians have sufficient men and material (tanks, artillery, and aircraft) and Ukraine does not, Ukraine will unfortunately lose the math problem. My concern is the US and NATO only want to provide enough arms so Ukraine can defend itself out of fear of escalation (we are “self deterred” because we fear direct conflict with Russian that could lead to a nuclear exchange and Russia will use this to its advantage). But can they defend themselves indefinitely and who will win the battle of attrition? We need to shift from battles of attrition to battles of annihilation (while most focus on Frederick the Great, Bonaparte, Grant, Sherman, von Moltke, we should not forget the Russian General theorists who perfected the Russian concept of operational art and annihilation, such as Tukachevsky and Triandefilov, among others.)
The bottom line in my opinion is that we need to ensure Ukraine has sufficient amounts of weapons, especially advanced weapons that are superior to the Russians, so they can conduct offensive operations and not only defensive ones. This requires numbers and mass.
It is a misjudgment of theory, history, geography, operational art, and strategy to think that Ukraine can be successful with enough weapons sufficient for only defensive operations. And it will also not protect, sustain, and advance US interests by only providing weapons sufficed for defense. We have to stop fearing escalation because that fear is going to make us all lose.
But the misguided belief among many is that if we say we are only providing “defensive” weapons that somehow that will make Putin believe we are not providing “offensive” weapons so he should have no reason to retaliate or escalate. The half measures we take to try to appear to be defensive only will in no way positively influence Putin and only make certain political factions feel good about themselves while leaving the Ukrainians out to dry.
The other part of this is that we have little to no understanding of strategic influence if we believe these stories we tell ourselves and that our “restraint” will result in reciprocity from Putin. We have no idea how to conduct effective influence operations because we only try to influence ourselves and do not have a deep understanding of the target audience and how it thinks and perceives our rhetoric and more importantly, our actions.
The only reason Putin is not laughing his ass off about what we are doing is because the Ukrainians are kicking his ass.
Glad to see Boris Johnson in Kyiv yesterday. Wish some senior leaders from the US would visit as well.
Inside the covert network sending arms and drones to Ukraine forces
Yesterday at 1:07 p.m. EDT
LVIV, Ukraine — They wait in a secret warehouse on the city’s outskirts, lounging in a corner hammock or an idle wheelchair as a red van weaves through small villages and over gravel roads. When it finally pulls into the gated lot, seven bodies spring into action. The drones are here.
The volunteers unloading the military supplies are friends from the Ukrainian film and television industry — a longhair bunch of cinematographers, gaffers, set decorators and marketing strategists. They take dozens of boxes of self-heating meals, six thermal rifle scopes, a satellite communications kit and 10 drones worth $8,000 each. All are bound for the front.
The paths these vans weave daily from the Polish border to the Lviv warehouse to places such as Kyiv, Sumy and Kharkiv illustrate a daunting reality for Russian invaders: The defense of Ukraine has mobilized citizens from every sector of life, from battle-hardened soldiers who have been at war in Donbas for almost a decade, to the people who decide the food budgets for Florence and the Machine music video shoots.
This is Vladislav Salov’s show. Before Russia invaded six weeks ago, the 34-year old was a cinematographer who shot Apple, BMW and Mercedes commercials for a Kyiv-based film studio. On most shoots, he was the first assistant camera, responsible for image clarity.
“Now he’s managing all the contraband in Ukraine,” said a friend and former unit production manager turned smuggler.
Volunteers Vladislav Salov and Elizabeth Sigorska spend most of their waking hours on their cellphones to coordinate deliveries of donated supplies to Ukrainian soldiers fighting the Russian invasion. (Kasia Strek/Panos Pictures for The Washington Post)
Salov is actually managing just a small chunk of the unmeasurable volume of goods now flowing through unofficial and clandestine channels in support of Ukraine’s military. His crew estimates it has acquired more than $1 million worth of supplies and high-end fighting tools for friends and strangers in the Ukrainian military battling Russian forces.
“Film producers are used to having us get anything from anywhere, yesterday,” Salov said. “Now we’re doing the same thing, but we’ve changed our point of view.
“It used to be cameras. Now it’s armor.”
Ukrainian victories in the north and center of the country in recent days have been aided by a flow of supplies to Kyiv, the capital and a major supply hub. Nonprofits that sent basic medical supplies and necessities such as diapers and water to the front in the early days of the war have shifted to hard-to-find medicines, medical supplies and specialized military equipment.
“We have enough Pampers,” Salov said. “Our defenders can’t fight with those.”
Local organizations built on informal networks of friends who once enjoyed open roads toward the war’s hot zones, now find their vans in Kyiv-bound checkpoint traffic jams behind Red Cross vehicles and tractor trailers.
The road to Kyiv, for the first time since the invasion began, has more people coming than going.
Rude awakening
Sigorska, a brand strategist before the Russian invasion, now works with the volunteer group calling itself the IT Troops and helping get drones and other technology to Ukrainian units on the front line. (Kasia Strek/Panos Pictures for The Washington Post)
Elizabeth Sigorska was vacationing in Egypt when Russian forces invaded Ukraine. At 5 a.m. on Feb. 24, the 32-year-old brand strategist woke up to the news and called her boyfriend, Salov.
“Wake the [expletive] up,” she said. “The war has started.” Sigorska caught a plane to Berlin several days later, then a ride to the border to meet him.
Salov connected with an executive at a digital marketing company in Kyiv who was rallying a network of young, educated professionals to action. Friends in banking, casinos, pharmacy and information technology united to form the IT Troops. More than 200 people work for Ukraine’s official information technology arm in an information war with Russia.
While the group used donations to the group to send humanitarian and military supplies to the front, the IT Troops computer minds planted digital advertising on Russian social media and entertainment platforms faster than Russia could thwart them. When Russia blocked citizens’ access to most social media sites, IT Troops turned their focus to the rest of Europe, placing ads approved by Ukraine’s armed forces calling for volunteers to join the military’s foreign legion.
After depleting most of their own bank accounts, members appealed to comparatively wealthy friends across Europe.
Donations came in quickly at first. Some were made online via the group’s donation page. Others came in the form of supply purchases. One donation came with an odd request: A man who gave $30,000 asked if a van driver could collect his Porsche summer tires from his Kyiv home and somehow deliver them to his summer home in France. “I don’t know how I’m going to get it there, but I’ll figure it out,” Salov said. “Tomorrow evening they’ll be in France.”
As the IT Troops proved their reliability delivering ballistic helmets and armor to military units, soldiers began to request items that were more difficult to obtain. A member of a sniper group asked for an Adams Arms P2 rifle. It was found in Lviv and delivered within seven hours. The Ukrainian Alpha Group sent back photos of dead Russian soldiers to encourage investors to give more.
Three weeks ago, a connection texted Sigorska with a revelation: A friend knew a man in Poland who would sell six black armored vehicles to the IT Troops. Within two days, the vehicles were leaving Lviv on a transport truck bound for Kyiv.
IT Troops have now sent to the front helmets from Israel, drones from England, thermal-vision goggles from France, laser range finders from Canada, Starlinks from the Netherlands, 3D printers, red dot sights and body armor from Poland and meals from the United States.
Kirill Skurikhin, a 20-year-old student at the Taras Shevchenko University in Kyiv, has done sourcing research for the group. He said every request has been filled within two weeks.
“Who would’ve thought in 2022 Russia wouldn’t have McDonald’s and Ukraine would have Starlink?” he said.
But as Ukraine’s war front successes have continued, Sigorska said, donations have begun to slow.
“The landscape of donation has changed a lot,” she said. “At a certain point we had no money to donate. And now all of our friends of friends have given all they can.”
The road to Kyiv
Serhiy Vorobiov, a lighting technician before the invasion, now transports high-end military supplies to the front lines. The billboard reads, “Where there is truth, there is God. Where there is God, there is victory.” (Kasia Strek/Panos Pictures for The Washington Post)
The drones arrived last Saturday in the back of the van driven by Rafael Schleifer, a 46-year-old business consultant in Poland. Schleifer volunteers his time on the weekends. He considers his contribution a small one; multiple friends are hosting refugee Ukrainian families in their homes.
“What I’m doing doesn’t require you to be especially brave,” Schleifer said. “We live quite close, so we can really feel this conflict in a very personal way. We have this feeling in Poland that we could be next. When Russians have problems here, they will not come to Poland so quickly.”
While Sigorska shared pictures of the haul on the IT Troops Instagram page, Serhiy Vorobiov helped load a separate van destined for Kyiv. Vorobiov, 36, has made the trip to the capital four times, usually wheeling through the southern suburbs to avoid fighting west of Kyiv.
Vorobiov says he was having a cigarette on his balcony in Zhytomyr in early March when a Russian missile struck a school less than three miles away. “In my hometown, not everybody really comprehended what was going on,” he said. “Once you see and hear that type of thing in real life, you understand.”
His marriage soon became a casualty of the war. His wife of three years preferred to stay close to family in the Kyiv area, but he wanted to link with friends who were creating a supply chain anchored in Lviv. “The war made us realize we might not be the best fit for each other,” he said.
When IT Troops established the Lviv-Kyiv route, Vorobiov volunteered to drive. He’s had one major brush with death: He was returning to Lviv via Kyiv’s southern suburbs last month when he was told at a checkpoint there was a Russian column on his tail. As he sped through checkpoints, the Russians blew by territorial defense forces for several miles. Finally, a well-equipped Ukrainian unit engaged them and Vorobiov could slow.
Otherwise, he’s seen only the aftermath of battles: Captured Russian military vehicles repainted and in transit to the front; burned out shells of armored military vehicles; buildings obliterated by artillery strikes.
Vorobiov drove the 10 drones through dozens of Ukrainian checkpoints last week, past white and black storks plucking bugs from sopping soil, by graveyards full of light-blue Orthodox crosses and alongside grandmothers on bicycles carrying groceries in handlebar baskets. Outside the capitol, he speeds over stretches of road pocked by artillery fire.
“The closer you get to Kyiv,” he said, “the more you start seeing the ghosts of war. But I’m only thinking about today. I’m here, now. I’m a little gear in the Ukrainian mechanism now.”
‘Are you with me or not?’
Donated supplies for the Ukrainian military are stored in a warehouse on the outskirts of Lviv. (Kasia Strek/Panos Pictures for The Washington Post)
Two weeks into the war, a police major in Cherkasy asked his fraternal twin brother, a commander of a combat unit in Ukraine’s national guard, what supplies he needed.
“What do you want to eat?” Yevheniy Honcharenko asked.
Alex Honcharenko shot back: “If you ever ask me again about food, I’ll send you to hell. We will not win with food.”
Alex, 35, fought Russian and separatist forces from 2015 to 2016 in Donbas before that conflict cooled to an extent. He lived in Kyiv for a year and then moved to New York City, where he started an appliance repair business. When Russian soldiers began massing at the Ukrainian border, Alex sold the business and his car and flew back to Ukraine nine days before the full-scale invasion.
“I asked him, ‘Do you really think this kind of war is possible in the 21st century?’” Yevheniy recalled. “He said, ‘Brother, are you with me or not?'”
Alex Honcharenko, left, and Yevheniy Honcharenko last month. (Family photo)
During his time in Donbas, Alex had spent much of his wages on advanced weapons and armor systems. Upon his return to Ukraine, he pulled a thermal rifle scope out of storage and rejoined the military.
Two weeks ago, he asked his brother and friends for a drone. The Ukrainian military flies drones in support of artillery units, which use them for target reconnaissance, but combat units like Alex’s often don’t have them.
Katia Egorova, a friend of the brothers who before the war was chief executive of a Ukrainian advertising agency and now works as a military volunteer, found someone willing to spend $80,000 on 10 drones. Other front-line units that could put them to use were quickly identified.
“This is a story of war, destruction and despair, but also of friendship and brotherhood,” Egorova said. “That’s the main thing now.”
A London-based film producer picked up the drones in northern England and organized a network of friends to take them by ferry to the Netherlands, through Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland. After the pit stop in Lviv to change vehicles, the journey continued through shellshocked Kyiv suburbs. Vorobiov met another volunteer in a secret location in Kyiv. The volunteer sorted the goods into six piles bound for 10 locations in the north, east and southeast.
Finally, the military contacts responsible for picking up the supplies were called and told them they were ready. Between England and Kyiv, the drones had changed hands six times and traveled more than 1,500 miles.
A soldier in Chernihiv received one of them. He slapped away the instruction manual, shouted “just give me the remote!” and began nimbly piloting the craft above the heads of his unit. “With this, the Russians will be gone soon,” he declared in Ukrainian.
Around Kyiv and in the north, the Russians were already gone. The same day the drones were delivered, the invading forces retreated and began to regroup in the east. That is where Alex’s group may meet them in what many fear will be the bloodiest chapter of the invasion.
Yet this time his unit will have technology capable of revealing enemy positions in advance. It’s a small victory for a twin brother pulling every string he can to keep his family and friends well-equipped. “I would sell my soul to the devil to save one Ukrainian life,” Yevheniy said.
On Friday Alex was in an undisclosed forward position. Talking via a video interview from an improvised barracks, he paused to consider the gargantuan effort required to put a single drone from the opposite end of Europe in his hands.
“It feels like we’re not left behind,” he said, “like we’re not on our own.”
Violetta Pedorych in Lviv contributed to this report.
14. The Real Collapse Of The USSR Is Taking Place Only Now
Excerpts:
Vladimir Putin’s decision 15 years ago to focus on maintaining social and political stability rather than promoting social and economic modernization has meant, Kortunov argues, that “Russia did not become for its CIS neighbors what Germany and in part France turned out to be for its partners” in what is now the European Union.
Moscow relied on a variety of tools to hold the former union republics close to it, but all of these have become less effective with time as these countries have adopted their own strategies to promote their own national identities, most of which are based on opposing Russia, and have developed relationships with outside powers despite Moscow’s objections.
...
While it is “premature” to analyze what Moscow is doing in Ukraine now, “one can speculate that this will be remembered as the last act of the 30-years-long drama of Russia struggling with its imperial legacy,” a struggle that clearly has had the most paradoxical of results, Kortunov argues.
The Real Collapse Of The USSR Is Taking Place Only Now – OpEd
In 1991, many were surprised that the demise of the USSR involved so little violence, Andrey Kortunov says. There are many reasons for that but chief among them is that “the Soviet Union did not actually collapse at the end of 1991.” Its real collapse is “only taking place now.”
What happened in 1991 was “superficial” with many in Russia and elsewhere certain that many or all of the former Soviet republics, except for the Baltic states which had a very different status, would “not go anywhere but sooner or later” come back to Moscow and that their return was “an absolutely necessary condition for Russia’s return to the former status of a great power.”
But for many reasons, Russia has not achieved this goal. The most important one is that “over the 30 years of its independent existence, Russia has not been able to find an effective model of social and economic development that would be perceived as a role model in neighboring countries.”
Vladimir Putin’s decision 15 years ago to focus on maintaining social and political stability rather than promoting social and economic modernization has meant, Kortunov argues, that “Russia did not become for its CIS neighbors what Germany and in part France turned out to be for its partners” in what is now the European Union.
Moscow relied on a variety of tools to hold the former union republics close to it, but all of these have become less effective with time as these countries have adopted their own strategies to promote their own national identities, most of which are based on opposing Russia, and have developed relationships with outside powers despite Moscow’s objections.
What Moscow did in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2014 had the effect of putting an end to “any plans for the comprehensive reintegration of the former Soviet space around Russia,” if indeed such plans ever really existed. Over the last eight year, Moscow has reduced its economic subsidies and adopted a much tougher attitude about the outside ties of its neighbors and their nation building efforts.
In many respects, Kortunov says, “the launch of ‘the special military operation’ in Ukraine is clearly an exception from the trend toward a more rational, more risk averse and more pragmatic approach to the post-Soviet space.” Indeed, “any rational cost-benefit analysis would suggest the Kremlin has a lot to lose but not much to gain by trying to reconstruct Ukraine by military means.”
While it is “premature” to analyze what Moscow is doing in Ukraine now, “one can speculate that this will be remembered as the last act of the 30-years-long drama of Russia struggling with its imperial legacy,” a struggle that clearly has had the most paradoxical of results, Kortunov argues.
Over the last three decades, Russia “has been able to turn into a very active global power without becoming a regional leader.” And it is entirely possible that “the very Russian globalism of recent years can be viewed as a kind of political compensation for Moscow’s many failures in its attempts” to build more constructive and stable relations with its neighbors.
Despite that, Kortunov insists, “the task of building such relations should sooner or later return to the top of Moscow’s primary foreign policy priorities. It will be much more difficult to do than it was back in 1991” given everything that has happened. But “without addressing this critical problem, any successes in other parts of Russian policy will inevitably depreciate” in value.
15. Does the New U.S. National Defense Strategy Make Any Sense?
So I assume they are talking about the 69 page classified NDS or are they only talking about the page and half NDS fact that was released to the public?
I lean a little more toward Matt Kroneig's slightly optimistic views rather than Emma Ashford's very pessimistic view. As a former military planner I was always taught to begin planning with reviewing the guiding documents, most importantly the NSS and the NDS. Despite the negative criticism I find the 2 page fact sheet as well as the interim strategic guidance for the NSS of a year ago to be very useful as a planner. I like broad guidance that is not overly prescriptive. I could put these documents to good use.
Quite a critique:
But can we shift to U.S. defense strategy? A classified version of the new U.S. National Defense Strategy was briefed to Congress last week, and a short fact sheet was released by the Pentagon, setting off a wave of debate about several issues, including U.S. defense spending.
What are your thoughts?
...
"I’m still not sure about the utility of a strategy document that in effect just says, 'We’ll do everything.' It seems to fail the most basic strategic principle of placing means and ends in balance - not to mention the basics of good writing and concise prose. It would give any decent op-ed editor a heart attack."
-- Emma Ashford
Does the New U.S. National Defense Strategy Make Any Sense?
The Pentagon is scrambling to deter China while adjusting to war in Europe—but does its new approach amount to more than just rhetoric?
By Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, and Matthew Kroenig, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
Emma Ashford: Hello, Matt. I hope you’re enjoying Washington’s wet and blustery spring weather?
Matthew Kroenig: Hi, Emma. I just returned from Brussels for meetings at NATO.
The dreary weather, unfortunately, fits the news of the day, with war continuing to rage in Ukraine and credible evidence of Russian war crimes in Bucha. Given that I doubt we disagree on that issue, we should probably choose another subject for this week’s exchange.
EA: There’s certainly nothing to debate when it comes to war crimes. And the tragic images coming out of Ukraine this week are a reminder that war is truly a horrifying thing. I hope that the two parties can find a peace deal sooner rather than later and end this war.
Have you been following the presidential race in France? The first round of elections for president will be held this weekend, and while Emmanuel Macron is currently favored to win, no French president has been reelected to office in nearly 20 years!
MK: My French colleagues were assuring me Macron would win several weeks ago, but it looks like this is going to be a close race. Do you expect a major shift in French foreign policy if Marine Le Pen, Macron’s conservative challenger, manages to win the race?
It’s likely an intentional part of Putin’s strategy to flood Europe with refugees, as in 2015, and destabilize governments once the backlash sets in.
EA: Well, I still think they’re right that Macron is likely to win. As a reminder, France has a two-stage voting system. In the first stage, where there are a dozen potential candidates, the race between Macron and Le Pen is quite close, but when the top two candidates move to the runoff stage, that gap could widen substantially. Equally, it might not: Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a left-leaning candidate, is in third place and unlikely to make the runoff, but he’s appealing to a similar subset of society, with similar policies to Le Pen. The primary difference between the two is on immigration; it’s not entirely improbable that some of his supporters might choose to back Le Pen in the runoff.
So it’s definitely worth taking a look at Le Pen and her foreign-policy stances, particularly as she reflects some broader trends in French political life. Indeed, one reason why she’s doing so well in this election is that Éric Zemmour, a more right-wing candidate, is allowing Le Pen to portray herself as a moderate in comparison. The other, of course, is that inflation is rampant and French citizens are starting to feel the financial pinch.
Le Pen is a nationalist and a populist, and her top priorities are preventing immigration and protecting traditional French culture and language from immigrants. On foreign policy, she is somewhat hawkish, is skeptical of the European Union (to the extent that she was openly supportive of Brexit!), and has previously been friendly with autocrats or semi-autocrats such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orban.
MK: I can’t imagine that a pro-Putin stance would go over very well given the images of the war. Le Pen already faced controversy after her party printed over 1 million campaign leaflets featuring a picture of her shaking hands with Putin and has slightly backpedaled on her previous friendly rhetoric about the Russian leader.
EA: Le Pen has done a lot in the last 15 or so years to paint herself as more moderate than her father was, emphasizing her femininity and her policies that might appeal to the left, in what’s known as de-demonization. Her father, the politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, had a lot of unpleasant baggage—particularly related to his involvement in atrocities during the French war in Algeria—that really turned off the voters. But it’s an open question whether the junior Le Pen is actually more moderate than her father, or whether the acceptable political space has simply widened since his time as a candidate.
The rise of Zemmour in that context has been particularly interesting. He’s a Jewish far-right candidate—in a country where the far-right has a long history of virulent antisemitism. He routinely traffics in Islamophobic rhetoric and appeals to voters who are unhappy with their economic lot. Indeed, other than Macron, the top challengers for the presidency are all vaguely populist: Le Pen, Zemmour, and Mélenchon. They differ on issues like immigration, but not as much on economics; it’s difficult to predict how their voters will split in the second round.
So this could be a lot closer than anyone thinks, particularly with the impact of the war in Ukraine on global food and commodity prices hitting voters all over the world where it hurts. That’s the kind of pain that historically leads to electoral upsets. If Macron is reelected, he will be lucky that his election fell early enough in this crisis that the economic impacts haven’t yet made too much difference.
MK: A flood of refugees from Syria transformed the domestic politics of Europe several years ago, and I suspect the war in Ukraine, with its refugee flows and disruptions to energy supplies, might have a similar effect. Indeed, this is likely an intentional part of Putin’s strategy, to flood Europe with refugees, as in 2015, and destabilize governments as a result once the backlash sets in.
But can we shift to U.S. defense strategy? A classified version of the new U.S. National Defense Strategy was briefed to Congress last week, and a short fact sheet was released by the Pentagon, setting off a wave of debate about several issues, including U.S. defense spending.
What are your thoughts?
The U.S. National Defense Strategy is an overhyped bowl of word salad that would give any decent op-ed editor a heart attack.
EA: It’s an overhyped bowl of word salad! I sincerely hope that the classified National Defense Strategy is better than the fact sheet at explaining what America’s defense strategy is, because I have pored over this document and cannot find a strategy.
Here’s one example: the document defines the Department of Defense’s new concept of “integrated deterrence” as “developing and combining our strengths to maximum effect, by working seamlessly across warfighting domains, theaters, the spectrum of conflict, other instruments of U.S. national power, and our unmatched network of Alliances and partnerships.”
I’m really not sure what that means, unless it’s simply saying that integrated deterrence is everything the U.S. government does?
MK: Maybe I’ve spent too much time studying Pentagonese, but I can translate that sentence. It is trying to say that in order to deter enemies, like Russia and China, the United States needs to integrate different types of weapons (e.g., conventional, nuclear, cyber, space) with nonmilitary tools (like sanctions and diplomacy), better incorporate the capabilities of our allies, be ready at both low (like cyberattacks and gray-zone tactics) and high levels of conflict, and do so globally.
EA: I’m sure you’re right, but I’m still not sure about the utility of a strategy document that in effect just says, “We’ll do everything.” It seems to fail the most basic strategic principle of placing means and ends in balance—not to mention the basics of good writing and concise prose. It would give any decent op-ed editor a heart attack.
[Ed: Amen!]
MK: In theory, I think “integrated deterrence” is the right idea. The difficulty is doing it in practice. And, moreover, I do worry that what “integrated deterrence” really means is that President Joe Biden wants to rely more on nonmilitary tools (like sanctions, cybersecurity, and diplomacy) to deter enemies. I think that would be a mistake if taken too far. Old-fashioned hard power remains the most potent deterrent.
EA: Now that would be an interesting shift. And I am mostly supportive of the Biden administration’s attempts to rebalance the use of our various tools of statecraft away from military tools toward other avenues. There are a lot of problems you can’t solve with pure militarized deterrence! Everything from nuclear nonproliferation to trade requires a broader toolkit. But, again, I don’t see much of that here. I mostly see an attempt to shoehorn everything they already do into a new concept.
MK: In theory, Washington should be doing all these things, but I am not sure the U.S. interagency process actually works all that well together in practice.
Some in the administration have said that “integrated deterrence comes out smelling pretty good” in Ukraine, because they are using every tool other than direct military intervention to repel the Russian invasion. But I think this is a bad example for the concept. After all, Ukraine was a deterrence failure. Biden tried to deter Putin with threats of sanctions and arms to the Ukrainians, and it didn’t work. Putin invaded anyway. So, again, I think deterrence requires hard power at its core.
EA: I actually don’t think you’re wrong there: Deterrence does fail sometimes! And Ukraine was a failure of potential sanctions as a deterrent. After all, the administration leaned pretty heavily on promising that it’d roll out heavy sanctions if Russia invaded—a clear deterrent threat—and that didn’t succeed in preventing the invasion. The fact there are sanctions in place now shows that deterrence failed; the best the West can hope for now is that the sanctions coerce Russia to negotiate a peace deal or that they punish the Russians for their actions in Ukraine.
Of course, Ukraine wasn’t a failure of military deterrence, because Washington never suggested that it would use military means. But, again, I want to see more on integrated deterrence in the final unclassified National Defense Strategy document. I’m not convinced at this point that it’s anything new or unique.
On the other hand, something I do think is excellent in this document is the clear and concise presentation of U.S. interests and defense priorities, in particular the fact that the document seeks to prioritize the Asian theater over Europe in defense planning. China is still the main threat to the United States: a rapidly growing peer competitor with the potential for regional hegemony in Asia. Russia may be showing that it’s an aggressive revisionist actor in Europe, but this war is also showing that threat is limited; after all, the Russians are barely holding their own against Ukraine! There needs to be more prioritization in U.S. foreign policy, and it’s heartening to see the administration embrace this kind of language, despite the ongoing war in Ukraine.
MK: They are right to prioritize China. They were also correct to hold back the document a few weeks to incorporate lessons from the war in Ukraine. Russia now features as the second-biggest challenge in the released materials. In earlier drafts, it was like sixth, after climate change and pandemic recovery. Rising temperatures are a problem, but, unlike Russia’s nuclear weapons, climate change cannot possibly kill us all before we finish this column.
U.S. defense strategy was in the news this week because the Biden administration released its defense budget. It calls for a $30 billion increase in defense spending, but many critics (including me) think it is not enough.
Simply increasing spending isn’t a substitute for strategy, and it seems like this is just throwing money at the Pentagon’s many problems.
EA: Really? The administration is already proposing an eye-watering 4 percent increase in the defense budget, building on similar large increases in recent years. And the defense budget overall is now headed toward $800 billion, which is a massive amount, far more than most of our allies or our supposed peer competitors. Simply increasing spending isn’t a substitute for strategy, and it seems like this is just throwing money at the Pentagon’s many problems: an overreliance on overpriced contractor firms, an inability to do procurement efficiently, and a complete lack of budgetary discipline.
MK: The Defense Department is a big government bureaucracy, and, as with most government agencies, there is waste, fraud, and abuse that should be cleaned up.
But I strongly disagree on the size of the U.S. defense budget. Washington only spends about 3 percent of GDP on defense. By that metric, it is at historic lows. During the Cold War, Washington spent an average of 7 percent of GDP on defense. It was able to cut back due to the peace dividend of the 1990s and 2000s, but now that Washington is entering two new cold wars, it is time for a massive increase in defense spending.
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A plaque of the U.S. Defense Department seal
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has forced the Pentagon to tweak its China-focused approach.
Firefighters sit amid debris in the area of a research institute, part of Ukraine's National Academy of Sciences, after a strike by drones, in northwestern Kyiv.
Powerful threats could too easily become real disasters.
With inflation running at 8 percent, Biden’s 4 percent increases are actually cuts in real terms. I agree with the Republicans in Congress who argue that Washington should be aiming for 5 percent real growth—that is, 5 percent over and above inflation.
EA: I find those parallels problematic for a couple of reasons. One is that those Cold War averages include periods of large-scale war like Korea and Vietnam. Another is that the early Cold War period was characterized by a ruined Europe and Asia, requiring the United States to bear a substantial military burden in order to maintain security in both regions.
The situation today isn’t even remotely that dire: Washington’s counterterrorism campaigns in the Middle East continue, but the United States isn’t engaged in a major war, and its allies in Europe are in some ways richer and more prosperous than Americans! So I don’t think simply pointing at the Cold War and saying “let’s do the same” is particularly persuasive, especially when you bear in mind that the U.S. economy today is substantially less robust than it was during that earlier period.
The bigger problem, of course, is that increased budgets are also an attempt to avoid thinking about hard strategic choices. If you throw enough money at the problem, some folks think, then you can avoid having to prioritize certain regions or to choose certain goals over others. That’s just folly. Perhaps it will work for a while, but eventually the country won’t be able to sustain that kind of consistent spending increase.
Washington can comfortably increase defense spending. Why make hard choices if it is not required?
MK: Exactly. A good strategy starts with clear goals. And Washington’s goals should be to maintain peace and stability in Europe and Asia. That requires deterring Russia and China at the same time.
So, then the question becomes: Can the country resource that strategy? Fortunately, the answer is yes. Washington can comfortably increase defense spending. Why make hard choices if it is not required?
If you don’t like the early Cold War analogy, let’s take Ronald Reagan’s buildup in the 1980s. He spent between 5 and 6 percent of GDP on defense. The United States was at peace (other than a short war in Grenada), and its allies were already rebuilt. That defense buildup was essential to winning the first Cold War. To win these new cold wars, Washington should follow a similar approach. Looked at in that light, a 5 percent real increase above current levels is quite modest.
And why is the U.S. economy less robust than in the 1980s? To paraphrase Winston Churchill, America possesses the least robust economy on Earth today, except for all the others.
EA: Well, compared to the 1950s when there was routinely GDP growth of 5-7 percent per year, yes, the U.S. economy is less robust. But at the end of the day, every dollar spent on defense is a dollar that is taken out of the hands of Americans, whether you believe it should go to domestic spending instead or simply be left in the hands of citizens through lower taxes.
Excessive spending on defense can hurt the economy more broadly. And so, while defense is important, policymakers also have a responsibility to the public to keep spending at an acceptable—not overblown—level. And there are so many boondoggles in this new budget proposal, most notably the extra $50 billion the administration is throwing at largely unnecessary nuclear modernization projects.
MK: Literally the first line of the constitution says that the government will provide for the “common defense.” This is a top priority. If the government doesn’t keep the American people safe, no other entity can or will. Fighting a war with Russia and/or China would be much more costly than simply deterring it in the first place.
And you’re wrong on nukes; my biggest complaint about the new defense strategy is that it cut an essential nuclear weapon, the SLCM-N. This was a weapon designed specifically to deter Putin, and now the U.S. government is cutting it at a time when Putin is invading neighbors and making nuclear threats? It doesn’t make sense.
EA: Hard to see how a weapon that’s not even deployed yet could be utterly essential, but I suppose that’s a debate for another time.
MK: Deal. In fact, I challenge you to a live debate on nuclear weapons very soon! How about an FP Live event next week? I hope to see you on Tuesday, April 12, at 12 p.m. EST, and I invite all of our dear readers to please join us.
16. The Untold Story of the Afghan Women Who Hunted the Taliban
The Untold Story of the Afghan Women Who Hunted the Taliban
Trained by the U.S. Army, a group of trailblazing Afghan women turned into a formidable force in their homeland. They now live quietly scattered around the U.S., trying to reconcile their past with their present.
BY AMANDA RIPLEY | PHOTOGRAPHS BY SCOTT GOLDSMITH AND RAYMOND MCCREA JONES FOR POLITICO MAGAZINE
04/08/2022 05:00 AM EDT
In the cramped kitchen of a Chick-fil-A in Pittsburgh, out of the customers’ line of sight, there is a slight 26-year-old woman in a headscarf making chicken sandwiches. She looks up every few seconds to check the drive-thru screen. It beeps insistently, like a hospital heartbeat monitor, detailing each new custom order for her to assemble: no cheese, yes bacon, no tomato. She folds each leaf of lettuce so it tucks underneath the bun, just so. Her co-workers know her as a quiet employee with limited English who learns fast. It feels impossible to explain, almost like it never happened.
About this story: To protect the identities of some of the subjects, we have changed names or omitted last names where necessary, as noted in the text. We have also blurred some faces in photographs to protect the identity of those who are still in sensitive roles in the U.S. military or those who fear reprisals from the Taliban.
A year ago, Nahid was running off of U.S. military Chinook helicopters into remote compounds in the middle of the night, carrying an M4 assault rifle and scanning the horizon through the green haze of night vision, searching for Taliban and ISIS targets. She conducted some 50 midnight raids, alongside Green Berets, Navy SEALs and Army Rangers. One night, a grenade thrown out of a second-floor window killed three male Afghan soldiers standing nearby. She stood guard over an injured American soldier, firing into the darkness to ward off further attacks, praying for his survival, until air support arrived.
And then, six months ago, she boarded a C-17 military cargo plane out of Kabul, sitting on the floor with hundreds of her countrymen, heading toward an American life she hadn’t really asked for, but was thankful to get.
For six years, Nahid was known as a courageous and highly effective soldier, part of a covert unit of female Afghan soldiers created and trained by U.S. Special Operations. In a country where most women did not leave home without a male escort, her unit, the Female Tactical Platoon, worked alongside elite strike forces, doing the work that male soldiers could not do in a Muslim country: searching and questioning women and children on high-risk nighttime missions. From the time the Platoon was set up in 2011 to the fall of Kabul in 2021, the women conducted some two thousand missions.
And now she is here. One of 39 members of the Female Tactical Platoon to be evacuated to the United States in the chaos that followed the fall of Kabul in August.
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The Platoon members spent the fall in pop-up refugee camps on military bases. But now, all these women and 85 of their family members are officially “resettled”: which is to say, they are scattered across 26 cities, from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Anchorage, Alaska, studying English, looking for work and trying to reconcile their past with their present.
The fate of these unusual women is of outsized importance to their American military counterparts — and to the Taliban. “They are an affront to everything the Taliban stands for,” a Green Beret officer who served alongside four Female Tactical Platoon members in Afghanistan told me. “They were one of the few groups who were kill-on-sight for the Taliban. If they were captured, they would be killed.”
For the past several months, I’ve been following members of the Platoon, chronicling their new lives in America and their experiences in Afghanistan, based on hours of interviews with half a dozen Platoon members and 10 current and former U.S. servicemembers who trained and fought beside them.
Nahid in the kitchen of a Pittsburgh Chick-Fil-A.
This may sound, at first, like one of the few happy endings to come out of the fall of Kabul last summer. And it is. These 39 women are safe, sitting in sleepy suburban apartments practicing their English vocabulary words, while millions of their fellow Afghans are suffering. But for the Platoon members, it does not feel like the end of anything. They are devastated to have left their country in the hands of the enemy they spent years fighting, desperately worried about colleagues and loved ones they left behind and anxious about their immigration status, which remains in limbo.
In talking to them, it is clear that, one way or another, they are not done fighting. About half say they would like to join the U.S. military, if they can find a way to earn green cards one day. Others dream of returning to their country to help the women of Afghanistan. At the moment, one woman is taking three English classes simultaneously in Pennsylvania. Five are enrolled in English classes at Virginia Tech. Another is doing mixed martial arts training in Washington state. Four are working at Chick-fil-A restaurants across the country. One is working as a gardener on a horse ranch in New Mexico. Another is at a day care center in Utah. All are trying — and sometimes failing — to find a new purpose in life that can begin to match their old one.
I met with Nahid in Pittsburgh on a February morning before her shift at Chick-fil-A. Her new home is well-appointed with heavy, circa 1980s furniture donated by the people of Pittsburgh. A large Afghan flag sent to her by her U.S. military veteran friends hangs on one wall, right above an artificial white Christmas tree, donated by a local volunteer. Nahid hadn’t seen a good reason to take it down.
Top: In her apartment in Pittsburgh, Nahid talks about her experience as a Platoon member in Afghanistan. Left: Nahid shares a photograph of a medal she earned in Afghanistan. Right: Nahid and her sister pray in a bedroom of their home in Pittsburgh, before going to work at Chick-Fil-A.
Wearing a blue leopard-print headscarf and flip flops, Nahid sipped her tea and explained why she joined the Platoon. “When I was a girl, I was always told that girls and women cannot join the military,” she said. “And I was always annoyed by that. So I wanted to be the first to do those things.” (Nahid is not her real name. POLITICO agreed not to use her name because she fears reprisals from the Taliban.)
Her father never learned how to read or write; her mother gave birth to Nahid when she was 16. But all her life, her parents had told her that she could do big things. Like most of the Platoon members, Nahid and her family are Hazaras, a predominantly Shiite minority ethnic population that has been persecuted for years by the Taliban, who are mostly Sunnis from the Pashtun majority. “Other people told my father that girls should not go to school, and they made fun of my parents,” Nahid said. “And my parents never gave in.” Other girls her age stayed home and wove carpets, while she went to high school and then university. When she was 20, she saw a recruiting ad on TV, calling for women to join the military. Her father signed the permission slip.
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Nahid’s father was diagnosed with cancer several years ago. The family spent all of their savings getting him treatment in Pakistan, but he died soon afterward. She talks about him haltingly, still grieving the loss of the man who believed she could do anything, despite everything.
But whenever the conversation drifted back to her work with the Female Tactical Platoon, her eyes lit up. She talked about the intense workouts they did each day and about the time she helped rescue a group of six women and 13 children who had been taken captive by the Taliban. She earned a medal for that mission. It’s back in Afghanistan, along with everything else, she said, taking out her phone to show me a picture of the medal.
“What were you best at in your job?” I asked her. “Marksmanship? Physical fitness? Questioning?”
“Everything,” she said smiling. “I was good at everything.”
Nahid with Julia Pleasants, her Cultural Support Team counterpart, after a snowstorm in Bagram Afghanistan.
Nahid leaving her job at Chick-Fil-A for the evening.
‘It was like being in love’
When U.S. Army Major Laura Peters was told about the creation of a new and unusual unit of Afghan soldiers a decade ago, she was highly skeptical. It seemed dangerous at best, doomed at worst. Train Afghan women as elite fighters and send them into the worst parts of Taliban-held Afghanistan? “If I am being honest, I wasn’t sure it would work.” At the time, Peters, who is no longer in the military, was herself part of a newly formed unit called the Cultural Support Team — highly trained American women who were embedded with U.S. Special Operations forces on their missions to interact with women and children. That* *concept was controversial enough. Certain male American soldiers distrusted the unit and resented that women were being given precious seats on helicopters into combat zones.
“We had to prove ourselves,” Peters said. “And it was a really challenging mission.” Now they were going to do the same thing with Afghan women? “It seemed crazy. How would you possibly recruit them?” Afghan women are traditionally not supposed to work — or be out of the house at night. In Afghan culture, women do not, as a rule, go running or lift weights. “They couldn’t do one single sit-up,” another American officer who trained the recruits told me. But the Platoon members had to be fit enough to keep up with the male commandos on raids, which could mean sprinting out of a helicopter under fire or walking up a mountain wearing body armor.
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Anytime they were off base, the women had to wear civilian clothing and operate undercover, lying to their neighbors about where they were going each day. If they were stopped at a Taliban checkpoint, they had to make up a story to explain their movements and be ready to swear on the Quran that they were telling the truth. On base, the women needed their own spaces, separate from men, to work out, train, eat and pray. It was, logistically, a mess.
At the recruiting sessions, a hundred women would show up and, after hearing the job requirements, only 10 would return. The only reason Peters and her colleagues kept trying was because they understood how valuable these women could be, in theory. In any tribal community, women know where the men are, where the weapons are and who hid a phone in the floorboards. Male soldiers couldn’t talk to or search these women (local Afghan men might punish or even kill the woman who’d been interviewed, along with her children, and hatred for the U.S. military would spike in the area), which is why Peters and her colleagues on the Cultural Support Team had been brought in. But Americans were planning to withdraw from Afghanistan one day, so they wanted to create a parallel Afghan unit. Plus, American women might miss subtle cues in a foreign culture, and they had to talk to Afghan women through an interpreter, which made interactions stilted. So far, the American women had still made extraordinary finds — helping to identify and locate high-value targets and bomb-making materials, among other things. Imagine what Afghan* *women could find out.
Female U.S. Army officers were charged with helping select and train the female Platoon members in Afghanistan. The women grew close over the course of their deployments, bonding over chai tea, Disney movies and their shared belief that they were helping to protect women and children from the Taliban. “It’s a special kind of dedication,” said Sarah Scully, a U.S. Army Company Commander who worked alongside the Platoon members in 2020. “I don’t think there’s any other story like it in the military.” Top: Platoon members and their U.S. counterparts outside their training compound after training session in 2017. The women did weekly hikes up to 12 miles in full battle gear across mountainous terrain. Left: Platoon members and their American counterparts on the obstacle course summer of 2017. Right: Female U.S. and Afghan soldiers in the classroom.
Peters and her team ended up selecting a dozen recruits, picking women who could get permission from their families to join, who passed psychological and character screenings (which assessed, among other things, if they were willing and able to maintain a cover story with friends and neighbors) and who seemed like they could learn to do a push up. The American women brought them to Camp Scorpion, just outside of Kabul, and began teaching them everything they knew. They taught them to shoot and to lift weights. (After one lesson on how to do a burpee, an Afghan woman asked the blazingly obvious question: “Why?”) Then they moved on to other skillsets: how to search a room, how to question a suspected terrorist, how to run in boots while wearing night-vision goggles.
The first surprise, for the Americans, was the relentlessness of the new recruits. “None of these females wanted to quit, which was amazing,” Peters said. The Afghan women had trouble finding reliable transportation to the job, and some of them were threatened by relatives for doing this work. For the first few months, the women did not even consistently get paid — due to bureaucratic problems within the Afghan government. And still, “they just kept coming back for more.”
The other surprise was the joy. The women had to do weekly 12-mile walks, carrying 35 pounds of gear in scorching heat, all while wearing hijabs and long-sleeved shirts and pants. But even then, there was this current of delight, just under the surface. “Oh my gosh, there was so much giggling and laughter,” Peters said. The women were learning to kick down doors and fast-rope out of a helicopter, wielding a kind of power that had been, until then, unimaginable. “This is just my opinion, but a lot of their lives they’d been taught to be silent,” Peters said, “and I think, in a setting where they were together and encouraged to be a badass, it just brought up so much glee, to be perfectly blunt.”
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One of the earliest recruits was a woman named Mahtab, who had worked as a calligraphy teacher before joining the military. Mahtab (which is also not her real name) has pronounced cheek bones, long straight black hair and a small frame, like all the Platoon members. But she is also older and more serious, unafraid to look you in the eye and tell it like it is. As a soldier, she attended college at night, earning a bachelor’s degree in political science. She rose up through the ranks, becoming the Platoon’s commander for seven years.
Mahtab was recently resettled in the D.C.-area, and in January, I met her at Lapis, an Afghan restaurant in the city, along with Ellie, a U.S. army captain and one of the servicemembers most involved in helping the Platoon members resettle. (POLITICO agreed not to disclose Ellie’s real name because she remains on active duty and is not authorized to speak on the record.) When Mahtab thinks back to those early days, she remembers how hard and how thrilling it was, all at once. Each day was different from the one before, she said, barely touching her food. “On missions, you couldn’t predict what would happen next,” she said. “It was like being in love.”
Mahtab, shown here during target practice in Afghanistan, was the Platoon’s commander for seven years. “I’ve been in awe of her since I first met her,” said a U.S. Army officer who worked alongside her. “Her knowledge, her experience, how she presents herself.”
After grocery shopping, Mahtab puts her purchases away. Mahtab now lives in a small apartment outside of Washington, D.C.
Years later, once the initial excitement wore off, she stayed for another reason. “There was a sense of purpose,” she told me. “We were trying to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a terrorist haven. We weren’t just serving our country; we were serving the world.”
So that is what she began to tell other Afghan women, when she held recruiting sessions. “I always said, ‘This is war. You may die. You may lose your arm or your leg. But you are really serving your country — not just with your body but with your soul, your heart, everything.’”
One night, early in her career, Mahtab searched the wife of a Taliban leader who had just been captured by a strike force of Green Berets. Afterward, the woman stared stonily at her. “Today you come to my house,” she said. “Tomorrow, I will come to your house.” The encounter haunted Mahtab for weeks. “It was the first time it had occurred to me that the Taliban could come back to power,” she said. But her colleagues told her not to worry. The Taliban was weak, and the Americans were here. Eventually, she stopped thinking about it so much. Instead, she focused on the mission, trying to build a better future for the country.
Mahtab remembers one raid in Helmand Province, when a group of about 75 Army Rangers and Afghan special operators were searching for a suspected Taliban commander. The first house they went to, around midnight, turned out to be the wrong one, based on bad intelligence. Mahtab went inside the courtyard to question the family and found herself being stared at by a girl with big round eyes.
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“Are you a female?” the girl asked when she heard Mahtab’s voice, her eyes moving from Mahtab’s gun to her night-vision goggles to her headscarf, sticking out underneath her helmet.
“Yes,” Mahtab answered.
“Can you give me something? To keep?”
Mahtab understood that she was, to this girl, a unicorn, and the girl wanted proof that unicorns exist. She checked her pockets. She had a pen and some peanuts, nothing special, but she handed them over.
“Here, eat these peanuts,” she told the girl.
“I will never eat them,” the girl vowed. “I will keep them all my life.”
The girl’s name was Anargul, which means pomegranate-girl in Dari. Later that night, still struggling to identify the target, Mahtab returned to the house and called for Anargul. She and her family helped Mahtab and the commandos figure out where the Taliban suspect could be found.
Everyday, Mahtab receives desperate messages from male commandos left behind in Afghanistan. “If the Taliban doesn’t kill them, they will die of starvation,” she said. Top: Mahtab sits at the dining room table in her one-bedroom apartment in Maryland. Left: Mahtab checks her mail after returning from a shopping trip. One of the relatives she lives with is in the foreground. She is drinking tea from Afghanistan. Right: Mahtab copies Afghan poems in a journal given to her by one of her American military counterparts. She said this helps her deal with the sadness of being isolated from her homeland.
‘If I die tonight, I die pretty’
Soon, the American women noticed, male commandos were not just being ordered to bring Platoon members on missions — they were actively requesting their assistance. “We spoke the same language and understood the culture,” explains Mahtab. “When I searched a female, I’d say, ‘I am Muslim, you are Muslim. I am Afghan, you are Afghan. I am a woman, you are a woman.’” The Americans had money, training and gear, but there is no substitute for that kind of connection.
The Platoon remained largely under the radar, even within the U.S. military. When I asked U.S. Special Operations Command for comment on the Platoon, the public affairs officer told me he had never heard of it — and neither had his counterparts at U.S. Central Command. The only information the Special Operations historian had on the program was classified. But, in the field, news of the Platoon’s abilities reached the highest levels. Retired Gen. Joseph Votel, former Commander of U.S. Central Command, told me the women were of “immense value” to forces on the ground. “They opened up the 50 percent of the population that our male-dominated units could not connect with,” said Votel, now a Middle East Institute distinguished senior fellow. At one point, he visited one of their training sessions and was struck by how small and young the Afghan women seemed compared to their American counterparts. “Yet they possessed great desire and a high level of patriotism. [It was] very inspirational.”
Mahtab and a relative shop for a new living room rug at a Maryland store that sells Afghan home goods, clothing and food, near their home.
Over time, the American female soldiers became very close to Mahtab and all of the Afghan Platoon members. Between missions, they would hang out in each other’s rooms on base, dancing, drinking chai and doing henna tattoos. For all of their differences (and there were many), they were all positive deviants of a sort — women working in a hypermasculine profession, convinced they were making the world safer for other women. “It’s a special kind of dedication,” said Sarah Scully, a former Cultural Support Team member and current company commander who worked with Mahtab and Nahid in 2020. “I don’t think there’s any other story like it in the military.”
Platoon members with their American counterparts during a deployment in Northern Afghanistan.
The Platoon members learned a lot from their female U.S. counterparts, but certain things, they did their own way. Many of the Afghan women would show up for work wearing make-up, jewelry and heels, for example. It didn’t matter that they were preparing to go on a night raid in the mountains. The bemused American women started to refer to this as “Afghan style.”
One bitterly cold night, a Platoon member came to a mission wearing a long fur coat, with the hood up over her helmet and night-vision goggles. “I gave her a hard time,” an American female officer told me. “I said, ‘This is a joke, right? You’re not really wearing that, are you?’”
“If I die tonight, I die pretty,” the woman replied.
Platoon members with their American counterparts during a deployment in Northern Afghanistan.
At least once, Ellie said, the male Afghan commandos asked the female Platoon members if they would please dress more plainly — more like the American women. It became a running joke between both groups of women. But Afghan style prevailed. “It was almost an act of protest — to be feminine — for some women,” Mahtab said. “To say, ‘This is who I am.’”
One of the younger Platoon members, recruited by Mahtab, was a woman named Nafisa who has a heart-shaped face and unfailingly wears lipstick, eye shadow and mascara. She has a smile that crinkles up her nose and spreads over her whole face. Mahtab remembers her for two reasons: She was an excellent shot, and she was always on time. “I always told the other girls, ‘Look at Nafisa! She’s never late!’”
Nafisa, whose last name POLITICO has agreed not to publish, joined in 2018, serving in one of the most violent phases of the war. Over the course of three years, she went on about 60 missions and fired her weapon on almost all of them, becoming known as something of a sharpshooter. She loved target practice, but her favorite training session was when she got to fire the machine guns. Talking to her, this is hard to imagine because Nafisa weighs 92 pounds and is just 5 feet, 2 inches tall. But the truth is, at age 25, she has more combat experience than the vast majority of American servicemen.
Nafisa and a fellow Platoon member in Afghanistan. The women now live together in an Atlanta apartment as they rebuild their lives.
Nafisa, center, with two other Platoon members in Atlanta.
On one particularly memorable mission, in June of 2019 in Mazar-e-Sharif, Nafisa and about 50 Army Rangers and Afghan commandos were ambushed three separate times, repeatedly coming under heavy fire from the Taliban over the course of 24 hours. Nafisa was shot but uninjured because of her body armor. (Over its decade-long existence, the Platoon did not lose anyone in combat, though two of the women were seriously injured.) Another time, she tackled a woman said to be wearing a suicide vest — which turned out to be lined with cash, not explosives. Once, she discovered a pistol hidden in the swaddling blanket of a baby.
One American woman, a West Point graduate, told me she’d signed up for the deployment in order to get combat experience. But she was, in the end, much more profoundly affected by her connections to the Platoon.
“How those women carried themselves and all the badass things they were able to accomplish — in a society that really doesn’t value them — it was humbling,” she said. (POLITICO granted her anonymity because she still works for the U.S. military and is not authorized to speak on the record.) “When I think of them, I just smile. I absolutely loved my deployment because of these women.”
As the years went by, each rotation of American women left, one by one. Their deployments ended after six months, in most cases. But the Afghan Platoon members carried on. “While the U.S. was there, supplying a lot of funding and training, that program was successful,” said Andrea Filozof, a U.S. Army Reserve Major who helped train the initial cohort of Platoon members. “My fear always was, when we do leave, are these women going to be safe?” Each time, when the Afghan and American women said their goodbyes, they assumed that no matter what happened, they would never see each other again.
Screenshots of text messages from American servicewomen telling Platoon members where to go to be evacuated from Afghanistan.
‘Fight hard. … It’s the only way we can help you’
“The Taliban is here. You have to take off your uniform.” Nafisa heard what the male Afghan soldier told her on the morning of Aug. 15, 2021, but she did not react, not at first. She knew the Taliban was gaining ground across the country as the Americans pulled out, but she’d thought they would not take Kabul — not for months, if at all. How could this be happening? “It was a mental shock to me,” she said. Then she heard gunfire outside of her barracks, and she understood. Her life had changed in a permanent way.
She took off her uniform and put it in her locker. “I will never forget that moment,” she told me. She took a taxi home on eerily empty roads. For three days, she stayed in her home, terrified, waiting for the Taliban to come to her door. “I was going crazy,” she said. She burned her awards and any documents in English and deleted most of the apps on her phone.
Back in America, Ellie and other veterans had spent months helping the women apply for Special Immigrant Visas — a program created by Congress in 2009 to offer safe haven to Afghans who had worked for the U.S. government. But the Platoon members soon learned they may not qualify. The Platoon was created by the Americans but formally under the employment of the Afghan National Army, which meant the women did not have a letter from a U.S. employer, as required for the visa.
As the American exit from Afghanistan approached, the American women scrambled to help the Platoon members apply for other visas but got nowhere. Then, the week before Kabul fell, a beloved Platoon member named Mahjabin Hakimi was killed at home. The circumstances of her death remain unclear — but don’t appear to be directly related to her work. Still, Hakimi’s death was a gut punch to all the women, on both continents, and the Americans vowed to work harder, from afar, to protect the remaining Platoon members.
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A few days after the Taliban swept into Kabul, the Platoon members finally decided to try their luck at Kabul International Airport. Nafisa, Nahid, Mahtab and most of the Platoon members were all there, amidst the throngs of Afghans trying to escape. Stripped of their weapons and their uniforms, they watched families get trampled and children scream in hunger, and they were unable to help in the ways they were trained to do. It was a terrible feeling, to be so powerless, so suddenly. More than being killed, they feared being captured by the Taliban. “There is no morality or ethics among the Taliban,” Nahid told me. “So being captured meant being tortured or worse. The worst things you can think of.”
For hours and, in some cases, days, Ellie and the other Americans bombarded the Platoon members on WhatsApp and Signal, trying to get the Afghan women close enough to the airport perimeter so that American soldiers they had connections with could pull them up over the fence. “Push faster please. Fight hard to get close. It’s the only way we can help you.” Back and forth the messages flew, changing from moment to moment, for hours. “Tell all the girls to get close.” Crying emoji. “To the tower.” Heart emoji. There were maps and photos and hand-drawn diagrams. “You need to get to the Swedish flag on the fence, by the gate.” Heart, heart, heart. “OK I try.”
Nafisa, the sharpshooter, was one of the last Platoon members to make it into the airport. An Army Ranger in contact with the American women knew a soldier on the ground who pulled her over the fence. Then the Americans worked through the State Department and a general on the ground to get the Platoon members cleared to get onto actual airplanes. When Nafisa finally boarded a C-17 military cargo plane out of Afghanistan, she had no idea where it was going. The plane was packed with people, all sitting on the floor. They ended up in Qatar. Two hours later, she got on another plane. This one went to Germany, where she stayed at Ramstein Air Base for seven days. Like the other evacuees, she had no say over where she went. She’d gone from elite soldier to refugee, literally overnight. From rescuer to rescued. Finally, she was flown to Fort McCoy in Wisconsin, where she stayed for three months, along with Mahtab and 13 other Platoon members.
Meanwhile, Ellie and a handful of other current and former servicewomen tried to track where each of the Platoon members had gone. “It was chaotic,” Ellie said. It was hard to find some of them and harder still to keep in regular contact. “It became clear we couldn’t give them the attention they needed on our own. They needed to know that someone was looking out for them over the long term.” So they launched a program called Sisters of Service and began recruiting one-on-one mentors for each Platoon member. The Sisters of Service sent care packages out to the military bases where the Platoon members were staying, full of warm jackets, running shoes and, naturally, makeup. The Afghan women sent back many selfies, accessorized with endless emoji. One Platoon member proudly sent a photo of the 3-inch wedge heels she’d worn to evacuate, Afghan style.
In January, Mahtab joined a sparsely attended protest against the Taliban in front of the White House in Washington, D.C. “Sometimes I wonder what it must feel like to be an American and not be always living in war,” she said.
‘‘I am safe. But it’s hard to accept’
The U.S. looks strangely familiar, Mahtab told me. Like it does in the movies. The buildings are tall and beautiful. The traffic is much better than in Afghanistan, and she is grateful to be safe. She is working remotely as an interpreter for an immigration law firm and living with her nieces in a modest apartment beside a freeway in Maryland.
But this time in her life, she said, is by far the hardest ordeal she has ever experienced. Even harder than war. “People clapped for us at the airport,” Mahtab told me. “I appreciate them. But my heart wasn’t there. My heart is with my people.”
Every day, she gets WhatsApp messages from the men she worked with in the Ktah Khas, Afghanistan’s elite special operations unit. They are trapped in a nightmare, begging her to help them evacuate, which she has no way of doing. “If the Taliban doesn’t kill them, they will die of starvation,” she told me. They do not qualify for Special Immigrant Visas, since they, too, worked for the Afghan military, not for the Americans. And yet, no matter what she tells them, many of them still hold out hope that the Americans will evacuate them one day.
When I visited Mahtab at her apartment in February, she told me about a male colleague who had been tortured and killed by the Taliban. She picked up her phone to show me a picture of his body, covered in burn marks, which had just been returned to his family. “The United States helped me to get out of the country. My question is, ‘What was the difference between me and a soldier who served side by side with me?’” The obvious answer is that she is a woman, and therefore especially endangered back home. But looking at the photo of her murdered colleague, the argument falls apart.
In February, Nafisa and a fellow Platoon member attended an art class at Refuge Coffee, a business created to employ and support refugees in Atlanta. Nafisa’s goal is to get a Green Card so she can join the U.S. military one day. Top: Nafisa poses for a portrait at Refuge Coffee. Left: Nafisa and two other Platoon members have lunch at a local pizza place following their English class. Right: Nafisa draws a picture of a bird during the art class.
Anyone fleeing war or famine endures an impossible kind of psychological splitting: You must start a new life here while everything you know and love is over there. You’re neither here nor there. “Sometimes I feel like it might be easier if I were there,” Mahtab told me. “Now, I am safe. But it’s hard to accept.”
Recently, to keep herself sane, Mahtab vowed to memorize a poem and make a drawing each week. Someone sent her a video of an Afghan woman in traditional dress dancing, whirling round and round, dancing in spite of everything. She drew the woman dancing in front of an Afghan flag, and she put it up on her bookshelf, next to her photos of the Platoon members.
In November, at the Halifax International Security Forum, Cindy McCain gave the John McCain Prize for Leadership in Public Service to the Platoon members. “He would be honored,” McCain said of her husband, “that the fourth recipient of this award … are the brave freedom fighters, the Afghan Female Tactical Platoon.” Mahtab accepted the award, by video, on behalf of all the Platoon members. “If you want to help Afghanistan, please stand up for the education of women, for the right of women to work, for women to have a voice,” she said. “Though our platoon has been disbanded, our mission is not over yet.”
In March, the Taliban reneged on its earlier promises to let girls stay in school and began shuttering schools for girls above 6th grade. The Taliban has also banned women from traveling more than 45 miles from home without a close male relative. And TV stations have been told to stop showing programs with female actors.
Mahtab’s dream is to go back to Afghanistan one day and serve her country again, in some other way. “I don’t want to have children. All the children of Afghanistan are my children,” she said. “Maybe I’ll open an orphanage.” Maybe, she said, she’ll name it Anargul, after the pomegranate-girl with the big eyes.
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In the meantime, all the Platoon members have to figure out a way to legally stay in America. The Platoon members ultimately evacuated Afghanistan through a program known as humanitarian parole, which means they can stay in the U.S. for up to two years and are entitled to Social Security numbers and work authorization papers. Most have also applied for something known as a Priority 1 visa, designed for refugees facing significant threats back home, but those applications are still pending. It is unclear whether evacuees will be able to receive extensions of the parole status while they wait for resolution, according to the National Immigration Forum.
In the months to come, the Platoon members may need to apply for asylum — through America’s dysfunctional asylum system, which has over 400,000 cases sitting in a backlog. Doing so may require expensive immigration lawyers and years of bureaucratic wrangling.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers from the House and Senate is drafting language to introduce an Afghan Adjustment Act, which would allow the Platoon members and thousands of other Afghan evacuees living in the United States to apply for permanent status through a more streamlined system (just as Congress has done for Cuban, Vietnamese and Iraqi refugees, among others, in the past). The process could still take years, but it would be easier, cheaper and faster than the asylum system.
For now, these women still have more support than most of the other 76,000 Afghan evacuees living in America. Each Sisters of Service mentor, many of whom are themselves military veterans, receives training, attends bimonthly meetings and spends two to four hours a week in communication with their Afghan mentee. On her own time, Ellie has been traveling around the country, visiting the Platoon members. She brings each one a toy female soldier, in pink. For Mahtab, she brought a whole platoon.
In October, the PenFed Foundation hired two U.S. military veterans who had worked with the Platoon members in Afghanistan to help support all the Platoon members. They coordinate with the Sisters of Service mentors and help provide the Platoon members with rental assistance, medical care and quality English classes — one of the most expensive, hard-to-find and critical pieces of the resettlement puzzle.
So far, some of the Platoon members have received their work authorization papers and Social Security numbers, both of which they need to get a job. Others have not. The resettlement agencies are overwhelmed with cases. Nearly a third closed down under the Trump administration, as the numbers of refugees allowed into the country dwindled. And so, the women’s experiences have varied wildly — depending on which caseworker and agency they were assigned.
On one end of the spectrum, there’s Nahid in Pittsburgh, who received all her papers months ago and, with the help of her American servicewomen comrades, got connected via Facebook to a group of enthusiastic local volunteers. They introduced her to Aimee Hernandez, the owner of a Chick-fil-A restaurant, who spent hours talking with her and her siblings, using their phones’ translation apps. It took about 45 minutes for Hernandez to ask if it was OK that the chicken was not halal. (It was OK.) She hired them on the spot, and they’ve been working full-time in the kitchen for four months now — while also attending English classes at Duquesne University. Nahid, the combat veteran who was good at everything, would like to join the U.S. military one day and work her way up into a leadership position.
On the other end of the spectrum is Nafisa, the sharpshooter, whose papers got lost somewhere in the system. She is living with another Platoon member in an apartment on the outskirts of Atlanta. Catholic Charities Atlanta, her assigned resettlement agency, did not respond to multiple messages I left seeking details about her case.
The Platoon members attend an art class at Refuge Coffee, a coffee shop in Atlanta established to employ immigrants and refugees.
I visited Nafisa and three other Platoon members living in Atlanta in late January, along with Ellie, the American who helped start the Sisters of Service program. Giggling with excitement, the Platoon members ushered me into their living room. They’d set out an elaborate spread of pistachios, cashews, tea and purple heart-shaped cookies with the words “true luv” stamped on each. Nafisa wore lipstick, hot-pink Fila sneakers, jeans and a sweater. (She is always cold in America, so the thermostat was set to a cozy 79 degrees.)
I sat down on their donated floral couch and started asking the obvious questions. Why did you join the Platoon? What was it like?
Nafisa started talking, and then stopped. I looked up from my notebook. There was the sharpshooter, the combat veteran, the giggling 25-year old, with her hand over her face, silently weeping. After a moment, she started talking again: “We started something important,” she said. “And we lost everything, in a moment — the uniform, the power. The Taliban took our chance from us.”
Back in Afghanistan, all of the Afghan military documents related to the Platoon likely fell into the hands of the Taliban. In the chaos of the country’s collapse, the records were not destroyed, as far as the Platoon members know. Nafisa is one of nine children, the only one who managed to evacuate. The rest of her family is now in hiding — targeted by the Taliban because of her work. “I’m here physically,” she told me, “but my heart and mind are in Afghanistan.”
Nafisa spent her first three months in Atlanta checking Facebook, learning English online, listening to music, watching Farsi films on YouTube and killing cockroaches in the kitchen. A year ago, she was running out of helicopters and questioning suspected terrorists. Now, she’s taken up knitting, making a small purple purse for the American women to include in a Sisters of Service fundraiser auction. All she can do is wait. And try not to think. “Life is not bad here,” she told me. “But overall, I do not have a good feeling. I have nothing here to prove that I am here in this country legally. Other people are getting jobs, but for me, everything is very uncertain. I’m not even sure if I will be returned to Afghanistan.”
If the U.S. doesn’t find a way to make use of the talent and experience of this group, their American military counterparts say, it will be a tragedy for both countries. “These women have been highly vetted to work alongside U.S. special operations,” said Ellie. “We don’t want them to end up on nightshifts at Walmart in some small town in America. Put them in places where they can make decisions.”
Mahtab, the Platoon’s former commander, has decorated her American apartment with photos of her Platoon members as well as a squad of toy female soldiers — a gift from Ellie, a U.S. Army captain who worked with her in Afghanistan.
The next morning, I went running with Nafisa and Ellie. It was the first time Nafisa had gone running since the fall of Kabul. It was bitterly cold, but she was on time, just like always. She wore a scarf, gloves and her jeans and Fila sneakers. We made it about a half mile before she had to turn around.
Since then, her Social Security Card has finally arrived, and with help from Ellie, she was finally able to track down her work authorization information. Her apartment has become infested with rats, and she is planning to move. In late March, she got a job as a barista at a coffee shop in Atlanta.
Her dream is to join the U.S. military one day. “I want to always be in service to the American people and my family,” she wrote me in February. “I will never give up.”
In the meantime, she goes running almost every day. A little farther each time.
17. The AP Interview: Zelenskyy seeks peace despite atrocities
Can President Zelensky find an acceptable durable political arrangement to protect Ukraine?
The AP Interview: Zelenskyy seeks peace despite atrocities
AP · by ADAM SCHRECK and MSTYSLAV CHERNOV · April 9, 2022
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Saturday that he is committed to pressing for peace despite Russian attacks on civilians that have stunned the world, and he renewed his plea for more weapons ahead of an expected surge in fighting in the country’s east.
He made the comments in an interview with The Associated Press a day after at least 52 people were killed in a strike on a train station in the eastern city of Kramatorsk, and as evidence of civilian killings came to light after Russian troops failed to seize the capital where he has hunkered down, Kyiv.
“No one wants to negotiate with a person or people who tortured this nation. It’s all understandable. And as a man, as a father, I understand this very well,” Zelenskyy said. But “we don’t want to lose opportunities, if we have them, for a diplomatic solution.”
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Wearing the olive drab that has marked his transformation into a wartime leader, he looked visibly exhausted yet animated by a drive to persevere. He spoke to the AP inside the presidential office complex, where windows and hallways are protected by towers of sandbags and heavily armed soldiers.
“We have to fight, but fight for life. You can’t fight for dust when there is nothing and no people. That’s why it is important to stop this war,” Zelenskyy said.
The president said those defenders are tying up “a big part of the enemy forces,” characterizing the battle to hold Mariupol as “the heart of the war” right now.
“It’s beating. We’re fighting. We’re strong. And if it stops beating, we will be in a weaker position,” he said.
Zelenskyy said he is confident Ukrainians would accept peace despite the horrors they have witnessed in the more than six-week-long war.
Those included gruesome images of bodies of civilians found in yards, parks and city squares and buried in mass graves in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha after Russian troops withdrew. Ukrainian and Western leaders have accused Moscow of war crimes.
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Despite hopes for peace, Zelenskyy acknowledged that he must be “realistic” about the prospects for a swift resolution given that negotiations have so far been limited to low-level talks that do not include Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Zelenskyy displayed a palpable sense of resignation and frustration when asked whether the supplies of weapons and other equipment his country has received from the United States and other Western nations were enough to turn the tide of the war.
“Not yet,” he said, switching to English for emphasis. “Of course it’s not enough.”
Still, he noted that there has been increased support from Europe and said deliveries of U.S. weapons have been accelerating.
Just this week, neighboring Slovakia, a European Union member, donated its Soviet-era S-300 air defense system to Ukraine in response to Zelenskyy’s appeal to help “close the skies” to Russian warplanes and missiles.
After meeting Zelenskyy in Kyiv earlier Saturday, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer said he expects more EU sanctions against Russia even as he defended his country’s opposition to cutting off deliveries of Russian natural gas.
The U.S., EU and United Kingdom responded to the images from Bucha with more sanctions, including ones targeting Putin’s adult daughters. While the EU went after the Russian energy sector for the first time by banning coal, it has so far failed to agree on cutting off the much more lucrative oil and natural gas that is funding Putin’s war chest. Europe relies on those supplies to generate electricity, fill fuel tanks and keep industry churning.
In Kyiv on Friday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presented Ukraine’s leader with a questionnaire marking the first step for applying for EU membership. The head of the bloc’s executive arm said the process for completing the questionnaire could take weeks — an unusually fast turnaround — though securing membership would take far longer.
Zelenskyy turned introspective when asked what impact the pace of arms deliveries had for his people and whether more lives could have been saved if the help had come sooner.
“Very often we look for answers in someone else, but I often look for answers in myself. Did we do enough to get them?” he said of the weapons. “Did we do enough for these leaders to believe in us? Did we do enough?”
He paused and shook his head.
“Are we the best for this place and this time? Who knows? I don’t know. You question yourself,” he said.
___
AP photographer Evgeniy Maloletka contributed to this story.
AP · by ADAM SCHRECK and MSTYSLAV CHERNOV · April 9, 2022
18. In Africa, U.S.-Trained Militaries Are Ousting Civilian Governments in Coups
We should be careful of trying to draw a direct link of cause and effect here. It would be a mistake to allow the knee jerk reaction to stop training.
In Africa, U.S.-Trained Militaries Are Ousting Civilian Governments in Coups
Insurrections are disrupting American security strategy in the region and giving Russia an opening to gain sway
FORT BENNING, Ga.—A flurry of military coups across Africa has disrupted the U.S. strategy of enlisting local armies to counter Islamist extremists and other security threats.
The U.S. has trained thousands of African soldiers, from infantrymen rehearsing counterterrorism raids on the edge of the Sahara to senior commanders attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The programs are a linchpin of U.S. policy on the continent, intended to help African allies professionalize their armed forces to fight armed opponents both foreign and domestic.
But U.S. commanders have watched with dismay over the past year as military leaders in several African allies—including officers with extensive American schooling—have overthrown civilian governments and seized power for themselves, triggering laws that forbid the U.S. government from providing them with weapons or training.
“There’s no one more surprised or disappointed when partners that we’re working with—or have been working with for a while in some cases—decide to overthrow their government,” Rear Adm. Jamie Sands, commander of U.S. special-operations forces in Africa, said this week. “We have not found ourselves able to prevent it, and we certainly don’t assess that we’re causing it.”
The strategic setback was apparent in recent weeks here at Fort Benning, where the U.S. Army hosted its annual gathering of top ground-force commanders from around Africa. Senior soldiers from three dozen African countries watched American recruits tackle boot-camp obstacle courses, witnessed parachute training and saw live-ammo tank and mortar demonstrations.
The Army withheld invitations from coup leaders in Mali and Burkina Faso, West African countries engaged in existential struggles with al Qaeda and Islamic State. Guinean soldiers, who in Septembertoppled the West African nation’s civilian government, were left out of the Fort Benning events and are no longer included in U.S.-led special-operations exercises.
African soldiers watched American troops practice hand-to-hand combat last month at Fort Benning, Georgia.
PHOTO: MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Sudan’s ruling junta, which last year reversed a U.S.-supported transition to democratic rule, was unwelcome at the Fort Benning summit. Ethiopia hosted the last such gathering in 2020; this year its military is on the outs with the U.S. over alleged human-rights abuses in its war against Tigrayan rebels.
“We don’t control what happens when we leave,” said U.S. Army Col. Michael Sullivan, commander of the 2d Security Force Assistance Brigade, a unit created to advise and train African armies. “We always hope we’re helping countries do the right thing.”
Last year, a logistics advisory team from Col. Sullivan’s brigade had just arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, and was waiting out its Covid-19 quarantine at a hotel when the Biden administration decided to cancel the deployment “due to our deep concerns about the conflict in northern Ethiopia and human-rights violations and abuses being committed against civilians,” according to a State Department spokesperson.
The advisers completed quarantine and left the country.
“I think everybody is hopeful they will turn the corner again and we’ll be able to work with our Ethiopian partners,” Col. Sullivan said.
Meanwhile, America’s Great Power rivals can seek to take advantage of the U.S. pullback.
Malian commandos attended U.S.-led special-operations exercises in Mauritania in 2020, but were cut off from American training after its military overthrew the president last May. The Malian junta hired Russian mercenaries from the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group to provide security.
The coup and the presence of the Russian agents led to a falling-out between Mali and France, the former colonial power in much of West Africa, and the announcement that Paris would withdraw thousands of troops that were in Mali fighting Islamic State and al Qaeda.
Human Rights Watch alleged this week that the Russians and their Malian allies rounded up and massacred roughly 300 civilian men—some suspected militants—in the town of Moura last month.
Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Damiba, a veteran of U.S. military training, was sworn in as president of Burkina Faso in March following a coup.
PHOTO: OLYMPIA DE MAISMONT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
“The Malian government is responsible for this atrocity, the worst in Mali in a decade, whether carried out by Malian forces or associated foreign soldiers,” Corinne Dufka, a director of Human Rights Watch, said in a written release.
The Malian Defense Ministry reported that it had killed 203 “terrorists” in the operation and arrested 51 others, seizing weapons and ammunition. The military subsequently announced an investigation into the alleged massacre.
For years, the U.S. trained soldiers from Burkina Faso, which is facing waves of attacks from Islamic State fighters and a coalition of al Qaeda affiliates called Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin, or JNIM.
In 2019, Burkina Faso hosted 2,000 commandos from 32 African and Western countries for U.S.-led special-operations exercises, aimed at beefing up security in the Sahel, the semiarid strip just south of the Sahara.
In 2020, Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Damiba was among the Burkina Faso army contingent when the American-led exercises moved to Mauritania. Col. Damiba had previously attended a U.S.-sponsored military intelligence course in Senegal and a State Department peacekeeping-training program.
Early this year, the U.S. military was sufficiently concerned about the spread of militant violence in Burkina Faso to dispatch a Special Forces team to Ouagadougou, the capital city, to advise local commandos.
The Green Berets had just arrived when Burkina Faso soldiers, unhappy with the civilian government’s conduct of the war, surrounded the presidential palace, arrested President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, and announced that a military junta, the Patriotic Movement for Safeguarding and Restoration, would take power.
Eight days after the first burst of gunfire in front of the presidential palace, the junta named Col. Damiba president.
Instead of training local forces, the Green Berets reinforced security at the U.S. Embassy in Ouagadougou, in case the coup unleashed anti-American unrest. The U.S. also suspended work on plans to send one of Col. Sullivan’s advisory teams to the country.
Ghana, Ivory Coast, Benin and Togo dropped Burkina Faso from a joint task force being formed to prevent militants in the Sahel from pushing south toward the Gulf of Guinea—a prospect that alarms the Pentagon.
“Burkina was taken out because of the coup,” said Maj. Gen. Thomas Oppong-Peprah, Ghana’s army chief of staff.
Col. Mamady Doumbouya, who took part in U.S. training exercises before staging a coup in Guinea, is pictured on posters of the capital Conakry last year.
PHOTO: SUNDAY ALAMBA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
American officers say their work with African counterparts routinely includes discussion of the importance of civilian control of the military and adherence to the rule of law.
“So these coups are completely opposite to everything that we’re teaching,” Adm. Sands, the special-operations commander, said in a call with reporters.
Still, Michael Shurkin, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst, questioned whether American lectures can successfully counter the political pressures Africa armies can face amid fierce insurgencies, ethnic divisions and corrupt civilian governments.
“Why is a year at Fort Leavenworth going to change how you behave politically in your own country?” asked Mr. Shurkin, now with 14 North Strategies, an Africa-focused consulting firm. “It just doesn’t make sense to me.”
American Green Berets were in the midst of training Guinean special forces last year when the local soldiers broke away to oust the country’s civilian president. The coup leader, special forces Col. Mamady Doumbouya, had headed Guinea’s delegation to the 2019 American-led commando exercises in Burkina Faso.
When they realized they were at the center of an insurrection, the U.S. commandos took shelter at the U.S. Embassy in Conakry, Guinea’s capital. “At this time, the U.S. Africa Command has suspended all training with the Guinea military,” said a U.S. Africa Command spokeswoman.
Sudan, which had forsaken past ties with terror groups, begun a democratic opening and embarked on a sweeping rapprochement with the U.S., was invited to the U.S.-African army summit in 2020. But a military junta retook power last year and launched a bloody crackdown on protesters, losing its invitation to the Fort Benning event.
U.S. officers say they have no choice but to work with other militaries in global security missions; the U.S. practice is to fight its wars alongside allies. “Our intent is to continue to extend a hand to African nations to help them and really help them address some of the underlying causes of these coups,” said Adm. Sands.
Over the past 20 years, Fort Benning, which specializes in infantry, airborne and Ranger training, has hosted 1,650 soldiers from 37 African countries.
“The military should always collaborate,” said Maj. Gen. Chikunkha Harrison Soko, Malawi’s U.S.–trained land-force commander.
Insecurity in one part of the world quickly leaks into others, he said, through refugee flows and the spread of extremist ideologies. “What affects Europe, affects Africa,” Gen. Soko said. “What affects Africa, affects the whole of Europe.”
19. Russia is Turning into North Korea
Perhaps Korea watchers can expand their portfolios to include focus on Russia. Russia and Korea watchers should join forces!
Russia is Turning into North Korea
Russian President Vladimir Putin is destroying Russian power, and his misbegotten Ukraine war is accelerating Russian decline. Putin himself does not seem to realize this. Western officials increasingly suspect that Putin is being lied to about the war by his closest advisors. And Putin has never seemed much interested in economic affairs. He does not appear to grasp just how much the Russian economy will shrink if the sanctions on Russia are left in place for a lengthy war.
Putin is now a Fascist War Criminal
The regime Putin has built over the last decade and a half is increasingly authoritarian, closed, hyper-nationalistic, and repressive. Putin began his presidency seeking to restore Russian stability after the chaotic 1990s. A strong hand was arguably necessary to rein in the gangsterism of post-Soviet ‘wild west’ capitalism. But Putin slid increasingly toward open authoritarianism, rigging the constitution to stay in power almost indefinitely.
Putin has also become increasingly paranoid about Western intentions. He has seen a Western hand in the ‘color revolutions’ on Russia’s perimeter. He has helped North Korea and Iran evade sanctions. He has sought to play spoiler in the Middle East, particularly in Syria where his military engaged in brutal behavior against civilian targets similar to the shelling of Ukrainian cities in the current war.
At home, this paranoia has led to a closing of Russian society, repression of its civil institutions, jailing of opponents, elimination of opposition media, and so on. An ideology of belligerent nationalism – Russia under siege by hostile Western forces – accompanied this crackdown.
This slide toward rightist authoritarianism seems to have peaked with the Ukraine war, where Putin’s extreme language, embrace of open imperialism, and toleration of war crimes have led many to argue that Putin is now a fascist.
The Russian Economy is Corrupt and Shrinking
Corruption not only undercuts Russian economic growth, it also undercuts its military capability. A stagnant economy cannot support the expense of a hi-tech modern military. Corruption in society inevitably spreads to the military itself. It is increasingly clear that Russian military logistical problems in Ukraine stem from widespread graft – theft and sale of spare parts, fuel, munitions.
On top of this, the war-related sanctions are punishing. Russia’s GDP is now the 11th largest in the world, and economists are predicting a sanctions contraction of 10-15% of GDP just this year (!). If the war drags on for years, Russia will fall out of the world’s top twenty economies in, perhaps, two years. Capital flight and the brain drain will accelerate, as will economic dependence on China.
Reckless Nuclear Threats Worsen Isolation
Putin has responded to Russia’s isolation from diplomatic intercourse and the world economy with outlandish threats and references to nuclear weapons. Putin appears obsessed with Russia’s perception as a great power. Yet Russia does not have the economic might to support its pretensions, and that problem is about to worsen dramatically because of sanctions.
Putin has responded with the nuclear card, talking up these weapons as a last-ditch claim to Russian importance in world politics. As Russian conventional power has stagnated under the weight of a corrupt, dysfunctional economy, its doctrine has increasingly emphasized nuclear weapons. Russia has reduced its threshold for nuclear use as its ability to generate traditional power – to match NATO and China – has declined.
The Ukraine war has illustrated that Russian conventional power is even weaker than outsiders thought. After the war finally ends and Russia’s economic base is much reduced, it will likely strategically lean into its nukes even more as a last grasp at great power prestige.
Russia as North Korea
There is another country much like Russia emerging from the Ukraine war: led by a paranoid, brutal, nationalistic leader toadied to by servile cronies; with a corrupt, dysfunctional economy; loathed, feared, and isolated by much of the world; served by a corrupted, bloated military; leaning into nuclear weapons for international prestige; making outlandish threats and waving its nukes around recklessly; repressive of its own people, where anyone who can leave does; with an extreme nationalist ideology; dependent on China.
Dr. Robert E. Kelly (@Robert_E_Kelly; website) is a professor of international relations in the Department of Political Science at Pusan National University. Dr. Kelly is a 1945 Contributing Editor as well.
20. Intel: Putin may cite Ukraine war to meddle in US politics
Our strategic influence through information advantage campaign: Uee intelligence to recognize Russian strategy, understand it, expose it and then attack the strategy. - recognize, understand, expose, attack.
Intel: Putin may cite Ukraine war to meddle in US politics
AP · by NOMAAN MERCHANT · April 9, 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin may use the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine as a pretext to order a new campaign to interfere in American politics, U.S. intelligence officials have assessed.
Intelligence agencies have so far not found any evidence that Putin has authorized measures like the ones Russia is believed to have undertaken in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections in support of former President Donald Trump, according to several people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive findings.
But given Putin’s antipathy toward the West and his repeated denunciations of Ukraine, officials believe he may see the U.S. backing of Ukraine’s resistance as a direct affront to him, giving him further incentive to target another U.S. election, the people said. It is not yet clear which candidates Russia might try to promote or what methods it might use.
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The assessment comes with the U.S. electoral system already under pressure. The American public remains sharply divided over the last presidential election and the insurrection that followed at the U.S. Capitol, when supporters of Trump tried to stop the certification of his loss to President Joe Biden. Trump has repeatedly assailed intelligence officials and claimed investigations of Russian influence on his campaigns to be political vendettas.
Tensions between Washington and Moscow have reached levels not seen since the end of the Cold War. The White House has increased military support for Ukraine, which has mounted a robust resistance against Russian forces accused of committing war crimes, and helped impose global sanctions that have crippled Russia’s economy.
There’s no sign the war will end soon, which some experts say could delay Moscow from pursuing retaliation while its resources are mired in Ukraine. But “it’s almost certain that a depleted Russian military after Ukraine is going to again double down on hybrid tactics to wreak havoc against us and other allied countries,” said David Salvo, deputy director of the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy.
In Ukraine and in past campaigns against adversaries, Russia has been accused of trying to spread disinformation, amplifying pro-Kremlin voices in the West and using cyberattacks to disrupt governments.
Top U.S. intelligence officials are still working on plans for a new center authorized by Congress focusing on foreign influence campaigns by Russia, China and other adversaries. Avril Haines, the U.S. director of national intelligence, also recently appointed career CIA officer Jeffrey Wichman to the position of election threats executive several months after the departure of the previous executive, Shelby Pierson.
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“Our Election Threats Executive continues to lead the Intelligence Community’s efforts against foreign threats to U.S. elections,” said Nicole de Haay, a spokesperson for Haines, in a statement. “We’re also continuing to work to deliver on the legislative requirement to create a center to integrate intelligence on foreign malign influence.”
De Haay declined to comment on what intelligence officials think of Putin’s intentions. Russia’s embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
Foreign adversaries have long looked to interfere in American politics, according to investigations of past elections and indictments brought against alleged foreign agents. The U.S. has accused Putin of ordering influence operations to try to help Trump in the 2020 election. And a bipartisan Senate investigation of the 2016 election confirmed intelligence findings that Russia used cyber-espionage and information efforts to boost Trump and disparage his opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s nearly two-year investigation found no conclusive evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia, but Mueller declined to pass judgment on whether Trump obstructed justice.
Trump continues to falsely insist that the election he lost to Biden was stolen, with Republicans in many states following his lead and opposing election security measures.
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies continuously investigate foreign influence efforts. The Justice Department last month charged five men with acting on behalf of China to harass Chinese dissidents in the U.S. and derail a little-known congressional candidate.
Experts say the proposed Foreign Malign Influence Center would bring much-needed direction to efforts across government studying adversaries. Congress provided partial funding for the center in the budget passed last month because the budget funds the government through September and not a full year.
The center has been previously delayed over questions within the intelligence director’s office and on Capitol Hill about its structure and size and whether it would unnecessarily duplicate efforts that already exist in government. In a sign that some of those questions remain unresolved, Congress last month also required the director’s office to complete within six months a report on the “future structure, responsibilities, and organizational placement” of the center.
Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that the committee was closely watching “the malign activities of our adversaries” and the proposed center could be one way to help.
“As Russia continues to use disinformation campaigns in Ukraine, we are reminded to be strategic in our response to countering their tactics,” Turner said. “It is no secret that our adversaries use disinformation to undermine the national security interests of the U.S., so we must take into account all viable options to protect our democracy.”
AP · by NOMAAN MERCHANT · April 9, 2022
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.
