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Quotes of the Day:
“It should be the aim of grand strategy to discover and pierce the Achilles’ heel of the opposing government’s power to make war. And strategy, in turn, should seek to penetrate a joint in the harness of the opposing forces. To apply one’s strength where the opponent is strong weakens oneself disproportionately to the effect attained. To strike with strong effect, one must strike at weakness”.
- B.H. Liddell Hart
“Nothing in the Golden Rule says that others will treat us as we have treated them. It only says that we must treat others in a way that we would want to be treated.”
– Rosa Parks
"August 15th, is the anniversary of Korean liberation from Japanese colonial rule with the end of the Second World War in the Pacific. This day represents a moment in time when the aspirations of the independence movement could have been fulfilled. Yet, by 1948, with the creation of two separate governments, the dream two create a unified independent nation true to the ideals of Hong-ik Ingan were dashed....Korean identity, originating in the Dangun founding story and the Hongik Ingan ideal, and forged through harsh historical experience, is inseparable from Korea’s destiny. Hongik Ingan laid out the principles that took root in the Korean consciousness, leading Koreans to aspire to high-minded ideals and adopt a fundamentally spiritual outlook toward life. On the level of society this produced the desire to establish an ideal nation and to become a source of inspiration and learning for the rest of humanity. Hongik Ingan means to live for the benefit of all mankind"
- Dr. Hyun Jin P. Moon”
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 14 (Putin's War)
2. Too Premature to Say Putin is Losing
3. FDD | Why Palestinian Islamic Jihad Rockets Kill So Many Palestinians
4. Ending the Ideology of the Offense, Part I
5. Ukraine 'blows up Wagner HQ in Donbas'
6. China announces new drills as US delegation visits Taiwan
7. China-US decoupling gushes out
8. Nearly 1 year after Afghanistan exit, Gen. Keane says 'we’re right back where we started' in 2001
9. Afghanistan One Year Later: What Does America Really Think?
10. Rethinking How the United States Trains Foreign Militaries
11. Can Putin Really Fight a Two-Front War in Ukraine?
12. Is Russia using rape as a weapon of war in Ukraine?
13. Aid helps Ukraine achieve ‘outweighed gains.’
14. Russia’s Repeat Failures
15. Taiwan’s KMT: Between a Rock and a Hard Place
16. Ukraine Is Waging Guerilla Warfare Hell on Putin
17. Microsoft disrupts Russian-linked hackers targeting NATO countries
18. Do Legislative Visits Actually Help Taiwan?
19. Tracing a conspiracy culture throughout U.S. history: Sarah Kendzior on why con men are an American institution
20. Salman Rushdie and the Cult of Offense
21. Former Afghan president agrees Trump’s deal with Taliban on US withdrawal was a disaster
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 14 (Putin's War)
Maps/ graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-14
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 14
understandingwar.org
Kateryna Stepanenko, Karolina Hird, Grace Mappes, and Frederick W. Kagan
August 14, 9:30 pm ET
Click here to see ISW's interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Russian and proxy troops in Ukraine are likely operating in roughly six groups of forces oriented on Kharkiv City and northeastern Kharkiv Oblast; along the Izyum-Slovyansk line; the Siversk-Lysychansk area; Bakhmut; the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area; and Southern Ukraine. The Kharkiv City and Siversk-Lysychansk groups are likely built around cores drawn from the Western and Central Military Districts respectively. The Izyum-Slovyansk axis is increasingly manned by recently formed volunteer battalions that likely have very low combat power. Wagner Group private military company (PMC) soldiers are in the lead around Bakhmut, while forces drawn from the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) predominate in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area. Troops from the Southern Military District (SMD) likely formed the original core of forces in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts but have been reinforced with troops of the Eastern Military District, Airborne Forces, and Rosgvardia. None of these groupings is homogeneous—elements of various military districts, proxy forces, volunteer units, and other formations are scattered throughout the theater.
These dispositions suggest that Moscow is prioritizing the advance around Bakhmut and, possibly, toward Siversk with its Russian forces while seeking to draw on the enthusiasm of DNR forces to seize ground they have failed to take since 2014 on the Avdiivka axis. The high concentration of volunteer battalions around Izyum and Slovyansk suggests that that area is not a focus of Russian attention and may be vulnerable to Ukrainian counterattacks. The congeries of forces in and around Kherson Oblast may pose significant challenges to Russian command and control, especially if Ukrainian forces press a counteroffensive there.
Kharkiv City and northeastern Kharkiv Oblast:
Mainly Western Military District units
Russian force composition around Kharkiv City is at least in part composed of Western Military District (WMD) units. The Ukrainian General Staff has identified that Russian forces concentrated WMD units around Kharkiv City and in border areas of Russia’s Kursk and Bryansk Oblasts (northeast of the city).[1]Russian offensive operations on this axis have generally been desultory and suggest a lack of focus, possibly reflected in more limited force deployments.
Izyum-Slovyansk line:
Mainly Volunteer Battalions and some Eastern Military District units
Russian forces are likely committing volunteer units and some remaining detachments of the Eastern Military District (EMD) to the Izyum-Slovyansk line and are likely deprioritizing the axis in favor of defending positions in southern Ukraine. Ukrainian military officials reported that EMD elements that had previously supported offensive operations towards Slovyansk have been redeploying to the Southern Axis in an effort to defend occupied territories in western Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Oblasts.[2] Russian outlets and Telegram channels have begun identifying and announcing recruitment for volunteer units operating near Izyum around reports of Ukrainian counteroffensive preparations. Russian media outlet Readovka reported that the volunteer Cossack detachments “Yermak” and “Kuban” are recruiting reinforcements for offensive operations in Kharkiv Oblast, likely around Izyum given that Cossack units have been operating in the area since April.[3] Kremlin-affiliated outlet Kommersant also reported that the “Don” Cossack Detachment that has been fighting around Velyka Komyshyvakha (southwest of Izyum) since April is joining volunteer and other Cossack units (including the ”Kuban” detachment).[4] Russian war correspondent Sasha Kots reported that the “Russian Legion” is recruiting personnel to operate on the Kharkiv-Donetsk Oblast border.[5] The “Russian Legion” has reportedly operated southeast of Izyum since entering Ukraine on May 12. Reliance on volunteer forces may explain the lack of Russian progress and some successful Ukrainian counterattacks on the Izyum-Slovyansk line.
Siversk-Lysychansk:
Central Military District with some DNR and LNR units
Units of the Russian Central Military District (CMD) and some LNR and DNR units are operating on the Siversk-Lysychansk axis and have resumed their offensive operations likely following an operational pause initiated in late July. CMD Commander Colonel General Aleksandr Lapin visited Lysychansk on August 8 and likely ordered CMD troops to resume offensive operations towards Siversk during his visit. The Russian Defense Ministry identified Lapin as responsible for securing Lysychansk on July 3, and he had likely continued to command the troops in the area since then.[6] The grouping has been consistently launching offensive operations in the Siversk area since August 8, whereas they had previously engaged in sporadic limited assaults usually at two-to-three-day intervals.[7] Social media footage published on Twitter on August 5 showed elements of the Russian 55th Motorized Rifle Brigade of the 41st Combined Arms Army of the CMD reportedly operating in the direction of Siversk.[8] ISW has previously reported that Russian forces also moved a CMD battalion tactical group (BTG) to the Severodonetsk-Lysychansk area in late June.[9]
Bakhmut:
Wagner Group with LNR and some WMD units
Detachments of the Wagner Group private military company (PMC) have been active in Russian efforts to gain ground around Bakhmut and have likely contributed to recent successes in this area. Various Russian and Ukrainian sources reported that Wagner Group mercenaries were instrumental in the previous captures of Pokrovske (due east of Bakhmut), Klynove (18km southeast of Bakhmut), Novoluhanske (25km southeast of Bakhmut), and the Vuhlehirska Power Plant (about 20km southeast of Bakhmut).[10] Russian Telegram channels lauded the work of the Wagner Group in completing the tactically complicated capture of the Vuhlehirska Power Plant on July 26, showing the approval that the Russian information space has recently awarded the Wagner Group.[11] LNR units, such as the 6th Cossack Regiment, and other WMD detachments are operating in the Bakhmut direction as well.[12]
The Wagner Group also reportedly maintains a headquarters in Popasna, about 40km northeast of Bakhmut. A Russian miblogger posted imagery on Telegram of his reported visit to the Wagner Group headquarters, which he claimed was in Popasna, on August 9.[13] This location likely allows Wagner Group command to coordinate various offensive operations in northeastern Donetsk Oblast from well within Russian-occupied territory in Luhansk Oblast. Various Russian and Ukrainian sources reported that Ukrainian forces targeted and destroyed the headquarters on August 14, possibly based on geolocation of the aforementioned milblogger’s Telegram post.[14] The strike may impact Wagner’s command and control abilities in the Bakhmut area.
Avdiivka-Donetsk City:
DNR units
DNR units, which have been operating in the area since 2014, are operating in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area after likely having participated in operations to seize Luhansk Oblast. DNR-based milbloggers and war correspondents have been publishing footage of the DNR 1st Slavic Brigade, 5th Brigade, and the 11th Regiment making limited advances north and northwest of Donetsk City.[15] The DNR also began advertising volunteer recruitment for the DNR 100th Guards Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade, and Ukrainian officials reported that Russian occupation authorities have begun to mobilize men from Mariupol to join DNR efforts.[16] Readovka also identified that one unspecified Cossack detachment is operating around Mariinka, northwest of Donetsk City.[17] ISW has previously assessed that DNR-based milbloggers have increased their coverage of small-scale progress on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City axis likely in an effort to boost morale among DNR and Russian fighters.[18] It is likely that such coverage is aimed at recruiting more DNR fighters to support the attempted breakthroughs around Donetsk City.
Southern Ukraine:
Mixed
The Russian force composition along the Southern Axis is relatively more diverse than that of other axes. Russian military leadership has likely rushed a mix of forces to this area to defend it against an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive, which likely explains the wide variety of force groupings in this area. ISW has observed elements of the 35th and 36th Combined Arms Armies (CAA) of the Eastern Military District (EMD), the 22nd Army Corps of the Black Sea Fleet, the 49th CAA of the Southern Military District (SMD), 76th Guards Air Assault Division, and Rosgvardia throughout Southern Ukraine.[19]
Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command noted on August 3 that Russian forces were sending elements of the 35th CAA to northern Kherson Oblast.[20] Various Ukrainian officials reported on August 3 that Ukrainian forces destroyed a command post of the 22nd Army Corps in Chornobaivka, on the outskirts of Kherson City.[21] Ukrainian forces additionally targeted control points of the 76th Air Assault Division in Chornobaivka on August 5.[22] Elements of the 49th CAA reportedly have been active on the western bank of the Dnipro River, particularly in the Snihurivka area of Mykolaiv Oblast.[23] Deputy Chief of Ukraine’s Main Operational Department of the General Staff Oleksiy Gromov stated on August 4 that elements of Rosgvardia (Russia’s internal military force) moved to the eastern bank of Dnipro River, suggesting that Russian forces are prioritizing securing the defense of this bank.[24]
Key Takeaways
- Russian and proxy troops in Ukraine are operating in roughly six force groupings.
- Russian forces conducted ground attacks north of Kharkiv City, northwest of Slovyansk, east of Siversk, and made unspecified gains around Bakhmut.
- Ukrainian forces reportedly struck a Wagner force concentration in Popasna, Luhansk Oblast, inflicting casualties.
- Forty-two states called on Russian forces to withdraw from the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Enerhodar, just two to four hours before another strike hit Enerhodar.
- Ukrainian forces struck the Antonivsky road bridge, likely keeping all three road bridges to and on the right bank of the Dnipro inoperable to heavy equipment.
- Russian military recruitment and enlistment centers continue to face challenges in incentivizing Russians to sign military service contracts.
- Russian occupation authorities continued rubleization measures and civilian data collection in occupied territories to set conditions for annexation referenda.
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.
- Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts);
- Subordinate Main Effort—Encirclement of Ukrainian Troops in the Cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
- Supporting Effort 1—Kharkiv City
- Supporting Effort 2—Southern Axis
- Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces conducted a limited ground attack northwest of Slovyansk on August 14. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops tried to break through Ukrainian defensive lines in Dolyna, about 20km northwest of Slovyansk along the E40 Izyum-Slovyansk highway.[25] Russian forces continued artillery strikes between Izyum and Slovyansk, particularly along the Kharkiv-Donetsk Oblast border near Krasnopillya, Dibrovne, Kurulka, and Bohorodychne.[26]
Russian forces conducted several ground attacks around Siversk on August 14. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian troops conducted reconnaissance-in-force operations near Serebryanka (11km northeast of Siversk) and Vesele (21km southeast of Siversk).[27] Russian forces additionally attempted to advance from Spirne and Ivano-Darivka, 20km and 15km southeast of Siversk, respectively.[28] Russian Telegram channels claimed that Russian forces have seized checkpoints in Spirne and now control the settlement, but ISW cannot independently confirm these claims at this time.[29]
Several Russian and Ukrainian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted a strike (potentially with HIMARS) on a force concentration of the Wagner Group private military company (PMC) in Popasna (east of the Siversk-Bakhmut line) on August 14.[30] Russian Telegram channels reported that the Wagner Group suffered losses as a result of the strike.[31] The Wagner Group has been active in operations in the Popasna-Bakhmut area specifically and has likely contributed to Russian combat capabilities in this area, as ISW has previously reported.[32]
Russian forces continued ground attacks east and south of Bakhmut and made partial gains in this area on August 14. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian forces had “partial success” in the direction of Bakhmut, but offered no specifics.[33] Russian forces reportedly fought around Soledar and Yakovlivka, both within 15km northeast of Bakhmut along the T1302 Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway.[34] Russian forces also continued fighting southeast of Bakhmut around Vershyna (15km southeast of Bakhmut), Kodema (20km southeast of Bakhmut), and Zaitseve (10km southeast of Bakhmut).[35] Russian sources claimed that Russian troops are advancing from positions in Vershyna towards the outskirts of Zaitseve and will continue to push north towards Bakhmut from Zaitseve.[36]
Russian forces conducted ground attacks north and northwest of Donetsk City on August 14. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops repelled a Russian attack on Krasnohorivka, about 20km north of the outskirts of Donetsk City.[37] Ukraine’s Eastern Command Spokesperson Serihy Cherevatyi notably contested the Russian Ministry of Defense’s August 13 claim that Russian troops had taken full control of Pisky.[38] Cherevatyi stated that Russian forces are still actively fighting in Pisky and towards Pervomaiske (about 10km northwest of Pisky along the E50 highway), but that Ukrainian troops retain control of the town.[39] Cherevatyi’s assertion is supported by geolocated footage of a Russian strike on a building in Pisky, which suggests that the Russians are still targeting Ukrainian troops within the settlement rather than fully controlling it.[40] Russian sources also claimed that Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) troops have begun fighting towards Nevelske, just 1km west of Pisky.[41] While Russian forces likely have not cleared the entirety of Pisky, they are likely consolidating their positions in order to launch further attacks westward.
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks southwest of Donetsk City on August 14. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces attacked Pavlivka, Vremivka, and Prechystivka, all settlements within about 25km of the Zaporizhzhia-Donetsk Oblast border.[42] Russian troops continued air and artillery strikes in the area between Donetsk City and the southwestern oblast border.[43]
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum and prevent Ukrainian forces from reaching the Russian border)
Russian forces conducted a limited ground attack north of Kharkiv City on August 14. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian reconnaissance-in-force attempt near Pytomnyk, about 10km north of Kharkiv City.[44] The Russian Defense Ministry formally claimed that Russian forces took Udy, echoing Russian sources’ August 13 claims, but there is no further evidence to support this claim.[45] Russian forces conducted airstrikes north of Kharkiv City near Pytomnyk and northeast of Kharkiv City near Peremoha and Verkhnii Saltiv.[46] Russian forces continued shelling settlements north, northeast, and east of Kharkiv City.[47] Kharkiv Oblast Head Oleg Synegubov stated that Russian forces struck the Kyivskyi District of Kharkiv City with incendiary munitions on the evening of August 13.[48]
Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Forty-two states, including all European Union members, released a joint statement calling on Russia to immediately withdraw from the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) in occupied Enerhodar, Zaporizhzhia Oblast around 0500-0600 ET on August 14, just two to four hours before further strikes hit the city. Ukrainian government sources reported that Russian forces fired six rounds at Enerhodar at 1500-1530 Ukrainian time (0800-0830 ET) on August 14, killing an employee of the NPP.[49] Russian sources accused Ukrainian forces of striking the NPP with foreign-manufactured kamikaze drones, GMLRS rockets, and NATO artillery systems.[50] ISW reported on August 13 that geolocated footage shows a Russian Pion 203mm artillery system operating roughly 11km from the Zaporizhzhia NPP.[51]
Ukrainian forces again struck the Antonivsky road bridge near Kherson City overnight on August 13-14, likely ensuring that all three road bridges into central Kherson Oblast remain unusable.[52] Ukrainian government sources confirmed that Ukrainian forces struck the Antonivsky road bridge and stated that military convoys cannot cross the bridge.[53] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command stated that Ukrainian forces are continuing to target Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs).[54] Footage of the strikes shows explosions from the Antonivsky Bridge as the missiles likely struck Russian military equipment, ammunition, or fuel transports on the bridge.[55] Ukrainian First Deputy Head of Kherson Oblast Rada (parliament) Yuriy Sobolevskyi claimed that a significant portion of the Russian military command left Kherson City, likely to avoid being trapped in Kherson City if Ukrainian strikes cut off all GLOCs connecting the right bank of the Dnipro River to the Russian rear.[56]
Russian forces did not make any confirmed territorial gains on the Southern Axis on August 14. Ukraine's Southern Operational Command reported that two Russian airborne detachments of an unspecified echelon attempted a failed ground assault towards Lozove, Kherson Oblast.[57] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command also reported that Ukrainian forces conducted successful missile strikes on Russian ammunition depots in Muzykivka and Nova Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast.[58] An explosion occurred in the port of Berdyansk, Zaporizhzhia Oblast.[59] Zaporizhzhia occupation official Vladimir Rogov claimed that a failure in fire safety protocols resulted in the explosion.[60] Ukrainian forces have previously struck the port of Berdyansk and partisans have been active in Berdyansk in recent weeks.[61] Russian forces intensified airstrikes along the line of contact in Kherson Oblast, including striking Bila Krynytsa, Velyke Artakove, and Bilohirka, Kherson Oblast.[62] Russian forces fired on Nikopol, Maharets, and Kryvyi Rih district, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, damaging civilian and critical infrastructure.[63] Russian forces struck residential areas and port infrastructure of Mykolaiv City with GMLRS rounds and continued shelling along the entire line of contact.[64]
Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
Russian military recruitment and enlistment centers continue to face challenges in incentivizing Russians to sign military service contracts. St. Petersburg-based outlet Fontanka reported that military-aged men (some as old as 49 years of age) began receiving letters and calls ordering them to show up in military recruitment centers to chat about contract service.[65] Fontanka followed one of these men to the military recruitment center and observed that the officials required the man to sign a waiver stating that he is not interested in contract service. ISW has previously reported that Russian lawyers warned against responding to such letters and calls, as it is one way that Russian authorities coerce men into signing contracts.[66]
A senior assistant of a local military commissariat told Fontanka that the center has only deployed three or four contracted soldiers to Ukraine in total, while 15 other people who had expressed interest in contract service did not complete their documentation. The senior assistant noted that the recruitment center collects written refusals to sign military contracts to show leadership that they attempted to fulfill their orders but were unsuccessful in incentivizing recruits. The senior assistant added that the recruitment center would take at least a year to form a volunteer unit in peacetime and that the interest in contract service has significantly decreased since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.
The report also supports ISW’s assessment that Russian forces are treating all security forces as prospective manpower in Ukraine, as Fontanka noted that a policeman received a similar letter to appear at the military recruitment center. The report added that the military recruitment center staff was not enthusiastic about promoting contract service, likely echoing general disinterest among residents of large cities to participate in the war. The military recruitment center offered the summoned men the same pay and benefits as offered by Russian federal subjects (regions) to recruits for the volunteer battalions, which indicates that the Kremlin is conducting a large-scale recruitment campaign through different portals with likely limited success.
The federal subjects are likely unable to generate the necessary number of recruits in a short time period and are increasing financial incentives to meet the deadlines. The Republic of Tatarstan announced that recruits for the “Alga” and “Timer” Volunteer Battalions would receive a one-time enlistment payment of 360,000 rubles (approximately 5,800) instead of the initially advertised 260,000 rubles (about $4,200).[67] The Republic of Tatarstan likely increased its offered enlistment bonus due to a lack of recruits. ISW previously reported that the Republic of Tatarstan likely misreported the number of enlisted and prospective recruits in an effort to garner more interest in volunteer battalions.[68]
Russian local media outlets identified an additional volunteer unit that will be joining the recently-announced 3rd Army Corps. The Novosibirsk-based “Vega” Volunteer Battalion reportedly participated in a celebratory ceremony for their deployment to an unspecified area on August 12.[69] Local outlets continued to advertise the benefits of contract service in volunteer battalions, suggesting that Novosibirsk Oblast has not yet met its quota of recruits. ISW has previously identified that Penza and Samara Oblasts’ volunteer battalions will serve as parts of the 3rd Army Corps, which further supports ISW’s initial assessment that the new 3rd Army Corps will be at least in part composed of recent recruits.[70]
Unknown assailants continued to target Russian military recruitment centers throughout Russia. Kremlin-sponsored outlet RIA Novosti claimed that police detained two followers of the Antifa Movement who attempted to set a military recruitment center in Krasnoyarsk Krai on fire on August 10.[71] Russian online outlet News.Ru reported that there have been over 20 attempts to set Russian military recruitment centers on fire since the first incident on February 28 in Lukhovitsy, Moscow Oblast.[72]
Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)
Russian occupation authorities continued efforts to increase control of occupied territories through rubleization measures and collection of civilian data to set conditions for annexation referenda. Deputy Head of the Kherson occupation administration Kirill Stremousov stated that businesses in occupied Kherson Oblast are seeking to exclusively conduct business with rubles instead of hryvnias.[73] Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported that Kherson City occupation authorities are pressuring ambulance workers to sign forms consenting to work for the new occupation government and receive payments in rubles rather than hryvnias.[74] GUR also stated that Russian occupation authorities are continuing to collect personal passport data from recipients of humanitarian aid, civilians who contact the occupation government, and customers of Russian mobile phone services.[75] Occupation authorities can leverage financial incentives and personal information to coerce Ukrainian civilians into cooperating with the occupation government, including coercion to vote in favor of the referenda. Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai stated that Russian occupation authorities are campaigning for a referendum among displaced civilians in Svatove, Luhansk Oblast, promising to “solve all their problems” if the displaced civilians vote in favor of the referendum.[76]
Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.
[15] https://t.me/nm_dnr/8737; https://t.me/kommunist/8303; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/39193; https://tass dot ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/15338023?utm_source=google.com&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=google.com&utm_referrer=google.com
[19] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=400798705452366; https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=400798705452366; https://t.me/khersonskaODA/768; https://t.me/spravdi/14718; https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1552978414801412097; https://realist dot online/politika/armija-bolotnikh-smuhastikiv-navishcho-voroh-nakopichuje-desantni-sili-na-pivdni-ukrajini-; https://twitter.com/The_Lookout_N/status/155297505120457523; https://tw... https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/07/27/na-hersonskomu-napryamku-ruh-oporu-likviduvav-grupu-okupantiv-ta-zdobuv-umovni-poznachennya-shyfry-ta-mapy-voroga/; https://t.me/informnapalm/11142; https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1552978414801412097; https://realist dot online/politika/armija-bolotnikh-smuhastikiv-navishcho-voroh-nakopichuje-desantni-sili-na-pivdni-ukrajini-; https://twitter.com/The_Lookout_N/status/1552975051204575237; https://t.co/LpJOwicgnC; https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/15570996707... https://lb dot ua/society/2022/08/04/525295_vorog_prodovzhuie_pidgotovku.htm; https://ua dot interfax.com.ua/news/general/850517.html; https://www dot ukrinform.ua/rubric-ato/3543522-na-hersonsini-vijskovih-rf-lakaut-zagorodzuvalnimi-zagonami-cecenciv.html; https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1555155302412173315; https://vk.com/anti_terrorism?w=wall-107187851_166517
[22] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=784657516308592; https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1552978414801412097; https://realist dot online/politika/armija-bolotnikh-smuhastikiv-navishcho-voroh-nakopichuje-desantni-sili-na-pivdni-ukrajini-; https://twitter.com/The_Lookout_N/status/1552975051204575237
[23] https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1552978414801412097; https://realist dot online/politika/armija-bolotnikh-smuhastikiv-navishcho-voroh-nakopichuje-desantni-sili-na-pivdni-ukrajini-; https://twitter.com/The_Lookout_N/status/1552975051204575237; https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1552526084821893120; https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/07/27/na-hersonskomu-napryamku-ruh-oporu-likviduvav-grupu-okupantiv-ta-zdobuv-umovni-poznachennya-shyfry-ta-mapy-voroga/
[24] https://lb dot ua/society/2022/08/04/525295_vorog_prodovzhuie_pidgotovku.htm; https://ua dot interfax.com.ua/news/general/850517.html; https://www dot ukrinform.ua/rubric-ato/3543522-na-hersonsini-vijskovih-rf-lakaut-zagorodzuvalnimi-zagonami-cecenciv.html
[63] https://t.me/dnipropetrovskaODA/1548; https://t.me/mykola_lukashuk/1034; https://t.me/vilkul/1717; https://t.me/Yevtushenko_E/511; https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/08/14/okupanty-obstrilyaly-dva-rajony-dnipropetrovshhyny-z-gradiv-ta-stvolnoyi-artyleriyi/; https://t.me/rybar/37161; https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1206792250115652; https://www.facebook.com/okPivden/posts/pfbid0jLodm987VnaPrEvuy2w1vAxnEF...
[65] https://www dot fontanka.ru/2022/08/13/71568242/; https://www dot fontanka.ru/2022/08/13/71568227/?isPreview=1
[67] https://kazanfirst dot ru/news/589794
[69] https://rberega dot info/archives/86991; https://rberega dot info/archives/86950
[71] https://newizv dot ru/news/society/10-08-2022/v-krasnoyarske-zaderzhali-antifashistov-sobiravshihsya-podzhech-voenkomat
[72] https://news dot ru/society/sploshnoe-beloe-pyatno-kto-podzhigaet-voenkomaty-v-rossii/
[73] https://tass dot ru/ekonomika/15465705
[74] https://gur dot gov.ua/content/okupanty-v-khersoni-vymahaiut-vid-medykiv-pidpysuvaty-dokumenty-pro-zghodu-otrymuvaty-zarplatu-v-rubliakh.html
[75] https://gur dot gov.ua/content/okupanty-v-khersoni-vymahaiut-vid-medykiv-pidpysuvaty-dokumenty-pro-zghodu-otrymuvaty-zarplatu-v-rubliakh.html
[76] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/08/14/rosiyany-agituyut-luganchan-jty-na-referendum-tyh-komu-nide-zymuvaty/; https://t.me/luhanskaVTSA/4987
understandingwar.org
2. Too Premature to Say Putin is Losing
Excerpts:
If we do not step up to see that the people of Ukraine have what they need, the Russian army will eventually be able to regroup and use its numerous advantages to make genuine progress in overcoming Ukraine piece by piece. The people of Ukraine will not have the resources they need to defend themselves. Likewise, as Putin’s scorched earth campaign continues through the changing seasons, our coalition in support of Ukraine is going to face greater and greater stress. Will it hold?
And, if Russia wins in Ukraine, Washington’s miscalculations will become evident as Putin presses on NATO’s borders. Then, the financial cost of supporting Ukraine will pale in comparison to the cost of fighting Russia in NATO countries. If that were to happen, forget the administration’s “no boots on the ground” stance – there will be U.S. boots firmly on the ground and U.S. lives on the line.
The cost of letting Putin dictate our moves today will lead to far greater U.S. costs in the future.
The weapons Ukraine needs and the critical logistics to support those weapons need to be delivered to the front lines right now.
Too Premature to Say Putin is Losing - KyivPost - Ukraine's Global Voice
By Robert McConnell. Published Aug. 14 at 2:16 pm
kyivpost.com
Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to intimidate the West and keeps Washington from fully committing to Ukraine. And time is not on Ukraine’s side.
Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine, the U.S., NATO, and the West has not gone as the tyrant had planned. Ukraine has not crumbled, the NATO alliance remains united and is so far holding together, while the Russian army’s reputation has been badly bruised.
Added to that, Western companies are pulling out of Russia, sanctions imposed so far are having an impact on the Russian people, and Sweden and Finland are being welcomed as new members of NATO.
Putin’s personal commitment to a distorted view of history and a fantasy rationale for his war in Ukraine, weakens his standing outside Russia, at least in the West. But he still maintains to garner substantial support at home. Putin is evidently in this war for the long term (he has little choice) and he continues to dictate the terms and manage operations at a micro level.
Sanctions, no matter how extensive, will not win the war with Russia. Put simply, Putin’s army will not stop until it is defeated in battle.
Since 2008’s invasion of Georgia, Putin has continued his aggression against Russia’s neighbors, along with the the security structures created after World War II. He has poked those structures and the West over and over again, with minimal consequences.
In 2014, he seized, occupied, and annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. Under the cover of his own propaganda, he then invaded eastern Ukraine to “protect Russian-speakers” and, despite some setbacks, continues slaughtering Russian-speaking people in Ukraine. He is targeting innocent civilians and destroying villages, towns and cities.
The extent of the slaughter is far worse than what is publicly reported. Western reporting standards limit the visuals we see, but what the people of Ukraine see day-after-day are almost unimaginable atrocities.
Many volunteers stepping forward to help the courageous women of Dattalion – an independent open-source database – on documenting Russian war crimes, leave shortly after joining the information effort. They simply cannot deal with the up-close reality that is Putin’s war of brutal and indiscriminate murder and destruction.
Help is there, but not enough to win
Despite Washington increasing its aid to Ukraine in the face of Putin’s remorseless savagery, it has not come close to providing the necessary weapons in the right place and at the right time. It seems determined to help Ukraine continue to fight but has not committed to enabling Ukraine to win.
Keep in mind who is fighting on each side in this war. Putin is fighting with the Russian army. Their opponents are virtually all the people of Ukraine who are fighting for freedom and independence one way or another. They are fighting for themselves, their country and all of us. They are fighting for our critical national security interests and the agency of western democracy.
Nevertheless, it seems the thinking in Washington is to avoid escalating the war in Ukraine to a situation that might require direct U.S. involvement. Washington is intent on not risking Putin’s use of a nuclear weapon when, in effect, he is already using it.
Nuclear blackmail
Think first of the Russian Army’s take-over and at best cavalier handling of the Chornobyl nuclear power station earlier in the war, and the on-going unconscionable shelling of the huge Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. That is what I mean by saying Putin is dictating the terms of this war and Washington is allowing him to do so.
Threats, bluster, and inserting the word “nuclear” in Putin’s and his minion’s statements serves as a checkmate to Washington’s doing what it should and must do – to make sure the people of Ukraine can win this war for themselves and the democratic world.
For how many decades have we been hearing about “nuclear deterrence” and the fact that one nuclear power could not possibly use its arsenal because of the response that would inevitably come? The U.S., a superpower, at one time behaved like a superpower. Now, Washington cowers before Putin’s threats and is providing too little, too late. And it is not providing enough for Ukraine to win while it still has time on its side.
If we do not step up to see that the people of Ukraine have what they need, the Russian army will eventually be able to regroup and use its numerous advantages to make genuine progress in overcoming Ukraine piece by piece. The people of Ukraine will not have the resources they need to defend themselves. Likewise, as Putin’s scorched earth campaign continues through the changing seasons, our coalition in support of Ukraine is going to face greater and greater stress. Will it hold?
And, if Russia wins in Ukraine, Washington’s miscalculations will become evident as Putin presses on NATO’s borders. Then, the financial cost of supporting Ukraine will pale in comparison to the cost of fighting Russia in NATO countries. If that were to happen, forget the administration’s “no boots on the ground” stance – there will be U.S. boots firmly on the ground and U.S. lives on the line.
The cost of letting Putin dictate our moves today will lead to far greater U.S. costs in the future.
The weapons Ukraine needs and the critical logistics to support those weapons need to be delivered to the front lines right now.
Robert McConnell is co-founder of the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation and Director of External Relations for the Foundation’s Friends of Ukraine Network.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.
kyivpost.com
3. FDD | Why Palestinian Islamic Jihad Rockets Kill So Many Palestinians
Excerpts;
A Reuters expose in 2012 found evidence that the group was also test-firing rockets into the neighboring Egyptian Sinai, where collaborators would report back regarding impact. But with the Sisi government now in place in Cairo, such an option is no doubt denied them. So in wartime, Islamic Jihad and Hamas are often firing blind, with rockets that are – in performance terms – a Russian roulette.
But thanks to Iranian support, the precision, range and lethality of Islamic Jihad’s weapons will likely improve, as have those of other Iranian proxies in the region like Lebanese Hezbollah. In time, Islamic Jihad will grow more effective at killing Israeli civilians. This will require more Israeli military action to deter and punish the terror group. More Palestinian civilians will die as Islamic Jihad’s zeal to kill Israeli civilians – matched only by that of Hamas and their Iranian patron – overwhelms any concern for the lives of the
FDD | Why Palestinian Islamic Jihad Rockets Kill So Many Palestinians
Roughly 200 Gaza rockets misfired in the recent conflict, killing at least 15 civilians. So why are Islamic Jihad’s projectiles so fatally unreliable? And what are Iran’s plans for its proxy?
Mark Dubowitz
Chief Executive
Behnam Ben Taleblu
Senior Fellow
fdd.org · by Mark Dubowitz Chief Executive · August 14, 2022
As a pioneer of suicide bombings, Palestinian Islamic Jihad has long made clear its willingness to kill Palestinians in order to kill Israelis. The latest surge of fighting across the Gaza Strip border took the group’s tactical nihilism up a notch: Its rockets caused Palestinian casualties that exceeded the collateral damage from Israel’s military strikes.
According to estimates from the Israel Defense Forces, of the approximately 51 dead in Gaza, at least 15 were killed by Palestinian rockets that unintentionally landed in the coastal strip. Haaretz’s latest report indicates 16 killed by rockets and 49 Palestinians in total. By contrast, Israel killed 11 Palestinians as collateral damage. The remainder of the deaths involved Palestinian terrorists killed by Israeli forces.
These same estimates indicate that of the approximately 1,100 projectiles launched by the terrorist group, roughly 200 rockets – or 18 percent of all strikes – malfunctioned or otherwise fell short of their target. Thanks to Israel’s Iron Dome air-defense system, no Israelis perished from Palestinian rockets.
Two of the Islamic Jihad misfires that killed Palestinians took place in the final hours of the conflict, as the group stepped up its salvos in the hope of entering the cease-fire with dead Israelis as a trophy. No doubt the gunners’ zest to beat the deadline, while avoiding exposure to lethal Israeli counterstrikes, had further deleterious effects on the accuracy of these rockets.
This self-inflicted damage provoked a response from Hamas, which rules Gaza. Shortly after the conflict ended, Hamas issued strict rules on Gaza media coverage, prohibiting Gaza-based outlets from reporting on Palestinians killed by Palestinian rockets or military operations. Hamas also required reporters to blame Israel. The terrorist group later rescinded these rules after protests from international media, which depend heavily on Palestinian reporters and translators. But the implicit threat to local and foreign media was clear for future coverage.
Also clear: the dismal operational performance of Islamic Jihad, twinned with Israel’s decapitation of the Islamic Jihad high command, contributed to the Iranian-backed faction’s decision to agree to a cease-fire after a reported 56 hours of fighting that exacted zero Israeli fatalities. What remains to be seen is whether Islamic Jihad will manage to overhaul and improve its arsenal ahead of the next round of violence.
Conditions are not currently in its favor. But that may change with support from the Islamic Republic of Iran.
With hefty funding from Tehran, Islamic Jihad has acquired more sophisticated antitank missiles, explosive UAVs, and other advanced weapons. It is also the recipient of Iranian know how to locally produce projectiles. This represents a shift from transferring complete systems seen in the Iranian arsenal, such as the Fajr-3 and Fajr-5, to proliferating technology and component parts specifically for Iran’s proxies, making attribution and interception comparatively harder. This strategy is already yielding new and more lethal rockets, like the Badr-3 with its 250-plus kilogram warhead, which are fast appearing on the battlefield. Hamas employed the Badr-3 in the May 2021 war against Israel.
However, at present, most of Islamic Jihad’s arsenal remains rudimentary. Israeli and Egyptian interdiction has hampered the terrorist group’s efforts to smuggle factory grade munitions into Gaza through the Sinai and Sudan. This has required its cadres to resort to improvised and Gaza-based production, consulting Iranian-supplied manufacturing blueprints, with water pipes repurposed as rocket casings and fertilizer-mix explosives filling the warheads. As a precaution against Israeli counterstrikes, Islamic Jihad has positioned some of the rockets in small underground silos for future remote activation, though changing weather and soil erosion can impair their aim.
Islamic Jihad and Hamas, as well as the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon, position these silos near schools, homes, mosques and hospitals using human shields, including children.
Though the use of human shields is prohibited under American law and UN resolutions, these terrorist groups are adept at using civilians to force the IDF to call off strikes against rocket launchers and other weaponry targeting Israeli civilians – or bear harsh international condemnation for Palestinian civilian casualties.
Islamic Jihad and Hamas have long trumpeted these rudimentary weapons and battlefield tactics as a badge of honor in their asymmetrical struggle against a militarily superior enemy. These admissions are well-documented, and should now render hollow their attempt, after the latest conflict, to deny they had inflicted Palestinian casualties.
After all, any munition can misfire, but the risk is far greater for munitions manufactured underground and with subpar materials. A bent fin, too short a fuse or engine fuel overheated by the summer sun can be enough to cause one of these rockets to blow up too close to launch or plummet to the ground mid-flight.
One bystander’s video showed a rocket banking almost 180 degrees, then plunging into a Gaza neighborhood. In another video, a rocket nearly strikes an Al-Mayadeen news crew in Gaza before it hits the ground.
Islamic Jihad’s rockets lack guidance systems, instead being designed for fire-and-forget saturation attacks hoping to overwhelm Israel’s Iron Dome interceptors. Still, even the simplest of rockets need to be test-fired, and here is another weakness facing the militant Islamists of Gaza: While they have launched rockets into the Mediterranean Sea, they do not have monitoring and telemetry systems capable of providing accurate data on impact points that would help extrapolate range and accuracy.
A Reuters expose in 2012 found evidence that the group was also test-firing rockets into the neighboring Egyptian Sinai, where collaborators would report back regarding impact. But with the Sisi government now in place in Cairo, such an option is no doubt denied them. So in wartime, Islamic Jihad and Hamas are often firing blind, with rockets that are – in performance terms – a Russian roulette.
But thanks to Iranian support, the precision, range and lethality of Islamic Jihad’s weapons will likely improve, as have those of other Iranian proxies in the region like Lebanese Hezbollah. In time, Islamic Jihad will grow more effective at killing Israeli civilians. This will require more Israeli military action to deter and punish the terror group. More Palestinian civilians will die as Islamic Jihad’s zeal to kill Israeli civilians – matched only by that of Hamas and their Iranian patron – overwhelms any concern for the lives of the Palestinian people.
Mark Dubowitz is the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Twitter: @mdubowitz. Behnam Ben Taleblu is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
fdd.org · by Mark Dubowitz Chief Executive · August 14, 2022
4. Ending the Ideology of the Offense, Part I
Excerpts:
Absent a specific problem to match up against, there are no gaps to analyze that could provide data about, for example, how much range is adequate for a new missile. In the case of ground-based long-range fires, a missile with a thousand-mile range can hit Moscow from NATO territory. Unintended or not, such a weapon would likely be perceived as a strategic threat to the Russians and potentially escalatory. Furthermore, Moscow will assume the missile, like theirs of similar range, is nuclear-capable, thus increasing their perception of risk. On the other hand, if launched from Guam, the same missile weapon would fall into the Pacific Ocean before reaching China.
An assessment of specific adversary capabilities would yield data that might create the demand for two systems of different ranges. The data would also provide a gap analysis to show how many of each would be required in each theater. Absent this context, “longer range” and “more weapons” are the only answer possible.
Ironically, all the technologies that have been and are being developed for rapid, decisive offensive operations turn out to be even more formidable in the defense. They deny our adversaries surprise and enable us to dispose our forces where they can most effectively defend against attack. Consequently, as Alex Vershinin notes: “Emerging technologies in the fields of network, artificial intelligence, and space are shifting the balance back to defenses.” He continues by stating that the United States may have missed this shift and that the consequences are significant: “Unable to fight a short decapitation campaign, the United States may be forced into a prolonged attrition campaign, at unacceptable political costs.”
In the next part of this essay, I will turn to how the war in Ukraine can help the Department of Defense better understand the ascendance of the defense, so it can better prepare for the military problems it faces now and in the future.
Ending the Ideology of the Offense, Part I - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by David Johnson · August 15, 2022
We have already stated what defense is — simply the more effective form of war: a means to win a victory that enables one to take the offensive after superiority has been gained; that is, to proceed to the active object of the war.
-Carl von Clausewitz
“Would you rather be Ukraine and be on the defense, or Russia and on the offense?” “I would always rather be on the offense.”
-A conversation with a U.S. Army infantry officer shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine
In the aftermath of America’s crushing victory over Iraq, President George H.W. Bush declared, “The ghosts of Vietnam have been laid to rest beneath the sands of the Arabian desert.” The capabilities and concepts developed to fight the Soviet Union had performed brilliantly.
The party, however, was short-lived, as the post-Cold War downsizing that had temporarily been deferred when Iraq attacked Kuwait continued. For the first time since the 1940s, the United States did not face a threat from a powerful country. Consequently, the three main factors that frame a military problem — a place, an adversary, and the adversary’s capabilities — were in flux. The key questions were: What would the U.S. military be and do after the collapse of the Soviet Union?
Absent a clear threat, the U.S. Department of Defense adopted capabilities-based planning in the aftermath of the Cold War. Given the absence of any peer adversary in the foreseeable future, this was unavoidable. This is no longer the case. With presidential guidance to deter China and Russia, and to prevail in conflict if deterrence fails, the Department of Defense now has threats against which to plan. It is time for change.
The U.S. military, designed as it is for offensive expeditionary operations, is ill-prepared for its principal mission of deterrence. Indeed, against nuclear-armed adversaries, several aspects of U.S. warfighting concepts have a high risk of escalation. Further, information and precision strike technologies have progressed to the point where the defense has become ascendant. This is now being displayed in Ukraine and should change U.S. approaches to deterrence. Such a reorientation will be difficult, because of the strong institutional and cultural preferences in the U.S. military for offensive operations.
Building the Force Absent a Significant Military Problem
In preparation for the February 1990 Department of Defense budget submission Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell had been working within the Bush administration to gain consensus on what became known as the “Base Force.” That plan essentially cut the existing structure by 25 percent and called for “armed forces capable of fighting two major regional conflicts ‘near simultaneously’” as the force sizing construct to determine service end strengths. In aggregate, Powell believed that the base force was sufficient for the challenges of the foreseeable future. This seemed logical at the time with the end of the Cold War. As Powell wrote in his memoir, “our old nemesis [is] not only down but out.” At the time that he penned these words, Powell, and most of the world, believed them.
Although the joint force would still need capabilities, they would be for different purposes than during the Cold War. For example, Powell noted, “we might no longer have a specific airlift requirement to move X million tons of matériel to Europe to meet a potential Soviet invasion. But we still needed the capability to move huge stores to unpredictable trouble spots around the world.” It would, however, be more difficult justify new combat capabilities because any foreseeable contingency could be met with existing and programmed systems. If they could defeat Iraq so handily, they were fit for purpose against lesser adversaries who were the only ones on the horizon.
With the significant reductions planned for the Europe-based force, the joint force was steadily becoming more continental U.S-based. The “place” was anywhere and everywhere. Importantly, aside from the defense of South Korea, combat missions required this force to execute offensive operations, generally to compel an adversary to change its behavior, e.g., end Serbia’s persecution of its ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo.
These were the days of the Weinberger and Powell doctrines that called for clear objectives, the use of force as a last resort for clear policy objectives, and the employment of overwhelming force in the application of military power. In the 1991 National Security Strategy, Bush made a statement that reflected the view that although challenges were looming, “We cannot be the world’s policeman with responsibility for solving all the world’s security problems.”
The World’s Policeman
The incoming Clinton administration had a different view of military sufficiency and its utility. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin’s views of the Base Force given in a speech to the Atlantic Council in January 1992 showed that more cuts were coming. He viewed the Base Force as “less of the same,” essentially a smaller version of the Cold War structure. Aspin mandated what became known as the “Bottom-Up Review,” asserting that “American concern about economic threats means that the new American force must be a less expensive one.” What followed were a series of significant budget cuts — the so-called “Peace Dividend” — that persisted throughout the Clinton administration. There were significant personnel cuts, reductions in the number of forces based overseas, particularly in Europe, and the deactivation of units and naval vessels. The goal was military sized and designed for a very different world than that of the Cold War.
These decisions were, at the time, logical. After decades of significant investments to deter and contain the Soviet Union, that principal threat was gone. Aside from realizing an opportunity to invest in domestic priorities, the Clinton administration was determined to reduce the deficit to better the U.S. economic position. Unfortunately, the peaceful world predicted by many was not a reality. Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm were not a coda to the Cold War; problems that had simmered below the surface of the Soviet threat were now suddenly surfacing.
The Clinton administration soon found itself acting as the world’s policeman in contingencies in Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and elsewhere. These operations included war, peacekeeping, disaster relief, and providing humanitarian assistance around the globe. It was stretching the military thin, but despite Powell’s reluctance, views like those of Secretary of State Madeline Albright held sway: “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”
Although the two major regional conflicts, renamed major theater wars, were still the basic construct, demands on the force steadily increased. This created a perfect storm: a military designed for conventional combat, frequently deployed to irregular contingencies with unpredictable frequency, operating on a declining budget. The billpayer became research and development for future capabilities, a particularly easy choice to cut absent a competitive threat. Thus, the legacy systems from the Cold War era remained in the field — and were envisioned to be there indefinitely — with little in the pipeline to replace them.
Finally, given the post-Cold War force posture, military interventions were principally offense-based operations designed to compel opponents to change behaviors, such as stopping the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, or what at the time were termed military operations other than war, such as stability operations in Bosnia. Concepts began to mirror practice, and the rapid deployment of sufficient forces from the continental United States or the remaining overseas bases became the norm.
Modernizing Without a Military Problem
The 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review instituted capabilities-based planning as the new approach to modernization. This decision would have a significant influence on future U.S. warfighting concepts and their supporting capabilities. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the specifics of the decades-old military problem of a given place, adversary, and an adversary’s capabilities were gone. Something had to replace it. That something was at the core of capabilities-based planning.
As Michael Pietrucha wrote, the decision meant that “no more would DOD plan to fight an actual enemy.” Thus, the critical context of the military problem was replaced by an approach that “would plan to deal with a collection of enemy capabilities. … A strategy oriented on a potential enemy was out.”
Pietrucha disagreed with the approach because it “ignore[d] the necessity of accounting for cultural, geographic and strategy aspects of any given opponent and concentrate[d] on technology instead.” Pietrucha criticized capabilities-based planning as “a defense procurement strategy” and “intellectually lazy” as a warfighting approach. As former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Operational Energy Sharon Burke noted: “We didn’t know who the enemy was anymore but wanted really big weapons programs, anyway.”
In retrospect, these criticisms may ring true but at the time they were irrelevant. The adversaries the U.S. military faced were even less capable than the Iraqi military that had been trounced during Operation Desert Storm. The United States already vastly overmatched the best in class. But would that be the case in the future? This was the conundrum facing the U.S. military, due to the long lead times involved in advanced weapons system development and fielding.
Capable for Whom with What?
In capabilities-based planning, there is little or no constraining of a technology whose imperative is to defeat the “best in class” of all potential adversaries in the deep future. This is important because the timeframes driving development are generally decades in the future. For example, one of the key documents driving joint modernization was Joint Vision 2020, published in 2000. At these time horizons, the specifics of any competing technologies are largely unknowable.
This has two consequences in capabilities-based planning. First, U.S. capabilities must be continually improved because no weapon is ever “good enough.” Second, because anything is possible in the future, concepts posit the use of borderline-theoretical technologies, essentially betting that they will mature in time and that the adversary will also be striving to acquire them. Most recently this is embodied in claims about the future revolution in military affairs that will result from the military application of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and autonomous systems.
Thus, a cycle was created where the possible capabilities of a nonspecific enemy created a demand for better capabilities; the concept then incorporated these capabilities and created a demand for further capability development. The centrality of the imagined capability results in what Benjamin Jensen and Michael Rountree characterize as a fundamental flaw in our processes:
defense strategy too often is reduced to my widget is lethal, lethality wins war, my widget will win the next war. Context, obstacles, and competition are wished away. Complex historical cases are reduced to mythmaking and trends divined into simplistic scenarios to justify predictions derived from deduction.
As Michael Kofman observed, this can lead to “techno-romanticism, believing that new sensors, networks, and integration will solve real and enduring problems in war.”
Concepts proliferated, but perhaps the one that best captured U.S. military ambitions was Rapid Decisive Operations, the enabling concept for goals of “full spectrum dominance,” as outlined in Joint Vision 2020. This concept held that, in order to meet national security objectives, the joint force of the future would employ “the ability of U.S. forces, operating unilaterally or in combination with multinational and interagency partners, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the full range of military operations.”
Joint Forces Command was responsible for developing joint concepts until its disestablishment by Secretary Robert Gates in 2011. Its operational concept for Full Spectrum Dominance was Rapid Decisive Operations which articulated the lofty expectations the U.S. military had for what it then believed were its singular capabilities. The concept stated that it would “provide the capability to rapidly and decisively coerce, compel, or defeat the enemy in order to accomplish our strategic objectives without a lengthy campaign or an extensive buildup of forces.” As historian Williamson Murray noted, the concept portended “a warfighting concept so powerful that the U.S. armed forces can win a war in one blow.”
“Rapid decisive operations” thus promised short, decisive, low-casualty wars from U.S. offensive operations employing overmatching technologies. In short, Napoleonic results with Frederick-the-Great-sized forces.
In my view, capabilities-based planning has three fundamental problems. First, it is biased toward technology-centric approaches and solutions that ignore the will of the adversary to resist: Defeat their systems and they will quit. This ignores the possibility of protracted attrition warfare or insurgency. Second, expensive precision weapons and sensor systems, which are not procured in large quantities given their costs and expectations of a short decisive war, may not be a substitute for the large volume of dumb munitions needed in a protracted war of attrition. Third, a concept based on being able to defeat an amalgamation of the best technologies anywhere seemingly promises that it can beat any adversary with lesser combinations of weapons. Ironically, this was apparently the perspective of those who believed that the superbly equipped, modernized Russian army would quickly defeat Ukraine. Until it did not.
Again, capabilities-based planning was necessary given the absence of a significant military problem on the order of that of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It was an important bridge from the Cold War until now. Despite its shortcomings, it did provide the impetus for research and development whose results are in many cases relevant to current and future challenges. However, the approach persists even though the peer threats the United States faces — China and Russia — are known. Ogden Nash’s comment, “Progress may have been all right once, but it went on too long” is a fitting epitaph, and it is time to move on.
The Department of Defense needs to return to a threat-based approach that focuses on the military problem of deterring peer nuclear-armed adversaries. Again, the three components of the problem must be the place, the adversary, and the adversaries’ capabilities.
The “Place” Component of the Military Problem
For the first time since the 1940s, the United States faces competition and conflict with state adversaries in the Pacific and Europe that can contest operations in all the domains of land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. The geography of the two theaters is radically different and each will demand different concepts and capabilities.
Here, emerging service concepts have a key weakness: insufficient forces in place prior to the war to assure their execution: all the advantages of position are ceded to the adversary.
The ongoing war in Ukraine has shown that indications and warnings are a risky gauge on which to base decisions about the flow of forces into a theater. For Russia, whose deployment distance is stepping across a border, while the United States must cross an ocean and all of Western Europe, it is especially fraught. The Chinese advantage of proximity similarly creates challenges in defending Taiwan and elsewhere in the region. These realities, coupled with the ever-growing threat to air bases and seaports from long-range precision fires, only complicate the getting-to-the-fight challenge. Even if there is sufficient warning, as there was in Ukraine this February, deployment could be stalled because of trepidations over fears of escalation or provoking enemy aggression.
What is needed as a first step in establishing regional deterrence in the Pacific and Europe is an assessment of what bare minimum has to be in place before a crisis to assure partners and allies that the coalition can credibly deter. This will include allied contributions, so the demand on U.S. forces will be less than shouldering the entire burden. If what is in place is not sufficient for the plan, it will likely not get there before the onset of hostilities.
The “Adversary” Component of the Military Problem
China and Russia are different. Nevertheless, U.S. military concepts frequently treat them as if they are essentially the same. I believe this is a result of the capabilities-based planning assumption that war is a contest between systems, not peoples. If you defeat the enemy’s systems, they will not be able to resist, and the war will end favorably. If this were so, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would have been over in weeks, with favorable outcomes.
What is apparent in Ukraine — on both sides — is not just an ability to continue to resist, but an astonishing ability to persist. In what has become a grinding war of attrition with high numbers of casualties on both sides, neither combatant appears ready to throw in the towel.
One could imagine Russia would have the same will to fight against NATO. China, although it would almost surely behave differently than Russia, would, I believe, has a strong will to fight. Furthermore, there is the unavoidable reality that both have nuclear arsenals.
It is time to actually act on what has been quoted from Sun Tzu in countless military classrooms over the decades: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” Russia and China are different, and defeating their will to resist — and persist — will surely require understanding them each in detail.
The “Adversary’s Capabilities” Component of the Military Problem
The earlier discussion of capabilities-based planning is not intended to be dismissive of the importance of overmatching the adversary. What a specific place and adversary do is give context — an understanding of in what geography which specific capabilities, wielded by whom, must be defeated or countered. The ongoing war in Ukraine is affording an excellent opportunity to assess Russian capabilities and the concepts for their employment. This is particularly important if, as recent assessments have noted, the Russians are not as formidable as many believed them to be before the war.
Absent a specific problem to match up against, there are no gaps to analyze that could provide data about, for example, how much range is adequate for a new missile. In the case of ground-based long-range fires, a missile with a thousand-mile range can hit Moscow from NATO territory. Unintended or not, such a weapon would likely be perceived as a strategic threat to the Russians and potentially escalatory. Furthermore, Moscow will assume the missile, like theirs of similar range, is nuclear-capable, thus increasing their perception of risk. On the other hand, if launched from Guam, the same missile weapon would fall into the Pacific Ocean before reaching China.
An assessment of specific adversary capabilities would yield data that might create the demand for two systems of different ranges. The data would also provide a gap analysis to show how many of each would be required in each theater. Absent this context, “longer range” and “more weapons” are the only answer possible.
Ironically, all the technologies that have been and are being developed for rapid, decisive offensive operations turn out to be even more formidable in the defense. They deny our adversaries surprise and enable us to dispose our forces where they can most effectively defend against attack. Consequently, as Alex Vershinin notes: “Emerging technologies in the fields of network, artificial intelligence, and space are shifting the balance back to defenses.” He continues by stating that the United States may have missed this shift and that the consequences are significant: “Unable to fight a short decapitation campaign, the United States may be forced into a prolonged attrition campaign, at unacceptable political costs.”
In the next part of this essay, I will turn to how the war in Ukraine can help the Department of Defense better understand the ascendance of the defense, so it can better prepare for the military problems it faces now and in the future.
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David Johnson is a retired Army colonel. He is a principal researcher at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and an adjunct scholar at the Modern War Institute at West Point. He is the author of Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers: Innovation in the U.S. Army, 1917-1945, Hard Fighting: Israel in Lebanon and Gaza, and Learning Large Lessons: The Evolving Roles of Ground Power and Air Power in the Post-Cold War Era. From 2012-2014 he founded and directed the Chief of Staff of the Army Strategic Studies Group for General Raymond T. Odierno.
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warontherocks.com · by David Johnson · August 15, 2022
5. Ukraine 'blows up Wagner HQ in Donbas'
Who does not believe in the power of Open Source Intelligence? (of course better Russian/Wagner OPSEC might have protected the HQ). But as Bonaparte said, never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. But this article also provides feedback to the Russians that might improve their OPSEC.
Ukraine 'blows up Wagner HQ in Donbas'
The photo that condemned Putin's Wagner thugs: Ukraine 'blows up Russian mercenary HQ in Donbas using HIMARS' after propagandist gave away its location with picture of a street sign
- Sergei Sreda, a so-called 'war reporter' and Russian propagandist, visited Wagner HQ in Ukraine last week
- He posted photos on Telegram, saying he was welcomed 'like family' by fighters who told him 'funny stories'
- But one photo gave away the base's location after Sreda accidentally captured a sign with an address on it
- Ukraine says it used photo to locate the base and hit it with HIMARS, with strike confirmed on Sunday
By CHRIS PLEASANCE and WILL STEWART FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 03:37 EDT, 15 August 2022 | UPDATED: 12:03 EDT, 15 August 2022
Daily Mail · by Chris Pleasance · August 15, 2022
Smiling alongside mercenaries in full combat gear, this is how Russian war propagandist Sergei Sreda marked a visit to Wagner's Ukraine headquarters last week - saying they welcomed him 'like family' and told 'funny stories'.
But Sreda may have condemned the men to death - giving away the base's location in the occupied city of Popasna after inadvertently photographing a street sign that contained the address of a nearby bomb shelter.
That was all experts needed to locate the base, which Ukraine then used to launch a HIMARS strike. Confirmation that it had been struck came on Sunday, when Telegram channels with links to Wagner began posting photos of the aftermath - including soldiers being carried away on stretchers.
It is just the latest embarrassing blunder for Vladimir Putin's forces almost six months into what was supposed to be a days-long war in Ukraine - having been forced to retreat from Kyiv, seen the Black Sea flagship Moskva sunk, withdrawn from Snake Island, and last week seen an airbase in Crimea all-but wiped off the map.
Sergei Sreda, a Russian war propagandist, visited Wagner's HQ in Ukraine last week to pose with soldiers - but inadvertently revealed its location with this photo, which included a street sign with the address of a nearby bomb shelter (top left)
Ukraine said it used the information in that photo to launch a HIMARS attack on the base, with confirmation coming from Wagner-linked Telegram channels on Sunday that it had been hit (pictured, the aftermath of the strike)
It is not clear how many mercenaries were killed or wounded in the strike, but images uploaded to Telegram accounts linked to the group show men being carried out on stretchers
Popasna is located in Ukraine's Donbas region and was captured by Russian forces back in May. It is thought Wagner troops led the fight, and have since adopted the city as their headquarters in Ukraine
Sreda's visit also seems to have coincided with a visit to the frontline by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch who owns Wagner and has been dubbed 'Putin's chef' because he rose to prominence throwing lavish banquets for the Russian leader.
Another photo uploaded to his Telegram channel on August 8 - and since deleted - shows him shaking hands with a man who looks very like Prigozhin, as a rifle-carrying thug stands nearby.
Unconfirmed reports that have emerged on Telegram claim that Prigozhin has not been seen since the strike, and those who know him are in a 'mild panic'.
However, there has been no official confirmation from either Russia or Ukraine that he was at the base when it was struck.
Wagner is an army-for-hire whose existence was denied by the Kremlin for years, but is thought to be at the beck-and-call of Putin himself.
The group is used to fight wars on behalf of the Kremlin in areas of the world where direct Russian military involvement would draw unwanted attention.
Wager is believed to operate in Africa, the Middle East and South America, where allegations of war crimes, rape and torture by its troops are common.
Mercenaries are often recruited from the ranks of Russia's regular military, often having been discharged for poor conduct.
Prigozhin is also thought to recruit from prisons, and is said to be in the middle of a hiring spree amid heavy casualties in Ukraine.
Murderers are allegedly being offered clemency from prison sentences provided they are willing to fight for six months on the frontlines.
Prigozhin came to prominence arranging lavish Kremlin functions for the Russian president - earning himself the nickname 'Putin's chef'.
Next, he was linked to pro-Putin troll factories pumping out supportive propaganda in Russia and the West, and to the Wagner private army which is active in Ukraine, Syria and Africa.
He disputes the link to Wagner, despite claims he has been seen personally recruiting prisoners - including convicted murderers - to fight in the war in Ukraine.
He reportedly told inmates: 'I was jailed, too. Now I am a Hero of Russia. We need your skills.'
Putin last month awarded him Russia's top honour. In Soviet times, he was jailed for robbery, fraud, and involving teenagers in crime.
'He is alive, even swearing,' a source from Popasna, not related to Wagner, told VCHK-OGPU Telegram channel.
Video shows what appear to be Wagner troops combing through the ruins of their destroyed headquarters in Popasna after it was struck by Ukraine
Video shows soldiers believed to be Wagner troops loading their dead and wounded comrades into the back of an ambulance in Popasna
Sreda (right) also posted an image of himself shaking hands with a man who appears to be Yevgeny Prigozhin (left), a Russian oligarch who owns Wagner, at the base. It is not clear whether Prigozhin was still there when the rocket attack happened
Prigozhin (left) is an oligarch who rose to prominence organising lavish functions for Vladimir Putin (centre), earning him the nickname 'Putin's chef'
Elsewhere in Ukraine today, Mykolaiv governor Vitaly Kim accused Russia of abandoning 'stupid orc' soldiers on the west bank of the Dnipro River near Kherson while withdrawing all its commanders to the east.
Ukraine has already blown up all three bridges under Russian control connecting the two banks, meaning its soldiers on the west side have no easy way of resupplying, reinforcing, or retreating as Kyiv's men advance.
Kim, who runs a city on the west bank, said Monday that Russian commanders have now begun withdrawing - apparently fearing capture or death at the hands of the Ukrainians.
'I feel just a bit sorry - but not much - for the stupid orcs who had been abandoned on the right bank of the Dnipro,' he wrote on Telegram. 'All of the commanders are moving to the other side.'
Meanwhile horrifying video emerged from the port city of Odesa - located around 90 miles along the Black Sea coast from Kherson - that showed two men being blown to bits by a floating mine.
Two more beachgoers were injured in the explosion at the Black Sea coastal town, according to Ukrainian media which shared the CCTV footage yesterday.
Odesa authorities have urged residents not to swim in the waters by the port city, which is littered with both Russian and Ukrainian explosives.
Footage shows a number of people on the shoreline when the huge blast sent water spraying upwards. According to Ukraine's Pravda newspaper, two swimmers were killed instantly in the explosion. Two more were injured.
A city council spokesman said 'a group of men' had 'ignored the announced restrictions on visiting the coast and swimming in coastal waters'.
It follows the detonation of another landmine at an Odesa beach in June, which killed a father in front of his horrified family.
The 50-year-old man from Donetsk was killed instantly after stepping on the mine.
Two more beachgoers were injured in the explosion at the Black Sea coastal town, according to Ukrainian media which shared the CCTV footage yesterday
Russia is now almost six months into what was supposed to be a days-long war in Ukraine designed to topple the government, install a puppet regime, bring the country back under Moscow's sway and challenge western order.
But Putin has failed to achieve any of those objectives - and is struggling even to reach his revised target of liberating the entirety of the Donbas region.
Moscow's troops did manage to liberate the entirety of Luhansk - one of two region that together make up the Donbas - when they captured the cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk in late June and early July.
But the offensive has ground to a virtual halt since then. Though Russia continues to advance in pockets along the Donbas front, it has gained no significant ground in the last several weeks.
That is thought to be because American HIMARS launchers have devastated ammo dumps and command posts in the region, meaning Putin's generals can no longer rely upon the massive artillery barrages that allowed them to advance in early summer.
Putin (pictured today) used the speech to pitch Russian arms to a number of concerned allies
Putin is pictured speaking at Patriot Congress and Exhibition Centre outside Moscow today
America believes Russia has now lost around 75,000 men killed and wounded - about half the force Putin amassed before invading - and is struggling to recruit more men.
Wagner is said to be so desperate for recruits that Prigozhin is going in person into Russian jails looking for convicted murderers to draft into its ranks.
He is said to be offering them clemency from long prison sentences in return for spending six months fighting on the frontlines.
Conscription is also underway in occupied regions, but these troops are poorly trained and equipped and have been called 'canon fodder' by Ukrainian soldiers.
There is also increasing evidence that they are refusing to fight, with videos emerging showing units and their commanders asking to be sent back from the front.
Putin stands with Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu on stage in Moscow this afternoon
Putin celebrated the Russian army's supposed success in eastern Ukraine, without evidence
Putin cut a relaxed figure as he boasted about his nation's 'modern' and 'advanced' weaponry
Meanwhile Ukraine is preparing a counter-attack against the southern city of Kherson, and has blown up all major Russian-controlled bridges connecting occupied areas to the west of the river from occupied areas to the east.
Putin's generals are now thought to be relying on two pontoon bridges to carry troops and equipment across, meaning forces on the west side have no easy way of reinforcing or retreating if they are attacked.
Kyiv's men are now slowly advancing on the city from multiple directions, with the aim of re-taking it.
An attack by partisans in the southern city of Melitopol on Sunday reportedly took out a railway bridge linking it with Crimea, meaning Russian forces there are also without an easy supply route.
And Crimea itself came under attack last week when an airfield was blown up, destroying between ten and 20 Russian aircraft stationed there.
Putin warns he is ready to arm his allies with 'the most modern types of weapons' as he boasts of Russia's military capabilities
By Adam Solomons for MailOnline
Vladimir Putin has boasted that Russian weapons are 'decades' ahead of Western rivals' in a speech at an arms expo in Moscow.
Delegations from more than 70 countries are attending Army-2022 to take advantage of good deals on Russian kit.
Allies and buyers of Russian hardware have expressed concern as Putin's tanks, warships and planes continue to drop like flies in Ukraine.
A Ukrainian Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile is pictured on the ground in Russia
Putin vowed: '[We] are ready to offer our allies the most modern types of weapons, from small arms to armored vehicles and artillery to combat aviation and unmanned aerial vehicles.
'Almost all of them have been used more than once in real combat operations.
'Many of them are years, if not decades, ahead of their foreign counterparts.
'And in terms of tactical and technical characteristics they are significantly superior to them.'
He was speaking nearly six months into Russia's war in Ukraine, where Moscow has suffered repeated setbacks and heavy losses.
Putin also spoke positively of the war despite a flurry of large-scale setbacks including the apparent destruction of a key mercenary group's HQ with American HIMARS missiles.
The Kremlin leader claimed Russian soldiers in eastern Ukraine 'are honorably fulfilling their duty'.
'They are fighting for Russia', he said, '[and] for a peaceful life in the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics. Step by step, they liberate the Donbas.'
Western military analysts say the poor performance of Russian troops and weaponry could make its arms exports less attractive to potential buyers.
Allies such as India and Egypt have heavily relied on its technology in the past.
In July, Egypt bought 500 Russian T-90 tanks.
India has purchased more than 450 and Algeria has also bought T-90 tanks, making them the most advanced military vehicle found in Africa.
India, China and Egypt accounted for nearly two-thirds of Russian arms sales from 2017 to 2021, Bloomberg reported.
Its sluggish development of competitive drones, easily destroyed T-90 tanks, and missing-in-action T-14 Armata have sent worrying signals to all three partners.
Competitors Japan, South Korea, Turkey or some European countries could pose a threat to Russia's arms industry as non-aggressors in frosty US-China relations.
Putin's speech came as a Kremlin foreign ministry spokesperson said Russia will do 'everything necessary' to enable nuclear specialists to attend the fiercely fought-over Zaporizhzhia power station in southern Ukraine, which has been occupied by Russia.
Scientists from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will be able to visit the plant, Maria Zakharova promised today.
"In close cooperation with the Agency and its leadership, we will do everything necessary for the IAEA specialists to be at the station and give a truthful assessment of the destructive actions of the Ukrainian side," Zakharova said.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the biggest in Europe, was captured by Russia early on in its invasion of Ukraine.
The plant has come under shelling in recent days, with both Moscow and Kyiv accusing each other of risking a nuclear accident.
Kyiv has accused Russia of firing at Ukrainian towns from the site in the knowledge that its forces would not return fire at one of the world's ten biggest nuclear sites.
Moscow has reportedly shelled the area, blaming Ukraine without evidence.
The UN's International Atomic Energy Agency has said the shelling of Zaporizhzhia, Europe's biggest nuclear power station, could cause a nuclear disaster.
Russia's allies have reportedly expressed concern at the vulnerability of expensive weaponry bought from Moscow. Pictured: a wrecked Russian tank is displayed for the public in Kyiv
But it has so far been unable to arrange the conditions for an inspection.
Kyiv and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres have called for the area to be demilitarized, and the Group of Seven major economies have urged Russia to return it to Ukraine.
But senior Russian lawmaker Leonid Slutsky, chair of the lower house's foreign affairs committee, said the idea of returning the plant to the control of Ukrainians was 'a 'mockery from the point of view of ensuring safety.'
'And all the statements of the G7 foreign ministers in support of their demands are nothing but 'sponsorship of nuclear terrorism',' he added on his Telegram channel.
Russia seized the Zaporizhzhia plant in March after invading Ukraine on Feb. 24, but the site is still being operated by its Ukrainian staff.
Kyiv said the complex had been struck five times on Thursday, including near where radioactive materials are stored.
Daily Mail · by Chris Pleasance · August 15, 2022
6. China announces new drills as US delegation visits Taiwan
Are they re-running the same exercises or doing something new? How agile are the PLAN and PLAF? Are they able to execute these exercises at no notice? (do they have the equivalent EDREs- emergency deployment readiness exercises?)
China announces new drills as US delegation visits Taiwan
AP · by JOHNSON LAI · August 15, 2022
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — China announced more military drills around Taiwan as the self-governing island’s president met with members of a new U.S. congressional delegation on Monday, threatening to renew tensions between Beijing and Washington after a similar recent visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi angered China.
Pelosi was the highest-level member of the U.S. government to visit Taiwan in 25 years, and her trip prompted nearly two weeks of threatening military exercises by China, which claims the island as its own. In those drills, Beijing fired missiles over the island and into the Taiwan Strait and sent warplanes and navy ships across the waterway’s midline, which has long been a buffer between the sides that split amid civil war in 1949.
China accuses the U.S. of encouraging the island’s independence through the sale of weapons and engagement between U.S. politicians and the island’s government. Washington says it does not support independence, has no formal diplomatic ties with the island and maintains that the two sides should settle their dispute peacefully — but it is legally bound to ensure the island can defend itself against any attack.
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American and Taiwanese officials have accused China of using Pelosi’s visit as a pretext for intimidating moves, and a senior U.S. official said recently that Washington would continue to deepen its ties with Taiwan in the coming days and weeks.
The latest trip began Sunday with little notice ahead of time — and drew more ire from China. The delegation was due to leave late Monday.
“China will take resolute and strong measures to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a daily briefing Monday, after Beijing announced new drills in the seas and skies surrounding Taiwan. “A handful of U.S. politicians, in collusion with the separatist forces of Taiwan independence, are trying to challenge the one-China principle, which is out of their depth and doomed to failure.”
The new exercises were intended to be “resolute response and solemn deterrent against collusion and provocation between the U.S. and Taiwan,” the Defense Ministry said earlier.
It was not clear if the new drills had already started since the ministry gave no details about where and when they would be conducted, in contrast to previous rounds.
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The U.S. lawmakers, led by Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, met with President Tsai Ing-wen, Foreign Minister Joseph Wu and legislators, according to the American Institute in Taiwan, Washington’s de facto embassy on the island.
At their meeting, Tsai said her administration was working with allies to ensure stability in the Taiwan Strait and maintain the status quo — a reference to the island’s self-governance, separate from Beijing.
“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year has shown the threat that authoritarian nations pose to the global order,” Tsai said.
Markey responded by saying Washington and Taipei had a “moral obligation to do everything we can to prevent an unnecessary conflict and Taiwan has demonstrated incredible restraint and discretion during challenging times.”
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The senator also highlighted legislation intended to boost political and economic ties with Taiwan, especially in the critical semiconductor industry. Taiwan is a crucial provider of computer chips for the global economy, including China’s high-tech sectors, and beyond the geopolitical risks of rising tensions in the region, an extended crisis in the Taiwan Strait could have major implications for international supply chains at a time when the world is already facing disruptions and uncertainty.
Markey is one of the few members of Congress still serving who voted for the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act that ensured continued relations with the island following the switch of U.S. diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. The other members of the delegation are Republican Rep. Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen, a delegate from American Samoa, and Democrats John Garamendi and Alan Lowenthal from California and Don Beyer from Virginia.
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China says it wants to use peaceful means to bring Taiwan under its control, but its recent saber rattling has emphasized its threat to take the island by military force. The earlier drills appeared to be a rehearsal of a blockade or attack on Taiwan that would force the cancellation of commercial flights and disrupt shipping to Taiwan’s main ports as well as cargo passing through the Taiwan Strait, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
The exercises prompted Taiwan to put its military on alert, but were met largely with defiance or apathy among the public used to living in China’s shadow.
The American “visit at this time is of great significance, because the Chinese military exercise is (intended) to deter U.S. congressmen from visiting Taiwan,” Lo Chih-cheng, the chair of the Taiwan legislature’s Foreign and National Defense Committee, said after meeting with the U.S. lawmakers.
“Their visit this time proves that China cannot stop politicians from any country to visit Taiwan, and it also conveys an important message that the American people stand with the Taiwanese people,” Lo said.
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A senior White House official on Asia policy said last week that China had used Pelosi’s visit as an excuse to launch an intensified pressure campaign against Taiwan.
“China has overreacted, and its actions continue to be provocative, destabilizing, and unprecedented,” Kurt Campbell, a deputy assistant to U.S. President Joe Biden, said on a call with reporters on Friday.
Campbell said the U.S. would send warships and planes through the Taiwan Strait in the next few weeks and is developing a roadmap for trade talks with Taiwan that he said the U.S. intends to announce in the coming days.
AP · by JOHNSON LAI · August 15, 2022
7. China-US decoupling gushes out
I guess they can't handle the regulatory scrutiny. The question is why has such scrutiny not occurred sooner?
China-US decoupling gushes out
Top Chinese SOEs to delist from NYSE as US regulators push to inspect their books in ways Beijing views as ‘crackdowns’
asiatimes.com · by M.K. Bhadrakumar · August 14, 2022
In a flurry of statements on Friday (August 12) against the backdrop of escalating US-China tensions, five of China’s biggest state-owned companies announced their intent to delist from the New York Stock Exchange – PetroChina Co Ltd, China Life Insurance Co, China Petroleum & Chemical Corp, Aluminum Corp of China and Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Co, which represent more than US$300 billion in market cap.
As of this month, the market cap of these Chinese giants are as follows: PetroChina $132.11 billion; China Life Insurance $94.88 billion; China Petroleum & Chemical Corp $70.23 billion. Aluminum Corp of China ($10.29 billion) is also the world’s second-largest alumina producer and third-largest primary aluminum producer; and Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Co ($3.77 billion) is a subsidiary of Sinopec (market cap $68.45 billion), and is one of the largest petrochemical enterprises in China.
At work here primarily is greater scrutiny of Chinese companies listed in the United States that the American regulators are insisting on since the congressional legislation passed in 2020 during former president Donald Trump’s administration in this direction.
The legislation followed the failure of protracted negotiations for the American regulators to gain full access to inspect the audit papers of US-listed Chinese businesses, which Beijing views as “crackdowns” on Chinese companies and as “financial decoupling.”
Both in terms of the market cap of the NYSE as a whole (which currently stands at $26.2 trillion) and in terms of American depository shares in the five Chinese companies, this development per se is not earthshaking but has implications.
Will it bring a bad name to the NYSE? Maybe, eventually. Will it seriously impact the Chinese companies’ operations? Unlikely. (For example, American depository shares in PetroChina represented about 0.45% of the total share capital of the company.)
Nonetheless, it is a signpost that will be noted in financial markets, even as a growing number of Chinese firms are also positioning to delist from the US markets.
Interestingly, the 2020 US legislation also includes a push to delist US-listed companies by changing audit rules. The US Securities and Exchange Commission had put 159 Chinese concept stock companies (companies that operate in China) on its delisting watch list as of the end of July.
Alibaba has announced it plans a primary listing in Hong Kong. Image: Agencies
Considering that the race to maintain top position among global capital markets is fierce, the perceptions of global investors do matter, and the exodus of high-potential Chinese companies cannot but reflect poorly on the New York Stock Exchange. Wall Street is a powerful lobbyist, too.
Therefore, the Chinese game plan would be to get the strict US regulations moderated, which currently is tightening the screws on Chinese companies raising money in the US unless they fully explain their legal structures and disclose the risk of their business being interfered with by the Chinese government.
Evidently, China’s interest lies in reaching a consensus. Going forward, the ultimate litmus test will be whether or not more large Chinese state-owned firms delist from the US markets. There are about 250 Chinese companies listed in the US. That is where the uncertainties in US-China relations will come into play.
It is only natural that Chinese companies will rearrange their financing approaches – for example, going public on the Hong Kong stock exchange – rather than expose themselves to rising political risks in the US. And political risks can come from a variety of sources.
Traditionally, political risks could have been assessed in terms of policy decisions and shifts affecting trade tariffs, taxes, labor conditions, privatization and regulation, political leadership changes, political volatility, or uncertainty stemming from terrorism, riots, coups or wars, etc that could disrupt a company’s ability to execute its chosen strategy and ability to deliver its products or services cost-effectively.
But geopolitical risks such as the Russian intervention in Ukraine have introduced a new template altogether – the “sanctions from hell” froze Russian currency and gold reserves, confiscated Russian private assets, and evicted Russian banks from the Western banking system.
Top Western politicians have hinted that similar horrible things could be done to China too if it extended help to Russia – although, that is easier said than done, given the sheer size of the Chinese economy compared with Russia’s and the high degree of interdependency in the EU-China trade and US-China economic relationships.
Meanwhile, the Taiwan situation looms large. In the wake of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei on August 2-3, Chinese commentaries have threatened “serious wide-ranging implications for bilateral ties, including in economic fields” – citing for example the decision by China’s leading electric-vehicle battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology Co to put on hold its plans to announce a multibillion-dollar plant in North America.
US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (L) waving beside Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen on August 2, 2022, in Taipei. Photo: Handout
One unattributed commentary in Global Times threatened on August 4:
“With the start of major military drills around the Taiwan island, the mainland has actually started or accelerated the process of reunification, which the US cannot stop. That means China is, in effect, prepared for US intervention. One can only imagine what China will do to eliminate potential risks, including its massive holdings of US Treasuries.
“China is the second-largest foreign holder of US Treasuries, only after Japan. China’s holdings of US Treasury securities dropped to $980.8 billion in May, falling below $1 trillion for the first time in 12 years….
“Further deterioration of China-US relations will likely have a direct impact on China’s risk appetite for holding US Treasuries, and reducing holding of US treasuries could become a precautionary option. That could deal another blow to the global standing of the US dollar – the real backbone of the US economy.
“The Russia-Ukraine conflict has already dealt a severe blow to the credibility of the dollar. Now an escalation in China-US tensions could further weaken the dollar’s status if China cuts its holding of US Treasuries. In this sense, in the long run, Pelosi’s graduation trip will eventually come back to bite the US economy in a way that will exhaust the dollar’s credibility.”
That seems a stretch, but the good part in all this is that both Washington and Beijing seem to agree that jaw jaw is better than war war.
Broadly, the parting message that Kurt Campbell, the coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs in US President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, gave during his on-the-record press call Friday on Pelosi’s visit was his confirmation that Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping had raised the possibility of an in-person meeting when they last talked by phone in late July “and agreed to have their teams follow up to sort out the specifics.”
Campbell said there were no new details to announce, but both leaders are expected to take part in the Group of Twenty meeting in November in Bali.
Interestingly, an influential Chinese editor noted on calm reflection, a full week after Pelosi’s trip to Taipei, that “one of the reasons” could be that she intentionally used the Taiwan question to whip up “a storm of public opinion” and “create an atmosphere” for the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act last Tuesday, in a deft “combination of punches” against China.
Then-US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell in a file photo. Photo: AFP / Kazuhiro Nogi
One never can tell in these extraordinary times in American politics. Actually, Campbell also singled out for disapproval Beijing’s sanctions against Pelosi and her family members.
Campbell said the US would ensure freedom of navigation in the Taiwan Strait and in the region, but “We will not be reflexive or kneejerk.
“We will be patient and effective. We will continue to fly, sail and operate where international law allows, consistent with our long-standing commitment to freedom of navigation, and that includes conducting standard air and maritime transits through the Taiwan Strait in the next few weeks.”
Importantly, Campbell did not give details of when any such transits would take place, or confirm reports that the US had opted not to sail an aircraft carrier through the strait as the Biden administration “did not want to escalate the tense confrontation.”
This article was produced in partnership by Indian Punchline and Globetrotter, which provided it to Asia Times.
M K Bhadrakumar is a former Indian diplomat. Follow him on Twitter @BhadraPunchline.
asiatimes.com · by M.K. Bhadrakumar · August 14, 2022
8. Nearly 1 year after Afghanistan exit, Gen. Keane says 'we’re right back where we started' in 2001
Another way of saying what goes around comes around?
Nearly 1 year after Afghanistan exit, Gen. Keane says 'we’re right back where we started' in 2001
foxnews.com · by Ronn Blitzer | Fox News
Video
‘Tragic’ Afghanistan withdrawal puts America ‘back where we started:’ Gen. Keane
Fox News senior strategic analyst Gen. Jack Keane looks back at the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, discussing the consequences of the decision and the ‘disturbing’ messaging from the White House.
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Approximately one year after the U.S. completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan, retired Army Gen. Jack Keane lamented that the situation there is no different than it was when the U.S. first began its 20-year war there in 2001.
In an interview with "Fox News Sunday," Keane pointed not just to the resurgence of the Taliban, but the presence of al Qaeda, despite the U.S. recently killing Usama bin Laden's deputy in the 9/11 terror attacks, Ayman al-Zawahri. In fact, Keane said that Zawahiri's presence in Afghanistan at the time of the American strike is proof of the problem.
"We went to Afghanistan to stop the Taliban from providing sanctuary to the al Qaeda, from which the attack on the United States took place. We all know that. And what did this decision get us? It got us the Taliban in charge again … providing sanctuary to the al Qaeda," said Keane, former Army vice chief of staff. "And Zawahiri's killing resurrected the fact that he’s living in a Taliban house in a neighborhood that I’ve been to many times, where senior Taliban leaders are in residence. And obviously, they are protecting the al Qaeda leader as well as his organization."
Keane added that "to date, we’ve done nothing against the organization or done nothing against ISIS."
US TAKES OUT AL QAEDA LEADER AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI IN ‘SUCCESSFUL’ AFGHANISTAN COUNTERTERRORISM OPERATION
Video
Far from the Taliban rooting out terrorists, Keanse said that Afghanistan is now "a sanctuary for terrorism" under their control.
"The very reason we went there, the very reason we stayed there for 20 years, to ensure that terrorists did not rise again, to attack the American people, and we’re right back where we started," he said.
Keane then offered harsh criticism of President Biden, asserting that the commander-in-chief went against the recommendations of advisers and allies alike, calling him "defiant" in his insistence that the U.S. withdraw by the end of August 2021.
"He was advised by the military, by the intelligence services, and by many of his foreign policy advisers, and all of the NATO nations to maintain the stalemate that we had, the status quo," Keanse said. The general, who is now a Fox News strategic analyst, admitted that this was not a "perfect situation," but it had kept the Taliban from retaking control of the country, and prevented al Qaeda and ISIS from building their presence there.
US ALLIES STILL WAITING TO LEAVE AFGHANISTAN ONE YEAR AFTER BOTCHED WITHDRAWAL
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"The president thought he knew better, and he was very defiant and rejected all of their advice," Keane said. "And then, he presented a false narrative to the American people, which I find very disturbing. He said, my choice is get out now, or have to put thousands of American troops back in here to fight the Taliban and take casualties doing that."
Keane insisted that this was not the choice, as the U.S. had "not been in direct combat with the Taliban since 2014."
AFGHANISTAN COLLAPSE ONE YEAR LATER: JENNIFER GRIFFIN RECOUNTS HOW TALIBAN TOOK OVER
Keane also criticized the U.S. decision not to accept an offer from the Taliban to control Kabul, which would have meant having a secure airport.
Video
"Obviously that would have been a little bit more than we were intending to bite off in doing that," Keane admitted, "but it would have given us the opportunity to conduct a very methodical withdrawal as opposed to this chaos that we saw."
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The retired general then weighed in on the reported after-action review that the State Department and Department of Defense are expected to release in the near future. He said he hopes it covers not just the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but the entire two decades the U.S. was there.
"Let's learn some lessons here about these decisions in terms of going forward, and let’s be honest with what took place and the mistakes that were made," he said.
foxnews.com · by Ronn Blitzer | Fox News
9. Afghanistan One Year Later: What Does America Really Think?
Graphs/charts at the link: https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/08/afghanistan-one-year-later-what-does-america-really-think/?utm_source=pocket_mylist
Afghanistan One Year Later: What Does America Really Think?
19fortyfive.com · by Victoria Coates · August 15, 2022
One year after the surrender, Americans remain deeply unsettled about the end of the war: Last September, TIPP did some of the earliest polling on how Americans viewed the fall of Afghanistan. This data revealed strong concerns about the potential for Afghanistan to be a base for future terrorist attacks against the United States, a desire to retain counter-terrorism capabilities in the country, and a disinclination to recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan (although there was a stronger partisan split on this question with 40% liberals likely to support the move as opposed to only 13% of conservatives).
Earlier this month, TIPP revisited the topic in anticipation of the one-year anniversary of the end of America’s “longest war” with three questions on whether or not the fall of Afghanistan was a “generational setback” for the United States, on whether or not the fall of Afghanistan encouraged Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, and on whether or not Afghanistan might be exploited for future terrorist attacks on the United States.
A majority of Americans (53%) agreed that the fall of Afghanistan was indeed a “generational setback” for the United States. Although conservatives were more likely to agree at 64% versus 47% of moderates and 45% of liberals, for no group did a majority disagree with the statement.
Views on a connection between the fall of Afghanistan and Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in light of perceived American weakness fall on similar lines, with about a half of respondents agreeing and a quarter disagreeing. Again, there was a partisan split with 59% of conservatives agreeing compared to 42% of moderates and 43% of liberals.
On the final question, regarding concerns about a future terrorist attack on the United States from Afghanistan, however, there was far greater unity with a majority of all three groups agreeing. Only 11% of conservatives, 17% of moderates and 27% of liberals disagreed, indicating that even as we approach the 21st anniversary of the 911 attacks, those memories remain fresh.
Notably, for the first two questions, roughly a quarter of those polled responded they were not sure, suggesting a significant number are still processing the ramifications of the end of the war in Afghanistan. But for the third question on concerns about future attacks that number dropped to 8%, including 5% of conservatives and 6% of liberals, clearly indicating this is a major worry for most Americans.
The TIPP polling was done before the strike on Ayman al Zawahiri, the head of al Qaeda, who moved into a former USAID villa in Kabul after the U.S. departed. While the Biden administration tried to frame the strike as a vindication of their claims that they would retain “over the horizon” counter-terrorism capabilities, it could also be understood as an indication of how very permissive an environment for terrorism has been created by the Taliban, and it will be interesting to see what future data reveals.
Victoria Coates is a Distinguished Fellow in Strategic Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC. In the Trump administration, she served as Deputy National Security Advisor for the Middle East and North Africa, as well as Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary of Energy.
19fortyfive.com · by Victoria Coates · August 15, 2022
10. Rethinking How the United States Trains Foreign Militaries
Some useful criticisms. e.g., Institutional versus "individual" training.
However, I will simplify this: what is needed is a strategy that "training foreign militaries" must support. Engagement for engagement's sake, "random acts of touching,"
"presence operations," engagement by intuition or hoping for an unknown outcome, come about when we lack a coherent interagency strategy.
Conclusion:
Finally, the United States should emphasize institution building over individual training—or at least accord them similar importance. This shift could require a major overhaul of the U.S. approach to engaging with partner militaries. For one thing, it would require focusing on security governance holistically, with operations and tactics subsumed under strategy rather than dominating it. It would also require grappling with local political dynamics and civilian institutions because military and defense institutions are ultimately connected with—and, in liberal democracies, subordinate to—civilian political authority.
This is a much more political understanding of institutional capacity building than currently typifies much of the Defense Department’s efforts, and would require an interagency approach on both the U.S. and partner sides. The United States has made steps in this direction, with congressional authorities broadening the Defense Department’s institutional capacity building reach to include all security force institutions. And the State Department has led targeted efforts to improve security governance in recent years. Much more should be done to integrate these activities and ensure that political context and institutional design inform all efforts to train and advise partner militaries. This approach would be complex and time-consuming, but it is also the only way to translate individual preference changes into durable changes in when and how militaries fight.
Rethinking How the United States Trains Foreign Militaries
By Renanah Miles Joyce Sunday, August 14, 2022, 10:01 AM
lawfareblog.com · August 14, 2022
Editor’s Note: The United States has invested heavily in training militaries around the world with at best limited success. Brandeis University’s Renanah Miles Joyce examines the pitfalls of different approaches, with a particular emphasis on when U.S. efforts to spread the norms of respect for human rights and civilian control succeed and fail and how the United States can do better.
Daniel Byman
***
In May, President Biden quietly signed an order authorizing a persistent U.S. military presence in Somalia. U.S. troops are not engaging in direct combat operations there; instead, they are primarily training and advising Somali and African Union partner forces to fight the terrorist group al-Shabaab. These training efforts are part of a global web of U.S. military training and advising that aims both to build partner militaries’ warfighting capabilities and to influence when and how they fight.
The United States has different tools at its disposal to influence security partners: It can provide material goods such as arms and equipment to incentivize good behavior, or it can make support conditional on partners doing what it wants. Both approaches have problems. Generous flows of assistance rarely motivate partners to change, particularly when they get what they want without having to make painful adjustments. Conditionality has a better track record, but it can backfire. Pushing weak partners too far risks their collapse, and alternative providers such as China and Russia create outside options that allow them to dodge compliance.
Military training offers another pathway to influence: changing soldiers’ beliefs so that their preferences align with those of the United States. Shaping how partner militaries think and what they want offers a cheaper, more durable path to influence, because partners who share U.S. values should need less monitoring and less motivating to do what the United States wants them to do.
Two issue areas where the United States attempts to impart its preferred norms and values are human rights and civilian control of the military. Prioritization of these norms has increased over time—the United States did not always champion liberal norms in the militaries that it trained (the coup-producing School of the Americas is a notorious case in point). But U.S. law now requires that all efforts to build partner forces include training on “observance of and respect for the law of armed conflict, human rights and fundamental freedoms, the rule of law, and civilian control of the military.”
In theory, producing more liberal and more competent militaries should go hand-in-hand. Research has shown that illiberal civil-military relations often produce ineffective militaries, and abusive militaries can fuel insurgencies by alienating local populations. But despite committing vast amounts of resources toward foreign military training—including almost $15 billion to train over 2.3 million military students around the world between 1999 and 2016—the United States has struggled to produce militaries that are either competent or liberal minded, especially in weak and unstable states.
In recent years, U.S.-trained militaries have launched coups in Mali and Guinea and committed human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Cameroon, among other places. Policymakers and scholars disagree on the reasons why training fails to impart U.S. values. Policymakers and military officials often point to insufficient focus on norms, while scholars often point to fundamental problems with interest misalignment—the United States and its local partners often want different things and, as a result, partners misuse or redirect resources toward their own goals. A common policy solution is more training, while scholars suggest choosing better partners (and, at least implicitly, not choosing ones that are unlikely to produce success). Both recommendations have merit, but flawed assumptions in the U.S. approach will undermine outcomes even with increased investment or better selection.
Training and Advising as a Path to Influence
Norms training tends to occur in places where policymakers believe that more liberal and professional militaries are key to long-term stability. Norms training is particularly useful for countries where the primary threats are tied to internal state weakness. Militaries in these countries often have histories of human rights violations and intervention in politics. The United States tries to build up capabilities for counterterrorism or counterinsurgency missions while simultaneously inculcating norms of restraint to prevent abuse of military power.
The U.S. playbook for training and advising foreign militaries relies heavily on socialization to transform partner preferences. Teaching and persuasion are core socialization mechanisms through which people come to adopt new norms and rules for behavior.
The U.S. approach emphasizes interpersonal relationships and rapport-building as a foundation for persuasion. Training and advising build on this foundation in several different ways. First, trainers and advisers provide partner soldiers with ready-made “templates” for operational or tactical activities. In my visits to Liberia, I saw that the walls of the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) headquarters are lined with U.S. doctrine, imported wholesale and adopted for use by the Liberian military.
Second, trainers use classroom and field training to teach partner soldiers what constitutes appropriate behavior. This training ranges from tactical and operational instruction to regional seminars and courses in U.S. professional military education institutions. In Liberia, for example, U.S. trainers spent weeks teaching the new AFL a civics curriculum that emphasized, according to one trainer, “that human rights were the key to everything.” Finally, trainers and advisers attempt to demonstrate appropriate behavior in the hopes that partners will see the merit in doing things differently and seek to emulate the new behavior. Many advisers describe showing partners “what right looks like” as their primary strategy for persuasion.
The socialization theory behind these efforts predicts that as partner soldiers are exposed to new ways of thinking, they will see the merit of the ideas and start to bring their behavior in line with the new standards. Eventually, they will adopt new norms, their beliefs will shift, and their preferences over specific policies will reflect these realigned beliefs and values.
Liberal norms aren’t the only issue areas where the U.S. military tries to shape its partners’ preferences. But they are a dominant theme in parts of the world like sub-Saharan Africa, where the primary stated goals of U.S. foreign military training for nearly every country include respect for human rights and civilian control of the military.
Flawed Assumptions in the U.S. Approach
Given the investment, why the meager results? To be fair, it is not clear how meager the results are—the U.S. government has not yet figured out how to measure the effectiveness of their efforts to impart norms. But the anecdotal evidence suggests that outcomes are mixed at best. There are at least three flawed assumptions in the U.S. approach to training and advising that help to explain why efforts to shape partner soldiers’ beliefs may not translate into durable influence.
First, the U.S. approach assumes that socialization is cheap and easy. It is not. Socialization may reduce costs over the long run by reducing the need to monitor partners or coerce them to comply, but military socialization typically requires intensive and sustained interaction over time. In other words, it is least likely to work when the United States is trying to get results quickly and cheaply—which is often when it reaches for the foreign military training tool in its foreign policy toolkit. In a survey that I did of the Liberian military, I found that soldiers with the most exposure to U.S. norms training expressed the strongest support for liberal norms, but that these effects faded quickly for soldiers with less training.
Second, the U.S. approach assumes that liberal norms are mutually reinforcing. This is not necessarily true in the fragile states where the most norms training happens. In research published recently in International Security, I examine the problem of conflicting liberal norms, in particular, the tension between the norms of respect for human rights and civilian control of the military. Soldiers are taught to obey civilians and protect the population, but what happens if civilian leaders order them to repress the population? Experimental evidence suggests that the answer is bad for liberal norms. I found that soldiers who heard a scenario in which the civilian leader orders the military to repress protests were less likely to support prioritizing human rights and more likely to prioritize internal cohesion—that is, doing whatever best served the military organization in that moment. And the results were strongest for soldiers with more U.S. training.
Third, the U.S. approach assumes that individual belief change translates unproblematically to institutional change. But there is a disconnect between operational- and tactical-level training and the kinds of strategic activities necessary to lock changes into institutional design. My research suggests that norm gains are fragile and easily reversible without the right institutions. The U.S. Department of Defense has begun to incorporate institutional capacity building into its repertoire, working to improve governance and organizational processes such as planning, logistics, and resource management in partner defense institutions. But these efforts remain too small and divorced from the primary focus on individual- and unit-level training that consumes the bulk of security assistance resources implemented through the Defense Department. And the department’s institutional capacity building efforts largely focus on the technical aspects of defense institutions while leaving the political aspects untouched.
Improving the U.S. Approach
The U.S. approach is neither irrational nor fatally flawed. Under the right conditions, training and advising can shape when and how partners fight. But these conditions are narrower than expected, not least because influence is a two-way street and partners have a say in outcomes. These limitations notwithstanding, improving the assumptions that underpin the U.S. approach can still make it a more useful tool.
Above all, U.S. policymakers should temper their expectations when it comes to training and advising. There is no silver bullet for ensuring compliance. Shaping beliefs might be the most durable form of influence when it works, but it takes time and sustained engagement, both of which are in short supply for U.S. foreign policy, especially in “economy-of-force” theaters like sub-Saharan Africa. It also requires receptive political partners who are open to new norms. Reforming a military does little good if the political leadership within the state continues to view it as a threat or tool for repression.
Second, trainers and advisers should address problems of liberal norm conflict. Expecting soldiers to respect human rights and obey civilian authority works only when civilians are demanding the right things. If civilians are not, then U.S. policymakers must consider whether they really want soldiers to prioritize human rights over civilian authority and what that would mean in practice. Right now, the stated U.S. position of putting human rights first is rarely conveyed clearly to trainees. This is no surprise, because policymakers may not want their hands tied depending on whether or not the regime is a friend. Clearer messaging about norm preferences can help provide a blueprint for action when norm conflicts arise.
Finally, the United States should emphasize institution building over individual training—or at least accord them similar importance. This shift could require a major overhaul of the U.S. approach to engaging with partner militaries. For one thing, it would require focusing on security governance holistically, with operations and tactics subsumed under strategy rather than dominating it. It would also require grappling with local political dynamics and civilian institutions because military and defense institutions are ultimately connected with—and, in liberal democracies, subordinate to—civilian political authority.
This is a much more political understanding of institutional capacity building than currently typifies much of the Defense Department’s efforts, and would require an interagency approach on both the U.S. and partner sides. The United States has made steps in this direction, with congressional authorities broadening the Defense Department’s institutional capacity building reach to include all security force institutions. And the State Department has led targeted efforts to improve security governance in recent years. Much more should be done to integrate these activities and ensure that political context and institutional design inform all efforts to train and advise partner militaries. This approach would be complex and time-consuming, but it is also the only way to translate individual preference changes into durable changes in when and how militaries fight.
Renanah Miles Joyce is an assistant professor of politics at Brandeis University and a nonresident fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative, a jointly sponsored program between the Modern War Institute at West Point and the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project.
lawfareblog.com · August 14, 2022
11. Can Putin Really Fight a Two-Front War in Ukraine?
Some rather large numbers:
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense claimed that as of Sunday, Ukrainian forces have killed approximately 43,550 Russian troops (and wounded approximately thrice that number), destroyed 233 fighter, attack, and transport jets, 194 attack and transport helicopters, 1,864 tanks, 980 artillery pieces, 4,126 armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, 261 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), 15 boats and cutters, 3,039 vehicles and fuel tanks, 136 anti-aircraft batteries, 784 tactical unmanned aerial systems, 91 special equipment platforms, such as bridging vehicles, and four mobile Iskander ballistic missile systems, and 187 cruise missiles shot down by the Ukrainian air defenses.
Can Putin Really Fight a Two-Front War in Ukraine?
19fortyfive.com · by Stavros Atlamazoglou · August 15, 2022
On day 172 of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military is struggling with a strategic conundrum in Ukraine: attack in the Donbas or defend in the South?
South or Donbas?
Russian forces are trying to conduct operations on two fronts at the same time, according to the daily estimate of the British Ministry of Defense. However, the two efforts rely on two different sources of troops, and are thus likely to have dissimilar effectiveness.
In the Donbas, or at least some parts of it, the Russian offensive operations are relying on Russian-backed separatist forces that are trying to reach Bakhmut from Donetsk City. In other parts of the Donbas, the Russian military or the mercenaries of the infamous Wagner Group are taking the lead in operations.
In the south, the Russian military continues to relocate forces from the rest of the battlefield in an attempt to defend against the incoming Russian counteroffensive against Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Kherson is the most important urban center to have fallen to the Russian forces and the only provincial capital Kyiv has lost.
Equally important, Kherson is the only ground north of the Dnipro that the Russian forces have captured and held. With a limited or non-existent bridge-crossing capability, the Russian military needs to hold Kherson if it wishes to push northwards.
“Over the past week, Russia’s priority has likely been to re-orientate units to reinforce southern Ukraine,” the British Military Intelligence assessed.
“However, in the Donbas, Russian-backed forces – largely militia of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic – have continued to attempt assaults to the north of Donetsk city,” the British Ministry of Defense stated.
“Particularly heavy fighting has focused on the village of Pisky, near the site of Donetsk Airport. The settlement probably remains contested. The area has been on the front line of the Donbas Line of Control since 2014,” the British Ministry of Defense added.
“The Russian assault likely aims to secure the M04 highway, the main approach to Donetsk from the west,” the British Military Intelligence assessed.
Russian Casualties
The Russian military continues to lose an unsustainable amount of men in Ukraine, frustrating any offensive plans in the Donbas.
From Twitter: “An AZP S-60 57mm AA gun mounted on a truck used by UA forces- one example of the many improvised weapons appearing recently,”
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense claimed that as of Sunday, Ukrainian forces have killed approximately 43,550 Russian troops (and wounded approximately thrice that number), destroyed 233 fighter, attack, and transport jets, 194 attack and transport helicopters, 1,864 tanks, 980 artillery pieces, 4,126 armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, 261 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), 15 boats and cutters, 3,039 vehicles and fuel tanks, 136 anti-aircraft batteries, 784 tactical unmanned aerial systems, 91 special equipment platforms, such as bridging vehicles, and four mobile Iskander ballistic missile systems, and 187 cruise missiles shot down by the Ukrainian air defenses.
1945’s New Defense and National Security Columnist, Stavros Atlamazoglou is a seasoned defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate. His work has been featured in Business Insider, Sandboxx, and SOFREP.
19fortyfive.com · by Stavros Atlamazoglou · August 15, 2022
12. Is Russia using rape as a weapon of war in Ukraine?
Deliberate or not, the brutality is criminal. Deliberate or not, leaders still must be held accountable. But I fear this may be deliberate.
Is Russia using rape as a weapon of war in Ukraine?
Russian officials dismiss accounts of rape by Russian soldiers as Ukrainian and western propaganda
irishtimes.com · by Lara Marlowe
She was a 12-year-old schoolgirl, living quietly in a suburb of Kyiv with her parents, until her childhood ended brutally one night last March.
Viktoria Osypenko, the gynaecologist who cared for the girl for one month, is on the verge of tears as she recounts the story. She initially tells me the child’s lovely name, worthy of a tsarina.
Then Osypenko catches herself. “She did not want her name or surname to be disclosed. She did not want anyone to know why she was brought to hospital. She was ashamed.”
Osypenko decides to refer to the girl as Maria, like one of two angels, a boy and a girl, which the child made for her as a farewell gift when she joined the flow of refugees to Poland at Easter.
Maria made the angels from blue and yellow yarn, in the Ukrainian national colours. Osypenko keeps the girl angel at her mother’s house, in memory of Maria, and attached the boy angel, Ivanko, to the mirror of her car.
This angel, in Ukrainian national colours, was a farewell gift from a 12-year-old rape victim to her gynecologist. Photograph: Courtesy of Viktoria Osypenko
Maria was evacuated on one of the last buses from Bucha, the town 30km northwest of Kyiv which has faced the worst atrocities of the war so far. “I don’t know how she survived,” Osypenko says. “Townspeople must have helped her.
“She was covered in bruises. They pulled her hair and choked her. When they were done, they threw her on the ground.”
The medical doctor was horrified when she examined the child. “Her genitalia were ruptured. She was in terrible pain. I tried to repair her organs, under general anaesthesia.
“For the first two weeks she said nothing more than hello. She cried a lot. She does not look like a developed woman. She has no breasts. No menstrual function. She is only a child, about 1.5m tall, with light brown hair, skinny, a pretty child. She is modest, shy, intelligent.”
On that night when Russian soldiers marauded through Bucha, Maria and her parents hid in the back garden with the lights out. Two soldiers wore balaclavas. A third did not. All three raped the child. Then they shot Maria’s parents dead, along with the family dog.
Maria’s psychologist heard more details of the child’s ordeal, but Osypenko was nonetheless destabilised by what she heard. “I came home every night and cried. I simply did not know how to help her. I still think about her every day. I am a Christian. I pray for her.”
Gynaecologist Viktoria Osypenko is haunted by the memory of a 12-year-old girl who was raped by three soldiers in Bucha. Photograph: Viktoria Osypenko
The 28-year-old divorced mother of a six-year-old boy, Osypenko says her “maternal heart” could not cope with Maria’s grief. “I wanted to be a friend to her. I prepared food for her and talked to her and watched cartoons with her. She got used to my presence.”
Because Maria did not receive immediate post-rape care, she must undergo repeated blood tests over months to ensure that she did not contract certain diseases. “If she has no serious infections, such as HIV or hepatitis, which affect you for the rest of your life, she may recover physically,” Osypenko says. “Psychological recovery is more difficult.”
What should happen to the three men who raped Maria and killed her parents, I ask Osypenko. “I hope they did not make it out of Bucha alive. I hope they rot in hell.”
Some of the victims of sexual violence in Ukraine cannot speak because they are dead.
There was the woman found naked, but for a fur coat, in a cellar in Bucha. The New York Times photographed her lying face down on the ground on a blanket while police and rescue workers bustled around her corpse.
Karina Yershova’s cut and lacerated body was also found in Bucha. Her grieving stepfather, Andriy Dereko, told the Kyiv Independent he believes Russian soldiers raped 22-year-old Karina before they killed her. Several inhabitants of the area said some Russian soldiers warned them to “hide the girls”.
Paris Match magazine photographed bloodied sheets in the ransacked bedroom of a woman called Tetiana, a widowed mother of two children in Markariv, 50km west of Kyiv. “We buried her body in the garden,” the soldiers scrawled in lipstick on the mirror of Tetiana’s vanity table.
A 31-year-old woman from Malay Rohan, near Kharkiv, told Human Rights Watch (HRW) how a Russian soldier broke into the school where she, her family and other villagers were sheltering on March 13th. He singled her out of the group, took her upstairs and raped her repeatedly through the night.
In an account verified by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, a woman from a small village near Kyiv said a Russian soldier shot her husband in the head, then told her: “You don’t have a husband any more. I shot him with this gun. He was a fascist.” Two soldiers then gang-raped the woman repeatedly.
Three drunken Russian soldiers raped a woman named Viktoria and her neighbour Natasha in their village near Kyiv after shooting Natasha’s husband, Viktoria told the New York Times. The soldier who assaulted Viktoria was 19 years old, the same age as her son.
Russian officials dismiss accounts of rape by Russian soldiers as Ukrainian and western propaganda. Vassily Nebenza, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, said: “The ratcheting up of accusations of Russian service personnel committing crimes of a sexual nature since the very beginning of our special military operation in Ukraine has become a favourite tactic of the Kyiv regime and our Western colleagues.” Mr Nebenza said that “no evidence” of such crimes has been provided.
It is difficult to assess the scale of sexual violence in the Ukraine war, or to determine if rape is being used as a deliberate weapon of war, as alleged by Ukrainian officials, the European Parliament, the British and Canadian foreign ministers Liz Truss and Mélanie Joly in a joint open letter, and many western media outlets.
“At this point, we don’t have a good sense of scale, and my impression is that no one does yet. We at Human Rights Watch have confirmed three cases,” says Hillary Margolis, senior women’s rights researcher at HRW.
“Obviously, that is not to say that it is not happening or that case reports are not accurate,” Margolis continues. “We just don’t have enough information to say it is happening on a widespread or systematic scale.
“Nor do we have evidence of it happening as an intentional weapon of war,” Margolis says, “which again does not mean that it is not, only that we do not have evidence of that. The cases we have documented appear to be opportunistic.”
Pramila Patten, the UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict, who visited Ukraine at the beginning of May and concluded a co-operation agreement with Ukrainian officials, denounces what she calls “the insidious myth that sexual violence in conflict is inevitable”.
In peace negotiations through history, Patten warned in an interview with the US news programme Democracy Now, “the question of amnesty for crimes of sexual violence has always been on the table... The option was women or peace. And, as usual, women get sacrificed.”
When Patten spoke to the UN Security Council about sexual violence in Ukraine in June, she demanded that there be specific provisions in any ceasefire or peace agreement to ensure that there is no amnesty for crimes of sexual violence.
Lyudmyla Denisova, who was then Ukraine’s parliamentary ombudswoman for human rights, says she received 400 reports of sexual violence by Russian soldiers in the first two weeks of April. The head of the psychological hotline which Denisova set up for sexual crimes, torture and abuse says the hotline received 1,500 calls in six weeks from April 1st until May 15th.
The rape-as-a-weapon-of-war story became the perfect metaphor for Russia’s assault on Ukraine.
The Security Service of Ukraine or SBU published what it said were conversations between Russian soldiers and their wives or girlfriends. “You go ahead, rape Ukrainian women and do not tell me anything,” one Russian woman allegedly told her partner.
“A lot of big numbers were being thrown around, by [Denisova] but also by others, without clear evidence,” says Margolis. “That is dangerous because people may come back and say, ‘This wasn’t actually happening after all.’ It feeds the myths around ‘Oh, women lie about being raped.’ Again, it’s not to say these things are not happening or that people report cases that are not true. We simply do not have clear information about those 400 cases.”
The focus on sexual violence in April and May was “not just journalists”, Margolis says. “It’s politicians. I’ve heard about politicians visiting and wanting to speak to [rape] survivors. It’s people from the prosecutor’s office. It’s international investigators. It’s NGOs. It’s everyone…There is a real appetite for these stories, which was also fed by the report of 400 cases and the constant reference to this being a weapon of war.”
Margolis is concerned that survivors of sexual violence may be retraumatised by “the race to get the story and to prosecute the cases”. The ethical question “of how that information is going to be used, whether it’s useful and the impact on the survivor and their family members” is sometimes neglected. “I worry about people being asked to go through this over and over and over.”
Pramila Patten says that in the past, rape victims have sometimes been questioned more than 15 times.
At the end of May, the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, voted to dismiss Denisova, saying she had focused too much on sexual violence and neglected other aspects of her brief, including humanitarian corridors and prisoner exchanges. Several human rights groups opposed Denisova’s dismissal.
Denisova admitted to the Ukrainian website LB.ua that she had used “cruel” or “harsh” language. In an ambiguous quote which was interpreted as an admission of guilt, she said, “Maybe I exaggerated… to achieve the goal of convincing the world to provide weapons and pressure [on Russia].” Denisova insisted that she had only repeated the testimony of victims in phone calls to her office. “It has been confirmed that there is sexual violence. Now the investigators need to prove it,” she concluded.
Some of those who had spoken out earlier declined to comment. The head of investigations at the Kyiv Independent, who conducted an in-depth study of rape in the Kyiv area, did not wish to speak to me. Neither did the mayor of Bucha, who had talked about 25 women being held as sex slaves in a basement in his town.
Oleksandra Matviichuk, the human rights lawyer who heads the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, fears that the focus on sexual violence may distract attention from other Russian war crimes. She also warns that delving into sex crimes can harm both the survivor and the investigator.
Human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk. Photograph: Lara Marlowe
Working with regional human rights groups across Ukraine, Matviichuk has documented what she calls 13,000 “criminal episodes” involving Russian troops. These are only “the tip of the iceberg”, she says. Though her group refrains from asking about sexual violence and refers such reports to trained specialists, it has nonetheless received five complaints of rape.
The inability of the Ukrainian and international justice systems to handle such a huge number of cases is one of Matviichuk’s main concerns. “The International Criminal Court [ICC] has started an investigation here. But they will select only a few cases. Who will provide justice for thousands of others who will not be selected by the ICC?” she asks.
“In July of this year, our former prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova said she had opened 23,000 criminal proceedings [against Russian forces],” Matviichuk says. “Even Scotland Yard could not cope with such a huge number of crimes.” She advocates the creation of international hybrid tribunals on war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, in which national investigators and judges would work alongside international investigators and judges.
“It will be difficult to achieve the political will,” Matviichuk warns. “Because there is a lack of bravery to say, ‘Putin, we will prosecute you’.”
I ask Matviichuk what cases have left the deepest impression on her. “I try not to focus on my own emotion, because I will be broken,” she says. “We have testimony from a mother who told how Russian soldiers killed her daughter before her eyes. We have testimony of people who were forcibly put in a basement and Russian soldiers ordered them to choose volunteers because they wanted to shoot somebody, and they shot them.”
What Matviichuk calls “the accountability gap” is particularly wide in cases of sexual violence because evidence is often scant, victims are reluctant to come forward and the knowledge of commanders must be demonstrated – as it was in Bosnia and Rwanda – for rape cases to reach the level of an international tribunal.
“It is possible that troops are extremely undisciplined but that commanders are still aware of what they are doing and do not take action to stop it,” Margolis says.
Matviichuk says Russian prisoners are also being used as combatants, a possible explanation for the apparently high number of war crimes. Ethnic minorities recruited from outlying regions of the Russian Federation are often accused of atrocities by Ukrainian refugees from occupied areas.
Matviichuk says: “When the world was horrified by the atrocities at Bucha, what did Putin do? He gave medals to the Russian solders who served there, to encourage them to do what they want to. He showed the whole Russian army, ‘We don’t care’.”
irishtimes.com · by Lara Marlowe
13. Aid helps Ukraine achieve ‘outweighed gains.’
Aid helps Ukraine achieve ‘outweighed gains.’
The New York Times · by Marc Santora · August 13, 2022
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A Ukrainian artillery unit firing toward Russian infantry troops advancing around the eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovske on Wednesday.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
By Jesus Jiménez and
Aug. 13, 2022
As the war drags on, Ukraine has managed to hold off Russian gains for the past month thanks in large part to continued support from the United States and its European allies, and help on the ground from partisans.
Following months of grinding war in which Ukraine has lost territory, Kyiv has been able to stem Russian advances recently and force Russia to sustain heavy losses, with up to 500 Russian troops killed or injured every day, according to some estimates.
John Spencer, a retired Army officer and chair of urban warfare studies for the Madison Policy Forum research institute, said that while Ukraine has lost tactical ground in some regions, its troops have succeeded in weakening Russia’s military.
“They have also made Russians expend resources that they can’t replenish,” Mr. Spencer said. “You don’t want to say they’re winning the war because there’s so much fighting to be done, but from really every measure you think about, especially geopolitically and militarily, they’re achieving outweighed gains.”
Russia still maintains a huge advantage in the size of its weapons arsenal, and Ukraine has suffered heavily over the course of the war. As many as 200 soldiers were being killed each day at one point; the civilian death toll has topped 5,000, according to United Nations estimates; and several of the country’s cities have been flattened. But Moscow has had no major territorial gains since the capture of the eastern Luhansk Province in late June.
Ukraine was bolstered on Thursday when the defense ministers of 26 countries, including Britain and Denmark, pledged about $1.55 billion in military aid to Ukraine. Ben Wallace, Britain’s defense minister, said the aid would include additional multiple-launch rocket systems and long-range missiles.
“We are not getting tired,” Mr. Wallace said of his country’s continued support for Ukraine.
Morten Bodskov, Denmark’s defense minister, said his country would not just help with weapons, but that it would also assist in training service members.
The aid, which Mr. Zelensky has called for repeatedly since the war began, added to another package from the United States that was announced earlier this week. The Pentagon said on Monday that it would send more ammunition in a new shipment of up to $1 billion worth of weapons and supplies. With that, the United States will have sent more than $9 billion in aid to Ukraine since Russia invaded the country on Feb. 24.
Mr. Spencer said that maintaining such continued support from Western countries has taken “as much fighting as actually fighting Russian forces, as far as showing the world that they’re fighting a just war.”
Support for the country has not only come in the form of aid packages, but also through help on the ground in the form of partisans, resistance fighters who aid the Ukrainian military on Russian-occupied territory.
At least five fighter bombers and three multi-role jets were “almost certainly destroyed or seriously damaged” this week in blasts at an air base in Crimea, according to a British military intelligence report on Friday. Crimea — which Moscow annexed in 2014 — has largely avoided attacks since February and the base was far from any recognizable front line.
One senior Ukrainian official said the attacks were carried out with the help of partisans, but the government has not taken responsibility for the attack.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, has reported that “the Kremlin is scrambling to find any reinforcements” to replenish its decimated ranks of troops.
It said Saturday there were growing indications that Moscow would continue to expand the Kremlin’s direct control over Russia’s weapons manufacturers and other military-related industries as it tries to bolster a prolonged war effort.
The New York Times · by Marc Santora · August 13, 2022
14. Russia’s Repeat Failures
Excerpts:
Russian military planners closely study whether their forces are combat effective, including by looking at attrition rates (also known as “critical loss” in Russian military science). For Russian ground forces, military planners projected before the war that a unit becomes ineffective when it loses 50 to 60 percent of its original strength. They estimate that a regional command-and-control network is permanently broken when 40 percent of its equipment is destroyed. They believe that an air force squadron can no longer operate when it loses 70 percent of its aircraft. If Ukraine can create a highly contested frontline—just as it did outside Kyiv and Kharkiv—with attacks on command-and-control points, high rates of equipment losses, and large Russian casualties, it may again convince Moscow to withdraw.
But for such a Ukrainian strategy to have the best chance of success, it must be in progress before Russia attempts to annex the territory it holds, that way Ukrainian attacks can deny Russia a foothold in an area like Kherson. And even if Russia does annex Ukrainian territory and tries to force an operational pause, Kyiv and its Western supporters don’t have to comply. Russia’s overall ambitions for Ukraine, after all, remain intact. Moscow wants to annex large parts of Ukraine, it wants to demilitarize the country so that the government cannot fight against its actions, and it wants a pro-Russian leader in Kyiv. The sad reality is that annexing four regions is unlikely to be the end of Russia’s mission in Ukraine, but just one phase in Putin’s much longer project. Both Ukraine and its backers must be prepared for a protracted war.
Russia’s Repeat Failures
Moscow’s New Strategy in Ukraine Is Just as Bad as the Old One
August 15, 2022
Foreign Affairs · by Dara Massicot · August 15, 2022
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the Kremlin inadvertently put its military forces in an unsustainable position, ordering them to take on more operations than they could bear. It had nearly all its soldiers surge simultaneously and rapidly into Ukraine to fight along multiple fronts. It did so without taking necessary protective measures, such as clearing routes of explosives. It had its forces advance at an unsustainable pace. As a result, Russian troops were vulnerable to ambushes, counterattacks, and severe logistical problems that cost the military enormous numbers of soldiers and equipment.
That initial error was caused by the Kremlin’s prewar delusions. Moscow was overconfident in its intelligence, in the ability of its agents to influence events and politics inside Ukraine, and in its own armed forces. It underestimated Ukraine’s capabilities and will to fight. And it failed to account for a massive expansion of Western support to Kyiv.
But although Russia has had six months to learn from these mistakes, it appears poised to once again commit its depleted forces to an untenable mission: annexing and holding Ukraine’s Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia provinces, or oblasts. Holding this territory will require substantial amounts of manpower and armored equipment—particularly given that the regions have contested frontlines and that Russian forces in each experience organized partisan attacks. And Moscow has lost its most advanced equipment, for which it does not have equivalent replacements. The Russian armed forces have also suffered tens of thousands of casualties, including well-trained personnel, and its current strategy for replenishment—recruiting new soldiers from a motley mix of communities and armed groups—will not create a combat effective force. There remains, in short, a mismatch between the Kremlin’s goals for Ukraine and the forces it has to deliver them.
The Kremlin may continue with its plans anyway, concluding that by annexing these four regions, it can force a rapid end to this phase of the war, stymie Western support for Ukraine, and buy itself time to repair and regenerate its military. If Moscow cannot marshal enough resources to support this goal, however, an exhausted Russian military will struggle to hold a contested frontline of about 620 miles. Even if the Kremlin pulls all levers available, declaring a general mobilization in order to call up sufficient armored equipment and trained personnel, that process would still take time. Russian forces, then, are likely to face very significant resource constraints in the next year or two. This may provide Ukrainian forces with an opportunity to push back against Russia’s efforts to hold all four oblasts.
RUNNING ON EMPTY
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began with high-profile losses. As Russian troops advanced toward Kyiv and Kharkiv, they were vulnerable to intense fires and ambush tactics from a committed and increasingly well-supplied Ukrainian military. After the Russian offensive stalled and suffered heavy casualties, Moscow abandoned its plan to capture these cities. Instead, it concentrated its attacks on the Donbas—made up of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts—and southern Ukraine, both places where the Russian military has had more success. Today, Russian forces have conquered the entirety of Luhansk, the vast majority of Kherson, and over half of Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia.
Seizing Kyiv was critical to one of Moscow’s key objectives at the outset of the war: fast regime change. When that failed, Russia downsized its plans, and now, the Kremlin’s revised intermediate goal has come into sharper focus. Through a series of policy announcements, leadership statements, and targeted military operations over the last three months, it appears that Russia seeks to illegally annex the provinces it has entirely or mostly occupied, potentially as early as this fall.
For the Kremlin, annexing parts of Ukraine is a means to a bigger end.
Russia has laid the administrative groundwork for such a move. It has installed Russian citizens or officials to administer occupied Ukrainian territories, appointed instructors to teach a distorted pro-Russian curriculum in schools, changed Ukrainian Internet service providers and telephone area codes to Russian ones, and confiscated Ukrainian passports to force Ukrainian citizens to acquire Russian documents. The recently installed puppet governments of occupied regions have announced so-called election commissions that could hold sham referendums on joining Russia. Moscow has created temporary security services offices in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, nominally to help administer these southern regions but probably to break up partisan networks that could interfere with the annexation process.
For the Kremlin, annexation would be a means to a bigger end. Should Moscow declare these territories part of Russia, it could then proclaim a cease-fire and paint continuing Ukrainian counteroffensives as attacks on what it defines as Russia. Kremlin officials might also declare that their country’s nuclear guarantees apply to all of what they consider to be the Russian Federation, as Russian President Vladimir Putin did after annexing Crimea in 2014. Such a plan assumes that the threats would deter the United States and Europe from supporting Ukraine, prompting them to curtail or even cut off arms flows to Kyiv over fears of escalation. Over time, the Kremlin hopes, Western interest in and support for Ukraine will fade, allowing Russia to set the terms of the conflict’s settlement.
Ukraine is highly unlikely to accept any annexation or cease-fire. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has declared that “freezing the conflict with the Russian Federation means a pause that gives the Russian Federation a break for rest.” Kyiv will almost certainly also continue to ask for Western assistance. Ukrainian and Russian goals through the end of 2022 are therefore on a collision course: one side is working to prevent the conflict from ossifying along a frozen line of contact while the other works to attain precisely that outcome.
MUDDLING THROUGH
The Ukrainian and Russian militaries are entering into a critical period in the weeks and months ahead, although for different reasons. In some areas, Ukrainian forces are outgunned, outranged, and in critical need of ammunition and certain weapons—thanks in part to Russia’s efforts to disable Ukraine’s defense industry. But in the near term, Ukraine may have a more sustainable position. The country has sufficient personnel, Western support, and a strong will to fight. Russia, meanwhile, has experienced troop and material losses that will be difficult to overcome. According to Western estimates, Russia has suffered between 45,000 and 75,000 wounded and killed personnel, from junior enlisted soldiers to generals. It has lost more than 5,000 pieces of equipment. Russia’s military has learned and adapted at the operational and tactical levels from its early defeats, shifting to new tactics that favor its superior firepower. But such battlefield adjustments are not enough to overcome the early and severe losses.
These deficits will make it hard for Russia to successfully hold the regions it may try to annex. At a minimum, if the Kremlin annexes them this fall, it would be doing so at a time of great vulnerability. To succeed, Moscow will have to replenish personnel and equipment at scale—tasks that will prove extremely difficult.
Consider, for instance, Russia’s shortage of soldiers. So far, Russia is taking an ad hoc approach to replenishing personnel, drawing from at least nine populations: active duty troops stationed outside Ukraine, reservists, mercenary groups, Kadyrovtsy (fighters loyal to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov), military prison battalions, foreign fighters, the National Guard, direct volunteers, and far-right neo-Nazi groups such as Rusich. This system is far from ideal. The Russian military and mercenary groups may be touting decent combat pay—over $3,000 a month—but they are offering short-term contracts, dropping recruitment standards, and providing only a few weeks of basic training.
Russia has experienced troop and material losses that will be difficult to overcome.
Russia could drum up more soldiers by reaching into the border troops or further into the National Guard. But the country’s ability to generate personnel will also probably reach its zenith in the coming months unless it declares a general mobilization and drafts men from across the country. Even in a best-case scenario, however, mobilization would take at least several months to a year to confer an operational benefit. Russia’s mobilization base, made of equipment in long-term storage and reservists with military experience, has been largely dormant for over a decade. Expanding the system nationwide, including by calling up military-age males with no experience, would strain it significantly; thousands of officers and noncommissioned officers needed to command mobilized units are currently fighting or have already been killed in Ukraine.
Russia’s equipment problem is just as difficult to solve. According to U.S. officials, the Russian military has committed 80 percent of its active duty army, airborne, and marine units and their equipment to Ukraine, and it has already withdrawn additional equipment from long-term storage. Although Russia has thousands more armored vehicles and missiles in storage, they are less capable and more unreliable: gear in long-term storage, for example, is mostly old and in various degrees of serviceability, often kept for years in open fields. Russia’s defense industry still has manufacturing capacity, but with its already bottlenecked and inefficient production lines under heavy Western sanctions, Russia will struggle to mass-produce new equipment on short notice. The Kremlin has taken initial steps to shore up this sector so it can better regenerate lost gear and expand its supply of missiles, but it will take many months to several years before these measures begin to show results.
THE BATTLE AHEAD
Moscow’s troubles, however, don’t guarantee Ukraine’s success. Kyiv has also lost many troops and weapons. In the near term, Ukraine, like Russia, will probably struggle to carry out new large-scale offensives or counteroffensives. Both states could be focused on ad hoc efforts to stave off exhaustion. Ukraine will need to fight hard to deny Russia a meaningful hold on the areas it plans to annex, or to contest annexation if it occurs. Kyiv will also need continued Western support to implement its qualitative advantages on the battlefield. It will need to use the momentum of its counterattacks to prevent Moscow from integrating occupied oblasts into Russia.
Kyiv has said its counteroffensive in Kherson is a priority, and it is striking Russian bases at greater distances—possibly including a naval aviation base in Crimea. Russian forces in Kherson were the most vulnerable at the start of the summer, but in recent weeks, Russia has redeployed assets there from the Donbas. Ukraine can complicate Russia’s ability to fortify and annex this vital territory by using a method that worked in the opening phases of the war: inflicting battlefield losses so stark that Russia’s military leadership becomes convinced their forces cannot hold the oblast and that their positions are, or will imminently become, unsustainable. To do that, the Ukrainian military must maintain a contested frontline, attack Russian command-and-control systems, and steadily thin out Russian forces to the point that they are combat ineffective in a particular area.
Russian military planners closely study whether their forces are combat effective, including by looking at attrition rates (also known as “critical loss” in Russian military science). For Russian ground forces, military planners projected before the war that a unit becomes ineffective when it loses 50 to 60 percent of its original strength. They estimate that a regional command-and-control network is permanently broken when 40 percent of its equipment is destroyed. They believe that an air force squadron can no longer operate when it loses 70 percent of its aircraft. If Ukraine can create a highly contested frontline—just as it did outside Kyiv and Kharkiv—with attacks on command-and-control points, high rates of equipment losses, and large Russian casualties, it may again convince Moscow to withdraw.
But for such a Ukrainian strategy to have the best chance of success, it must be in progress before Russia attempts to annex the territory it holds, that way Ukrainian attacks can deny Russia a foothold in an area like Kherson. And even if Russia does annex Ukrainian territory and tries to force an operational pause, Kyiv and its Western supporters don’t have to comply. Russia’s overall ambitions for Ukraine, after all, remain intact. Moscow wants to annex large parts of Ukraine, it wants to demilitarize the country so that the government cannot fight against its actions, and it wants a pro-Russian leader in Kyiv. The sad reality is that annexing four regions is unlikely to be the end of Russia’s mission in Ukraine, but just one phase in Putin’s much longer project. Both Ukraine and its backers must be prepared for a protracted war.
Foreign Affairs · by Dara Massicot · August 15, 2022
15. Taiwan’s KMT: Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Excerpts:
While the KMT fills 39 of the Legislative Yuan’s 113 seats and accounts for more county magistrates and mayors of special municipalities than the DPP, the party has struggled to exceed 20 percent of popular support since the last election. July’s Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation poll shows only 14.9 percent of Taiwanese currently back the party, putting it neck and neck with Taipei Mayor Ko wen-je’s upstart Taiwan People’s Party. The DPP, meanwhile, is riding high with 34.2 percent support among the electorate.
As Taiwan looks toward November 26 local elections, there are some opportunities for the KMT to make gains. There is also ample potential to run afoul of public opinion in the sensitive months ahead. One such example is Vice Chairman Andrew Hsia’s “fact-finding” mission to southern China, which he embarked on merely a week after China conducted live-fire drills near Taiwan. The mission’s stated goal was to study the situation of Taiwanese expats there and provide aid.
Hsia’s visit has been widely criticized by the DPP and even some fellow KMT officials, with criticisms ranging from questioning the timing of the mission to accusations of colluding with the enemy.
With such little time between China’s military drills and unification propaganda and the upcoming local elections, “it will be very difficult for the KMT to make any meaningful adjustment,” Lu remarked, “even though I personally see this as necessary for the KMT to win any (national) elections in the future.”
Taiwan’s KMT: Between a Rock and a Hard Place
China’s aggressive maneuvers are making it harder for Taiwan’s main opposition party to finesse its cross-strait sta
thediplomat.com · by Micah McCartney · August 15, 2022
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When China reacted to U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s recent Taiwan trip with its largest-scale military flexing in 26 years, including four missiles evidently fired over the island nation and numerous incursions into its air defense identification zone, Taiwan’s main opposition party Kuomintang (KMT) excoriated Beijing for the show of force.
The party issued a flurry of statements via its official Twitter account, warning the exercises damage cross-strait relations and destabilize the region and calling on “the entire civilized world” to denounce the “belligerent acts.” These rebukes have a sharpness to them rarely seen from the KMT, which has been Taiwan’s more China-friendly party since the 1990s.
In addition, the KMT’s Culture and Communications Committee stated in a press release that the Republic of China (Taiwan) is “a sovereign and independent nation,” a sentiment most often used as a rallying cry by the party’s arch-rival: President Tsai Ing-wen’s independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Does this signal a paradigm shift for the KMT’s Beijing policy? Likely not, says Yeh-chung Lu, chair of National Cheng-chi University’s Department of Diplomacy. Yet a significant debate seems to be ongoing, one largely being waged between the old guard and the new. “The debate is to what extent they should engage with China, and then what are the principles and the big noes,” Lu told The Diplomat.
The Chinese authorities have in recent years not made things easy for the party that is the closest they have to an ally across the strait. The Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong was a major factor in Tsai’s landslide 2020 victory, and the KMT is struggling to make inroads with an electorate that is increasingly wary of closer economic and political ties with their authoritarian neighbor.
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How the KMT Might Have Handled Pelosi’s Visit
KMT Department of International Affairs Director and U.S. envoy Alexander Huang pointed out it was the KMT that repelled Chinese Communist forces after Chiang Kai-shek and his forces fled the mainland for Taiwan in 1949. “Our position is firm and has never changed,” Huang said. “We do our best to maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait through the strong defense and necessary dialogue. We do not give up hope in peace but if diplomacy and deterrence both failed, we will defend our homeland without compromise.”
He observed that KMT administrations in years past also went to great efforts to invite top American political leaders to Taiwan. Yet in Pelosi’s case, he claimed the KMT would have handled the trip in a more sensitive manner to avert a crisis.
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“We would work with the U.S. government together on the possible impacts on our bilateral interests and then inform Washington that there is a need for us to make an effort (through cross-strait communications channels) to let Beijing know that we would emphasize that we see her as the highest representative of the American people — the House represents the people — with much less focus on her position in political succession,” he said. A KMT administration would have greeted Pelosi as a friend from a fellow democracy and assuage Beijing’s anxiety by reaffirming the party’s commitment to the “1992 Consensus” and “anti-Taiwan independence,” Huang went on.
He stressed that it is in Taiwan’s interest to resume communication channels with China to reduce tension and prevent a crisis. The DPP is not likely to change its posture, which increases the risk of escalation in the future, he added.
China has frozen nearly all official ties with Taiwan since Tsai’s election and ramped up its gray-zone military exercises as well as efforts to squeeze Taiwan’s international space. Despite multiple attempts by Tsai to extend an olive branch, Beijing has made acknowledgement of the so-called “1992 Consensus” a precondition for resuming talks.
KMT-U.S. Relations in Flux
The KMT’s relationship with Washington has stagnated since Ma Ying-jeou occupied the Presidential Office. Wu Den-yih, who replaced Ma as KMT chairman, did little to engage with the United States. In the “two-level game, U.S. ties and local politics,” he was far more focused on the latter, Lu said, which reduced mutual trust with Washington.
While Wu’s replacement, Johnny Chiang, tried to restore this trust, the party’s resounding defeat in 2020 mired him in intraparty intrigue on one hand and battles with the DPP on the other. Further straining the KMT’s image in Washington was the party’s high-profile campaign to block American pork imports containing the leanness-enhancing drug ractopamine.
Current KMT Chairman Eric Chu is hastening to make up for lost time. In June, the party opened a liaison office in Washington, D.C., 14 years after the last one shuttered.
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Huang, who heads the new office, says party officials are hitting the streets in Washington and “expanding our reach” in large cities like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston. The office is in contact with “key stakeholders in the U.S. government, congressional members and staff, and experts in major policy think tanks.” Various activities are being planned, such as summer camps and workshops for young Americans.
Meanwhile, Chu embarked on an 11-day public relations mission to the U.S., where he declared the KMT historically “pro-U.S.” and “pro-democratic” and met with national security officials, think tanks, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. He referred to the so-called “1992 Consensus,” which the current Taiwan government does not recognize, as an ambiguous “non-consensus consensus” between both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
It is no longer viable for the KMT to be seen as the “pro-China” party in the current political climate, but there are also inherent risks in appearing to hedge its bets in Washington. Hardline nationalist KMT members regard a pivot toward the U.S. as incompatible with eventual unification with China and a misguided imitation of the DPP, Lu said, while the Chinese government now openly touts its plans for “One Country, Two Systems” for Taiwan.
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“1992 Consensus”
There was a struggle over the party’s emphasis on the “1992 Consensus” under the chairmanship of Johnny Chiang. Chiang made waves when he said he supported a 1992 Consensus, but one rooted in the Constitution of the Republic of China. This led more conservative members within the party to fear he was jeopardizing cross-strait harmony.
The term itself was created by former Mainland Affairs Council Minister Su Chi in 2000, with the implicit understanding that there is but “one China” and each side of the Taiwan Strait is free interpret what this means. Tsai has not accepted the “1992 Consensus.” Notably, the concept was dismissed out of hand by the late Lee Teng-hui of the KMT, who was president while the cross-strait exchanges of 1992 took place.
On August 10, a white paper published by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, the first such document released on Xi Jinping’s watch, confirmed that “One Country, Two Systems” is fundamental to Beijing’s vision of unification with Taiwan. This is makes a rapprochement with a KMT, or indeed any Taiwanese administration, more difficult to achieve given how “One Country, Two Systems” played out in Hong Kong. Even pro-China former President Ma has declared the framework “dead.”
2022 Local Elections and Beyond
While the KMT fills 39 of the Legislative Yuan’s 113 seats and accounts for more county magistrates and mayors of special municipalities than the DPP, the party has struggled to exceed 20 percent of popular support since the last election. July’s Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation poll shows only 14.9 percent of Taiwanese currently back the party, putting it neck and neck with Taipei Mayor Ko wen-je’s upstart Taiwan People’s Party. The DPP, meanwhile, is riding high with 34.2 percent support among the electorate.
As Taiwan looks toward November 26 local elections, there are some opportunities for the KMT to make gains. There is also ample potential to run afoul of public opinion in the sensitive months ahead. One such example is Vice Chairman Andrew Hsia’s “fact-finding” mission to southern China, which he embarked on merely a week after China conducted live-fire drills near Taiwan. The mission’s stated goal was to study the situation of Taiwanese expats there and provide aid.
Hsia’s visit has been widely criticized by the DPP and even some fellow KMT officials, with criticisms ranging from questioning the timing of the mission to accusations of colluding with the enemy.
With such little time between China’s military drills and unification propaganda and the upcoming local elections, “it will be very difficult for the KMT to make any meaningful adjustment,” Lu remarked, “even though I personally see this as necessary for the KMT to win any (national) elections in the future.”
Micah McCartney
Micah McCartney is a freelance journalist covering Taiwan and East Asian affairs.
thediplomat.com · by Micah McCartney · August 15, 2022
16. Ukraine Is Waging Guerilla Warfare Hell on Putin
Ukraine Is Waging Guerilla Warfare Hell on Putin
19fortyfive.com · by Alexander Motyl · August 14, 2022
Ukrainian partisan resistance to Russia’s occupation forces has intensified significantly in the last 10 days, August 4-13. In my last update, which encompassed 28 days, July 6-August 2, I noted 33 resistance incidents, of which 17 were non-violent and 16 were violent, being directed at persons or property. That comes out to 1.18 incidents per day.
In marked contrast, the last 10 days have witnessed 34 resistance incidents, of which 12 were non-violent and 22 were violent, with 13 being directed at property and nine at persons. That comes out to 3.4 incidents per day, almost a threefold increase over the last reporting period.
No less important, whereas non-violent incidents represented 0.52 percent of the total in July 6-August 2, they dropped to 0.36 percent in the last 10 days. Unsurprisingly, most of the partisan activity is in Kherson and Zaporizhzhya provinces; importantly, a resistance movement appears to have also emerged in occupied Crimea.
The evidence speaks for itself: the Ukrainian guerrilla struggle is intensifying and becoming decidedly more violent.
August 4, Bilovodsk, Luhansk province: partisans shoot at a car carrying collaborators, Vitaly Kovalenko, Bilovodsk district head, and his deputy, Valentyna Hladkova. Both are wounded.
August 4, Melitopol, Zaporizhzhya province: anti-Russian leaflets distributed in mail boxes.
August 4, Kherson: collaborationist Kherson province governor, Volodymyr Saldo (the target of a failed assassination attempt on July 11), falls into coma and is hospitalized in Moscow. Doctors suspect Saldo was poisoned.
August 5, Melitopol, Zaporizhzhya province: pro-Ukrainian slogans appear in the city center.
August 5, Vovchansk, occupied Kharkiv province: pro-Ukrainian leaflets appear in the city.
August 6, Nova Kakhovka, Kherson province: collaborationist deputy head of local administration, Vitaly Hura, shot and killed.
August 6, Tokmak, Zaporizhzhya province: partisans blow up rail line.
August 6, Kherson: Yellow Ribbon resistance movement distributes first issue of underground gazette, Voice of the Partisan. Print run: 1,200.
August 6, Berdyansk, Zaporizhzhya province: the Berdyansk Partisan Army stages explosion near the city police department.
August 8, Berdyansk: explosion near the home of collaborationist deputy mayor, apparently, the work of the Berdyansk Partisan Army.
August 8, Kherson: leaflets appear in the city threatening the poisoned Volodymyr Saldo’s successor as collaborationist Kherson province governor, Kyrylo Stryemousov, with the same fate.
August 8, Beryslav, Kherson province: graffiti appears announcing that the Ukrainian armed forces are “already here” and that “Putin is a prick.”
August 9, Simferopol and Alushta, occupied Crimea: partisans declare a $230,000 bounty on Sergey Aksyonov, head of the self-styled republic.
August 9, Melitopol, Zaporizhzhya province: partisans paste leaflets asking for information about the location of voting stations for Russia’s planned “referendum.”
August 9, Melitopol: partisans set off explosion near United Russia headquarters in the city center.
August 9, Kherson: partisans distribute leaflets dissuading people from accepting Russian passports and taking part in the referendum.
August 9, Saki air base, occupied Crimea: multiple explosions with possible involvement of local partisans.
August 10, Mariupol, Donetsk province: explosion in city center, possibly the work of local partisans.
August 10, Melitopol, Zaporizhzhya province: partisans kill two collaborators involved in preparing the “referendum.”
August 11, Kherson: pro-Ukrainian leaflets appear in the city.
August 11, Kherson province: pylon supporting power line leading from Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant to occupied Crimea collapses, possibly due to partisan activity.
August 11, Starobilsk, Luhansk province: partisans explode car driven by a collaborator who heads the Interdistrict Registration and Examination Department.
August 11, Lysychansk, Luhansk province: leaflets appear threatening collaborators (in particular, one Andriy Skoryy) with death.
August 12, Melitopol, Zaporizhzhya province: explosion in yard off Hohol Street. Target was Oleh Shostak, collaborationist head of the propaganda division of local United Russia electoral command. Shostak was hospitalized.
August 12, Kherson: leaflets warning that “the Russian passport kills” appear in the city.
August 13, Melitopol, Zaporizhzhya province: partisans set off explosions in the northeastern part of the city. Target: military building occupied by Russian troops.
August 13, Kherson province: multiple explosions in Chkalov, Novotroyitske, Chaplynka, Nyzhni Sirohozy, Velyka Blahovishchenka, and Nova Kakhovka.
August 13, Mariupol, Donetsk province: powerful explosion in city.
There is no reason to think that the resistance will wane anytime in the near future. Quite the contrary, it is sure to grow and become even more violent—especially if the Ukrainian armed forces continue to press the Russians in the south and keep them from advancing in the east.
Expert Biography: Now a 1945 Contributing Editor, Dr. Alexander Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia, and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires, and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, including Pidsumky imperii (2009); Puti imperii (2004); Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (2001); Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities (1999); Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism (1993); and The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919–1929 (1980); the editor of 15 volumes, including The Encyclopedia of Nationalism (2000) and The Holodomor Reader (2012); and a contributor of dozens of articles to academic and policy journals, newspaper op-ed pages, and magazines. He also has a weekly blog, “Ukraine’s Orange Blues.”
19fortyfive.com · by Alexander Motyl · August 14, 2022
17. Microsoft disrupts Russian-linked hackers targeting NATO countries
Bill Gates, warfighter.
Microsoft disrupts Russian-linked hackers targeting NATO countries - Breaking Defense
The company said information collected during SEABORGIUM intrusions likely supports traditional espionage objectives and information operations as opposed to financial motivations.
breakingdefense.com · by Jaspreet Gill · August 15, 2022
Hacker in a hoodie ASCII art. (Getty)
WASHINGTON — Microsoft has taken actions to disrupt hacking campaigns linked to a highly persistent Russian threat actor that has targeted defense and intelligence consulting companies, among other entities, primarily in NATO countries, the company announced today.
The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) has been tracking the Russian state-sponsored group SEABORGIUM since 2017, whose campaigns involve phishing and credential theft campaigns. Its intrusions have also been linked to hack-and-leak campaigns, where stolen data is “used to shape narratives in targeted countries,” the company said in an advisory.
The company said information collected during SEABORGIUM intrusions likely supports traditional espionage objectives and information operations as opposed to financial motivations.
“SEABORGIUM primarily targets NATO countries, particularly the US and the UK, with occasional targeting of other countries in the Baltics, the Nordics, and Eastern Europe,” according to Microsoft. “Such targeting has included the government sector of Ukraine in the months leading up to the invasion by Russia, and organizations involved in supporting roles for the war in Ukraine.”
Microsoft assessed that Ukraine is likely not the primary focus of SEABORGIUM and is more likely a “reactive focus area” for the group among other targets. It has also targeted former intelligence officials, experts in Russian affairs and Russian citizens abroad.
The company said SEABORGIUM uses fake online personas through LinkedIn accounts and email addresses to send phishing attachments to individuals and organizations. Microsoft also confirmed SEABORGIUM has been observed exfiltrating emails and attachments from inboxes, setting up forwarding rules from inboxes to actor-controlled dead drop accounts where it has long-term access to collected data and using impersonation accounts where sensitive information was shared between them and their targets.
Last year, MSTIC attributed an information operation to SEABORGIUM that involved stolen documents from a political organization in the UK that were uploaded to a public PDF file-sharing site that were then amplified on social media via SEABORGIUM accounts. Then, in May this year, Microsoft and Google TAG detected attacks by SEABORGIUM to steal documents from UK political organizations and activists, according to the advisory. The threat actors stole emails and documents from pro-Brexit activists, which were then leaked online, Reuters reported.
“In the said operation, the actors leaked emails/documents from 2018 to 2022, allegedly stolen from consumer Protonmail accounts belonging to high-level proponents of Brexit, to build a narrative that the participants were planning a coup,” according to the advisory. “The narrative was amplified using social media and through specific politically themed media sources that garnered quite a bit of reach.”
Microsoft in its advisory shared a list of “indicators of compromise” believed to be associated with SEABORGIUM’s phishing campaigns.
“While we have only observed two cases of direct involvement, MSTIC is not able to rule out that SEABORGIUM’s intrusion operations have yielded data used through other information outlets,” according to the advisory. “As with any information operation, Microsoft urges caution in distributing or amplifying direct narratives, and urges readers to be critical that the malicious actors could have intentionally inserted misinformation or disinformation to assist their narrative.”
breakingdefense.com · by Jaspreet Gill · August 15, 2022
18. Do Legislative Visits Actually Help Taiwan?
Who thinks Congressional visits are acts of deterrence? I guess they are intended to show political will.
Excerpts;
The West must always remember that the greatest problem isn’t that Taiwan doesn’t have many embassies abroad, that Taiwan isn’t a member of the WHO, or that Taiwanese athletes need to compete under the “Chinese Taipei” banner. That problem is that one day Taiwan might be invaded and conquered, with incalculable human suffering, by the second most powerful, or maybe by then the most powerful, military in the world. That is the problem that needs to be addressed, and visits will never solve it. On the contrary, they needless complicate it by attracting Beijing’s anger.
The risk of these political visits is twofold. The first, most obvious risk is that these visits will bring forward the timeline when Beijing will judge it has no other option than military means and that solving the “Taiwan issue” sooner involves fewer costs, including political, emotional, honor, and status costs, than delaying action to wait for a more favorable balance of power. The second risk is that the West will bask in its belief that it is clearly signaling commitment to Taiwan and thus strengthening deterrence, and avoid the hard choices and costly actions that are necessary in order to really enhance Taiwan’s security. Those will take political hard work at home, not trips abroad.
Taiwan will not be defended and China will not be deterred though visits, handshakes, smiling photos and inspirational speeches, but by reducing the great and growing gap in the balance of power across the Taiwan Strait. Unless the West understands this, Taiwan will remain mostly on its own, falling behind a China dead set on achieving its territorial and nationalistic goals.
Do Legislative Visits Actually Help Taiwan?
Instead of deterring China, such visits in fact increase the risk of an invasion of Taiwan, because they create a nefarious incentive for it.
thediplomat.com · by Andrei Lungu · August 15, 2022
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International tourism was probably the worst hit industry by the COVID-19 pandemic. But one type of tourism has unexpectedly flourished over the past two years: political visits to and from Taiwan. Politicians from all over the “free world” – ranging from those important positions to those retired after political defeats and little-known politicians without much influence – have concluded that Taiwan needs to be supported against the “communist” menace across the Taiwan Strait and the best way they can do this is through… a visit.
Taiwanese politicians, not really used to but aching for intense diplomatic activity and international recognition, have welcomed them with open arms and engaged in return visits of their own.
Unfortunately, many of these visits aren’t really about Taiwan, but about the visitors and their position toward China. It shouldn’t be surprising that interest in Taiwan has risen in tandem with greater criticism and opposition to Beijing over the past few years, especially since the pandemic began.
This wouldn’t be a problem, if it were helpful to Taiwan. But that’s not the case, as these visits increase the risk of precisely the threat they are supposed to somehow counter: a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) invasion.
Political visits to Taiwan are based on the argument that such political and diplomatic engagement will deter China from an invasion, because they show that Taiwan has the firm backing of Western allies. They are supposed to convey the assurance that any Chinese invasion will lead to devastating sanctions, a flood of military aid to Taiwan, or even direct military intervention by countries such as the United States.
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But that’s not how things are perceived in Beijing. To China’s leaders, instead of a deterrent, such visits are seen as humiliating slights and provocative attempts to change the status quo, by integrating Taiwan into the international community as a normal, sovereign country and Western ally. Academically, it might matter whether this interpretation is or isn’t correct, but in the practice of foreign policy, the only thing that matters is that some powerful people see things this way.
Viewed from Beijing, Taiwan has become more active in international affairs and more daring in its political behavior. It also matters that Beijing sees Taiwan engaging with what it considers to be “small countries.” Chinese leaders, many of whom believe there is an international hierarchy of power, are used to ordinary slights from the world’s hegemon and their primary adversary, the United States. They are less inclined to accept disrespect from “small countries,” which should “know their place” in this order. It’s one thing to be bullied by the well-built school bully and another to be bullied by school kids half your age.
Therefore, instead of deterring China by raising the costs of an invasion, such visits in fact increase this risk, because they create a nefarious incentive for it. The more frequent and high-level the visits and the more active Taiwan becomes in international affairs, the thornier and more pressing the “Taiwan issue” becomes for Beijing. While China might not have a very clear timeline in mind for taking over Taiwan, it largely can afford to wait because Taiwan isn’t a pressing problem and time is perceived to be on China’s side. If, on the other hand, Beijing believes that Taiwan is increasing its international space and inching closer to being a normal country, even without a formal declaration of independence, it will have an incentive to strike earlier, before the perceived status quo changes completely.
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If Chinese leaders feel that Taiwan is getting out of their hands and causing them headaches, they might be more likely to act aggressively earlier, instead of waiting longer. And over the past two years, it’s been pretty clear that Beijing is increasingly annoyed by Taiwan and its engagement with the West, which only complicates the already dangerous situation Taiwan finds itself in.
This is why the trend of flashy visits to Taiwan isn’t just unhelpful, but counterproductive and dangerous, and, thus, needs to stop. What Taiwan needs are better defenses, not more frequent handshakes and warmer hugs. In the meantime, China’s military modernization and expansion continue apace, as do its military activities around Taiwan. This is what the West should be focusing on, instead of political tourism.
Taiwan’s most important problem isn’t that it is not recognized as a normal, independent, sovereign country. Ukraine is widely recognized as an independent country, and it has been invaded. Kyiv has become a mecca for foreign politicians over the past six months, yet hundreds of Ukrainians, soldiers, and civilians, are still being killed by Russian forces every day. Taiwan’s problem is that it too might be invaded, and political meetings or international rhetorical support will not deter that.
Visits to Taiwan won’t strengthen deterrence because they cannot convince Chinese leaders of U.S. resolve to fight for Taiwan’s defense regardless of costs. This is a problem often ignored in the debate about U.S. commitment, like arguments to abandon “strategic ambiguity.” Let’s get past the fact that Chinese leaders believe Washington will come to Taiwan’s defense. But how do you convince Beijing that the democratic U.S. is willing to weather devastating economic costs and sacrifice tens of thousands of Americans in a war for a faraway place, a war which might even reach the nuclear threshold? That is the real dilemma, and it’s more difficult than simply signaling an interest to intervene, through limited military engagement.
The fact that some politicians today express commitment for Taiwan through visits means nothing when nobody knows whether a future U.S. president will believe – as Donald Trump reportedly did – that Taiwan is like the tip of a Sharpie compared to China as the Resolute Desk.
Countless European and American leaders have trekked to Kyiv over the past few months, but there are no Western troops on Ukrainian soil. Leaders in Europe and the U.S. are afraid of a direct confrontation with a nuclear-armed great power.
And the idea that knowledge of commitment automatically leads to restraint is also flawed. True, Russian leaders probably misjudged the West’s commitment to Ukraine when they decided to invade, in February. But that commitment became crystal clear in just a few days, yet Russian troops are still fighting on Ukrainian soil, six months after the Kremlin clearly understood just how committed the West is. Regardless of numerous opportunities to end the war, it still goes on, showing just how much Western commitment, expressed through visits, aid, or sanctions, matters to nationalistic, authoritarian leaders with territorial ambitions and an appetite for vengeance for perceived past slights and disrespect against them and their country.
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When it comes to preventing an invasion, visits don’t help because Beijing’s calculus is based on other factors, ranging from the military balance of power, to the balance of commitment for Taiwan between China and the United States, or public perceptions regarding intervention in foreign wars in the United States and its Western allies. The fact that some Westerners profess their friendship toward Taiwan simply does not figure in this calculus, in the sense of enhancing deterrence. On the other hand, the perception that Taiwan is being used by “foreign hostile forces” to contain China’s rise likely plays a role in Beijing’s calculus.
But there is a simple counterargument to the proposal of toning down visits to Taiwan: We cannot let authoritarian bullies tell us what to do, because that would show weakness and weakness invites aggression. We can’t placate Beijing, but must stand up to the aggressor, by traveling to Taiwan, if that’s what we want to do.
Yet the argument that “we can’t let a bully tell us where we can’t go” doesn’t make much sense. If you ever hear it from somebody, take that person to a beach with a big “Danger: Shark zone” sign and ask them if they will let a bullying shark decide where they can or can’t swim. If everybody lived by the maxim “I do whatever I want, regardless of risks or costs,” there would be far fewer people on planet Earth. This isn’t about appeasement, or fear, or weakness, but about sensibly avoiding needlessly dangerous situations, while focusing on what is important.
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The irony is that, in the end, it won’t be Western politicians who will get bitten if they swim in shark-infested waters. Foreign politicians might come to Taiwan, but they will, inevitably, always leave. It is the 23 million people who call Taiwan home, who do not have either the opportunity nor the desire to leave, who will have to suffer the consequences of an enraged Beijing, not necessarily now, but in the future. It won’t be foreign politicians fighting on the beaches if PLA troops one day land.
If it were true that such foreign visits will undeniably instill of sense of fear and dread in the hearts and minds of Chinese leaders, they would be worth it. But it might be nice, for once, to imagine that Chinese leaders are actual human beings, driven by emotions, just as much as reason. They feel things like humiliation, pride, anger, hatred, and a desire to avenge or punish perceived disrespect. And for people as arrogant as some in the halls of power in Beijing are, it is profoundly humiliating that all ranks of Western politicians, from the obscure to the obsolete, have, over the past two years, descended upon Taipei, successfully showcasing Beijing’s impotence as it proved unable to prevent these visits. Each delegation, from Lithuanian to American politicians, brought more perceived shame for some in the Beijing leadership.
These visits don’t bring any increase in security or welfare for Taiwan, but do increase risks. They do not strengthen deterrence, but might provoke aggressiveness. After all, Chinese President Xi Jinping once claimed that “in the West you have the notion that if somebody hits you on the left cheek, you turn the other cheek. In our culture, we punch back.”
But there are other actions that can really help Taiwan and reduce the risk of invasion. For example, because Taiwan’s budget is quite limited and, therefore, there are only so many weapons it can buy, billions of dollars in foreign aid would help Taipei redirect some money from domestic needs toward its military budget and defense industry. This sort of spending would also be far less provocative, because the West would provide money for schools and hospitals, not submarines and rockets.
If, one day, Beijing decides to invade Taiwan, it should be obvious that the PLA will not be stopped by rousing speeches or firm handshakes. It will be stopped on and beneath the sea, in the air, on the beaches, in the cities, by brave soldiers, from Taiwan or maybe from the U.S., Japan, or other countries, fighting a tragic, deadly war. But Taiwan’s friends must do anything they can to avoid such a scenario. Taiwan could never “win” a war with China, but only survive it, at immeasurable costs.
Instead of visiting Taipei, Western politicians can play a far more important role by visiting their own constituents and spending countless hours explaining to them, so they won’t fall prey to propaganda, where Taiwan is, what Taiwan is, the intricacies of the cross-strait situation and why Taiwan matters. Leaders should try to convince voters affected by the high cost of living, sometimes driven by feelings of isolationism or nationalism or simply lack of knowledge about faraway issues, that Taiwan is worth spending dozens of billions to defend, whether in direct aid or in the costs of sanctions – or that Taiwan will even be worth the sacrifices of American lives.
Sure, this is a more difficult task than taking a free trip. It is also politically far riskier (and more courageous) to propose and vote for bills that appropriate billions in aid for a highly developed society in a time of persistently high inflation and recessionary worries at home. But this will be far more useful than political visits, which do nothing to strengthen deterrence or Taiwan’s defenses.
The West must always remember that the greatest problem isn’t that Taiwan doesn’t have many embassies abroad, that Taiwan isn’t a member of the WHO, or that Taiwanese athletes need to compete under the “Chinese Taipei” banner. That problem is that one day Taiwan might be invaded and conquered, with incalculable human suffering, by the second most powerful, or maybe by then the most powerful, military in the world. That is the problem that needs to be addressed, and visits will never solve it. On the contrary, they needless complicate it by attracting Beijing’s anger.
The risk of these political visits is twofold. The first, most obvious risk is that these visits will bring forward the timeline when Beijing will judge it has no other option than military means and that solving the “Taiwan issue” sooner involves fewer costs, including political, emotional, honor, and status costs, than delaying action to wait for a more favorable balance of power. The second risk is that the West will bask in its belief that it is clearly signaling commitment to Taiwan and thus strengthening deterrence, and avoid the hard choices and costly actions that are necessary in order to really enhance Taiwan’s security. Those will take political hard work at home, not trips abroad.
Taiwan will not be defended and China will not be deterred though visits, handshakes, smiling photos and inspirational speeches, but by reducing the great and growing gap in the balance of power across the Taiwan Strait. Unless the West understands this, Taiwan will remain mostly on its own, falling behind a China dead set on achieving its territorial and nationalistic goals.
thediplomat.com · by Andrei Lungu · August 15, 2022
19. Tracing a conspiracy culture throughout U.S. history: Sarah Kendzior on why con men are an American institution
A cautionary tale.
Excerpts:
G: What does that do to our shared relationship to truth?
SK: I describe [truth] as an increasingly useless currency, but one that I will pursue anyway. And I encourage everyone to keep pursuing it. Because we’ve been bombarded with so many lies — obviously, the round-the-clock lies of the Trump administration — but before that, just giant crises that deeply hurt the American people. The 2008 financial collapse and the lack of accountability for that, the lies that led to Iraq, Iran Contra, Watergate; you could go back to the Kennedy assassination. Cynicism is very understandable in that regard.
But of course, malevolent political actors will capitalize on cynicism. You see this in states that are much further down the road in terms of authoritarianism. Russia never completely censored its internet. What they wanted was for people to be bombarded with so many conflicting narratives and so much sensationalism and such a lack of truth about what’s going on within the government, particularly regarding corruption, that they just throw their hands up, and they just don’t care, and they move on.
That is what the government — including the American government — wants from its citizens. They don’t want honest civic inquiry. They don’t want people to feel like their representatives are public servants who are obligated to tell them the truth and obligated to act honorably. They want, instead, this stan culture of cults and worship. It’s deeply unhealthy.
Tracing a conspiracy culture throughout U.S. history: Sarah Kendzior on why con men are an American institution
Sarah Kendzior explains how American history is littered with people who gained power and wealth by manipulating distrust.
Anya van Wagtendonk
Misinformation Reporter
August 16, 2022
grid.news · by Anya van Wagtendonk
Sarah Kendzior is sometimes credited with predicting the rise of former president Donald Trump, long before he was elected to the White House. In her newest book, “They Knew,” she traces a broader “conspiracy culture” throughout American history.
From political scandals like Watergate to the willful disregard from pharmaceutical companies that precipitated the opioid crisis, people have been exposed to real trickery and trauma. Amid climate catastrophe, reverberating recessions and, of course, a global plague, an “epidemic of disillusionment and distrust” grips American life, she argues.
In a conversation with Grid’s misinformation reporter, Anya van Wagtendonk, Kendzior explained how American politics and media obfuscate truth and erode trust in institutions — and how American history is littered with people who gained power and wealth by manipulating that distrust.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Grid: Your book lays out several significant American con men, not least of whom is Donald Trump. What is so American about con men? Or why are con men so American?
Sarah Kendzior: That’s a great question, because con men appear elsewhere, but I think it’s the “rugged individualism” that’s prized in America — the commercialism, the sense that you could appear out of nowhere and transform yourself — that used to be an inspirational American story. All these stories of immigrants starting from nothing and turning into somebody else, and sometimes changing their name — that’s not necessarily bad, but it does open the door [for con men].
That, combined with the lack of a responsible, transparent state that provides public services, is where the con men make their move. They make their move as predators, and they prey on people’s pain.
Some of the examples I lay out in the book, including lesser-known figures like Norman Baker, thrive in the Great Depression. They thrive in times of great chaos and instability, and they bring that incredible confidence and arrogance. They do it within a system that is, one, not providing for the public and, two, not instilling any kind of consistent accountability, especially on the wealthy and powerful.
G: Tell me a little bit about normalcy bias and savior syndrome.
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SK: One of the things that I’ve been hearing from basically the time Trump was running, when I would bring up very serious issues — whether his ties to organized crime or his financial crimes, or his ties to the Kremlin, or to other illicit operatives abroad — was, “This can’t possibly be true, because if it were true, our intelligence services or law enforcement, or the Obama administration, or whoever, would stop it. And the media, which loves scandal, would certainly cover it.” So people went with this default assumption that I was exaggerating or lying or a hysterical woman or an alarmist. That’s normalcy bias. It’s this unearned faith that something that is truly wrong in society will be corrected by the powerful, instead of encouraged and enabled by the powerful.
And then, when that illusion begins to collapse, that’s when you end up with savior syndrome. That’s when you end up with these murky, shadowy yet benevolent figures that are believed to be there in the background, just waiting for the perfect time. That’s not just delusional; it is exceptionally dangerous.
G: We live in the social media age, and so much political discourse is mediated through technology. How do these new methods of communications interact with what you describe as our conspiracy culture?
SK: It’s become much more worrisome, I think, because of algorithms more than because of human interaction. Because I don’t think people are necessarily choosing their interactions as much as they were five, or certainly 10, years ago. They’re being directed and guided into certain arenas.
So you have a lot of information out there, and it’s not really accessible with the full context behind it. And that is very damaging, because a lot of people out there really are just trying to find the truth. They’re presented with an enormous number of conflicting and terrifying stories, and they want to get to the bottom of it all. And it’s become harder and harder to navigate that maze because of roadblocks, but also because of being directed into certain places, and also not being able to see other ones.
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G: What does that do to our shared relationship to truth?
SK: I describe [truth] as an increasingly useless currency, but one that I will pursue anyway. And I encourage everyone to keep pursuing it. Because we’ve been bombarded with so many lies — obviously, the round-the-clock lies of the Trump administration — but before that, just giant crises that deeply hurt the American people. The 2008 financial collapse and the lack of accountability for that, the lies that led to Iraq, Iran Contra, Watergate; you could go back to the Kennedy assassination. Cynicism is very understandable in that regard.
But of course, malevolent political actors will capitalize on cynicism. You see this in states that are much further down the road in terms of authoritarianism. Russia never completely censored its internet. What they wanted was for people to be bombarded with so many conflicting narratives and so much sensationalism and such a lack of truth about what’s going on within the government, particularly regarding corruption, that they just throw their hands up, and they just don’t care, and they move on.
That is what the government — including the American government — wants from its citizens. They don’t want honest civic inquiry. They don’t want people to feel like their representatives are public servants who are obligated to tell them the truth and obligated to act honorably. They want, instead, this stan culture of cults and worship. It’s deeply unhealthy.
G: You write about raising your children among this culture, saying, “My children learned early that the world keeps turning as it burns.” Is that a hopeful idea?
SK: They’ve grown up surrounded by continuous catastrophe. And of course, they learn more about it because I’m their mother and they see me doing interviews or they hear me talking about these things. But I’ve made a conscious effort to teach them about this country before it falls apart — and hopefully, it won’t completely fall apart.
I take them to beautiful places, to national parks, so that they have a real memory. So that they understand that they need to look closely when they see this kind of noxious rhetoric, and to also just find beauty in small things. To not deny that all of this is happening around them.
There is still some steadiness in life. There’s some steady beauty, awe-inspiring things that no one can take away from you. They belong to everybody. I feel that way about the night sky. There are times where I’ve taken them out to go see the Milky Way. We’ll drive deep into the woods in Missouri. I’m like, this is for everyone. This is for the world. And no one can take that from you, no matter how many horrifying things are happening around you. There’s still this beauty and goodness and small things that you can always appreciate.
It’s a mixed bag, I guess, but it’s what gets me through life. So maybe it’ll help them.
Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.
grid.news · by Anya van Wagtendonk
20. Salman Rushdie and the Cult of Offense
Excerpts:
V. S. Naipaul called Khomeini’s fatwa “a most extreme form of literary criticism”—a macabre joke that seemed at the time to come at Rushdie’s expense. Today it sounds just as macabre but hits a worthier target: those who muddle the distinction between offense and violence, and between a disagreement over ideas and a disagreement over whether your head should remain attached to your body.
Now that Rushdie’s head has been partially detached, and on American soil, I hope these distinctions will need no further elaboration, and that those who elided them will swallow their full helping of shame. Rushdie has survived long enough to see free expression debased in the name of free expression. Survive a bit longer, Salman, and we’ll see this cause restored to the status it deserves.
Salman Rushdie and the Cult of Offense
This is what happens when you debase free expression in the name of free expression.
By Graeme Wood
The Atlantic · by Graeme Wood · August 14, 2022
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died in June 1989, just months after issuing a fatwa ordering the murder of Salman Rushdie and all others involved in the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. Fatwas cannot be rescinded posthumously, which is why ever since then, this fatwa has hung in the air like a putrid smell, inhaled deeply for inspiration by devout followers of Khomeini and his successors. On Friday, a man stabbed Rushdie in upstate New York. The suspect is 24, from New Jersey, and reportedly an admirer of Iranian theocratic rule. “The news is not good,” Rushdie’s agent, Andrew Wylie, said in a statement. Rushdie took a hit to the liver and will likely lose an eye. By Saturday night, Rushdie was reportedly off his respirator and talking.
The honorable response is to say that we are all Rushdie now, and that America’s failure to protect him is a collective shame. In the face of this thuggery, Rushdie’s work should be read publicly, and his name thrown in the face of apologists for the regime that once ordered and offered to pay for his assassination. (In 1998, in an effort to normalize relations with the West, Iran canceled the hit but made clear that if some freelancer wanted to get him, Tehran would not be displeased.)
But we are not all Rushdie. And in fact the past couple decades have led me to wonder if some of us are more Khomeini than we’d like to admit.
In 1989, the reaction to the fatwa was split three ways: Some supported it; some opposed it; and some opposed it, to be sure, but still wanted everyone to know how bad Rushdie and his novel were. This last faction, Team To Be Sure, took the West to task for elevating this troublesome man and his insulting book, whose devilry could have been averted had others been more attuned to the sensibilities of the offended.
The fumes are still rising off of this last group. Former president Jimmy Carter was, at the time of the original fatwa, the most prominent American to suggest that the crime of murder should be balanced against Rushdie’s crime of blasphemy. The ayatollah’s death sentence “caused writers and public officials in Western nations to become almost exclusively preoccupied with the author’s rights,” Carter wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times. Well, yes. Carter did not only say that many Muslims were offended and wished violence on Rushdie; that was simply a matter of fact, reported frequently in the news pages. He took to the op-ed page to add his view that these fanatics had a point. “While Rushdie’s First Amendment freedoms are important,” he wrote, “we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated.” Never mind that millions of Muslims take no offense at all, and are insulted by the implication that they should.
Over the past two decades, our culture has been Carterized. We have conceded moral authority to howling mobs, and the louder the howls, the more we have agreed that the howls were worth heeding. The novelist Hanif Kureishi has said that “nobody would have the balls” to write The Satanic Verses today. More precisely, nobody would publish it, because sensitivity readers would notice the theological delicacy of the book’s title and plot. The ayatollahs have trained them well, and social-media disasters of recent years have reinforced the lesson: Don’t publish books that get you criticized, either by semiliterate fanatics on the other side of the world or by semiliterate fanatics on this one.
It is unfair to pick on Carter, because many who have less excuse for these atrocious opinions have agreed with him. These include professional writers. (Carter is a writer and poet, but his writing is more an unfortunate hobby than a real calling.) Like Carter, these writers have condemned murder, to be sure, but hastened to change the subject to the apparently equally urgent problem of the victims’ own sins.
In 2015, after jihadists killed eight members of the staff of Charlie Hebdo, PEN America, a venerable institution promoting the interests of writers and of free expression—and one that Salman Rushdie himself once led—presented the survivors with an award for their courage. Fanatics had warned them for years that they’d be killed for their cartoons, but they published anyway. After the slaughter, hundreds of PEN members, led by Teju Cole and Francine Prose, doubted whether they deserved an award, and objected in a sententious, scolding open letter. (I joined PEN that year, and where the application asked my reasons, I wrote “to cancel out the vote of Joyce Carol Oates,” another one of the signers.)
Today, with Rushdie sliced to ribbons in a hospital bed in Erie, it is impossible to read their letter without noticing how fully they surrendered to this cult of offense and took the side of those offended against those slain.
How awful that the Charlie Hebdo artists and writers were shot to death, the signers said. But should we really applaud them? “There is a critical difference between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable,” they wrote, “and enthusiastically rewarding such expression.” They then proceeded to explain (after, to be sure, a statement that mass murder is not acceptable) that Charlie Hebdo’s ridiculing of the “marginalized, embattled, and victimized” was also not acceptable. In 1989, Team To Be Sure had betrayed its philistinism by reducing Rushdie’s novel, one of the greatest by a living writer, to an “insult.” PEN’s critics of Charlie Hebdo declared that its “cartoons of the Prophet must be seen as being intended to cause further humiliation and suffering.” The letter did not even attempt to criticize Charlie Hebdo on literary grounds.
It takes nerve to describe artists and journalists who were recently shot in the face as having themselves caused “suffering.” To do this in one’s capacity as a PEN America member speaks to a larger faltering of the culture, in its confidence that the liberty of individuals is worth fighting and dying for. (I note that since the attempt on Rushdie's life, almost no one has advanced these arguments. I am not sure why successfully killing several cartoonists contemptuous of religion gets to be sure treatment, but trying to kill a novelist contemptuous of religion does not. In any case I welcome into the ranks of the sensible whoever wishes to join.)
V. S. Naipaul called Khomeini’s fatwa “a most extreme form of literary criticism”—a macabre joke that seemed at the time to come at Rushdie’s expense. Today it sounds just as macabre but hits a worthier target: those who muddle the distinction between offense and violence, and between a disagreement over ideas and a disagreement over whether your head should remain attached to your body.
Now that Rushdie’s head has been partially detached, and on American soil, I hope these distinctions will need no further elaboration, and that those who elided them will swallow their full helping of shame. Rushdie has survived long enough to see free expression debased in the name of free expression. Survive a bit longer, Salman, and we’ll see this cause restored to the status it deserves.
The Atlantic · by Graeme Wood · August 14, 2022
21. Former Afghan president agrees Trump’s deal with Taliban on US withdrawal was a disaster
Former Afghan president agrees Trump’s deal with Taliban on US withdrawal was a disaster
BY OLAFIMIHAN OSHIN - 08/14/22 5:01 PM ET
The Hill · b· August 14, 2022
Former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani agreed on Sunday that the Trump’s administration’s deal with the Taliban that intended to lead to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country was a disaster.
During an appearance on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” Ghani told host Fareed Zakaria that he was critical of the Afghan government being excluded from initial talks.
Ghani declined to say whether he felt betrayed by the U.S. but when Zakaria asked, “Do you think that Trump accord with the Taliban was a disaster?” Ghani replied, “It was,” adding that he believed the Afghan-led portion of the process was “hijacked.”
“We were excluded from the peace table, and the peace process was incredibly flawed. It’s assumption that Taliban had changed— were delusion,” he added. “The process violates everything that— from Acheson and Marshall to Kissinger and Baker, regarding preparation, regarding organization, we never got to discussions. It was all foreplay.”
Ghani also told Zakaria that Trump initially said his Afghanistan and South Asia strategy was going to be a condition-based agreement.
“This agreement was supposed to be conditional. But none of the core conditions was not only observed. The government, our partner, the government of the United States became the enforcer of the Taliban agreement on us, threatening us with cut-off of aid, with every conceivable form of pressure to release 5,000 of the most hardened criminals, et cetera,” Ghani told Zakaria.
Ghani’s remarks come nearly one year after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was ultimately executed by the Biden administration.
The troops’ withdrawal led to the Taliban regaining full control of the country, resulting in thousands of Afghan citizens desperately fleeing the country in fear. The country is plagued with high unemployment rates, soaring food insecurity and setbacks for women seeking an education.
One in three parents worry that school traffic endangers their kids: poll FBI, DHS warn of increase in threats to federal law enforcement officials after Mar-a-Lago search: reports
Ghani, who fled the country amid the chaos, told Zakaria that he hopes to return to Afghanistan in the near future.
“I want to be able to help my country heal,” Ghani said. “And I hope to be able to do that from the place that every cell of my body belongs and without which I always feel alien.”
Updated 6:16 p.m.
The Hill · by Laura Kelly · August 14, 2022
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
VIDEO "WHEREBY" Link: https://whereby.com/david-maxwell
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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