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Quotes of the Day:
“If a country is lost to communism through propaganda and subversion it is lost to our side as irretrievably as if we had lost it in actual warfare.”
-George Gallup, 1962
A 2020 follow up to the above quote:
"The gray zone isn't new. It's cheap and effective, especially against a military-first national security mindset."
- Matt Armstrong
“It is hard for me to understand a culture that not only hates and fights his brothers but even attacks nature and abuses her period man must love all creation or he will love none of it. Love is something you and I must have. We must have it because our spirit feeds upon it. Without love our self-esteem weakens. Without it our courage fails. Without love we can no longer look out confidently at the world. Instead, we turn inwardly and begin to feed upon our own personalities and little by little we destroy ourselves.”
- Chief Dan George
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 12 (Putin's War)
2. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (12.09.22) CDS comments on key events
3. The Ukraine war has reached a turning point
4. Putin Is Trying to Turn Ukraine Into a Culture War
5. Amid Ukraine’s startling gains, liberated villages describe Russian troops dropping rifles and fleeing
6. Ukraine Stands, Fights, and Wins
7. As Ukraine Pushes Forward, U.S. Officials Give Update
8. Putin Has a New Opposition—and It’s Furious at Defeat in Ukraine
9. A turning point in Ukraine leads to a turning point in Russia: Longtime Kremlin supporters are now calling the war a ‘disaster’
10. Ukraine, rushing into 'digital transformation,' prepares for more Russian cyber attacks: Officials
11. Why Non-Alignment Is Dead and Won’t Return
12. US struggles to mobilise its Asian ‘Chip 4’ alliance
13. Russian troops "failed to organize coherent retreat," abandoned tanks: ISW
14. Ukraine's Big Offensive Against Russia: Designed by U.S. Special Forces?
15. The truth will catch up to Putin
16. US leaders avoid victory dance in Ukraine combat advances
17. What Does the Weaponization of Global Finance Mean for U.S. Dollar Dominance?
18. Is Afghanistan's Long Civil War Really Over?
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 12 (Putin's War)
Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-12
Key Takeaways
- Ukrainian forces are continuing to make impactful gains in Kherson Oblast and are steadily degrading the morale and combat capabilities of Russian forces in this area.
- The Russian military command may be suspending the deployment of newly formed units to Ukraine due to recent Russian losses and overall degraded morale.
- Russian forces are failing to reinforce the new frontline following Ukrainian gains in eastern Kharkiv Oblast and are actively fleeing the area or redeploying to other axes.
- Ukrainian forces continued targeting Russian military assets and positions in Kherson Oblast, likely steadily degrading them.
- The Ukrainian recapture of Izyum has likely degraded Russian forces’ ability to conduct artillery strikes along the Izyum-Slovyansk highway.
- The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced the restoration of the second reserve power transmission line to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP).
- Ukraine’s sweeping counteroffensive is damaging Russian administrative capabilities and driving Russian departures from occupied parts of Ukraine far behind the line of contact.
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 12
understandingwar.org
Karolina Hird, Grace Mappes, Katherine Lawlor, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan
September 12, 8:45pm 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.
Ukraine’s southern counteroffensive is continuing to have significant impacts on Russian morale and military capabilities in southern Ukraine. Satellite imagery of known Russian positions in Kyselivka, 15km northwest of Kherson City, shows that all but four Russian vehicles have departed from previous forward positions, consistent with rumors that Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) troops have abandoned Kyselivka and moved back towards the Dnipro River.[1] Kyselivka is an operationally significant location for Russian forces around Kherson City because it is the last major settlement along both the E58 highway and a railway line between current Ukrainian positions and Chornobaivka, the outermost part of Kherson City. The apparent withdrawal of Russian troops from this position may compromise the Russians’ ability to defend the northwestern outskirts of Kherson City and suggests that Russian troops in this area perceive an imminent threat to their positions. Spokesperson for Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command, Natalya Humenyuk, stated on September 12 that Russian forces located along the right bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast are attempting to negotiate for surrender under the auspices of international law.[2] Ukrainian operations in Kharkiv Oblast are unlikely to have had such a dramatic psychological effect on Russian troops this far south, and both the withdrawal of troops from forward positions in Kyselivka and reports of surrender negotiations are indicators that Ukrainian counteroffensives in the south are progressing in a significant way, even if visibility on this axis is limited by the shift in focus to Kharkiv.
The success of recent Ukrainian counteroffensive operations may be impacting the will or ability of the Russian military command to use newly formed volunteer units in Ukraine in a timely fashion. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that the Russian military command has suspended sending new, already-formed units to Ukraine due to recent Russian losses and widespread distrust of the Russian military command, factors which have caused a large number of volunteers to categorically refuse to participate in combat.[3] This assessment is still unconfirmed, but low morale due to Ukrainian counteroffensive success may prove devastating to the Kremlin’s already-poor ability to generate meaningful combat capability. The deployment of these newly formed units to reinforce defensive lines against Ukrainian counteroffensives would be an operationally-sound decision on the part of Russian military leadership; and the delay or potential suspension of these deployments will afford Ukrainian troops time to consolidate and then resume the offensive, should they choose to do so, without having to face newly arrived and fresh (albeit undertrained and understrength) units.
Key Takeaways
- Ukrainian forces are continuing to make impactful gains in Kherson Oblast and are steadily degrading the morale and combat capabilities of Russian forces in this area.
- The Russian military command may be suspending the deployment of newly formed units to Ukraine due to recent Russian losses and overall degraded morale.
- Russian forces are failing to reinforce the new frontline following Ukrainian gains in eastern Kharkiv Oblast and are actively fleeing the area or redeploying to other axes.
- Ukrainian forces continued targeting Russian military assets and positions in Kherson Oblast, likely steadily degrading them.
- The Ukrainian recapture of Izyum has likely degraded Russian forces’ ability to conduct artillery strikes along the Izyum-Slovyansk highway.
- The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced the restoration of the second reserve power transmission line to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP).
- Ukraine’s sweeping counteroffensive is damaging Russian administrative capabilities and driving Russian departures from occupied parts of Ukraine far behind the line of contact.
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.
- Ukrainian Counteroffensives – Southern and Eastern Ukraine
- Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts)
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort- Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Supporting Effort- Southern Axis
- Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)
Eastern Ukraine: (Vovchansk-Kupyansk-Izyum-Lyman Line)
Ukrainian forces continued to consolidate gains in eastern Kharkiv Oblast on September 12. The Kharkiv Oblast detachment of Ukrainian Azov Regiment Special Forces stated that Ukrainian troops have taken control of the entire northeastern part of Kharkiv Oblast along the Vesele-Vovchansk line.[4] Ukrainian sources confirmed that Ukrainian troops have retaken Dvorchina (100km east of Kharkiv City) and Ternova (30km northeast of Kharkiv City), demonstrating the range of the Ukrainian advance in northeastern Kharkiv Oblast.[5] Ukraine’s Airborne Assault Command also claimed that Ukrainian paratroopers took control of Bohorodychne, a small settlement in northwestern Donetsk Oblast directly along the southeastern Kharkiv Oblast border.[6] Geolocated imagery additionally shows that Ukrainian troops have taken full control of Sviatohirsk, 3km due east of Bohorodychne.[7]
Russian sources claimed that the front has largely stabilized at the Oskil River, which runs just west of the Kharkiv-Luhansk Oblast border.[8] Russian milbloggers reported that Ukrainian and Russian forces are fighting around Lyman, but that Lyman remains under the control of Russian and proxy forces.[9] Some Russian sources also voiced concerns that Ukrainian troops are trying to cross the Siverskyi Donets River around Zakitne (about 15km southeast of Lyman) to take back Yampil.[10] Russian sources are seemingly focused on the Lyman-Yampil line as the next potential target for Ukrainian advances.
Russian forces are failing to reinforce the new frontline following Ukrainian gains in eastern Kharkiv Oblast and are actively fleeing the area or redeploying to other axes. Ukrainian sources claimed that all Russian forces have left Svatove, Luhansk Oblast (about 45km east of current Ukrainian positions along the Oskil River), and that only militia elements of the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR)—possibly locals—remain in Svatove.[11] Social media footage shows lines of cars stretching for kilometers near Schastia and Stanysia Luhanska, which are both along the border of long-held LNR territory and close to the Russian border.[12] Russian forces and pro-Russian collaborators are likely experiencing the psychological pressure of rapid Ukrainian gains and seek to remove themselves from settlements near the new frontline that they perceive as vulnerable to Ukrainian advances. Certain proxy forces are also reportedly already redeploying from Kharkiv Oblast to southwestern Donetsk Oblast, indicating that the Russian command is not prioritizing reinforcing vulnerable positions east of the Oskil River.[13]
Southern Ukraine: (Kherson Oblast)
Ukrainian military officials emphasized on September 12 that Ukrainian troops are making tangible gains in Kherson Oblast. Ukraine’s Kakhovka Operational Group announced that Ukrainian forces have penetrated the front line at depths between 4 and 12km in unspecified areas, amounting to over 500 square kilometers of liberated territory.[14] The Kakhovka Group stated that Ukrainian troops have liberated 13 settlements, including Vysokopillya, Novovoznesenske, Bilohirka, Sukhyi Stavok, and Myrolubivka.[15] Ukrainian military officials also stated that Ukrainian troops are continuing an operational interdiction campaign and regularly striking Russian military, logistical, and transportation assets in southern Ukraine.[16] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that the Russian 810th Naval Infantry Brigade has lost more than 85% of its personnel and is now refusing to return to combat, suggesting that even brigade-level elements have suffered substantial losses as a result of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.[17]
Social media footage taken by residents of Kherson Oblast provides further visual evidence for Ukrainian strikes on Russian assets and positions in Kherson Oblast. Footage posted on September 12 shows smoke near the Antonivskyi Bridge in Kherson City following a Ukrainian strike, and residents reported the sound of explosions around Kherson City.[18] Ukrainian sources additionally reported that Ukrainian troops successfully destroyed two Russian pontoon bridges near Darivka (15km northeast of Kherson City) and Nova Kakhovka (55km east of Kherson City), thus temporarily rendering passage across the Inhulets and Dnipro Rivers impossible in these areas.[19]
Neither Russian nor Ukrainian sources discussed ground maneuvers along the Kherson-Mykolaiv frontline on September 12. Russian and Ukrainian sources discussed Russian indirect fire attacks on Ukrainian positions in northern and western Kherson Oblast, confirming that Ukrainian troops are holding recently recaptured positions near the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border and near the Sukhyi Stavok pocket in western Kherson Oblast.[20] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) continued to provide likely excessive figures for Ukrainian losses in Kherson Oblast but did not make any additional claims on September 12.[21] Russian sources are increasingly focused on providing commentary on Ukrainian advances in Kharkiv Oblast.
Russian Main Effort- Eastern Ukraine
Russian Subordinate Main Effort- Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
The Ukrainian recapture of Izyum has likely degraded Russian forces’ ability to conduct artillery strikes along the Izyum-Slovyansk highway. The Ukrainian General Staff noted that Russian forces did not conduct artillery strikes in the Slovyansk direction on September 12, likely referring to settlements northwest of Slovyansk on the E40 highway.[22] Russian forces continued routine fire on Slovyansk and the surrounding area to the east, southeast, and south.[23]
Russian forces continued ground attacks in Donetsk Oblast on September 12. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground assaults on various settlements around Bakhmut and Avdiivka.[24] The continued ground attacks in this area far from the counteroffensive frontlines are noteworthy because Central Military District Commander Colonel General Alexander Lapin was given responsibility for the western grouping of forces that had been in Kharkiv Oblast following the loss of most of that oblast to Ukrainian forces. Lapin has shown no indication that he intends to alter his ongoing limited offensive campaign despite suddenly receiving responsibility for a collapsing front. He appears instead determined to continue attacks that have no meaningful chance of securing operationally significant, let alone decisive, gains. Russian forces continued routine fire along the line of contact in Donetsk Oblast.[25]
Russian sources did not conduct any ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast or eastern Zaporizhia Oblast and continued routine fire along the line of contact east of Hulyaipole.[26] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces are concentrating in the Vuhledar area and expressed concern that Ukrainian forces may launch ground attacks towards Vuhledar in the coming days.[27] However, one Russian source claimed that Ukrainian forces in this area have since dispersed.[28]
Supporting Effort- Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)
Russian forces did not conduct any ground attacks in Zaporizhia Oblast west of Hulyaipole and continued routine fire throughout Mykolaiv Oblast on September 12.[29] Russian forces also continued routine shelling in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast along the north bank of the Kakhovka Reservoir.[30]
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced the restoration of the second reserve power transmission line to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) on September 12.[31] The IAEA stated that this power transmission line allows Energoatom to keep one power line in reserve while the remaining line provides the ZNPP with necessary electricity to sustain essential safety operations during and after the cold shutdown.[32] The restoration of more power transmission lines to the ZNPP reestablishes safeguards that the Russian militarization and likely shelling of the ZNPP previously threatened or eliminated. Russian Zaporizhia Oblast occupation official Vladimir Rogov stated that ZNPP operations can restart after shelling ceases and the line of contact moves away from the plant, indicating that Russian officials likely hope to restart the plant and direct its energy production toward Russian grids in the future.[33] Russian officials have no formal authority to order the plant to start or to shut down and would likely have either to replace or coerce the Ukrainians operating the plant to restart it.
Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
Nothing significant to report.
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)
Ukraine’s sweeping counteroffensive is damaging Russian administrative capabilities and driving Russian departures from occupied parts of Ukraine far behind the line of contact. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on September 12 that Russian forces throughout occupied Kherson Oblast have restricted general freedom of movement, strengthened military checkpoints, and increased looting, particularly of motorcycles—all apparent signs of Russian desperation.[34] Russian forces may be looting mopeds and motorcycles to flee in the event of a military collapse. The Russian-backed head of occupied Crimea, Sergey Aksenov, claimed on September 12 that Russian FSB officers detained Ukrainian “terrorists” who were planning an attack on the Kherson Occupation Administration.[35] The Ukrainian Resistance Center also reported that Russian forces increased patrols and checkpoints around Mariupol on September 12 to thwart Ukrainian “sabotage.”[36]
The impacts of Ukrainian counteroffensives may reduce the likelihood that Russia will hold sham annexation referenda in occupied territories in the next month. The Center reported that “a number of” specialists remain in occupied Kherson, but that the Kremlin has put the referendum “on pause.” The Russian-appointed head of Zaporizhia Oblast, Evgeny Balitsky, claimed on September 12 that the Zaporizhia Occupation Administration would hold its annexation referendum “as soon as we are ready in terms of security.” Balitsky also claimed that 86% of Zaporizhia residents support Russian annexation of the oblast—indicating either that occupation officials are conducting fake public opinion polls to support their planned referendum, or that they have pre-ordained the results of the pseudo-referendum.[37]
The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Ukrainian forces will use facial recognition and other intelligence to identify Russian officials and Ukrainian collaborators in newly liberated Ukrainian territories. Ukrainian forces arrested the occupation administration head of the village of Ivanivka, Kharkiv Oblast on September 9 and the collaborationist chief of occupation police for Balakliya, Kharkiv Oblast by September 11 and plan to prosecute both officials.[38]
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.
[34] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/09/12/na-hersonshhyni-rosiyany-kradut-v-selyan-tehniku-aby-pozbavyty-yih-mozhlyvosti-peresuvatysya/; https://t.me/hueviyherson/25785
[36] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/09/12/rosiyany-posylyly-represiyi-v-okupovanomu-mariupoli/
[38] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/09/09/zsu-zatrymaly-gaulyajtera-na-harkivshhyni/; https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/09/11/kolaboranty-na-zvilnenyh-terytoriyah-ponesut-pokarannya/
understandingwar.org
2. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (12.09.22) CDS comments on key events
CDS Daily brief (12.09.22) CDS comments on key events
Humanitarian aspect:
Two people were killed, and two were injured due to the Sunday, September 11th Russian missile attack on critical infrastructure in Kharkiv Oblast, the press service of the State Emergency Service in Kharkiv Oblast reported. Head of the Kharkiv Oblast Military Administration Oleh Synehubov said that 80% of the electricity supply disrupted the night before was restored as of the morning of September 12.
As a result of the mass strikes of the Russian Federation on September 11, 40 electric substations of various voltages were cut off from the electricity supplies; four energy sector workers were killed and three injured, the Minister of Energy Herman Galushchenko said.
Around midnight, the Russian Federation carried out another missile attack on Kharkiv. One of the rockets hit a three-story residential building in the Novobavarsky district. The building collapsed. There was no fire, but one person died, and two were injured.
During the day, Oleh Synehubov reported two more instances of shelling of Kharkiv. One took place around 13:30 and one around 17:00. One person died, and 6 people were injured in the first strike. In addition, subway traffic was temporarily stopped in the city. Critical infrastructure facilities were also disabled by shelling, cutting electricity and water supplies.
During the first 11 days of the school year, another four thousand schoolchildren returned to Ukraine, and 488,000 school-age children remain abroad, the Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine Serhii Shkarlet said.
Head of the Coordination Headquarters on De-occupied Territories Iryna Vereshchuk signed a Memorandum with the head of the HALO Trust, an international charitable fund for demining. The parties discussed plans to increase the number of manual and mechanized demining teams in the liberated territories and agreed to conduct joint educational campaigns. Specifically now - during the mushroom picking season, inform people about the risks of encountering explosive objects in forests and forest strips.
About 160,000 square kilometers of the territories of Ukraine need demining, Deputy Minister of Defense Vyacheslav Shapovalov said.
Ukrainian Railway Company Ukrzaliznytsya scheduled an evacuation train from Donbas to Lviv for September 12. Ukrzaliznytsya warned passengers about the train delays to and from Kharkiv, Sumy, and Poltava due to the Russian shelling of infrastructure in Slobozhanshchyna.
Over the past two days, about 4,000 citizens have left dangerous regions and temporarily occupied territories. Thus, the total number of evacuees during the last month to date is more than 73,000 Ukrainians, the Reintegration Ministry reported.
Ukrzaliznytsya's medical trains, launched with the support of the independent international medical organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), have made 50 trips and transported 1,800 people in half a year. Most trips transported people with special medical needs from the Donbas region, Ukrzaliznytsya said.
Reports of mass graves, civilian executions and disappearances are emerging from the recently liberated areas. Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group published a short article on the situation in Vysokopillia urban-type settlement and its surrounding area in Kherson oblast. In the village of Zaliznychne in the Chkalov territorial community, Kharkiv Oblast, Ukrainian law enforcement officers discovered four bodies of civilians with traces of torture.
At least a thousand civilians died in Izyum, Kharkiv Oblast, due to Russian occupation, 80% of the city's infrastructure was destroyed, a member of Izyum City Council, Maksym Strelnikov, told a briefing at Media Center Ukraine - Ukrinform.
Occupied territories
Volodymyr Saldo, the Russia-installed head of the occupied part of Kherson Oblast, recorded a video claiming that he has been under the supervision of "serious doctors" and is now working on the region's budget for next year. Saldo was hospitalized on August 5 in the occupied Crimea; doctors put him in a medically induced coma and connected him to a ventilator. The cause of his condition was not made public. However, there were rumors of poisoning and a stroke. Two other de-facto officials that had been reported killed by the Ukrainian resistance forces, namely deputy head of Nova Kahkovka Occupation Administration Vitaliy Hura and Deputy Police Chief Vitaliy Tomka, appeared on Russian TV today, claiming that they were going "back to work".
In occupied Mariupol, the Russian Federation erected a monument to the Russian Prince Alexander Nevsky. The monument replaced a memorial to the Ukrainian military servicemen from Mariupol, who died in the first phase of the war, said Petro Andryushchenko, adviser to the mayor of Mariupol. Prince Alexander Nevskiy is increasingly used in Russian propaganda as someone Puttin is compared to.
In response to a wedding video from the occupied Crimean Bakhchisaray where guests danced to a Ukrainian patriotic song that appeared on pro-Russian Telegram channels, the so-called "head" of the occupied Crimea, Serhii Aksyonov, said that those who appear in these videos have to be identified, their businesses have to be shut down, and they have to be prosecuted. In a video address, Aksyonov said that these people would face criminal responsibility, they would be fired from their work, and their businesses would be closed down.
The Russia-appointed head of the occupied parts of Zaporizhzhya Oblast, Yevhen Balytskiy, said that the so-called referendum on joining Russia had been postponed indefinitely. Although he
did not mention the Ukrainian counteroffensive, he cited the need to make sure people can vote in safety. At the same time, he said that “referendum” is a technical formality: "Russia is already here, and we already feel like a part of it."
Operational situation
It is the 201st day of the strategic air-ground offensive operation of the Russian Armed Forces against Ukraine (in the official terminology of the Russian Federation – "operation to protect Donbas"). The enemy continues to concentrate its efforts on establishing full control over the territory of Donetsk Oblast, maintaining control over the temporarily captured territories and disrupting the offensive of the Ukrainian troops in certain directions.
A continued threat of air and missile strikes throughout the territory of Ukraine persists. Over the past day, the Russian military launched 18 missile and 39 air strikes on military and civilian targets on the territory of Ukraine. More than 30 Ukrainian towns and villages were affected, particularly Kramatorsk, Kostyantynivka, Dnipro, Pavlohrad, and Velykomykhailivka. The Russian forces carried out another terrorist act; they launched a missile attack on the Kharkiv Thermal Power Plant, a critical infrastructure facility in the city. As a result, power was partially cut off in several Oblasts [of Ukraine].
The enemy shelled the positions of the Ukrainian troops with mortars and barrel artillery in the areas around Yastrubyne, Maiske, Seredyna Buda, Bachivsk, and Kindrativka in Sumy Oblast.
The [Russian] Western grouping of troops was placed under the command of the Central Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Colonel-General Lapin, who now commands the Central grouping of Russian forces in Ukraine.
Aviation of the Ukrainian Defense Forces carried out eight strikes, hitting a platoon stronghold, six areas of the Russian manpower and military equipment concentration, and one anti-aircraft missile system.
Ukrainian Forces destroyed Orlan-10 UAV, and shot down one Kh-59 cruise missile, four Kalibr sea-based cruise missiles and five Kh-101 air-based cruise missiles.
Ukrainian missile and artillery troops of the ground troops continue to conduct counter-battery combat, inflict damage on enemy manpower and combat equipment, and disrupt Russian command and control system and logistical support, as well as support the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
A long [publicy-available] discussion in Kyiv and then the announcement of a counteroffensive operation in Kherson Oblast drew significant Russian troops away from the areas where Ukrainian troops had actually counterattacked. The Ukrainian Armed Forces used HIMARS and other Western systems to attack Russian supply lines in Kharkiv and Kherson, setting the scene for the successful operation. In a very demonstrative way, the Ukrainian leadership discussed strikes in the south but successfully confused the Russians about the intentions in Kharkiv Oblast.
Western weapons systems were necessary but not sufficient for Ukraine's success. The way Ukraine used these systems in a well-planned and well-conducted campaign ensured the extraordinary success of counterattacks in Kharkiv Oblast.
The morale and psychological state of the personnel of the invasion forces is considerably deteriorating due to significant losses and unwillingness to fight. The number of deserters in the Russian units is increasing.
Kharkiv direction
• Zolochiv-Balakleya section: approximate length of combat line - 147 km, number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 10-12, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 13.3 km;
• Deployed enemy BTGs: 26th, 153rd and 197th tank regiments, 245th motorized rifle regiment of the 47th tank division, 6th and 239th tank regiments, 228th motorized rifle regiment of the 90th tank division, 1st motorized rifle regiment, 1st tank regiment of the 2nd motorized rifle division, 25th and 138th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 6th Combined Arms Army, 27th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Tank Army, 275th and 280th motorized rifle regiments, 11th tank regiment of the 18th motorized rifle division of the 11 Army Corps, 7th motorized rifle regiment of the 11th Army Corps, 80th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 14th Army Corps, 2nd and 45th separate SOF brigades of the Airborne Forces, 1st Army Corps of so-called DPR, PMCs.
The Russian forces fired from tanks, mortars, barrel and rocket artillery in the areas around Kostyantynivka and Udy.
An increasing number of Ukrainian towns and villages are liberated from the Russian occupation. During the retreat, Russian troops quickly abandoned their positions and fled deep into the temporarily occupied territories or the Russian Federation's territory. This trend persists. Over the past day, the occupiers have taken [wle retreating] the looted property and seized vehicles from the local residents of Velikiy Burluk and Dvorichna, Kharkiv Oblast.
The Russian forces left Izyum, Oskil, Kamyanka, Udy, Martove, Borshchova, Hannivka, Hnylytsia, Chervona Khvyla, Golubivka, Kupyevakha, Velykiy Burluk, Mytrofanivka, Dvorichna. They began withdrawing troops from Kozacha Lopan, Makarove, Veterynarne, Lyptsi and Srilecha. The units of the enemy 2nd separate SOF brigade (Cherekha) of the Western Military District were withdrawn from the territory of Kharkiv Oblast to the Oktyabrsky district (Belgorod Oblast, Russia). They will probably be moved to Luhansk in the future. Preparations for withdrawing the BTG of the 200th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 14th Army Corps of the Northern Fleet from Hoptivka to Belgorod Oblast are underway.
In order to prevent the further advance of the Ukrainian troops, the Russian military is moving units of the 74th separate motorized rifle brigade of the Central Military District from Svatove towards Kupyansk. They blew up a bridge across the Siverskyi Donets River near Staritsa and mined bridges over the Vovcha River and Siverskyi Donets River.
Ukrainian troops entered Vovchansk and Veliky Burluk, cutting Russian land supply lines along the T2104 route, and reached the international border north of Kharkiv. On September 11, Ukrainian troops took control of Izyum and settlements to the south and southwest. Stabilization measures are being implemented.
Russian troops are withdrawing from villages around the city of Kharkiv, from the northern part of the Kharkiv region and villages on the western bank of the Oskil River.
The Russian military leadership lacks sufficient reserves to complete the formation of a new defense line along the Oskil River, which it is trying to form before Ukrainian forces continue to advance through this position. Common sense would require Russia to withdraw troops from other sectors of the battlespace to establish defense lines further east of the Oskil River to ensure that Luhansk Oblast administrative border, or a line as close as possible to the border, is held.
Kramatorsk direction
● Balakleya - Siversk section: approximate length of the combat line - 184 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 17-20, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 9.6 km;
● 252nd and 752nd motorized rifle regiments of the 3rd motorized rifle division, 1st, 13th and 12th tank regiments, 423rd motorized rifle regiment of the 4th tank division, 201st military base, 15th, 21st, 30th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 2nd Combined Arms Army, 35th, 55th and 74th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 41st Combined Arms Army, 3rd and 14th separate SOF brigades, 2nd and 4th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 2nd Army Corps, 7th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Army Corps, PMCs.
The Russian forces shelled the positions of the Ukrainian units with barrel, jet artillery and tank weapons in the areas around Siversk, Raihorodok, Mykolaivka, Bohorodychne, Kryva Luka, Sloviansk, Verkhnokamyanske, Ivano-Daryivka, Hryhorivka, Rozdolivka, Zvanivka, and Spirne. They carried out airstrikes in the areas around Spirne (with a pair of Su-25s), Shchurove (with a pair of Ka-52s), and Mykolaivka (with a pair of Ka-52s).
The successful actions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces forced the enemy to move away from Bohorodychne. The enemy is moving reserves from the rear areas.
In Luhansk Oblast, Russian military personnel and their families left the town of Svatove; only local residents that served in the so-called "people's militia of the LPR" remained.
As a result of the successful actions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Russian military left Sukha Kamyanka, Donetske, Yaremivka, Pasika, Synycheno, Brazhkivka, Sulyhivka, and Dovhenke.
Donetsk direction
● Siversk - Maryinka section: approximate length of the combat line - 235 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 13-15, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 17 km;
● Deployed BTGs: 68th and 163rd tank regiments, 102nd and 103rd motorized rifle regiments of the 150 motorized rifle division, 80th tank regiment of the 90th tank division, 35th, 55th and 74th
separate motorized rifle brigades of the 41st Combined Arms Army, 31st separate airborne assault brigade, 61st separate marines brigade of the Joint Strategic Command "Northern Fleet", 336th separate marines brigade, 24th separate SOF brigade, 1st, 3rd, 5th, 15th, and 100th separate motorized rifle brigades, 9th and 11th separate motorized rifle regiment of the 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR, 6th motorized rifle regiment of the 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LNR, PMCs.
The Russian military shelled the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces in the areas around Vesele, Yakovlivka, Soledar, Bakhmutske, Bakhmut, Mykolaivka Druga, Zaitseve, Karlivka, Vodyane, Pervomaiske, Krasnohorivka, Maryinka, and Novomykhailivka.
Ukrainian Defense forces repelled Russian attacks near Mayorsk and Krasnohorivka. Fighting continues in Mykolaivka Druga and Zaitseve areas.
The enemy led offensive actions by units of the 3rd separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Army Corps in the directions of Zaitseve (lower)- Mayorsk; Dacha-Mykolaivka Druga; Kodema - Mykolaivka Druga; Semyhirya - Zaitseve; Kodema - Zaitseve; Zaitseve (lower) - Zaitseve; Vershyna
- Zaitseve; Dacha - Ozaryanivka; Kodema - Kurdyumivka; Kodema - Ozaryanivka, but failed and withdrew.
Zaporizhzhya direction
● Maryinka – Vasylivka section: approximate length of the line of combat - 200 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 17, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 11.7 km;
● Deployed BTGs: 36th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 29th Combined Arms Army, 38th and 64th separate motorized rifle brigades, 69th separate cover brigade of the 35th Combined Arms Army, 5th separate tank brigade, 37 separate motorized rifle brigade of the 36th Combined Arms Army, 135th, 429th, 503rd and 693rd motorized rifle regiments of the 19th motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 70th, 71st and 291st motorized rifle regiments of the 42nd motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 136th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 58 Combined Arms Army, 46th and 49th machine gun artillery regiments of the 18th machine gun artillery division of the 68th Army Corps, 39th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 68th Army Corps, 83th separate airborne assault brigade, 40th and 155th separate marines brigades, 22nd separate SOF brigade, 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR, and 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LPR, PMCs.
Enemy shelling is recorded in the districts of Novopil, Novoandriivka, Poltavka, Hulyaipole, Zaliznychne, Novosilka, and Vremivka. The Russian military dealt airstrikes in Poltavka (with a pair of Ka-52) and Stepove (with a pair of Su-25).
Kherson direction
● Vasylivka–Nova Zburyivka and Stanislav section: approximate length of the battle line - 252 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 27, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 9.3 km;
● Deployed BTGs: 114th, 143rd and 394th motorized rifle regiments, 218th tank regiment of the 127th motorized rifle division of the 5th Combined Arms Army, 57th and 60th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 5th Combined Arms Army, 135th, 503rd and 693rd motorized rifle regiments of the 19th motorized rifle division, 70th, 71st and 291st motorized rifle regiments of the 42nd motorized rifle division, 51st and 137th parachute airborne regiments of the 106th parachute airborne division, 7th military base of the 49th Combined Arms Army, 16th and 346th separate SOF brigades.
There is no change in the operational situation. After the successful actions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces, the Russian military suffered significant manpower losses. According to the available information, the 810th separate marines brigade (permanently stationed in Sevastopol) lost almost 85% of its personnel. The rest of the servicemen have extremely low morale; they refuse to return to the combat zone en masse.
In order to transfer troops and provide logistical support to its units, the Russian military is building a pontoon-bridge crossing over the Dnipro River in the Kardashynka area.
During the day, the enemy ferries moved 50 pieces of equipment in the districts of Korsunka and Nova Kakhovka (ICVs and trucks) and 30 tanks and ICVs, 35 trucks were moved over the bridge at Kakhovska HPP.
According to preliminary information, an enemy echelon with military equipment (about 60 pieces, including armored personnel carriers, guns and trucks), ammunition and personnel arrived at the "Kalanchak" railway station in Kherson Oblast. After unloading, the equipment was moved through Novokiivka in the direction of Kherson.
Kherson-Berislav bridgehead
● Velyka Lepetikha – Oleksandrivka section: approximate length of the battle line – 250 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces – 22, the average width of the combat area of one BTG –
11.8 km;
● Deployed BTGs: 108th Air assault regiment, 171st separate airborne assault brigade of the 7th Air assault division, 4th military base of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 429th motorized rifle regiment of the 19th motorized rifle division, 33rd and 255th motorized rifle regiments of the 20th motorized rifle division, 34th and 205th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 49th Combined Arms Army, 224th, 237th and 239th Air assault regiments of the 76th Air assault division, 217th and 331 Air assault regiments of the 98th Air assault division, 126th separate coastal defense brigade, 127th separate ranger brigade, 11th separate airborne assault brigade, 10th separate SOF brigade, PMC.
The Russian forces shelled the positions of the Ukrainian troops with tanks, mortars, barrel artillery, anti-aircraft guns, anti-tank missiles in the areas around Myrne, Partyzanske, Bilohirka, Novohredneve, Blahodativka, Velyke Artakove, Sukhy Stavok, Kostromka, Bezymenne, Bila Krynytsia, Ivanivka, Novovoznesneske, Osokorivka, Arkhangelske, and Zarichne.
As a result of the successful actions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces, the Russian military moved away from Myrolyubivka. They fortify advanced positions in the direction of a possible [Ukrainian] breakthrough.
The Russian military conducted offensive (assault) operations employing units of the 83rd separate airborne assault brigade in the direction of Kostyrka and Novovoznesensk. They were unsuccessful, suffered losses, and retreated.
The Russian military moved seven tanks of the 126th separate coastal defense brigade of the 22nd Amry Corps to the Myrolyubivka area. Seven APCs, four light armored multi-purpose transporters and self-propelled guns from the 34th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 49th Combined Arms Army of the Southern Military District were moved to Arkhangelske, Novopetrivka areas.
The occupiers conducted remote mining of possible advance routes of the Ukrainian Defense Forces in Mala Seidemenukha, Kostromka and Myrolyubivka.
In the area around Dudchany, the Russian military is setting up a defense line, to which it has moved about 30 pieces of weapons and military equipment.
Azov-Black Sea Maritime Operational Area:
The forces of the Russian Black Sea Fleet continue to project force on the coast and the continental part of Ukraine and control the northwestern part of the Black Sea. The ultimate goal is to deprive Ukraine of access to the sea and connect unrecognized Transnistria with the Russian Federation by land through the coast of the Black and Azov seas.
Along the southern coast of Crimea, there are four enemy cruise missile carriers, a frigate, two small missile ships and a submarine. Up to 24 enemy Kalibr missiles are ready for a salvo. Additionally, 14 other enemy warships and vessels of the auxiliary fleet of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and the Caspian Flotilla are at sea, providing reconnaissance and blockade of navigation in the Azov-Black Sea waters.
Last evening, central Ukraine was hit by 6 Kalibr missiles from a surface ship in the Black Sea. Five of the six missiles were shot down by Ukrainian air defense.
Four large amphibious ships are maneuvering near the southern part of the occupied Crimea. The rest of the amphibious ships (8 units) are in the ports of Novorossiysk and Sevastopol for replenishment and scheduled maintenance. There are no signs of preparation for an amphibious assault on the southern coast of Ukraine.
Three enemy project 636.3 submarines are on high alert in Sevastopol. Enemy aviation continues to fly from Crimean airfields Belbek and Gvardiyske over the northwestern part of the Black Sea. Over the past day, 11 Su-27, Su-30 and Su-24 aircraft from Belbek and Saki airfields were involved.
On September 12, as part of the implementation of the "grain initiative", nine ships with 163.8 thousand tons of agricultural products left the ports of "Odesa", "Chornomorsk" and "Pivdenny". They are headed for the countries of Asia and Europe. On September 12, the ports of Greater Odesa plan to accept 13 vessels for loading with Ukrainian agricultural products. At 10:00 a.m., six ships were moored near the berths of the ports of "Odesa", "Chornomorsk", and the port of "Pidvdenny". Since the departure of the first ship with Ukrainian food, 2.78 million tons of agricultural products have been exported. A total of 122 ships left Ukrainian ports with agricultural products that were sent to the countries of Asia, Europe and Africa.
Operational losses of the enemy from 24.02 to 12.09
Personnel - almost 52,950 people (+300);
Tanks – 2,168 (+14);
Armored combat vehicles – 4,640 (+23);
Artillery systems – 1,269 (+6);
Multiple rocket launchers (MLRS) - 311 (0); Anti-aircraft warfare systems - 162 (0); Vehicles and fuel tanks – 3,463 (+18); Aircraft - 243 (+1);
Helicopters – 213 (0);
UAV operational and tactical level - 903 (+1); Intercepted cruise missiles - 216 (0);
Boats / ships - 15 (0).
Ukraine, general news
The court arrested the former head of the Kharkiv SBU Directorate, Roman Dudin, for two months without bail, the State Investigative Buro said. Dudin headed the Kharkiv SBU Directorate until May 2022. He is suspected of treason and voluntarily abandoning his post.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyi relieved Fedor Venislavskyi from the duties of the Representative of the President of Ukraine in the Constitutional Court of Ukraine and appointed Serhiy Dembovskyi instead. At the same time, the President appointed Venislavskyi as his Representative in the Verkhovna Rada.
International diplomatic aspect
The US will provide Ukraine with two hundred M113 armored personnel carriers under the next defense aid package. Meanwhile, the German defense Minister reiterated Berlin's "no tanks and infantry fighting vehicles for Ukraine" policy. "No country has delivered Western-built infantry fighting vehicles or main battle tanks so far," said Christine Lambrecht. "We have agreed with our partners that Germany will not take such action unilaterally." Yet she expressed her belief that Germany was obliged to play a leading global role in the military domain and that the country should not be afraid of the responsibility. It seems that she doesn't see a contradiction between stepping up the role of Europe's security provider and not supporting Ukraine enough unless
Christine Lambrecht thinks there's no connection between Ukraine's fight and the peace and security of Europe as a whole.
The director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency doesn't demand Russia withdraw all its troops and weapons but calls both sides "to agree on a very simple principle of not attacking, or not shelling, the plant." Pressed on whether his proposal includes demilitarization, Rafael Grossi replied: "Basically, it's a commitment that no military action will include or will imply aiming ... at the plant, or a radius that could be affecting its normal operation."
For eight years, Ukraine had seen the "impartial" approach of the OSCE that had called "both sides", including the victim of the aggression, to restrain from specific actions even when only Russia violated the ceasefire or other arrangements. The Russian criminal seizure of the nuclear power plant shouldn't become a precedent not accepted by the international community, either de facto or de jure. Ukraine's foreign ministry outlined the only acceptable way to go: de- occupation, demilitarization and turning the control over the ZNPP to Ukraine.
Russia, relevant news
The decision of the EU Council to suspend the agreement on the simplified visa regime with the Russian Federation enters into force on September 12. The number of new visas for Russians should be significantly reduced. The visa fee is now €80 instead of €35. In addition, more documents will be required, the processing time will increase, and the issuance of multiple-entry visas will be limited.
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3. The Ukraine war has reached a turning point
Excerpts:
So the Russian leader’s position looks perilous. From the start some western leaders have quietly hoped that Putin would lose power as a result of the war. President Joe Biden even blurted it out.
But if Putin is deposed, perhaps by a palace coup, his replacement is more likely to be a hardline nationalist than a liberal. The most vocal dissent being expressed in Russia is from militarists and nationalists — calling for escalation of the war. One theory doing the rounds in western intelligence circles is that the murder of Daria Dugina, a nationalist journalist, was organised by the Russian security services as a warning to Putin’s ultra-right critics.
A defeated Russia would not disappear off the map. And it would still possess large numbers of nuclear weapons, as well as a replenished stock of grievances.
So many dangers clearly lie ahead. But sometimes good news has to be recognised for what it is. In what has been a bleak year, the Ukrainian military victories of the past week are certainly that.
The Ukraine war has reached a turning point
Financial Times · by Gideon Rachman · September 12, 2022
The sight of Russian troops in headlong retreat in Ukraine is stunning — but it should not be surprising.
This war has gone badly for Russia from the outset. Vladimir Putin failed to achieve the lightning victory that he was aiming for on February 24. By April, the Russians had been forced into a humiliating retreat after making incursions towards Kyiv.
The limited gains Russia has made over the past six months have come at a terrible cost. The original invasion force mustered by the Kremlin was around 200,000 troops. The US estimated last month that 70,000-80,000 of that force has been killed or wounded since the beginning of the invasion.
Unwilling to acknowledge that Russia is at war, Putin has refused to institute conscription. By contrast, Ukraine has mobilised its entire adult male population. As a result, Ukraine now probably has more troops on the battlefield than Russia.
The Ukrainians also have the advantage in morale and munitions. They are fighting to defend their own country. The supply of advanced weaponry from the US and Europe — in particular, accurate long-range missiles — means they are now better equipped than the Russians.
The prospect of Russian defeat is real and exhilarating. But Ukraine’s advances also open a new and dangerous phase in the conflict.
The pictures of weeping civilians embracing Ukrainian soldiers as they liberate towns and villages from the Russians underline what this war is all about. Permanent Russian occupation would snuff out political freedom and would be enforced with killings, torture and deportations.
An easy Russian victory in Ukraine would also have opened the door to further aggression against its neighbours — including Moldova and perhaps even Nato members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. That prospect was alarming enough to persuade Finland and Sweden to apply for Nato membership.
If Russia is defeated, the invasion threat hovering over the rest of Europe will recede. The global political atmosphere will also change. Russian defeat will go down badly in Beijing and Mar-a-Lago. In the weeks before the invasion, China announced a friendship “without limits” with Russia. Donald Trump chortled that Vladimir Putin was a “genius”. That judgment now looks not just immoral, but stupid.
But some caution is in order. Almost a fifth of Ukraine is still occupied. The Russians will try to regroup and the Ukrainians could over-reach.
The really complex question is what happens if Russia is facing a humiliating defeat — perhaps including the loss of Crimea, which was occupied in 2014 amid much rejoicing in Moscow?
Rather than accept defeat, Putin may try to escalate. His options, however, look limited and unappealing. The refusal to call a general mobilisation must reflect nervousness about the opposition that could stir in Russian society. Calling up troops, training and equipping them will take many weeks — and the war is moving fast.
From the beginning of the conflict, Putin has hinted that Russia might use nuclear weapons. The White House has always viewed this possibility seriously. As the war has dragged on and gone badly for Russia, fears that Putin might resort to nuclear weapons have receded a little, but they have not gone away. As one senior western policymaker put it to me last week: “We have to remember that almost every Russian military exercise we’ve observed has involved the use of nuclear weapons.”
Using nuclear weapons in Ukraine would, however, create the obvious danger that Russia itself would be contaminated by the fallout. The global political reaction would be very negative and a western military response, probably non-nuclear, would be all but inevitable.
Like Russian leaders in the past, Putin is hoping that winter will come to his rescue. Russia’s recent announcement that it will stop almost all gas supplies to Europe is clearly intended to freeze the western supporters of Ukraine into submission.
But Putin needs a lot to go right for the gas gambit to work. A very cold winter or a surge in political protests in the west would help. Neither can be relied upon. The German government says the country “is now better prepared for a halt to Russian supplies” and that the total gas storage level is almost 87 per cent. Energy price subsidies are being rolled out across Europe.
So the Russian leader’s position looks perilous. From the start some western leaders have quietly hoped that Putin would lose power as a result of the war. President Joe Biden even blurted it out.
But if Putin is deposed, perhaps by a palace coup, his replacement is more likely to be a hardline nationalist than a liberal. The most vocal dissent being expressed in Russia is from militarists and nationalists — calling for escalation of the war. One theory doing the rounds in western intelligence circles is that the murder of Daria Dugina, a nationalist journalist, was organised by the Russian security services as a warning to Putin’s ultra-right critics.
A defeated Russia would not disappear off the map. And it would still possess large numbers of nuclear weapons, as well as a replenished stock of grievances.
So many dangers clearly lie ahead. But sometimes good news has to be recognised for what it is. In what has been a bleak year, the Ukrainian military victories of the past week are certainly that.
gideon.rachman@ft.com
This article has been corrected to clarify the level of German gas reserves.
Financial Times · by Gideon Rachman · September 12, 2022
4. Putin Is Trying to Turn Ukraine Into a Culture War
Excerpts:
While only about 6 percent of Republicans support Russia in the war, a small but vocal minority has promised to withdraw U.S. military support for Ukraine. Reasons vary from the right’s isolationist tilt in foreign policy to realist concerns over the war’s irrelevance to U.S. core interests. Yet culture has crept into the discourse over Ukraine. “Remember that [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky is a thug,” Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn told supporters in March. “Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies.”
Favorable views of Russia have plummeted in developed countries, and most white Christian nationalists and the extreme populist right in the West, Putin’s natural cultural allies, have condemned the invasion or remained silent. But depending on the group, these positions may shift. Peterson condemns the invasion—but quickly offers significant qualifications, implying that some cultural threats may be existential and might justify the violation of national sovereignty and basic human rights.
The revival of the appeal of Putin’s Russia for the Western cultural right will depend on several factors, including how long the carnage lasts in Ukraine. While many in the United States are repulsed by Russia’s brutality, others wonder whether the mounting cost of defending Ukraine, given growing inflation and a looming recession, is necessary to safeguard U.S. core interests and values. Still others balk at deeper involvement in the conflict due to fear of the inadvertent spread of the war. And if Donald Trump (who characterized Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as “genius”) receives his party’s nod as presidential candidate, supporters of Putin may feel emboldened. The combined, if uncoordinated, political influence of these strange bedfellows may allow for the creeping rehabilitation of Putin and his cultural policies.
Putin Is Trying to Turn Ukraine Into a Culture War
A conservative message isn’t selling well on the Russian homefront.
By Lionel Beehner, an adjunct professor in the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program and a co-editor of Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations, and Thomas Sherlock, professor emeritus of political science at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Foreign Policy · by Lionel Beehner, Thomas Sherlock · September 9, 2022
For most of us, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a brutal act of aggression. But a small yet growing and influential group of European and U.S. pundits and politicians is justifying it as a check against the spread of a decadent West. Members of Europe’s far-right are quick to qualify that Russia’s war is a “clear violation of international law and absolutely indefensible,” as France’s Marine Le Pen noted at the war’s onset. Yet almost in the same breath, they applaud Russian President Vladimir Putin as a defender of Western Christian civilization under attack from an unchecked mob of so-called woke liberals.
As Gunnar Beck of the populist Alternative for Germany party told CNN after the invasion, “Many of us are opposed to the fashionable social trends of our time, some of which are promoted through with public money. We look at Russia and see a European country where these issues have not gone too far.” By invading Ukraine and bringing it back under Russia’s fold, Putin will prevent this internal rot and decay from spreading farther eastward or in the West.
Canadian psychologist and conservative polemicist Jordan Peterson is somewhat more nuanced in his thinking but still makes the civilizational argument that the moral, cultural degeneration of the West is a contributing factor to the war. “We do not … have all the moral high ground,” he told his more than 5 million followers on YouTube. Invoking Dostoyevsky, he described the war as one fought not over territory but over ideas, values, and traditions—one that “can only be won on the intellectual or even the spiritual front.”
This camp frames the threat to their vision of the West as coming from within, not without. For them, the war that matters is the culture war. It’s a framing that Putin himself has been employing—but one that is much less successful, even in Russia, than its adherents believe.
Putin has played the culture card for years in France, Hungary, and other European countries with strong attachments to so-called traditional values. In so doing, he has tapped into larger fissures over identity politics in the West, which Putin has sought to deepen since taking power.
In these struggles, the Russian president has portrayed himself as defending an authentic European culture highjacked by a radical cultural left. Take Russia’s 2013 “gay propaganda” law—which bans the “promotion of nontraditional sexual relations to minors” and further stoked homophobia in Russia. (Putin himself has likened such “gay propaganda” to pornography.) Putin’s actions encouraged similar bills to criminalize homosexuality in Hungary, Poland, and Romania. In short, Putin’s Russia looks to export its version of traditional values across a region it once dominated.
At home, Putin has doubled down on his support for Orthodoxy. While Putin has for years stressed the centrality of religious and cultural values for Russia’s ontological security, he has reinforced this position to justify and bolster a war effort that has fallen far short of his expectations. “They sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature,” Putin said in a fiery speech declaring war on Ukraine. “This is not going to happen.”
Even as the war has exhibited the brutality (and often ineptitude) of Russian hard power, it is Russian soft power that Putin likely considers his ace in the hole. He has found a loyal tribe of followers and fellow propagandists in the West among culture warriors such as Peterson. Despite working for a liberal mayor in St. Petersburg earlier in his career, Putin has often invoked culture as a fifth column of sorts that has threatened regimes, many of them puppets installed by the Kremlin, within Russia’s sphere of influence. Color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan often were framed as attacks on Russian values and interests by Western liberals, the CIA, or George Soros, a coded reference to the financier’s Jewish roots. In this sense, the Kremlin views Western liberal democratic culture as a deadly method of hybrid warfare that must be resisted with Russia’s own cultural weapons and propaganda.
But this framing has backfired on Russia inside Ukraine itself. A survey in July by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that only 12 percent of Ukrainians support European or Western values, as opposed to 78 percent who support “traditional Ukrainian values.” But when traditional values are framed as “common to Eastern Slavs,” and Russia or Belarus is mentioned, then support evaporates: Only 33 percent support traditional values, while advocacy for European values jumps to 51 percent.
Ukraine is not as united a country in cultural terms as often portrayed, and its citizens—especially in the Russian-speaking, industrial, and lesser educated parts of the east—arguably lean more conservative than their western counterparts. Yet Putin’s invasion has squandered almost all the soft power Russia once enjoyed in the country. Other surveys underscore that the invasion has accelerated the reshaping of a post-Soviet national identity and culture in Ukraine that is understandably much more hostile to Russia and significantly more receptive to joining the West.
Similar, if less dramatic, reactions have occurred in other post-Soviet countries and in post-communist Eastern Europe. While significant parts of the population may agree with Putin’s embrace of religious values and cultural traditionalism, many have been shocked by the Russian invasion, which has often reinforced or generated positive assessments of the West’s own soft power and security institutions. In this context, the allure of Putin’s conservative interpretation of culture is a secondary, even tertiary, issue for most.
Even in Russia, this approach has not particularly paid off. This may be surprising, since much of Russian society, and particularly the Orthodox Church—which is closely aligned with Putin in support for the war—is culturally conservative. To take one barometer, 69 percent of Russians are against same-sex relationships. By contrast, a similar percentage (64 percent) of Ukrainians support such rights (while backing other restrictions).
Yet Russia’s turn to Orthodoxy after the Soviet collapse derived for the most part from a search for a post-communist cultural identity, not from the emotional embrace of religious beliefs that might be used to justify war. Relatively few Russians attend church services regularly, and when given the choice in opinion surveys, most Russians value living in a country with a high standard of living as opposed to one with strong spiritual values—or one with a powerful military that commands respect and fear abroad. While most Russians view the United States and NATO as dangers to Russia and its great-power status, which helps explain Putin’s popular support as well as significant (if often ritualistic) mass approval for the war, they also display a limited appetite for making serious sacrifices to support the war in Ukraine.
A primary cause of this disinterest is that many Russians do not feel fundamentally threatened by the West in either military or cultural terms. For example, a key component of the Kremlin’s domestic media campaigns is to inculcate fear and loathing of Westernized “traitors” in Russia in the guise of “fifth columnists.” After he launched the war, Putin confidently asserted that Russians would readily distinguish “true patriots from scum and traitors.” Yet recent evidence suggests that most Russians are unmoved by, or have only an unclear understanding of, the purported threat of a Western fifth column, marking a significant failure of Russian propaganda. In surveys just months before the start of the war, most respondents were indifferent to Russian laws that branded entities with ties to the West as “foreign agents And a large minority felt the laws were designed to repress civil society, not defend Russian culture.
Even though the Kremlin struggles to whip up mass support for the war through appeals to defend Russian civilization, prominent Russian elites—particularly the siloviki, current and former members of the security services and armed forces—provide strong support for the continuation of the war. These leaders are often closely aligned with the Russian Orthodox Church, a relationship buttressed by a common commitment to patriotism and conservative, often mystical, religious principles that brand Western progressivism as immoral and aggressive and its global influence a form of hybrid warfare. These groups have long embraced the necessity of cultural conflict with the West as well as within it.
Even without offering strong support for the culture war line, Russian society has nevertheless fallen into line, with little public protest or approbation, behind the Kremlin’s anti-West cultural narrative. By contrast, fierce debates over culture continue to divide Europe as well as the United States openly and deeply, providing political fodder for far-right groups in Italy, Austria, France, and elsewhere. In Italy, the recent collapse of the government and the rise of parties such as the League and Forza Italia suggest a greater affinity for Putin’s push for war in Ukraine. Italian society itself is almost equally split on the issue of which side, if either, to support.
The synergies between Europe and the United States on culture remain significant. This May, for the first Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest, organizers described Hungary as “one of the engines of Conservative resistance to the woke revolution.” (When Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban addressed a CPAC conference in Dallas in August, he stood in front of a backdrop that read “Awake, Not Woke.”) Even though Hungary’s halting support for Ukraine has more to do with not upsetting its energy supplies from Russia, the country has been held up as a cultural model within conservative circles in the United States.
While only about 6 percent of Republicans support Russia in the war, a small but vocal minority has promised to withdraw U.S. military support for Ukraine. Reasons vary from the right’s isolationist tilt in foreign policy to realist concerns over the war’s irrelevance to U.S. core interests. Yet culture has crept into the discourse over Ukraine. “Remember that [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky is a thug,” Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn told supporters in March. “Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies.”
Favorable views of Russia have plummeted in developed countries, and most white Christian nationalists and the extreme populist right in the West, Putin’s natural cultural allies, have condemned the invasion or remained silent. But depending on the group, these positions may shift. Peterson condemns the invasion—but quickly offers significant qualifications, implying that some cultural threats may be existential and might justify the violation of national sovereignty and basic human rights.
The revival of the appeal of Putin’s Russia for the Western cultural right will depend on several factors, including how long the carnage lasts in Ukraine. While many in the United States are repulsed by Russia’s brutality, others wonder whether the mounting cost of defending Ukraine, given growing inflation and a looming recession, is necessary to safeguard U.S. core interests and values. Still others balk at deeper involvement in the conflict due to fear of the inadvertent spread of the war. And if Donald Trump (who characterized Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as “genius”) receives his party’s nod as presidential candidate, supporters of Putin may feel emboldened. The combined, if uncoordinated, political influence of these strange bedfellows may allow for the creeping rehabilitation of Putin and his cultural policies.
Foreign Policy · by Lionel Beehner, Thomas Sherlock · September 9, 2022
5. Amid Ukraine’s startling gains, liberated villages describe Russian troops dropping rifles and fleeing
Excerpts:
The apparent collapse of the Russian forces has caused shock waves in Moscow. The leader of the Chechen republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, who sent his own fighters to Ukraine, said if there are not immediate changes in Russia’s conduct of the invasion, “he would have to contact the leadership of the country to explain to them the real situation on the ground.”
Evidence of the Ukrainian gains continued to emerge Sunday, with images of Ukrainian soldiers raising a flag in central Izyum, after it was abandoned by Russian forces, and similar images from other towns and villages such as Kindrashivka, Chkalovske and Velyki Komyshuvakha.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declined to elaborate on his army’s next moves, except to say in a CNN interview, “We will not be standing still. We will be slowly, gradually moving forward.”
Amid Ukraine’s startling gains, liberated villages describe Russian troops dropping rifles and fleeing
By Steve Hendrix, Serhii Korolchuk and Robyn Dixon
Updated September 11, 2022 at 8:12 p.m. EDT|Published September 11, 2022 at 5:55 p.m. EDT
The Washington Post · by Steve Hendrix · September 11, 2022
ZALIZNYCHNE, Ukraine — In the end, the Russians fled any way they could on Friday, on stolen bicycles, disguised as locals. Hours after Ukrainian soldiers poured into the area, hundreds of Russian soldiers encamped in this village were gone, many after their units abandoned them, leaving behind stunned residents to face the ruins of 28 weeks of occupation.
“They just dropped rifles on the ground,” Olena Matvienko said Sunday as she stood, still disoriented, in a village littered with ammo crates and torched vehicles, including a Russian tank loaded on a flatbed. The first investigators from Kharkiv had just pulled in to collect the bodies of civilians shot by Russians, some that have been lying exposed for months.
“I can’t believe that we went through something like this in the 21st century,” Matvienko said, tears welling.
The hasty flight of Russians from the village was part of a stunning new reality that took the world by surprise over the weekend: The invaders of February are on the run in some parts of Ukraine they seized early in the conflict.
The Russian Defense Ministry’s own daily briefing Sunday featured a map showing Russian forces retreating behind the Oskil river on the eastern edge of the Kharkiv region — a day after the ministry confirmed its troops had left the Balakliya and Izyum area in the Kharkiv region, following a decision to “regroup.”
On Sunday, Ukraine’s commander in chief, Valery Zaluzhny, said Ukrainian forces had retaken more than 3,000 square kilometers (more than 1,100 square miles) of territory, a claim that could not be independently verified, adding that they were advancing to the east, south and north.
“Ukrainian forces have penetrated Russian lines to a depth of up to 70 kilometers in some places,” reported the Institute for the Study of War, which closely tracks the conflict. They have captured more territory in the past five days “than Russian forces have captured in all their operations since April,” its campaign assessment posted Sunday said.
The apparent collapse of the Russian forces has caused shock waves in Moscow. The leader of the Chechen republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, who sent his own fighters to Ukraine, said if there are not immediate changes in Russia’s conduct of the invasion, “he would have to contact the leadership of the country to explain to them the real situation on the ground.”
Evidence of the Ukrainian gains continued to emerge Sunday, with images of Ukrainian soldiers raising a flag in central Izyum, after it was abandoned by Russian forces, and similar images from other towns and villages such as Kindrashivka, Chkalovske and Velyki Komyshuvakha.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declined to elaborate on his army’s next moves, except to say in a CNN interview, “We will not be standing still. We will be slowly, gradually moving forward.”
In a forceful statement to Russia on Sunday night, Zelensky insisted the invaders would be expelled. “Read my lips,” he said. “Without gas or without you? Without you. Without light or without you? Without you. Without water or without you? Without you. Without food or without you? Without you. Cold, hunger, darkness and thirst are not as scary and deadly for us as your ‘friendship and brotherhood.’ ”
Ukrainians emerged into the string of just-liberated villages southeast of Kharkiv hailing the end of their ordeal, and wondering whether it is truly over. “Only God knows if they will be back,” said Tamara Kozinska, 75, whose husband was killed by a mortar blast soon after the Russians arrived.
It is not over by any means, military experts warned. Russia still holds about a fifth of Ukraine and continued heavy shelling over the weekend across several regions. And nothing guarantees that Ukraine can keep recaptured areas secure. “A counteroffensive liberates territory and after that you have to control it and be ready to defend it,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov cautioned in an interview with the Financial Times.
But as Ukrainian soldiers continued Sunday to sweep deeper into territory that had been held by Russia, more of them were willing to see the campaign as a possible turning point.
In Zaliznychne, a tiny agricultural village 37 miles east of Kharkiv, residents were feeling their way back to normality Sunday, sleeping in bedrooms rather than basements for the first time in months and trying to make contact with family on the outside.
Kozinska hasn’t seen her daughter since February — even though she lives 12 miles away — but had just received word that she will come to pick her up as soon as officials open access to the village, just as the weather turns cold.
“I have been so scared about winter,” said the woman with lung problems, clutching a just-distributed paper giving her a number to call if she finds a land mine. “We have no power and it’s hard for me to collect firewood.”
The first Russian soldiers who set up in the village, turning the sawmill into their base and launching rocket attacks at Ukrainian troops in the next town, had at first not harassed the residents, she said. When they shot pigs on an abandoned farm, they sometimes let residents butcher some of the meat.
But as the occupation ground on, with the Russians rotating out every month, the troops became more aggressive. One of them asked to borrow Kozinska’s phone.
“I gave it to him so he could call his mother, but he took my SIM card,” she said.
One of the medics treated Halyna Noskova’s back after she was hit by mortar shrapnel in her front yard in June. Her 87-year mother pulled out the metal shard. “It was still hot,” she said. The Russian bandaged her up.
“They helped me, but I’m glad we are liberated,” said Noskova, 66.
The residents, all of whom are Russian speaking in this region adjacent to the Russian border, described treatment generally more humane than that experienced by occupied communities farther to the west. The discovery of more than 450 bodies in Bucha, near Kyiv — many showing signs of torture — set off international outrage over atrocities.
“They were not monsters, they were kids,” said Matvienko, who once asked Russian troops to move the tank they parked in front of her house. “I asked what they wanted from us and they said, ‘We can either be here or we can be in jail.’ ”
Others told the villagers they weren’t there to fight Ukraine, but to “protect us from America.”
The Russians’ biggest rule for residents was to get inside by 6 p.m. and stay there, quiet and in the dark, several said. Violating that order could be fatal, as two men on the street learned early on. The friends were drinking and had a light on, said Maria Grygorova, who lives in the attached house next door. The next morning she found them on the floor.
“Konstiantyn had two bullet holes in his head,” she said.
She and two friends buried them in the side yard. The same two friends dug them up Sunday, with Ukrainian war crimes investigators looking on.
The team from Kharkiv collected two other bodies during their visit, including a security guard whose remains have been rotting on the floor of a gravel elevator at an asphalt plant for months, even as the Russians used it as a sniper tower. One investigator vomited over a guardrail repeatedly as officers collected the remains.
“We’re here looking into war crimes,” said Serhii Bolvinov, chief investigator of the Kharkiv Regional Police, as his crew waited on demining techs to clear one area of explosives before they could recover some of the bodies.
The residents were scared of the Russians, several village residents said. But they almost pitied them in their scramble to escape the recent Ukrainian onslaught.
Half of the soldiers fled in their vehicles in the first hours of the offensive, they said. Those stranded grew desperate. Some residents overheard their radio pleas to unit commanders for someone to come get them.
“They said, ‘You’re on your own,’ ” Matvienko recounted. “They came into our houses to take clothes so the drones wouldn’t see them in uniforms. They took our bicycles. Two of them pointed guns at my ex-husband until he handed them his car keys.”
Buoyant Ukrainian officials said they would no longer negotiate a peace deal that would let Russia keep an occupying presence in any territory, even in Crimea and part of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions controlled by Russia or Russian-backed separatists for years.
“The point of no return has passed,” Reznikov, the defense minister, said at the Yalta European Strategy summit in Kyiv on Saturday.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Sunday seemed to backtrack on his previous assertion that the time wasn’t right for peace negotiations, as Russia was preparing to stage a round of sham referendums meant to annex occupied territories.
“We are not against the talks; we are not refusing the talks,” Lavrov said on the state TV program, “Moscow. Kremlin. Putin.” Rather, “Those who refuse should understand that the longer they delay this process, the more difficult it will be to negotiate.”
Robyn Dixon reported from Riga, Latvia. Mary Ilyushina in Riga and Isabelle Khurshudyan in Kyiv contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Steve Hendrix · September 11, 2022
6. Ukraine Stands, Fights, and Wins
I hope all the positive articles about Ukraine's success does not jinx it. Tom Nichols recognizes it is far from over but I think too many think the writing is on the wall for Putin's War. But I think we need to be cautious (while being cautiously optimistic) and ensure we sustain our support to help Ukraine see this through to victory. But we need to keep in mind the trinity - passion, reason, and chance - there is a lot of passion and chance will continue to play a dominant role so we had better be careful.
But Nichols' article here goes beyond Ukraine and focuses on lessons for dealing with extremism. I hope we can be "partisans of democracy" and contain and defeat extremism in all its various forms..
Conclusion:
Contain and defeat. If we really are to be partisans of democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and basic decency, then this is a painful truth. Policy has its limits. Negotiations must be grounded in not only good faith but reality, and not lies or myths.
The demands of extremists are meant to be impossible to fulfill: America must convert to Islam, Ukraine must accept Moscow’s rule, the election must be overturned and Mike Pence hanged. People issuing such demands are not interested in discussion or compromise; indeed, they’d be disappointed if they got what they wanted, because their anger sustains them and gives meaning to their lives. When faced with such movements and their demands, there is only one response: Contain and defeat.
Ukraine Stands, Fights, and Wins
A lesson for the rest of us about dealing with extremism
By Tom Nichols
The Atlantic · by Tom Nichols · September 12, 2022
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The war in Ukraine is far from over, but the Ukrainians have inflicted an immense loss on the Russians. There is a lesson here for all of us about how to deal with extremism in any form.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Contain and Defeat
Last weekend was full of grief and glory. Queen Elizabeth II died, and like many Americans, I felt the pang of loss. The Queen, a seemingly eternal part of our world, was a stalwart ally of the United States, and a model of dignity and duty. But while focusing on the mourning and pageantry, we might have lost track of another potentially world-changing story in Ukraine.
The Ukrainians, using a combination of clever strategy, military fortitude, and Western weapons, have routed the Russians from a series of positions around Kharkiv. These were not merely defeats; the Russians were abandoning their posts and leaving behind their equipment even before the Ukrainians could reach them. Apparently, Russian soldiers do not want to die for President Vladimir Putin’s pathetic dream of reestablishing a state that had already perished before some of them were even born.
This is an immense humiliation for the Russians and for Putin personally, and Russian pundits are already yelling at one another in panic on state television. The Russian state’s newspaper of record, Rossiskaya Gazeta, is, as the analyst Mark Galeotti noted, stammering and contradicting itself trying to wave away yet another Russian military disaster.
So what happens next? In some quarters, we might expect calls for the Ukrainians to negotiate. But to what end? As my Atlantic colleague Anne Applebaum wrote, there’s nothing to discuss. Putin “has put the destruction of Ukraine at the very center of his foreign and domestic policies, and at the heart of what he wants his legacy to be.” Negotiation, from the first day of the war, was impossible. The only answer was to stand and fight, which the Ukrainians have done with valor and tenacity.
There is a lesson for all of us here as we face the global attack on democracy. Americans, generally, are the products of a legalistic, free-market, democratic society, so we prize negotiation and dealmaking. We think almost any problem is amenable to rational discussion and good-faith exchanges. Each side gives something and gets something. But what if the person across the table has no interest in compromise?
Yesterday was the 21st anniversary of 9/11. I recall how the attack generated debates about how we might have avoided such hostility, how we should have understood that we were paying the price for our policies, how we didn’t hear the voices warning us.
Policies have consequences, but I never believed in such recriminations. Subsequent terrorist incidents over the years, to my mind, proved that we were being attacked for reasons we could not control. There was never a chance of averting violence from al-Qaeda, or from the lost and pathetic men engaging in mindless slaughter in places such as London, Madrid, Paris, and Brussels. (The Tsarnaev brothers, who attacked my beloved city of Boston, were poster boys for nihilism masquerading as a cause. These supposed Muslim warriors were, in reality, a young man described by a friend as “a normal pothead” and his narcissistic older brother, a would-be boxer who was an early suspect in a triple homicide before the Boston Marathon bombing.) Over the years, we learned the lesson that compromise was impossible, and that we would just have to fight groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State and their assorted cast of violent losers.
We then made the same mistake after the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Republicans and others engaged in hand-wringing about how the insurrectionists were expressing “legitimate” grievances. Once again, we were told that we should have been paying more attention to the voices of the unheard—as if somehow, we could have accommodated and satisfied those of our fellow citizens whose minimal demand was the suspension of the Constitution (to say nothing of those who wanted to see the execution of senior elected officials of the United States government).
Extremism, however, defeats compromise and dealmaking. There was nothing Ukraine could have done, short of immediate surrender, that would have stopped Putin’s invasion. The profusion of violent jihadists, particularly in Europe, is a complex social phenomenon that cannot be reduced to a reaction against U.S. policy. The rioters at the Capitol wanted to nullify an election and hang the vice president of the United States. Sometimes, there’s nothing left on the table to discuss.
Last week, my colleague Pete Wehner—a man of greater faith and patience than I could ever hope to be—wrote this in The Atlantic:
But even though we shouldn’t give up on individuals, I can’t escape concluding that the time for mollifying grievances is over. In our political endeavors, the task is now to contain and defeat the MAGA movement, shifting away from a model of psychological amelioration and toward a model of political confrontation.
Contain and defeat. If we really are to be partisans of democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and basic decency, then this is a painful truth. Policy has its limits. Negotiations must be grounded in not only good faith but reality, and not lies or myths.
The demands of extremists are meant to be impossible to fulfill: America must convert to Islam, Ukraine must accept Moscow’s rule, the election must be overturned and Mike Pence hanged. People issuing such demands are not interested in discussion or compromise; indeed, they’d be disappointed if they got what they wanted, because their anger sustains them and gives meaning to their lives. When faced with such movements and their demands, there is only one response: Contain and defeat.
Related:
Today’s News
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Ukrainian troops reclaimed further territory from Russian forces in the northeast and south of the country, reportedly including most of the Kharkiv region.
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In Edinburgh, an estimated 20,000 people waited in line to pay their final respects to Queen Elizabeth II, who will lie at rest in St. Giles’ Cathedral until Tuesday afternoon.
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Amtrak announced temporary cuts to three long-distance passenger routes in response to a potential strike by freight-rail workers.
Dispatches
Evening Read
(Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Shutterstock)
There’s Nothing Quite Like the Wrath of Losing Your Fantasy League
At first, Damon DuBois’s fantasy-football league kept the punishment for the last-place finisher fairly tame. The loser would have to let the champion select their team name for the following year, take care of the housekeeping at the next draft, or, at worst, sport an I suck at fantasy football license plate all off-season. Nothing crazy.
But by the final weeks of each season, league members already eliminated from playoff contention were checking out. DuBois wanted to raise the stakes. So about five years ago, he put the question to the group: What would be a good last-place punishment? And before long, an answer emerged: cheese shoes. “One of our league mates, he just started saying it, and we were like, Dude, what?!” DuBois told me. “And he was like, Yeah! Let’s just dump a bunch of cheese in our shoes!”
Read the full article.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
(FX; The Atlantic)
Read. “Floaters,” a poem by Arthur Sze. “Magpies fly from branch to branch. In the slow / tide of the afternoon, you sleep in my arms.”
Watch. FX’s The Patient, the latest TV show to explore the dramatic potential of confinement.
Play our daily crossword.
P.S.
Many of you know of my love for vintage television. The other night, I dozed through some classics and woke to find myself looking at the big-eyed, bobbing puppets of Thunderbirds, the British series filmed in Supermarionation—a puppeting technique pioneered by the legendary Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. This beloved show was remade as a live-action movie, but it doesn’t work without the weird puppetry. Indeed, I hope MeTV or some other network brings back Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, a 1967 Supermarionation show by the same team that was better, and weirder, than Thunderbirds and had a great theme. (Captain Scarlet is part of a secret army fighting creepy alien invaders called Mysterons, and he’s indestructible, because … look, it’s a puppet show; it doesn’t have to make sense.)
I saw a loving and nostalgic stage tribute to Thunderbirds in London back in the 1990s, but Supermarionation never got the treatment (and, in a demented way, the respect) it deserved until it was brought back by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the provocateurs behind South Park, in their movie Team America: World Police. It’s hilarious. But be warned: Team America nearly got an NC-17 rating until it was edited, and it is not even remotely a family movie.
—Tom
Kelli María Korducki and Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.
The Atlantic · by Tom Nichols · September 12, 2022
7. As Ukraine Pushes Forward, U.S. Officials Give Update
As Ukraine Pushes Forward, U.S. Officials Give Update
defense.gov · by JIM GARAMONE
Ukrainian government officials are trumpeting the success of their offensive in the Kharkiv region saying they have retaken about 1,200 square miles of territory from Russia, which launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion of its neighbor in February.
Maintenance Training
Armed Forces of Ukraine soldiers watch and listen to a block of instruction during M-109 Self-Propelled Howitzer maintenance training at Grafenwoehr Training Area, Germany, May 26, 2022. The training is led by U.S. and Norwegian soldiers as part of their respective country’s security assistance packages.
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A senior U.S. military official speaking on background said Ukrainians "are obviously fighting hard."
The military official said that "Ukrainian forces have very likely taken control of Kupiansk and Izyum in addition to smaller villages. Notably, we're aware of anecdotal reports of abandoned … Russian equipment, which could be indicative of Russia's disorganized command and control."
After six months of war, Ukraine launched the counteroffensive into the region east of Kharkiv. "On the ground in the vicinity of Kharkiv, we assess that Russian forces have largely ceded their gains to the Ukrainians and have withdrawn to the north and east, many of these forces have moved over the border into Russia," the senior military official said.
Ukraine has also launched a more limited offensive in the south around Kherson, and the official assessed the push in the south is making more limited gains.
Neither official would comment too much on the offensives because the Ukrainians are actively engaged in combat operations.
Russian forces are still shelling areas of Ukraine.
At the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the International Atomic Energy Agency has reported the last reactor has been shut down and put into its safest state. Still, there continues to be shelling in the area near the plant and the vicinity of Kherson.
On the maritime side, Russia has about a dozen ships underway in the Black Sea, including Kalibr-capable ships that have contributed to strikes in Ukraine and are supporting the Russian invasion.
Ukraine Training
U.S. and Norway soldiers train Ukraine artillerymen on using an M109 tracked self-propelled howitzer at Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany, May 12, 2022. Efforts to train Ukraine’s artillerymen on howitzer use is part of the security assistance packages from their respective countries.
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However, grain shipments from Ukrainian ports continue.
U.S. officials assess the airspace over Ukraine remains contested, with the Russians conducting increased airstrikes over the weekend. Many of those strikes are aimed at civilian targets, "which have contributed to widespread blackouts," the official said.
The senior defense official said the recent Ukraine Defense Contact Group Meeting at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, brought together 48 countries and two international organizations and put to rest the idea that Russian President Vladimir Putin could simply outwait the West.
One objective of the meeting, the official said, was to ensure Ukraine has the systems it needs to defend itself from the Russian invaders. "And at this meeting, there was a strong focus as well on what is necessary to provide Ukraine capabilities over the medium to longer term," she said.
This commitment is a key message to Russia. Putin needs "to understand that the international community stands behind Ukraine, and that Russia can't count somehow on holding out and waiting until the international community weakens," the official said.
This second part shows the international community is thinking in terms of energizing and coordinating the defense industrial bases of these countries to ensure an effective defense for Ukraine and deterrence to Russia.
This longer-term support will include training for Ukrainian military forces including basic training for new recruits and more complicated maneuvers involving larger units.
The United States and other nations are already training Ukrainian troops on some of the more modern capabilities that have been delivered. This includes the maintenance, repair and sustainment of these capabilities.
"We would certainly continue that area of training," the official said. "The leaders discussed … the next logical step in that progression, which is higher level unit training."
Spotlight: Support for Ukraine Spotlight: Support for Ukraine: https://www.defense.gov/Spotlights/Support-for-Ukraine/
defense.gov · by JIM GARAMONE
8. Putin Has a New Opposition—and It’s Furious at Defeat in Ukraine
Excerpts:
By creating a fantasy world in which the Russian army isn’t being defeated by Ukrainians but by domestic enemies, the movement has potentially disturbing implications for future Russian politics.
Their demand comes down to this: They want more war crimes—no mercy, no remorse, no pretense to even caring about civilian deaths until Ukraine is completely subdued and the very idea of Ukrainian-ness erased forever. Frustrated by the astonishing, unexpected defeat on Ukraine’s Kharkiv front, many pro-war bloggers demanded a swift retribution without regard for civilian deaths. Some recommended a nuclear strike on Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, to decapitate the government; popular blogger Maxim Fomin (who blogs as Vladlen Tatarsky), called for a nuclear warning strike against Ukraine’s Snake Island. Others called for “total war” against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure. When the Russian military appeared to oblige by launching missiles at several Ukrainian cities’ electricity grids overnight, an orgy of gloating ensued on Russian pro-war channels.
The level of hatred and derision toward everything Ukrainian in their blog posts is difficult to convey. Ukrainians are described as illegal squatters on Russian imperial lands or followers of the Nazi bandits supposedly governing in Kyiv. Their cities must be “hammered into the Stone Age” while massacres against civilians are gleefully referred to as “pig-butchering.” Even as they throw the Nazi slur at Ukrainians, these Russians’ views are not only genocidal in ways that recall the worst crimes of the 20th century but also, in some cases, openly fascist or neo-Nazi.
...
Russia’s inevitable defeat, deep economic malaise, and loss of great-power status at the hands of a country whose existence the Kremlin didn’t even recognize will be fertile ground for extremists. That counts double should Putin’s regime fall and a struggle for the future course of Russia ensue. If the pro-war nationalists searching for enemies to blame are the only opposition left in Russia, the world may be going down a dark and dangerous track.
Putin Has a New Opposition—and It’s Furious at Defeat in Ukraine
Right-wing nationalists are spreading a dangerous “stab-in-the-back” myth to explain Russia’s crushing defeats.
By Alexey Kovalev, an investigative editor at Meduza.
Foreign Policy · by Alexey Kovalev · September 12, 2022
A new Russian protest movement is coalescing, but it’s neither pro-democracy nor anti-war. Instead, it’s the most extreme of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s supporters, who have grown increasingly furious at the unfolding military disaster for Russia in the six-month-long war in Ukraine. They want Putin to escalate the war, use more devastating weapons, and hit Ukrainian civilians even more mercilessly. And they’ve openly attacked the Russian military and political leadership for supposedly holding back Russia’s full might—even as they rarely mention Putin by name.
Their push to escalate the war, including widespread demands to use nuclear weapons, is dangerous in itself. But by creating a fantasy world in which a supposedly all-powerful Russian army is being defeated by domestic enemies—instead of by superior Ukrainian soldiers fighting for their own land with modern tactics and Western weapons—the movement has potentially disturbing implications for a postwar and possibly post-Putin Russia. In fact, the narrative sounds a lot like the Dolchstosslegende, the German “stab-in-the-back” conspiracy theory that blamed the country’s defeat in World War I on nefarious enemies at home, including Jews. This narrative of military defeat became an integral part of the propaganda that brought the Nazis rose to power.
The promoters of the Russian stab-in-the-back myth aren’t a single party, movement, or group. Rather, the protesters are a loose coalition—mostly active online—of far-right ideologues, militant extremists, veterans of the 2014 Donbas war, Wagner Group mercenaries, bloggers, war reporters running their own Telegram channels, and individual Russian state media staff. Some are soldiers or mercenaries fighting in Ukraine, and their channels have doubled as recruitment tools. Others already had a modest following before the war by promoting different causes, some obscure but mostly nationalist or right-wing issues: restoring the Soviet Union’s rule over Eastern Europe, building a new Russian empire, or promoting “Russia for the Russians.”
Their loyalty to the Kremlin varies from veneration of and complete submission to Putin as a godlike historical figure to activism in right-wing opposition movements. But unlike the Kremlin’s mouthpieces on state television and in its troll factories, members of this amorphous war escalation camp are united in their scathing criticism of Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine.
By creating a fantasy world in which the Russian army isn’t being defeated by Ukrainians but by domestic enemies, the movement has potentially disturbing implications for future Russian politics.
Their demand comes down to this: They want more war crimes—no mercy, no remorse, no pretense to even caring about civilian deaths until Ukraine is completely subdued and the very idea of Ukrainian-ness erased forever. Frustrated by the astonishing, unexpected defeat on Ukraine’s Kharkiv front, many pro-war bloggers demanded a swift retribution without regard for civilian deaths. Some recommended a nuclear strike on Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, to decapitate the government; popular blogger Maxim Fomin (who blogs as Vladlen Tatarsky), called for a nuclear warning strike against Ukraine’s Snake Island. Others called for “total war” against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure. When the Russian military appeared to oblige by launching missiles at several Ukrainian cities’ electricity grids overnight, an orgy of gloating ensued on Russian pro-war channels.
The level of hatred and derision toward everything Ukrainian in their blog posts is difficult to convey. Ukrainians are described as illegal squatters on Russian imperial lands or followers of the Nazi bandits supposedly governing in Kyiv. Their cities must be “hammered into the Stone Age” while massacres against civilians are gleefully referred to as “pig-butchering.” Even as they throw the Nazi slur at Ukrainians, these Russians’ views are not only genocidal in ways that recall the worst crimes of the 20th century but also, in some cases, openly fascist or neo-Nazi.
Although most of these bloggers are unknown in the West—except to a small, dedicated circle of Russia-watchers—a few of them have caught the attention of the international press. Since they routinely point out Russian military failures in hopes of goading the Kremlin into escalating, some have become highly informative sources of unvarnished news from the front. As I write, I see Western war experts’ Twitter accounts full of detailed maps produced by pro-war Russians documenting the unfolding rout of Russian positions in the Kharkiv Oblast almost in real time while Ukrainian sources are several days behind in their statements in an attempt to preserve operational secrecy. The bloggers, who spout their diatribe mainly via Telegram and YouTube, also stand in sharp contrast to the bland, content-free triumphalism of Russia’s state-owned airwaves. The best-known individual among the critics is Igor Girkin, known by his nom de guerre, Strelkov. He is a retired Federal Security Service officer and a Russian Civil War reenactment aficionado who has proudly admitted that he “pulled the trigger of [the 2014 Donbas] war” when he led a band of armed Russians across the Ukrainian border, seized the city of Slovyansk, and held it for some six weeks.
By all accounts, Strelkov is a violent extremist—and quite possibly a war criminal for carrying out extrajudicial killings in the occupied Donbas in 2014. But he has become much-quoted in the Western press—and even profiled—as a critic of Putin’s war strategy since April, when he openly said Russia’s retreat from the Kyiv suburbs and parts of northeastern Ukraine had made a Russian defeat inevitable. On his Telegram channel, which has some 500,000 subscribers, and in his livestreams on the Russian social media network VKontakte, Strelkov has called Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu a “plywood general” and Russian Security Council deputy chair Dmitry Medvedev a bumbling fool. The lack of a countrywide military mobilization, he said, is a major criminal oversight. But he has mostly steered clear of criticizing Putin directly—not out of respect but only “until the war is over,” as he hinted in a recent post. That may be a reason why there have been no apparent attempts to silence him.
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A drone flying a giant Ukrainian national flag in celebration of Ukraine's independence.
An outright win for Kyiv now looks possible.
Ironically, some of the least palatable figures in Russia are now the most consistent and insightful critics of the Kremlin’s strategy—if for all the wrong reasons. One of them is Igor Mangushev, a senior manager at the Internet Research Agency, the troll factory in St. Petersburg, Russia, that was responsible for disinformation campaigns and interference in Western elections. One of the most unapologetically genocidal supporters of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Mangushev recently gave a macabre performance in a Moscow club where he presented a human skull he claimed to have harvested from a Ukrainian soldier killed during the bloody siege of Mariupol. “We will burn down your homes, murder your families, take your children, and raise them as Russians” is a fairly typical post on his Telegram channel. He also claims credit for inventing the letter Z as the symbol of Russia’s invasion. Yet Mangushev has no love lost for Russia’s military brass and decision-makers in the Kremlin, constantly attacking them for what he says is their indecision and bureaucratic slumber, which he sees as the main obstacle to the war effort.
Equally indignant is Yevgeny Rasskazov, also known as Topaz and a member of the far-right Rusich mercenary unit associated with the Wagner Group. On April 20, Rasskazov posted what appeared to be a celebration of Adolf Hitler’s birthday without naming the former Nazi leader directly. After the Russians’ loss of Balakliya, a city in eastern Kharkiv Oblast, during last week’s surprise Ukrainian offensive, he mocked the Russian defense ministry for attempting to present the defeat as a “tactical feint.” In a monologue, Rasskazov listed all the things that, in his view, the Russian war machine lacks: honesty in admitting a local defeat, a fully reformed defense ministry, more skilled commanders, and a well-oiled military with better coordination among different branches of the military.
In attempting to explain the Russian military’s increasingly desperate situation in Ukraine, the pro-war camp is developing its own “stab-in-the-back” myth that echoes the German intrawar version. Already, voices such the ultra-conservative pundit and RT commentator Egor Kholmogorov are openly accusing the Russian top command of criminal incompetence and demanding purges. The movement’s anger at treacherous “elites”—as of yet unnamed but almost universally reviled—is palpable. Although still marginal, there is even a new emerging subculture associated with the movement; for example, “Bands of Veterans” by singer Pavel Plamenev is a modern rock version of a 1920s German song, “We Are Geyer’s Black Company,” which became part of the official Nazi songbook. In Plamenev’s version, a Russian Donbas veteran returns from the war filled with rage, urging his fellow soldiers to burn the palaces of the rich and pass their wives around among the looters. In a worrying sign for the Kremlin, the new pro-war opposition is increasingly turning to the same indignant anti-corruption messages that fueled the opposition movement headed by now-jailed Russian dissident Alexey Navalny.
Surprisingly, considering the Kremlin’s accelerated crackdown on criticism since the start of the invasion in February, there have been no high-profile arrests of pro-war bloggers or even signs of censorship so far. The Kremlin couldn’t have missed these outbursts; a special monitoring department in the presidential administration watches Russian social media platforms closely and files daily reports to Putin’s aides. Nonetheless, there are signs that Moscow recognizes the problem and will seek to rein in the angry nationalists who are fast becoming what political scientist Tatiana Stanovaya calls “the most significant challenge to the Kremlin” since it crushed Navalny’s movement.
Whether or not the Kremlin now cracks down, the pro-war movement’s toxic narrative will take on a life of its own—especially if and when Russia loses the war, which is now all but inevitable. As the disconnect between official propaganda about an easy, successful “special operation” and the reality of crushing defeat becomes clear, many Russians will be looking for someone to blame. Here, the German example is instructive, where the combination of defeat, national humiliation, and economic collapse was the fertile soil for right-wing, extremist movements that blamed domestic enemies, assassinated liberal politicians, stirred antisemitic hate, and swore revenge on the victorious World War I Allies. This was the vicious brew that Hitler fed on as he rose to power.
Russia’s inevitable defeat, deep economic malaise, and loss of great-power status at the hands of a country whose existence the Kremlin didn’t even recognize will be fertile ground for extremists. That counts double should Putin’s regime fall and a struggle for the future course of Russia ensue. If the pro-war nationalists searching for enemies to blame are the only opposition left in Russia, the world may be going down a dark and dangerous track.
Foreign Policy · by Alexey Kovalev · September 12, 2022
9. A turning point in Ukraine leads to a turning point in Russia: Longtime Kremlin supporters are now calling the war a ‘disaster’
Let's be cautiously confident but not cocky.
Excerpts:
I have no doubt that in Russia, including in Putin’s entourage, there are people who are waiting for something else — negotiations and an early conclusion of a peace with Ukraine. As someone who has worked as a political observer in Russia for a long time, I know some of the proponents of peace personally. The problem is that, unlike the “patriots,” they remain silent.
For Putin personally, there is a more serious problem: His popularity is now fading among both the “patriots” who want a harsher war and those in the silent peace camp. Unless his forces can manage an equally stunning reversal of fortune on the battlefield — and that looks highly unlikely — he will inevitably have to take decisive action and make a choice as to whether to step back or strike harder. And if the latter, how exactly to do so.
I will not make predictions; I will note only that he is in a situation that he himself has described before: the position of a cornered rat. In a series of interviews published two decades ago, Putin described time spent in a drab communal apartment in St. Petersburg.
A turning point in Ukraine leads to a turning point in Russia: Longtime Kremlin supporters are now calling the war a ‘disaster’
A rout on the battlefield has led to unheard of criticism inside Russia.
Stanislav Kucher
Special Contributor
September 12, 2022
grid.news · by Stanislav Kucher
The sudden, successful Ukrainian counteroffensive near Kharkiv has been an unpleasant surprise for just about everyone in Russia — for the Kremlin, its propaganda machine, the Ministry of Defense and for millions of patriotically minded Russians. In a matter of just a few days, the Ukrainian flag has been raised over several towns and villages — and at least one major city — that had been held for months by the Russians. Television and social media showed footage of Russian tanks, armored personnel carriers and other military equipment, which the retreating army appeared to have abandoned in a hurry.
Bad battlefield news for Russia isn’t a new thing in this war; bad news that’s shared widely with ordinary Russians, with no filter, is certainly new. So is sharp criticism of the war.
And in the last few days, that’s what Russians have been seeing and hearing.
In a suddenly new information reality, the Kremlin is either unwilling or unable to hide the truth from its people. From day one, the conflict has been called a “special military operation” — by Russian President Vladimir Putin and everyone else in the Russian government and media; calling it vojna, or “war,” was made a crime early on. Now all kinds of people are saying vojna, and saying it openly. Many are saying that the vojna is not being waged well. And they are not buying the Kremlin’s explanations.
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This weekend, when the Ministry of Defense described the rapid — and by many accounts chaotic — retreat from the Kharkiv region as a “planned and pre-organized regrouping of troops,” reactions ranged from amusement to outrage. Even the most stalwart supporters of Putin’s “special military operation” wanted a better answer.
“It seems that your American friends taught the Ukrainians how to fight, and [Defense Minister Sergei] Shoigu was not ready for this,” said Lesha, one of my childhood friends from Orel, in western Russia, speaking on condition of partial anonymity. A few months ago, Lesha told me he had no doubts about the justification for the invasion or the imminent victory of the Russian army. This weekend, he was writing to me on WhatsApp, angry and bitter about the mess in Kharkiv.
That’s a mild version of the sudden turn among Kremlin supporters. Many of the same people who have been cheerleading Putin’s plans for the “denazification” and “demilitarization” of Ukraine are now calling the latest developments a “disaster” or “catastrophe.” Some are demanding a new “war council” or the sacking of Shoigu and others involved in the prosecution of the war.
And yes — now they are calling it a war. Vojna.
No one is calling out Putin by name. But the reaction of some of the loudest and most patriotic Russians to the recent Ukrainian successes testifies not only to a widespread shock and disappointment, but also to the awakening of new moods and forces that may influence the political landscape in Russia.
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At a minimum, it’s a sea change that few saw coming.
Partying — while the soldiers ran
On Saturday, the day that Russian troops fled Izyum, Balakleya and Kupyansk ahead of the Ukrainian advance, Moscow celebrated City Day, a long-standing holiday marking the anniversary of the foundation of Moscow, commemorated each year on the first or the second Saturday of September. The mismatch of tone and mood was stark; fireworks, dancing and drinking in Red Square, and retreat and humiliation some 500 miles to the south.
Putin was there, along with Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, to mark the occasion and open the “Sun of Moscow” — the new, largest Ferris wheel in Europe. The much-vaunted attraction broke down several times on its opening day and was temporarily shut down on Sunday.
Perhaps it was an omen.
People gather during City Day celebrations in downtown Moscow on Sunday. (Anadolu Agency/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Whatever the case, the contrast didn’t go over well. Sergey Mironov, the leader of a pro-Putin party in parliament, took to Twitter to blast the organizers. “It cannot be and it should not be that our guys are dying today, and we are pretending that nothing is happening!”
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A letter distributed by the Telegram channel Ostorozhno Novosti (literally, “Careful News”) demanded that Sobyanin, the Moscow mayor and among Putin’s closest allies, be dismissed, and that the “generals be sent to the trenches.”
The letter writers — who identified themselves only as “Russian hackers” — went on: “We consider it absolutely inappropriate and unacceptable that while our guys are dying at the front, the rotten liberal intelligentsia is firing salutes and indulging in idleness in the capital of our country. We demand from the military and political leadership to punish those responsible for the death of our guys.”
When “dissent” means support for a harsher war
For more than six months, ever since the first Russian forces invaded Ukraine, it has been considered treasonous to publicly criticize the Kremlin or the military. In the early days, the Kremlin issued decrees that made it a crime to condemn the war, or to question Putin or the war effort generally. Again — it was a crime even to call it a war.
Now the criticism is coming — as fast and as furiously as the Ukrainian advance.
Many in the West may equate dissent in Russia with the notion that the war is wrong or unjust, or that it has been prosecuted too harshly. Dissent, in this sense, means the likes of the anti-Putin figure Alexei Navalny and other pro-democratic politicians who are now either in prison or have been forced to emigrate. But there is another dissent, another opposition: those who believe wholeheartedly in the war, but who now feel Putin has not been decisive or tough enough. They categorically oppose any peace negotiations with Kyiv and demand both a harsher war against Ukraine and what they call a “real war” with the West.
These are the current voices of dissent — and after the first serious, ground-shifting defeats of the Russian army, their voices are sounding loudly and regularly for the first time. It’s a chorus of people who only a few days ago were considered Putin’s associates or his most forceful mouthpieces on Russian media.
“Because of some mistakes unknown to us, control over political processes is being lost,” Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin analyst, said on social media. “I guarantee you that this confusion will not last long. But right now, it’s a mess.”
On one of Russian state television’s most popular weekly programs, anchor Dmitry Kiselyov described the last week as “probably one of the most difficult,” and said Russians and their allies in the east had been forced to retreat “under the onslaught of superior enemy forces.” That, for Kiselyov, was an unprecedented acknowledgment of Russian failing.
On another Sunday template of Russian TV, host Vladimir Solovyov blasted the Russian military effort — without naming names. “It seems it’s time to get rough,” Solovyov said. “It’s just time to get rough.”
What they mean by “getting rough”
On Sunday, I checked the Telegram channel of Zakhar Prilepin, a Russian writer, politician and founder of the nationalist party A Just Russia — Patriots For Truth. Prilepin has been a preacher of the idea of a “Russian world” and a regular backer of Putin’s war on Ukraine.
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Above all, he has been a Kremlin cheerleader. But here was Prilepin’s Telegram channel this weekend:
“The events in the Kharkiv region can rightly be called a catastrophe. … Now even the blind and deaf must see the truth that the ‘special operation’ has ended long ago. The war has begun.”
In other words, a special operation will no longer suffice. War is needed. With all that entails.
Prilepin is a longtime evangelist for the concept of a Russian world, the idea championed by ultranationalist Alexander Dugin, whose daughter Daria was killed in Moscow two weeks ago. Prilepin personally participated in the fighting in the Donbas and believes that “the whole of Ukraine should become part of Russia.” On Saturday, his Telegram channel included the following clear definition of what he and others believe has gone wrong, and what war — vojna — must entail:
“Now everyone is wondering how this could have happened. The answer is, in principle, banal — catastrophic incompetence, the desire to hide the real state of affairs, ignoring the growing threats. Events were brewing for months, before the eyes of the whole country, when the situation was going downhill. A change of approach to the war in Ukraine is needed. Mobilization and militarization of the economy and industry. Creation of a political center for managing the country and the war.”
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That latter phrase is something entirely new — “a political center for managing the country and the war.” One wonders what Putin thinks when he sees such messages from people he has counted as strong supporters (assuming he does see them; he’s not a big fan of social media).
But there’s no avoiding the critics now. In the past few days, thousands of similar messages have flooded “patriotic” Telegram channels. Call it the “make Russia great again” constituency — a huge group of Russians that has swallowed Putin’s rationale for the invasion and in many cases the idea of a Russian world, and a group that cannot fathom what’s happening now.
Their basic question: How can the military of Ukraine — a vassal state of Russia, in this thinking — run roughshod over Russian soldiers, the forces of the second-largest army on earth?
In a sense, theirs are the voices of a monster created by the Kremlin’s own propagandists, who have spread the gospel of Russian superiority with relentless fervor and hammered home the message that Ukraine had to be tamed, “denazified” or destroyed. Now these people are demanding — with the same fervor — the punishment of Russian generals who have surrendered their positions. And they are calling for a total and totally unforgiving war.
It’s impossible to know the size of this monster, but this much is clear: These days in Russia, their voices are heard far louder and more frequently than the voices calling for peace. And while a protest in the name of peace still invites arrest and jail terms, the police are not coming for the “total war” crowd — even as they lambaste the commanders, and the Kremlin itself, for their failings.
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Silence in the Kremlin
Putin has yet to answer these critics or to say anything specific about the Kharkiv rout. And so for the first time in nearly seven months of war, I observe on the one hand, Putin’s silence, and on the other, a sharp activation of the hawks who tell Putin in plain language what to do. Mostly, they are telling him to punish people who until recently only the president had the right to criticize publicly, and telling him to do whatever is need to vanquish the Ukrainians once and for all.
Only last week, Putin told the world that Russia had “lost nothing” in the war to date. The lightning Ukrainian advance undercuts that message and many others, and every day of silence plays against him and into the hands of these radical patriots.
I have no doubt that in Russia, including in Putin’s entourage, there are people who are waiting for something else — negotiations and an early conclusion of a peace with Ukraine. As someone who has worked as a political observer in Russia for a long time, I know some of the proponents of peace personally. The problem is that, unlike the “patriots,” they remain silent.
For Putin personally, there is a more serious problem: His popularity is now fading among both the “patriots” who want a harsher war and those in the silent peace camp. Unless his forces can manage an equally stunning reversal of fortune on the battlefield — and that looks highly unlikely — he will inevitably have to take decisive action and make a choice as to whether to step back or strike harder. And if the latter, how exactly to do so.
I will not make predictions; I will note only that he is in a situation that he himself has described before: the position of a cornered rat. In a series of interviews published two decades ago, Putin described time spent in a drab communal apartment in St. Petersburg.
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“I got a quick and lasting lesson in the meaning of the word ‘cornered,’” Putin wrote. “There were hordes of rats in the front entryway. My friends and I used to chase them around with sticks. Once I spotted a huge rat and pursued it down the hall until I drove it into a corner. It had nowhere to run. Suddenly it lashed around and threw itself at me. I was surprised and frightened. Now the rat was chasing me.”
The young Putin got away unscathed. Today, in the wake of recent news from the front lines and the withering criticism at home, it is not far-fetched to think that Putin may soon find himself in precisely such a position. Cornered, but armed with much more than a stick, as he contemplates his next move.
Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.
grid.news · by Stanislav Kucher
10. Ukraine, rushing into 'digital transformation,' prepares for more Russian cyber attacks: Officials
Excerpts:
Before the invasion, Ukraine didn’t have an established cyber force like other countries, Dubynskyi said.
“Maybe it was our mistake, but we just decided to do that before the war,” he said.
Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, said during the summit he was surprised by the lack of “significant successes” in the cyber realm from Russia after the first couple of days of the invasion.
“I mean, I’ll tell you this, I was surprised that there was not more of an attempt to shut down the Ukrainian internet, not just necessarily through cyber means, but purely through kinetic means,” Alperovitch said. “The fact that you were able to mobilize the world and President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy was able to put out videos every night on the internet that are watched by millions of people around the world is an enormous failure for the Russian military in not going after those critical communication nodes.”
Ukraine, rushing into 'digital transformation,' prepares for more Russian cyber attacks: Officials - Breaking Defense
“This is the world’s first cyber war and Ukraine is successfully dealing with it,” said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister and minister for digital transformation. “We’ve shown the whole world that Russia is not such a powerful state as everyone thought.”
breakingdefense.com · by Jaspreet Gill · September 12, 2022
James Lewis, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’s Strategic Technology Program (left) Georgii Dubynskyi, Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation (center), and Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator (right), speak at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit Sept. 9, 2022. (Photo courtesy of Billington Cybersecurity)
WASHINGTON — Seven months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian officials foresee the country going through a rapid “digital transformation” grown from desperate self-defense, though one said he fears the Russian threats in cyberspace are far from over.
“They [Russia] are trying to find a way how to undermine, how to defeat our energy system and how to make circumstances even more severe for Ukrainians,” Georgii Dubynskyi, Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation, told reporters Friday. “We are preparing.”
Dubynskyi was speaking on the sidelines of the Billington Cybersecurity Summit, adding that he feared Russia would use “precision” cyber or hybrid attacks as their real-world invasion has stalled, according to VOA.
Meanwhile, Dubynskyi said on a panel that Ukraine wants “not only to fight, but also to… continue our developments over digital transformation and we are ready to… take any modern technology and to test them in Ukraine” to develop a digital country.
Dubynskyi’s comments followed a pre-recorded video from Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov, who shared his vision on turning Ukraine into a top defense tech hub, noting “game changing technology” such as drones and the power of using cyber attacks against Russia.
Though Russia has used cyber attacks to coincide with military operations as far back as its conflict with Georgia in 2008, Fedorov argued that the war in Ukraine was the “world’s first cyber war and Ukraine is successfully dealing with it.”
“We’ve shown the whole world that Russia is not such a powerful state as everyone thought,” he said.
As a result, he said that strong security and military solutions could become Ukraine’s “main export and expertise” and that Ukraine’s volunteer “IT Army”, established during the onset of the war on Feb. 26 to address emerging cybersecurity threats and attacks that targeted Ukrainian government and bank websites, has been one of the country’s “bravest” projects.
The official IT Army of Ukraine Telegram channel currently has over 200,000 subscribers, though it’s unclear how many are active in any significant cyber operations. (Near the outset of the invasion, experts told Breaking Defense that calling up a volunteer hacktivist army was a potentially dangerous gamble.)
During the first three days of the war the IT army allegedly shut down a number of Russian government websites and propaganda TV channels, Fedorov said, and on a weekly basis, the hacktivist group “attacks about 200 websites.”
Beyond just cyber defense, he noted the IT Army has used artificial intelligence to identify faces of abandoned Russian soldiers, finding their social media accounts and then notifying relatives of their deaths. The group also has a database of postal services “looters” used to ship stolen foods from Belarus to Russia, according to the prerecorded video showing at the conference.
Before the invasion, Ukraine didn’t have an established cyber force like other countries, Dubynskyi said.
“Maybe it was our mistake, but we just decided to do that before the war,” he said.
Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, said during the summit he was surprised by the lack of “significant successes” in the cyber realm from Russia after the first couple of days of the invasion.
“I mean, I’ll tell you this, I was surprised that there was not more of an attempt to shut down the Ukrainian internet, not just necessarily through cyber means, but purely through kinetic means,” Alperovitch said. “The fact that you were able to mobilize the world and President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy was able to put out videos every night on the internet that are watched by millions of people around the world is an enormous failure for the Russian military in not going after those critical communication nodes.”
11. Why Non-Alignment Is Dead and Won’t Return
Excerpts:
Finally, Western leaders should ignore the widespread rhetoric about a global south “unwilling to choose” and focus instead on the individual concerns, vulnerabilities, and interests of key states in the developing world. That is exactly what traditional diplomacy and statecraft did before ideological buccaneers hijacked Western foreign policies.
Meanwhile, the developing world is not dying to reinvent the failed nonaligned movement. Third Worldism—with its offspring ideologies of pan-Asianism, pan-Arabism, and pan-Islamism—was a big failure. Notwithstanding the clamor among a section of the global south’s own commentariat, few leaders in the developing world today delude themselves with the idea of collective bargaining against the global north. They are much wiser now and more adept at pursuing individual national goals.
Why Non-Alignment Is Dead and Won’t Return
Foreign Policy · by C. Raja Mohan · September 10, 2022
An expert's point of view on a current event.
An old ideology rears its head but offers little for the present age.
Mohan-C-Raja-foreign-policy-columnist
C. Raja Mohan
By C. Raja Mohan, a columnist at Foreign Policy and a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi welcomes Cuban leader Fidel Castro to the Summit of Non-Aligned Countries in New Delhi on March 5, 1983.
Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi welcomes Cuban leader Fidel Castro to the Summit of Non-Aligned Countries in New Delhi on March 5, 1983. Alain Nogues/Sygma via Getty Images
As much of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America has refused to line up behind the West amid its growing confrontation with Russia and China, the idea that these regions are returning to a policy of nonalignment has generated concern in Western capitals and a bit of excitement elsewhere. Both of these sentiments may, however, be misplaced. In the West, the debate over nonalignment is still haunted by the Cold War’s shadow, when “nonalignment” was often synonymous with an anti-Western stance. And for developing countries, the objective of building a non-Western or post-Western order—part of the ideology of nonalignment from its beginnings in the decolonization era—has been an enduring but elusive mirage.
Take a closer look, and you will find the ideology of nonalignment was dead long ago. And while it may not be entirely buried, it poses little threat to the West and does not offer much salvation to the East.
The responses of countries outside the West to the renewed great-power conflict today are too varied to fit neatly into a category. They have little to do with the notions of nonalignment that prevailed during the movement’s heyday following World War II, when newly decolonized nations found themselves right in the middle of a global conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union—and formed a loose third bloc as a result.
Nonalignment was never a coherent concept; it reflected a bouquet of distinct ideas on postcolonial engagement with the world. One of them was the proposition that keeping away from the great powers and their rival blocs was critical for freedom of action in the world. It did not take long for the idea of neutrality to crash against reality. One of the founders of the nonaligned idea, Indian Prime Minster Jawaharlal Nehru, had to abandon it with the outbreak of the Sino-Indian War in 1962. Whereas Nehru turned to the United States for military assistance, his successor and daughter, Indira Gandhi, entered into an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1971. It was the actual threat that mattered, not the abstract principle.
Nonalignment was never a coherent concept; it reflected a bouquet of distinct ideas on postcolonial engagement with the world.
India wasn’t just an isolated case. More broadly, as postcolonial nations encountered territorial and other conflicts with their neighbors and faced domestic challenges from rivals for power, many of them turned to one or the other superpower for support. Some occasionally switched from one side to another. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, another founding country of the nonaligned movement, dumped the Soviet Union for the United States in the early 1970s. In the 1950s, Pakistan had signed on to the United States’ anti-communist alliance in Asia but quickly found common ground with communist China against India.
In other words, internal and external security challenges compelled most postcolonial states to align with one or the other superpower, even while maintaining the pretense of nonalignment.
A second element of nonalignment was strictly ideological: the morphing of anti-colonialism into anti-Westernism. Many in the developing world elite absorbed socialist theories of development and saw the capitalist West as neocolonial. The Soviet Union and China were good at exploiting this anti-Western resentment and offering economic and political support to newly independent regimes.
This sentiment peaked in 1979, when the Non-Aligned Movement—an organization that still exists today—declared at a summit hosted by Cuban leader Fidel Castro in Havana that the Soviet Union was the developing world’s “natural ally.” But for every leader who turned to Moscow for support, there was another who turned to the West for regime survival and regional balance of power.
A third dimension of nonalignment was the idea of a movement that would overturn the post-1945 order and build a new one that would be more equitable and fair. Rapid decolonization in the 1960s and the emergence of a voting majority of developing countries in the U.N. General Assembly seemed to provide a tailwind for those seeking to transform the world order all through the 1970s.
That era coincided with a widespread sense of Western decline and growing Soviet influence around the world. Like China and Russia today, the Soviet Union and its satellites—as well as a multitude of radical movements around the world—had convinced themselves that the post-Western moment had arrived. The U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War, the growth of protest movements in the West, OPEC’s triumph in dramatically raising oil prices and throwing the West into economic malaise, the general crisis of capitalism, and the Non-Aligned Movement’s sweeping rhetoric about a “new international economic order” produced a giddy sense of a world in rapid transition.
Moscow’s achievement of nuclear parity with Washington was coupled with major gains for Soviet-backed national liberation movements—including in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, and Nicaragua. By the mid-1970s, Soviet-style ideologues were triumphal in their proclamation that the global constellation of forces was turning decisively in favor of socialism, uniting what were then called the Second and Third worlds against the First.
By the turn of the 1980s, however, Washington was triangulating nicely between Moscow and Beijing and had developed a strategy to push back against Soviet advances in the developing world. Many so-called Third World countries supported U.S. and Western efforts, and under the Reagan Doctrine, U.S. aid went to rebel and insurgent groups seeking to oust pro-Soviet radical regimes around the world.
Part of nonalignment’s demise was simple economics. Pragmatic leaders in the global south saw the Soviet model’s limitations, and by the 1980s, many of them were turning to Western capitalism and its system of global institutions for development. It turned out that it was socialism that was in deep crisis and that capitalism had considerable resilience. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, much of the developing world had already joined the Washington Consensus on economic development.
The West’s unfolding competition with the Sino-Russian alliance demands a decisive shift away from the Western preachiness of the last three decades.
That could have been the end of the story of nonalignment. But the seeds of today’s developing world indifference to Russia’s war in Ukraine were sown in the post-Cold War era. Having vanquished the Soviet Union, a complacent West now saw little need to cultivate good relations with the ruling elites of the global south. The new hubris was also reflected in policies that attempted to promote democracy and reengineer societies in the developing world as rich-world governments, organizations, and activist NGOs carpeted the global south with a vast apparatus of conditional aid. Political hectoring on issues from democratic governance to climate policy became a habit. Sanctions and aid cutoffs became preferred instruments to discipline developing societies that fell short of the benchmarks set by the West.
The conviction that the West and its development elite were serving a higher cause—much like the Christian missionaries of the colonial era—was an intoxicating one. But it ignored the fact that the heathens might not want to convert. Nor were Western wealth and power an endless bounty that could be drawn upon to produce preferred change in the rest of the world.
Despite these repeated failures and setbacks, the presumption that the rest of the world will march to a Western drum endures. It is no surprise, then, that the Western strategic community was so surprised when the rest of the world did not simply stand up to be counted against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
None of this means, however, that the backlash in the developing world will crystallize into a new nonalignment. That said, the West needs to learn a number of lessons if it seeks broader support—on Ukraine or other geostrategic issues—than it has been able to muster so far.
First, the West could have made a better case on Moscow’s war by framing the problem differently. Instead of defining it as a conflict between democracies and autocracies, it could have focused on the question of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. These ideas have much greater resonance in the developing world, not least because of an abundance of contested borders and simmering conflicts.
Second, distance matters. If Western and Eastern Europe can’t fully agree on how to respond to the war in Ukraine and if neither U.S. Republicans nor Democrats see Russia through the same eyes, why should one assume Latin America, Africa, and Asia will toe the current Western position on Ukraine?
Western leaders should ignore pundits’ rhetoric about a global south “unwilling to choose” and focus instead on the individual concerns and interests of key states in the developing world.
Third, support from the developing world on larger political issues will have to be earned by the West rather than claimed as an entitlement. Having neglected political engagement with the global south and having ceded much economic space to China in the pursuit of globalization, the West now needs to work hard to win back support. The experience of the 1980s tells us it can be done.
The first step in that direction is to recognize that the West’s unfolding competition with the Sino-Russian alliance demands a return to classical forms of diplomacy—of winning friends and influencing people. It would involve a decisive shift away from the Western preachiness of the last three decades. Paradoxically, the people who will find this the most difficult are those in the West who consider themselves friends of the global south, yet have exerted the most pressure on developing countries on a whole gamut of issues.
Second, restoring the importance of area studies in international relations would help Western governments and institutions better understand the complexities of different regions and countries around the world. The emergence of highly vocal single-issue groups in the West—along with their success in setting the agenda for governments and multilateral development institutions—has been toxic for relations with the developing world. Continuing on this track would be even more counterproductive in the age of heightened great-power rivalry.
Third, developing countries have much more political agency today than they did when nonalignment was last a topic during the Cold War. Their wealth, institutions, and confidence have grown, and many of their elites have learned the art of geopolitical bargaining between competing great powers. That presents opportunities the West would be wise to seize, especially given the far greater strategic challenge presented by China today compared with the Soviet Union in the past.
Finally, Western leaders should ignore the widespread rhetoric about a global south “unwilling to choose” and focus instead on the individual concerns, vulnerabilities, and interests of key states in the developing world. That is exactly what traditional diplomacy and statecraft did before ideological buccaneers hijacked Western foreign policies.
Meanwhile, the developing world is not dying to reinvent the failed nonaligned movement. Third Worldism—with its offspring ideologies of pan-Asianism, pan-Arabism, and pan-Islamism—was a big failure. Notwithstanding the clamor among a section of the global south’s own commentariat, few leaders in the developing world today delude themselves with the idea of collective bargaining against the global north. They are much wiser now and more adept at pursuing individual national goals.
C. Raja Mohan is a columnist at Foreign Policy, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, and a former member of India’s National Security Advisory Board. Twitter: @MohanCRaja
12. US struggles to mobilise its Asian ‘Chip 4’ alliance
US struggles to mobilise its Asian ‘Chip 4’ alliance
Financial Times · by Christian Davies · September 12, 2022
Fears of Chinese retaliation and regional tensions are hampering US efforts to rally its East Asian allies behind a proposed semiconductor supply chain alliance.
The so-called “Chips 4” initiative is part of a US strategy to strengthen its access to vital chips and weaken Chinese involvement, on trade and national security grounds.
It is supposed to comprise the US, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, offering a forum for governments and companies to discuss and co-ordinate policies on supply chain security, workforce development, R&D and subsidies.
But a year after the plans were first drawn up, the four countries are yet to finalise plans even for a preliminary meeting. Concerns include China’s likely response, hesitation over including Taiwan in an intergovernmental forum, and longstanding tensions between South Korea and Japan.
Sujai Shivakumar, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank in Washington, said the US “needs alliances to fortify its supply chain,” and to “give it breathing room” to recapitalise its industrial base in the sector. He added the Chips 4 initiative was also designed “partly to slow China’s progress [on chips]” .
The US is pitching the initiative as a positive, multilateral agenda quite separate from the export controls and investment screening it has imposed to make it harder for China to obtain advanced semiconductor technology.
But in July, Chinese commerce department spokesperson Shu Jueting warned against the US “damaging and splitting” the global semiconductor supply chain through the Chips 4 alliance, which she said could exacerbate supply chain problems if it was “discriminatory and exclusive”.
The opposition of China, which accounts for 40 per cent of global IT production and remains a crucial source of key components and materials, has unnerved several regional governments and chipmakers.
Kyung Kye-hyun, the head of Samsung Electronics’ semiconductor business, said last week that Samsung had “delivered our concerns” about the initiative to the South Korean government.
“Our stance is that, for the Chips 4 alliance, they should seek understanding from China first and then negotiate with the US,” said Kyung. “We are not trying to exploit the US-China conflict, but trying to find a win-win solution.”
Samsung and South Korea’s SK Hynix are global leaders in memory chips, while Taiwan’s TSMC dominates the non-memory sector and Japan is home to some of the world’s leading semiconductor materials producers and equipment makers.
A US government official said South Korea, the most reluctant of the potential members of the alliance, had expressed concerns that the initiative would “interfere in the competitive balance between some of the large chip companies,” for example by asking rivals such as Samsung and TSMC to share technology with each other.
Some in Korea also worry that Washington could be tempted to use the initiative to give a competitive advantage to US rivals Intel and Micron.
Lee Jong-ho, South Korea’s minister of science and ICT and a renowned semiconductor expert, said China had “already become a difficult market to do business in and bring new equipment into even before the alliance was proposed.”
But he said it was important to respect the views of private companies, adding that it is “not appropriate to see this as a crisis”.
Park Jea-gun, professor of electronics engineering at Hanyang University, said South Korea “should stress to China that it has no choice but to join because of the US pressure, and that it can’t produce memory chips in China without joining the alliance”.
But a Japanese government official said that if South Korea did join, then it could limit the initiative’s scope, given unresolved tensions between the two countries. Japan is yet to lift export controls on chemicals to the Korean semiconductor industry that were imposed in 2019 amid a dispute over historical issues.
Sanae Takaichi, the new economic security minister, stressed the importance of Japan working with the US and other close countries to make its semiconductor supply chain resilient. But she added: “It is also important, however, to be mindful that efforts in economic security do not restrict business activities and damage innovation or efficiency,”
Japan and Korea have also proved reluctant to engage at a governmental level with a formal grouping that includes Taiwan.
A senior Korean official said that South Korea had sought assurances from the US that Taiwan’s involvement could not be interpreted by Beijing as a challenge to the One China policy.
The Korean official added that South Korea had not made any commitments beyond attending a future “preliminary meeting” of the four countries.
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But the US official said that Seoul has now effectively taken the decision to join: “They don’t want to be left out or left behind, and frankly it would be difficult to move forward without them.”
Nazak Nikakhtar, a former senior US economic security official now at Washington law firm Wiley Rein, said that the slow progress of the initiative demonstrated that “a multilateral approach only works if everybody has the same desire to move at the exact same time”.
“South Korea is not as advanced as the US or Japan on the China issue — they are worried about North Korea, their proximity to China, and so on,” said Nikakhtar.
“We also can’t expect Taiwan to self-regulate trade with China, because so many of the raw materials they use to make chips come from China,” she added. “So the notion that you could get Taiwan and South Korea especially to move in lockstep with us on this is absurd.”
Additional reporting by Eleanor Olcott in Hong Kong
Financial Times · by Christian Davies · September 12, 2022
13. Russian troops "failed to organize coherent retreat," abandoned tanks: ISW
Russian troops "failed to organize coherent retreat," abandoned tanks: ISW
Newsweek · by Jack Dutton · September 12, 2022
Russian troops "failed to organize a coherent retreat" when Ukrainian forces launched a surprise counteroffensive against them in the areas around Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
The Guardian reported on Thursday that Ukraine had launched a surprise counterattack in the Northeast Kharkiv region, after the country spoke openly for weeks about its intent to begin a large-scale offensive on the Southern Kherson region, a strategically important location because of its proximity to the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula.
The Washington D.C.-based think tank ISW wrote in its daily update on Monday on the war that Russia had brought more of its forces in the south in response to a Kherson attack, but had left its front lines thin in Kharkiv Oblast.
Ukrainian military members use Stuhna-P, Ukrainian anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) system in position on April 28, 2022 in Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine. Ukrainian forces have made major ground on a counteroffensive in the northeastern region. Serhii Mykhalchuk/Getty
In recent days, Ukrainian forces have seized control of key cities such as Izyum and Kupyansk, forcing Russian troops to retreat. Kyiv has been making far more progress on its counterattack than many analysts predicted.
IWS also noted that social-media posts appear to show abandoned Russian tanks and other military equipment near Izyum.
"Ukrainian forces have inflicted a major operational defeat on Russia, recapturing almost all Kharkiv Oblast in a rapid counter-offensive," the ISW said. "The Ukrainian success resulted from skillful campaign design and execution that included efforts to maximize the impact of Western weapons systems such as HIMARS.
"Kyiv's long discussion and then an announcement of a counter-offensive operation aimed at Kherson Oblast drew substantial Russian troops away from the sectors on which Ukrainian forces have conducted decisive attacks in the past several days.
"Russian troops likely withdrew from the area in great haste, and social media posts show abandoned tanks and other heavy military equipment near Izyum, which indicates that Russian troops failed to organize a coherent retreat," the institute added.
The ISW said that Ukraine had turned the tide of the war in its favor and that Kyiv would likely increasingly dictate the location and nature of much of the fighting.
It added that Moscow will find itself increasing responding poorly to "growing Ukrainian physical and psychological pressure in successive military campaigns unless Moscow finds some way to regain the initiative."
Ukraine has said its offensive is snowballing – the county's chief commander General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, told on Sunday how his forces had regained control of more than 3,000 square kilometers (1,160 square miles) since the start of September.
Ukraine has also claimed to have made gains in the Kherson region, capturing several villages. Last week, U.S. officials and Ukrainian officials told CNN that Ukraine hopes to re-capture the whole region by year end.
Through the counteroffensive, Ukraine has remained quite secretive about what settlements have been taken back from Russia, not to reveal too much about where the fighting is taking place. Revealing too much information may give the Russian military the upper hand.
Russia meanwhile has rarely commented on the counteroffensive, leading to mistrust in the command and pro-war military bloggers to rail against the Kremlin and the Ministry of Defense, citing lack of progress in the conflict.
The ISW said that the Kharkiv counterattack is straining the Kremlin's relationship with the Ministry of Defense, "further alienating [Russian President Vladimir] Putin from the higher military command."
Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated that Putin has postponed all his meetings with senior Russian ministry of defense in Sochi— a seemingly bizarre decision given Russia's recent setbacks in the conflict.
Newsweek has contacted the Ukrainian and Russia foreign ministries for comment.
Newsweek · by Jack Dutton · September 12, 2022
14. Ukraine's Big Offensive Against Russia: Designed by U.S. Special Forces?
Sigh.... While it feels nice to see SOF get credit, I wish we would focus on the Ukrainians doing it themselves with perhaps omse advice and assistance from the US.
In the old days SOF had to demonstrate its relevance to ensure the forcestructure was maintained. That led to too much publicizing of the exploits of SOF. But SOF is in no danger of having its force structure cut (though some within the force think it might actually be prudent to make some cuts and downsize it), Therefore SOF no longer needs to "sell itself" and we need to return to quiet and low visibility operations (though that also is probably impossible in toays information environment. That means we do have to work with the environment where there is an "unblinking eye" of journalists and social media (as well as enemy intelligence capabilities)/. We do have to learn to hide or operate in plain sight.
There is only one lesson that we should be focused on and that is by using the indirect approach and executing economy of force type operations when the conditions are right, provides an option for policy makers and strategists. The second lesson is that providing advice and assistance is optimized when you have an educated, capable, and motivated force that can take advice and assistance, decide what works best for them and adopt and adapt what they think will be useful. The Ukrinians are fighting this fight and they are planning and executing it. We should not be trying to take too much credit (or any at all). But again the important lesson is that we do have options (when conditions are right) other than direct military engagement. Use of SOF is one option. Being the arsenal of democracy is another.
Excerpts:
The operation, so far excellent and aided by U.S. intelligence, bears all the hallmarks of a U.S. Special Operations Command deception operation, according to a former U.S. official.
Evelyn Farkas, the top Pentagon official for Ukraine and Russia during the Obama years, said, “These guys have been trained for eight years by Special Ops. They’ve been taught about irregular warfare. They’ve been taught by our intelligence operators about deception and psychological operations.”
Ukraine's Big Offensive Against Russia: Designed by U.S. Special Forces?
19fortyfive.com · by Steve Balestrieri · September 12, 2022
Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the eastern part of the country has been very successful so far. They have retaken about 3,000 square kilometers of territory from Russian forces.
The operation, so far excellent and aided by U.S. intelligence, bears all the hallmarks of a U.S. Special Operations Command deception operation, according to a former U.S. official.
Evelyn Farkas, the top Pentagon official for Ukraine and Russia during the Obama years, said, “These guys have been trained for eight years by Special Ops. They’ve been taught about irregular warfare. They’ve been taught by our intelligence operators about deception and psychological operations.”
Russian Bloggers Turn on the Government
In their headlong retreat out of the Izium region, Russian forces, in danger of being encircled and chopped up piecemeal, retreated in chaos. In doing so, they left behind a lot of armor, armored vehicles, weapons, equipment, and ammunition.
It is too early to predict how this will play out. For now, we can say the Russian military has suffered a huge setback – significant enough that they had to admit their forces are retreating. Even the most well-known pro-Russian bloggers, who always paint the picture of a “glass completely full,” have had to change their tune.
Igor Strelkov, the former head of the Donetsk People’s Republic militia, has become critical of the Russian invasion, especially “the exceptional caution of the actions of Russian aviation.”
Ramzan Kadyrov, the iron-fisted leader of Chechnya, called out the Russian army’s leadership after the disastrous events of the past two days. Kadyrov, a Vladimir Putin puppet, said that the Russian president might not know the real state of affairs.
“They have made mistakes, and I think they will draw the necessary conclusions,” Kadyrov said in a message posted to his Telegram channel on Sunday.
“If today or tomorrow no changes in strategy are made, I will be forced to speak with the leadership of the defense ministry and the leadership of the country to explain the real situation on the ground to them,” said Kadyrov, whose military expertise consists of terrorizing civilians behind the lines. “It’s a very interesting situation. It’s astounding, I would say,”
In the West, Ukraine’s blitzkrieg offensive has muted Germany’s reluctance to provide Kyiv with more advanced and plentiful weaponry. Berlin has taken the stance that by giving Ukraine these weapons, it would only prolong a war that Russia is bound to win.
“In this new phase of the war, Ukraine needs weapons that will enable it to liberate territories occupied by Russia and keep them permanently under its control,” Michael Roth, the foreign affairs committee chairman of the Social Democrats, the party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, told the Funke media group.
Russia Withdrawing and Resetting
The Russians are trying to quickly consolidate their lines and possibly take advantage of Ukrainian lines that are now stretched thin. The UK Ministry of Defense, in its daily intelligence assessment, posted on Twitter, “The rapid Ukrainian successes have significant implications for Russia’s overall operational design. The majority of the force in Ukraine is highly likely being forced to prioritize emergency defensive actions.”
The Ministry added: “The already limited trust deployed troops have in Russia’s senior military leadership is likely to deteriorate further. Isolated pockets of resistance remain in this sector, but since Wednesday, Ukraine has recaptured territory at least twice the size of Greater London.”
Resistance Grows in Kherson
With dual offensives ongoing, Ukrainian civilian resistance in Kherson, in the south, continues to grow. People are pushing back against Russian attempts to force a sham referendum on joining Russia. There have been bombings, assassinations, and other means of resistance among a population eager for liberation.
The Russians have had to divert some of their combat forces to occupation duty. They have been driving around the city, destroying garages and raiding apartments in search of Ukrainian partisans.
They’ve posted on television, offering about $165 to anyone ratting out partisans. Trying to win the minds of the young, they have opened schools that teach a Russian curriculum. They have threatened Ukrainian parents, telling them that anyone who doesn’t enroll their children in school risks having their children taken away.
Expert Biography: Steve Balestrieri is a 1945 National Security Columnist. A proven military analyst, he served as a US Army Special Forces NCO and Warrant Officer in the 7th Special Forces Group. In addition to writing for 19fortyfive.com and other military news organizations, he has covered the NFL for PatsFans.com for over 11 years. His work was regularly featured in the Millbury-Sutton Chronicle and Grafton News newspapers in Massachusetts.
19fortyfive.com · by Steve Balestrieri · September 12, 2022
15. The truth will catch up to Putin
Excerpts:
The entire edifice of today’s Orwellian Russian State is built on brutal repression that is supported by misrepresentation and distortions of truth. Putin has created mountains of mendacities over his more than two decades in power. The weight of all those lies is now enormous. There was a reckoning for the Soviet Union.
Has Putin placed the modern Russian state on a similar trajectory? If so, multiplying Western political, financial and economic sanctions should hasten its final days. Putin fears these figures, so much so that they were declared a state secret. Anyone caught releasing them could serve seven years in prison. What will the oligarchs do when their fortunes are further depleted? What will the people do if his war of choice turns into a quagmire that demands even more Russian lives? There is a problem with attempting to build and maintain a national edifice based on legions of lies. Multiple falsehoods will eventually prove unsustainable. Facts are stubborn that way. The truth will catch up to Putin, too.
The truth will catch up to Putin
By Robert Bruce Adolph
tampabaytimes-fl.newsmemory.com
The truth will catch up to Putin
I was in Ukraine last May and saw firsthand the massive damage done. Vladimir Putin executed an audacious nationally coordinated strategic deception in preparation for his “Special Military Operation,” the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. In other words, he told falsehoods to the Western nations and his own people regarding his true intentions. Then he lied some more about his thousands of losses once combat was joined.
Now the conflict has devolved into an artillery duel. The dead are multiplying at a startling rate. There are legions of lies at work here. But serial dishonesties have a shelf life. The end of Putin’s may soon be in view.
In 1989-90 I served with the U.N. Truce Supervision Organization in both Observer Group Egypt in the Sinai Desert, and then later with Observer Group Lebanon. Some of my observer post colleagues were Russian military officers. The Soviet Union collapsed during this period, and largely based on the collective weight of the veritable cornucopia of untruths told by the Communist Party.
The emotional and psychological impact on the Russian officers was terrible. I remember one telling me sadly over one too many vodkas, “They lied to us. My whole life has been a lie.” Tragically, it has happened again — drawn from the same playbook, only this time the fantastic fabrications are in the service of a kleptocratic dictatorship masquerading as a pseudo-democracy that harbors vainglorious delusions.
The dictator controls all levers of national power. His state news conglomerate spews pure propaganda. That effort to date has been effective. After all, the only story told domestically is his. But Putin’s attempts to convince the Russian people that the aggressor in this invasion is the defender may soon lose traction domestically. The Russian and Ukrainian peoples know and understand one another well. Ukrainians are not Nazis. Putin, the former KGB officer, swam well in oceans of pretense for all his adult life. His backstroke in these dark waters prior to this unwarranted conflict was often superb. But his invasion of Ukraine is a major faux pas. Has absolute power finally corrupted absolutely?
Ill-prepared and predominantly conscript Russian soldiers are being killed in vast numbers. Estimates range as high as 80,000 uniformed dead and wounded. News of those deaths will surface. Putin hopes that his “Special Military Operation” will not be perceived as a real war by average Russians. But if these casualty estimates are anywhere near accurate, the longer the fight lasts, and as the Kremlin’s losses continue to mount, the greater the danger to the autocrat’s rule, and he knows it.
America lost fewer than 2,500 soldiers to hostile action in Afghanistan over a period of 20 years. These huge Russian losses in less than eight months of conflict demonstrate a startling level of Russian military incompetence coupled with an uber-determined Ukrainian resistance.
The entire edifice of today’s Orwellian Russian State is built on brutal repression that is supported by misrepresentation and distortions of truth. Putin has created mountains of mendacities over his more than two decades in power. The weight of all those lies is now enormous. There was a reckoning for the Soviet Union.
Has Putin placed the modern Russian state on a similar trajectory? If so, multiplying Western political, financial and economic sanctions should hasten its final days. Putin fears these figures, so much so that they were declared a state secret. Anyone caught releasing them could serve seven years in prison. What will the oligarchs do when their fortunes are further depleted? What will the people do if his war of choice turns into a quagmire that demands even more Russian lives? There is a problem with attempting to build and maintain a national edifice based on legions of lies. Multiple falsehoods will eventually prove unsustainable. Facts are stubborn that way. The truth will catch up to Putin, too.
Robert Bruce Adolph, who served nearly two decades with the United Nations, is a retired senior Army Special Forces soldier, who holds graduate degrees in both National Security Studies and International Affairs. He is the author of his publisher’s number one best-selling book, “Surviving the United Nations: The Unexpected Challenge.”
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tampabaytimes-fl.newsmemory.com
16. US leaders avoid victory dance in Ukraine combat advances
As they should and must. Too much passion and chance out there and not enough reason.
US leaders avoid victory dance in Ukraine combat advances
AP · by LOLITA BALDOR and ELLEN KNICKMEYER · September 13, 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. leaders from President Joe Biden on down are being careful not to declare a premature victory after a Ukrainian offensive forced Russian troops into a messy retreat in the north. Instead, military officials are looking toward the fights yet to come and laying out plans to provide Ukraine more weapons and expand training, while warily awaiting Russia’s response to the sudden, stunning battlefield losses.
Although there was widespread celebration of Ukraine’s gains over the weekend, U.S. officials know Russian President Vladimir Putin still has troops and resources to tap, and his forces still control large swaths of the east and south.
“I agree there should be no spiking of the ball because Russia still has cards it can play,” said Philip Breedlove, a retired U.S. Air Force general who was NATO’s top commander from 2013 to 2016. “Ukraine is now clearly making durable changes in its east and north and I believe that if the West properly equips Ukraine, they’ll be able to hold on to their gains.”
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Lawmakers particularly pointed to the precision weapons and rocket systems that the U.S. and Western nations have provided to Ukraine as key to the dramatic shift in momentum, including the precision-guided High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, and the High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile, or HARM, which is designed to target and destroy radar-equipped air defense systems.
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“They’re there, they’re in theater, and they’re making the difference,” Sen. Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In the hands of highly motivated Ukrainian fighters who are making the most of weapons ranging from off-the-shelf drones and abandoned Russian arms to advanced weapons from the West, the HIMARS are enabling Ukrainians “to turn the tide, dramatically,” Coons said.
Meanwhile, a senior defense official said the U.S. is looking at future needs, including discussions about providing more intensive combat training for larger Ukraine units, a change from current training focused on smaller teams learning to handle specific weapons. It is also considering sending additional air defense systems, as well as lethal strike drones and more surveillance drones. The official was one of two who briefed reporters Monday on condition of anonymity to discuss planning details.
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Ukraine’s launch in recent days of a much-anticipated counteroffensive — in a different part of the country from where Russian troops occupying Ukraine had massed strength to meet it — has brought on the biggest territorial changes in months in the 200-day war, launched when Putin rolled Russian forces into the neighboring country, targeting its Western-oriented government.
The U.S. officials acknowledged that the U.S. provided information to help the Ukrainian counteroffensive, but declined to say how much or if Western officials helped strategize the idea to throw Russian forces off guard by calling attention to attack plans in the south, while actually plotting a more formidable campaign in the east.
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The U.S provided information “on conditions” in the country, said one of the officials, but “in the end, this was the Ukrainian choice. The Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian political leadership made the decisions on how to conduct this counteroffensive.”
Ukrainian forces claimed Monday to have retaken a wide band of territory and more than 20 Ukrainian settlements from Russia, pushing all the way back to the two countries’ northeastern border. Russian soldiers were surrendering in such numbers that Ukraine was having difficulty making room for them, Ukrainian military officials said.
Ukrainians have pounded 400 targets in all with the HIMARS since the U.S. began supplying them, using them “with devastating effect,” Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters late last week as Ukraine’s counteroffensive was getting underway.
The truck-mounted, GPS-guided systems fire faster, farther and more precisely than the Soviet-designed rocket launchers otherwise used by both Russia and Ukraine. They can hit targets up to 80 kilometers (50 miles) away. Ukrainian forces have used the 16 HIMARS and several similar systems to strike supply lines, ammunition depots and other key Russian targets.
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The Ukrainians “believe that this has happened because of the new technology equipment and weapons that we’ve sent them. They ... said well, if you would have sent them six months ago,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat. “We didn’t have them six months ago, but you know, we had to build the weaponry, and train their people on it, takes time.”
Still, Ukrainian leaders are still pressing for more — including fighter jets and the longer-range Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, a surface-to-surface missile that the U.S. has so far declined to send.
A key question going forward will be how much more Congress and the American public are willing to spend on the war in Ukraine, which the U.S. and the West say also represents a significant threat to Europe.
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It’s unclear if, or how, Ukraine fighters’ successes in recent day will affect the ongoing debate. The White House has asked Congress to greenlight an additional $11.7 billion in aid as part of an overall government funding measure that lawmakers must approve before the end of the month.
“I haven’t seen any lack of appetite so far” for continuing funding for Ukraine, said Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo. “I think to see the ability to take the help that they’ve been given and then be clearly successful in some of their efforts is an encouragement to want to do more of that.”
The U.S. — the lead contributor to Ukraine’s war effort among NATO members — has poured more than $15 billion in weapons and other military support into Ukraine since January.
Biden acknowledged the battlefield gains for Ukraine over the weekend but refused to say more. “I’m not going to speak to that now because things are in process,” he told reporters.
Breedlove noted that despite the recent battle losses, Putin still has “a lot of tanks and a lot of trucks and a lot of people that he can still throw at this problem. They’re just not his best tanks, his best trucks or his best people.”
But he warned that winter may bring the most daunting challenge. Putin’s moves to shut down fuel supplies to Europe, which is expected to increase prices, are likely aimed at turning public opinion across the region.
“Even though Mr. Putin’s military has taken a beating on the military front, his big card, yet probably to play is how well does Europe hold together through a winter that Mr. Putin is going to make completely miserable for the European people,” Breedlove said. “I think Mr. Putin is desperately trying to hang on to winter because his big hope now is to separate the European people from their European political leadership.”
___
Associated Press writers Seung Min Kim, Lisa Mascaro and Aamer Madhani contributed to this report.
AP · by LOLITA BALDOR and ELLEN KNICKMEYER · September 13, 2022
17. What Does the Weaponization of Global Finance Mean for U.S. Dollar Dominance?
We must protect the dollar as the reserve currency. It is a national security imperative.
Conclusion:
One clear conclusion from the extraordinary weaponization of the dollar in the Ukraine war is that it serves to increase incentives toward financial fragmentation. Although the ability to move away from the current dollar-centric system is structurally limited for now, that structure can change over time. The economic costs of such change, particularly when considered alongside the broader effects of global fragmentation, may be very high indeed.
What Does the Weaponization of Global Finance Mean for U.S. Dollar Dominance? - War on the Rocks
ELLIOT HENTOV, RAMU THIAGARAJAN, AND AARON HURD
warontherocks.com · by Elliot Hentov · September 13, 2022
$300 billion is a big number, even for a country the size of Russia. The United States and its allies froze roughly that amount belonging to Russia’s central bank’s foreign currency reserves (equivalent to about 35 percent of Russian GDP), froze assets of a wide range of individuals and Russian banks, and severely limited Russia’s access to the SWIFT payment system. We have seen such measures selectively applied to countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, and Venezuela in the past, but this sanctions package is unprecedented, not only due to its scope and magnitude but also because it targets a major world power. The action represents a tectonic shift from the policy of neutrality, signaling to the world that each country’s access to their reserves could become contingent on their foreign policy. In response, Russia has sought to rely on non-dollar payment systems and to exhaust non-dollar reserve assets, joining Iran and other countries sanctioned by the United States in pursuing alternatives.
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Do these historic sanctions signal the end of the dollar’s dominance? We believe that any imminent change is highly unlikely. Paradoxically, the recent events may have even buttressed reliance on the dollar and highlighted its appeals: deep and liquid capital markets; tradability and convertibility; and network effects. In the long run, any alternative needs to be able to compete on those metrics.
A Slow Decline in the Dollar’s Dominance Since 2000
The role of the dollar has been declining for the past two decades, with its share of reserve currencies down from 70 percent to 60 percent over that period, as shown in Figure 1. A detailed analysis of the International Monetary Fund’s Currency Composition of Official Foreign Reserves data shows that a quarter of the decline in the dollar is a shift into the Chinese renminbi, as well as nontraditional reserve currencies. The shift into nontraditional reserves is broad-based and now stands at nearly 10 percent of total identified reserves at the end of 2021.
Two key factors drive this erosion. First is the growing liquidity in many currencies outside the big four (dollar, pound sterling, yen, and euro), which historically did not have deep markets — markets with an abundant supply of investable assets with low transaction costs. However, falling transaction costs — following the advent of electronic trading platforms, automated market making, and automated liquidity management — have deepened these markets, thereby enabling currency reserve managers to comfortably deal in currencies outside the big four. In plain English, it has become much easier to use other currencies with the rise of technology and harmonized global regulation.
The second factor driving the dollar’s erosion as a reserve currency is a growing push by reserve currency mangers towards active reserve management due to the demarcation of “investment tranche” from “liquidity tranche.” The latter is the classic reserve pool held to meet the worst-case scenario requirement in a balance of payments crisis. Today, the investment tranche is sizeable and these funds do not need to be invested with the same conservative approach. For example, among the 55 emerging market economies for which the International Monetary Fund conducts its reserve adequacy analysis, 30 had excess reserves as of year-end 2017. In these countries, total reserves exceeded the minimum adequate reserve levels by 58 percent on average, thereby providing a sizeable investment tranche. And, as this investment tranche is less constrained in both asset-class choices and currency risk, non-dollar assets can be accommodated in larger shares.
Other changes contributing to the dollar’s slow erosion as the world’s dominant currency are also underway. Foreign cargo used to be priced predominantly in dollars, but that is changing after the outbreak of war in Ukraine. Russia is now invoicing its commodity exports to “non-friendly” nations in rubles. Saudi Arabia is open to China paying for oil in renminbi. We are starting to see efforts to move away from the dollar in the invoicing realm. And, of course, China’s rise as the largest trading partner for many nations increases their need for renminbi assets.
Do Post-Ukraine Financial Sanctions Represent a Regime Change?
The decline of the dollar’s dominance appears already to be set in motion, and we expect these forces to continue, particularly following the Western respond to the war in Ukraine.
The actions to freeze Russian reserves have raised alarms in global financial markets. Indeed, it has been reported that the Chinese finance ministry had been put on alert and called for risk scenarios. Will the centrality of the dollar change dramatically following its deployment as a weapon in the recent conflict in Ukraine? We think not.
There are three core reasons that the dollar will largely retain its dominant position, much to the chagrin of America’s adversaries.
The first is liquidity. It is difficult to find true alternatives to dollar-denominated reserves given the depth and liquidity of the U.S. financial market and its reliably positive Treasury bond yields. As depicted in Figure 2, the overall size of bond markets outside of the U.S. alliance system is minimal, making it very difficult to realize meaningful diversification.
Second, desirable reserve currencies need to be dependably tradable, or convertible into other currencies, and backed by governments with robust financial institutions and legal limitations to unfettered executive power. Markets believe that the dollar amply possess these traits, which makes transitioning to an alternative reserve currency extremely challenging.
Third, the complexity of recreating the whole ecosystem in a different currency renders a regime change unlikely. Indeed, the decline in dollar reserves has advanced at a glacial pace, taking more than 22 years to decrease by only 10 percent. It is hard to see a dramatic acceleration in the pace of dollar decline given the difficulty in disassembling the complex dollar-based ecosystem of trade invoicing, credit, and reserve status.
To further illustrate these points and the limits of the recent Russian sanctions on the dollar’s hegemony, it is useful to evaluate some possible alternatives as the world’s dominant currency.
Are Other G7 Currencies a Viable Alternative?
As liquidity improves and markets deepen, we see a continuation of the slow 20-year trend diversification into other developed market currencies such as the Australian and Canadian dollars. However, we do not see potential for a meaningful acceleration of the trend away from the U.S. dollar and into other reserve currencies outside the big four. The more likely source of an accelerated diversification away from dollar is for the euro to regain some of share in reserve portfolios. The euro reserve share dropped from 28 percent in 2009 to just 21 percent in 2021. As part of the transition away from the dollar, we believe that the euro is increasingly well-positioned to regain much of its lost share for several reasons: reduced fears of an Economic and Monetary Union breakup reduces catastrophic euro tail risk; elevated bond issuance to fund fiscal deficits coupled with a reduction in the bond purchases by the European Central Bank increases bond supply available for public purchase; and improved prospects for euro interest rates to move reliably back into positive territory improves expected returns. Overall, however, the pace of diversification is likely to remain slow as these G7 currencies are unlikely to attract substantial new capital from political opponents, given the “reserve-currency-as-weapon” example set by the Russian sanctions.
Could the Renminbi or Gold Dethrone the Dollar?
The renminbi and gold are definitely more politically acceptable to countries outside the West. However, these contenders have their own limitations as well.
Russia’s experience over the last 15 years provides some meaningful insights in this regard. During this time period, Russia was determined to reduce exposure to the dollar and rotated heavily into gold and the renminbi, as shown in Figure 3. However, neither choice provided the reserve functionality of dollar-allied reserves. On the one hand, gold reserves are simply not “user-friendly” in large quantities. Central bank gold reserves were traditionally held in deposit in New York or London, but there had been a push by Russia and others to store gold domestically in order to prevent it being subject to U.S. sanctions. However, even if physical gold is held domestically, it still requires an international transaction to convert it into foreign currency for payment purposes. In short, gold performs well on safety but falls short on liquidity.
On the other hand, the renminbi clearly offers a potential long-term alternative and will likely attract some additional reserves from its political allies in the wake of the Russian sanctions. But Chinese capital markets still do not provide the features required by reserve managers. China’s willingness to shut down swaths of its economy, impose or remove capital controls, or change convertibility into non-Chinese assets makes dollar-allied assets relatively more attractive. For that reason, even Russia’s reserve allocation to renminbi quickly peaked at about 14.7 percent of reserves, according to Macrobond (see Figure 3). It is our view that the renminbi’s attraction as a reserve currency will only grow at a sluggish pace for the foreseeable future.
Can Digital Assets Provide a Globally Attractive Alternative?
It is possible that digital assets will emerge that are beyond the reach of geopolitical influence, and yet still mimicking features of classical reserves in terms of safety and liquidity. While none of the current blockchain-based crypto-assets or stablecoins yet meet those standards sufficiently, future innovations could deliver a more credible alternative. In fact, Mark Carney’s speech highlighted the possibility of a consortium of central bank-backed digital currencies as a potential alternative to the dollar. We believe that the origin and design of most digital assets are likely to reinforce — not undermine — the dollar’s dominance in the medium term. The dollar is the primary fiat currency underpinning most stablecoins, as they are backed by U.S. Treasury bills and/or other low-risk dollar money market instruments. In addition, most of the innovation in this sector is embedded within the U.S. economy, despite the concept of non-territoriality. Thus, it is very difficult to dethrone the dollar as the reserve currency of choice.
Reserve Reduction as an Option for Reducing Dollar Dominance
Given the limited options for reserve diversification, the one major potential change in the response to the weaponization of the of global finance could be an overall reduction in official reserves.
Could countries simply liquidate reserves to reduce the effects of the dollar’s hegemony? We see clear incentives for such a reduction given the limited structural options for diversification. On the surface, it appears that the action of selling off reserve assets to reduce overall reserve levels would likely be a threat to dollar dominance. However, the expected impact of such an action on the dollar is very difficult to predict, in large part because it depends on how and where the former reserves are invested and where imports are sourced. To determine the impact of a general reduction in reserves, it is important to determine the resulting changes in the global web of trade and portfolio flows. These changes are impossible to model, however. Therefore, the impact of a reduction in the level of reserves as a way to counter the threat of dollar weaponization is highly uncertain.
Residual Risks to the Current Order
While we do not see a dramatic acceleration of the pace of decline in the dollar’s dominance, it is critical to consider even modest changes in the context of the current broader slide toward global economic fragmentation along competing political and economic blocs. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s “friend shoring” is not new. A 2021 White House Report on “supply chain resilience” forecast resilience strategies for industries such as semiconductor, pharmaceuticals and others. Recent International Monetary Fund research shows that technology fragmentation alone can lead to losses of nearly 5 percent of GDP for many countries. Seen in this context, even a modest increase in the pace of fragmentation in the global financial order could amplify the negative impacts from the fragmentation of real economic activities from friend shoring or other forms of de-globalization across industries and technologies.
One clear conclusion from the extraordinary weaponization of the dollar in the Ukraine war is that it serves to increase incentives toward financial fragmentation. Although the ability to move away from the current dollar-centric system is structurally limited for now, that structure can change over time. The economic costs of such change, particularly when considered alongside the broader effects of global fragmentation, may be very high indeed.
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Elliot Hentov is the Head of Macro Policy Research and Aaron Hurd is Senior FX Portfolio Manager at State Street Global Advisors. Ramu Thiagarajan is Senior Investment Adviser at State Street Corporation.
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Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Elliot Hentov · September 13, 2022
18. Is Afghanistan's Long Civil War Really Over?
Excerpts:
The United States and its allies may want to be more than passive observers and try to do something to stabilize the country. There is little harm in providing humanitarian assistance or even stepping aside if other countries want to assist the Taliban regime. Such activities—in contrast to supporting the anti-Taliban resistance and conducting counterterrorism activities inside Afghanistan—would not raise the risk of restarting the Afghan civil war. But the amount the United States and its allies can do is limited. The Taliban regime is unlikely to heed incentives or sanctions to modify its behavior. Moreover, substantial U.S. financial assistance to the Taliban regime would likely draw reactions from China, Iran, and Russia, which would would back Afghans to oppose any U.S. influence. The same is even more true if the United States attempts to back proxies to supplant the Taliban regime. The best policy for Washington may be to monitor the situation closely rather than to inadvertently cause harm by trying to help one side or another.
The United States and other powerful outsiders should not forget the roles they played in prolonging Afghanistan’s suffering during the past four decades. If they do, they may very well repeat the mistakes of the past.
Is Afghanistan's Long Civil War Really Over?
The Forces That Could Threaten the Taliban’s Control
September 13, 2022
Foreign Affairs · by Carter Malkasian · September 13, 2022
One year ago, the democratic government of Afghanistan collapsed. The humiliating evacuation of U.S. military forces and civilians as well as roughly 100,000 Afghans remains a sore spot for Washington and its allies. The Taliban regime has ruled the country ever since. Levels of violence throughout the country have been dramatically reduced—but so, too, have the rights of women, the freedom of the media, and the safety of those who supported the overthrown democratic government. Questions about the new state of affairs abound. Should the international community recognize the Taliban? Will the Taliban moderate themselves? Can diplomacy or sanctions compel them to do so? Is a new international terrorist threat forming under the Taliban’s watch?
And an even more pressing question looms over the country: Is the Afghan civil war that started in 1978 finally over? For four decades, Afghanistan tore itself apart. Mujahideen fought communists. Warlords fought warlords. The Taliban fought the Northern Alliance. The democratic republic’s army fought the Taliban. In the process, more than two million Afghans were killed or wounded and more than five million became refugees. Last year’s withdrawal of foreign forces from the country put an end to that cycle and allowed the Taliban to consolidate its control—at least for the time being. Pockets of resistance to Taliban rule, the Taliban’s continued embrace of the tactics of terrorism, and foreign intervention could all potentially rekindle the civil war in ways that are not apparent right now. What today appears to be a new period of peace may turn out to be just a pause in Afghanistan’s long trauma. Washington’s ability to do much about this is limited. The most important thing is to be cognizant of how previous interventions prevented the civil war from ending. Getting involved in Afghanistan again in order to mitigate risks to U.S. national security would pose an even greater risk: worsening the tragedy for the Afghan people.
STABLE INSTABILITY
Afghanistan has never been entirely peaceful. Tribal feuds, government repression, border skirmishes, and dynastic plots have been part of Afghan life for centuries. It is a hard place to govern. Tribal norms place a high value on the individuality of every member of a tribe, and no government—including the monarchy that ruled the country from 1747 to 1973—has ever been able to control the country’s hundreds of tribes, subtribes, and clans. Religious leaders—village mullahs and Islamic scholars and judges—also play an important role in society. They, too, have posed checks on the power of state authorities, and have sometimes called for jihad against not just foreign invaders but Afghan rulers, as well.
But there was a kind of stability to the instability. Tribes were too divided to pose an existential threat to the country or society. The monarchy’s own plotting and short bursts of violence were too brief to prevent leadership transitions. Attempts by the monarchy to oppress Afghans were largely deterred by the tribes and religious leaders. And for nearly a century after the British invasion and occupation of 1878–81, no major foreign invasions upset the equilibrium.
Forces of modernization began to tip that balance in the late twentieth century. But the event that sparked 40 years of civil war was the Saur Revolution, in 1978. Communists overthrew the regime of Daoud Khan, the cousin and successor of the former king. Yet the communists enjoyed only a small base of popular support, and their education, land, and marriage reforms prompted a backlash among tribes, religious leaders, and the rural population. In 1979, an insurgency formed and advanced rapidly. In December of that year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prevent the defeat of the incipient communist regime.
Religious leaders historically posed checks on the power of state authorities.
The Soviet invasion brought modern industrial war to Afghanistan and led to a decade of bloodshed. The majority of Afghan casualties and refugees from the past 40 years took place during this period. Soviet tanks, aircraft, and artillery smashed into villages, which militarized in response. Resistance to the occupation united once disparate tribes, ethnic communities, and religious leaders. Declaring themselves holy warriors, the people rose up, armed with assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and sophisticated communications gear supplied by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and other countries.
The Soviet defeat and departure in 1989 left the mujahideen without a common enemy, especially after the communist regime finally fell in 1992. They turned to fighting each other. War entered Kabul itself. Many Afghans remember this as the worst part of the past 40 years. The different sides razed neighborhoods and victimized communities. The tribal and ethnic community leaders that had been mujahideen became warlords.
TALIBAN RISE AND FALL
The Taliban emerged out of the chaos of the early 1990s. In his 2010 book, My Life with the Taliban, Abdul Salam Zaeef, who served as Taliban ambassador to Pakistan at the time of 2001 U.S. invasion, argued that “the Taliban were different” than what had come before. “A group of religious scholars and students with different backgrounds, they transcended the normal coalitions and factions,” Zaeef wrote. “They were fighting out of their deep religious belief in jihad and their faith in God. Allah was their only reason for being there, unlike many other mujahedeen who fought for money or land.” Although combat persisted in the north, the Taliban were able to reduce violence in much of the country, slowly gaining ground such that by 2001 their rivals were fairly contained. Their rule appeared stable, if harsh.
The U.S.-led intervention in 2001 toppled the Taliban regime and briefly created greater peace and freedom than Afghans had experienced since at least 1978. In the years that followed, however, it became clear that the more consequential effect of the invasion was the rekindling of Afghanistan’s civil war. The challenges of governing were not going away easily. Nor were the Taliban. Taking advantage of mistakes in U.S. policy, misrule by the government in Kabul, and support from Pakistan, the Taliban movement turned into a capable insurgency. Violence and instability persisted to August 2021.
The war between Western forces and the Taliban changed Afghan society dramatically. That can most easily be seen in the casualties from bombs, mines, night raids, and drones. War also disrupted the economy; many Afghans became dependent on poppy cultivation for income. Afghans experienced their first legitimate elections. Parliament had real power for the first time. Yet, in the end, democracy lost out.
RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM
The source of Afghan political power that has proved most enduring is religion. In the anarchy following the Soviet withdrawal, it was the traditional Islam of the villages that retained credibility among the people. As the anthropologist David Edwards has written, “Islam migrates better than honor or nationality. As a transportable system of belief and practice whose locus is personal faith and worship, it can be adapted to a variety of contexts and situations, but estranged from the familiar settings in which it arose, is it not also more resistant to the mundane negotiations and compromises that everyday life requires?” Through the Taliban, a religious movement ruled Afghanistan for the first time in the modern era. That was no flash in the pan. The movement survived 20 years of war and rules once again, making the Taliban the most significant religious force in Afghanistan’s modern history.
The civil war and its foreign interventions have a yet darker side. They bred extremism. As Edwards charts in his 2017 book, Caravan of Martyrs, the Soviet invasion and U.S. and Pakistani support for the mujahideen pushed martyrdom to the forefront. Foreigners—the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam and the Saudi Osama bin Laden foremost—brought with them ideas of terrorism and suicide bombing. Throughout the U.S. intervention, the Taliban were unable to divorce themselves from either. Siding against foreign terrorism risked criticism from internal supporters, and suicide bombing was an invaluable weapon against U.S. and government forces. In 2019, Amir Khan Muttaqi, a chief assistant to the Taliban emir Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada and now the Taliban government’s foreign minister, told me: “Suicide bombers are very cheap for us. Just a few suicide bombers thwart all the forces, expenses, and technology of the United States.”
As leader of the Taliban from 2016 onward, Mawlawi Haibatullah has endorsed the use of terrorism. In 2008, Haibatullah advised the Taliban founder and leader Mullah Omar that Islam justified a wider use of suicide bombings. Haibatullah’s own 23-year-old adopted son blew himself up in a car bomb during an attack in Helmand in 2017, recording a video before setting off on the mission. Until that point, no other Afghan leader had ever martyred a son, adopted or otherwise, signifying how values were changing. Traditionally, sons were to be cherished, not cast aside needlessly. An embrace of martyrdom and an indifference to the lives of civilians had become part of what it meant to belong to the Taliban. One can only hope that the trend fades with the departure of foreign powers and becomes an aberration in Afghan history.
WHERE TO GO FROM HERE?
A year after the U.S. withdrawal, it remains uncertain whether a new form of stability has taken hold in Afghanistan. The war may have truly been a transformational process for Afghan society. It is possible that the Taliban’s Islamic government may be able to keep violence at bay, enjoy a base level of legitimacy among the people, and deter foreign intervention. It is also possible, however, that the civil war is not yet over. It previously paused at times—for parts of the country during Taliban rule in the 1990s and during the first years of the U.S. intervention from 2001 to 2005. With that historical precedent in mind, a new unstable balance may not be apparent for another five years or so.
Peering ahead, a renewed civil war could take many forms. One is the resumption of decades-long fighting between the Taliban, which is composed primarily of Pashtuns, and resistance groups based in the country’s north that tend to draw from Afghanistan’s Hazara, Tajik, and Uzbek minorities. So far, the Taliban has faced little more than sporadic attacks from these groups and fiery statements from their exiled leaders—a far cry from an effective insurgency. But that could change with time if the groups can build up their cohesion and resilience and win over popular support. Resistance groups could also wind up receiving support from Iran or Russia, which might decide to aid them because of historical relationships, cultural ties, opposition to the Islamic State, and competition with Pakistan.
In a different scenario, a conglomeration of Afghans in cities around the country could rise up. With sufficiently poor governance, even certain Pashtun tribes could revolt. The Taliban could also be challenged by land disputes. Tribal and villager dissatisfaction with access to land and water have traditionally caused strife. The Taliban received support for 25 years from poor farmers to whom they gave or promised land. For the Taliban to make good on those promises, other Afghans, including landed tribes with title, must lose land, and they may resist. How well the Taliban can balance these competing demands matters. So far, the regime has not been too oppressive, taking a little from the landed without taking it all. Yet land issues can fester and are notoriously difficult for any government to manage.
A new unstable balance may not be apparent for another five years.
The Taliban could also fuel their own undoing. The tactics of terrorism feed violence, and the Taliban may be unable to control extremist trends. Young men could continue to look to martyrdom for meaning, grow restive, and look for new targets. Those targets are as likely to be within Afghanistan as abroad. In late 2021, there were rumors that Mawlawi Haibatullah and Sirajuddin Haqqani, deputy leader of the Taliban government, had declared an end to suicide bombings. But the presence of the al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul, where he was killed in a U.S. drone strike in July, bodes poorly. A wider acceptance of extremism could create more recruits for the Islamic State, which maintains a faction in the country and could adapt its terrorist campaign into an anti-Taliban insurgency.
Perhaps nothing is more likely to revive the civil war than foreign interventions. Russian and Iranian efforts to support ethnic and sectarian proxies in Afghanistan and ill-judged Pakistani moves to tame the Taliban, protect Islamabad’s perceived interests, or more clearly define an Afghan-Pakistan border could stoke new violence. U.S. military actions to counter terrorism could also do the same. Precision strikes on Afghan soil could trigger a backlash among Afghans and increase support for terrorist groups. Over-the-horizon strikes may be essential to U.S. national security, but they are also likely to encourage radicalization in Afghanistan. Worst of all, in today’s environment of great-power competition, intervention or influence by one great power could compel others to intervene, backing their own proxies or the Taliban government and producing an escalatory spiral of violence. That would be a recipe for renewed civil war and a tragedy for the Afghan people.
THE U.S. ROLE (OR LACK THEREOF)
The United States and its allies may want to be more than passive observers and try to do something to stabilize the country. There is little harm in providing humanitarian assistance or even stepping aside if other countries want to assist the Taliban regime. Such activities—in contrast to supporting the anti-Taliban resistance and conducting counterterrorism activities inside Afghanistan—would not raise the risk of restarting the Afghan civil war. But the amount the United States and its allies can do is limited. The Taliban regime is unlikely to heed incentives or sanctions to modify its behavior. Moreover, substantial U.S. financial assistance to the Taliban regime would likely draw reactions from China, Iran, and Russia, which would would back Afghans to oppose any U.S. influence. The same is even more true if the United States attempts to back proxies to supplant the Taliban regime. The best policy for Washington may be to monitor the situation closely rather than to inadvertently cause harm by trying to help one side or another.
The United States and other powerful outsiders should not forget the roles they played in prolonging Afghanistan’s suffering during the past four decades. If they do, they may very well repeat the mistakes of the past.
Foreign Affairs · by Carter Malkasian · September 13, 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
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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