Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"The US, and the free world, are on the defensive. Our policy as a nation has been reactive; that is, we have waited to act until forced by events to do so, rather than anticipating events and being ready to take action when they arrived."

– Murray Dyer, 1959

“The most decisive act of judgement which the Statesmen and General exercises is rightly to understand the War in which he engages.”

- Carl von Clausewitz

"You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else."

- Paul Auster

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 11 (Putin's War)

2. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (11.09.22) CDS comments on key events

3. Ukraine keeps initiative, claims it reached Russian border

4. It’s Time to Prepare for a Ukrainian Victory

5. The Russian Army Is Losing A Battalion Every Day As Ukrainian Counterattacks Accelerate

6. Putin’s strategy to weaponize winter

7. ‘Ammo! Ammo!’ Video shows close combat in Ukraine offensive

8. On the eastern front, a stunning week of Ukrainian success and Russian failures

9. Putin 'sacks' general of '16 days' after crushing Ukraine defeat

10. Ukraine Takes the Offensive

11. Sorting Through the Noise: The Evolving Nature of the Fog of War

12. The Pentagon’s Reckoning with Civilian Casualties Is a Good Start—But It’s Only a Start

13. As Ukraine counterattacks, Russia’s military facing steep artillery, resupply challenges

14. Old World Order

15. How to Build a Better Order

16. Understanding global right-wing extremism

17. Xi to meet Putin in first trip outside China since COVID began

18. Expanded Safety Net Drives Sharp Drop in Child Poverty

19. The Schrödinger's cat of public diplomacy

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 11 (Putin's War)

Maps/ graphics: https://www.iswresearch.org/2022/09/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment_88.html

Key Takeaways

Ukrainian forces have inflicted a major operational defeat on Russia, recapturing almost all Kharkiv Oblast in a rapid counter-offensive
Ukrainian authorities shut down the last active reactor at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant on September 11.
The Russian Ministry of Defense confirmed that Russian forces are withdrawing from positions throughout all but easternmost Kharkiv Oblast.
Russian milbloggers have defined the Oskil River that runs from Kupyansk to Izyum as the new frontline following Russian withdrawal from positions in eastern Kharkiv Oblast.
Ukrainian forces have advanced into Vovchansk and Velykyi Burluk, just south of the international border.
Ukrainian forces continue to fight positional battles and conduct strikes on Russian military, logistics, and transportation assets along the Southern Axis.
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks in the Avdiivka and Bakhmut areas.
Russian authorities are continuing to pull combat power from various external sources to support operations in Ukraine and are struggling to compensate volunteers.
The success of recent Ukrainian counteroffensives likely contributed to the Russian announcement that annexation referenda will be indefinitely postponed.

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 11

iswresearch.org · by Alexander Mitchell · September 12, 2022

Kateryna Stepanenko, Karolina Hird, Grace Mappes, and Frederick W. Kagan

September 11, 10pm 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.

Ukrainian forces have inflicted a major operational defeat on Russia, recapturing almost all Kharkiv Oblast in a rapid counter-offensive. 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. Ukraine’s armed forces employed HIMARS and other Western systems to attack Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) in Kharkiv and Kherson Oblasts, setting conditions for the success of this operation. Ukrainian leaders discussed the strikes in the south much more ostentatiously, however, successfully confusing the Russians about their intentions in Kharkiv Oblast. Western weapons systems were necessary but not sufficient to secure success for Ukraine. The Ukrainian employment of those systems in a well-designed and well-executed campaign has generated the remarkable success of the counter-offensive operations in Kharkiv Oblast.

The Ukrainian recapture of Izyum ended the prospect that Russia could accomplish its stated objectives in Donetsk Oblast. After retreating from Kyiv in early April, the stated Russian objectives had been to seize the complete territory of Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts.[1] The Russian campaign to achieve these objectives was an attack along an arc from Izyum through Severodonetsk to the area near Donetsk City. That attack aimed to seize Severodonetsk, Lysychansk, Slovyansk, Bakhmut, and Kramatorsk, and continue to the western boundary of Donetsk Oblast. Russian forces managed to take Severodonetsk on June 24 and Lysychansk on July 3 after a long and extremely costly campaign but then largely culminated, seizing no major settlements and little territory.[2] The Russian position around Izyum still threatened Ukrainian defenders of Slovyansk, however, and retained for the Russians the opportunity to return to the attack on the northern sectors of the arc, which they had largely abandoned by the middle of July in favor of a focus on Siversk (near Lysychansk) and Bakhmut.

The loss of Izyum dooms the initial Russian campaign plan for this phase of the war and ensures that Russian advances toward Bakhmut or around Donetsk City cannot be decisive (if they occur at all). Even the Russian seizure of Bakhmut, which is unlikely to occur considering Russian forces have impaled themselves on tiny surrounding settlements for weeks, would no longer support any larger effort to accomplish the original objectives of this phase of the campaign since it would not be supported by an advance from Izyum in the north. The continued Russian offensive operations against Bakhmut and around Donetsk City have thus lost any real operational significance for Moscow and merely waste some of the extremely limited effective combat power Russia retains.

There is no basis for assessing that the counter-offensive announced in Kherson Oblast is merely a feint, however. Ukrainian forces have reportedly attacked and made gains at several important locations on the western bank of the Dnipro River. They have cut the two bridges across the river and continue to keep them cut as well as interfere with Russian efforts to maintain supply via barge and pontoon ferry. Ukraine has committed considerable combat power and focused a significant portion of the Western-supplied long-range precision systems it has to this axis, and it is not likely to have done so merely to draw Russian forces to the area.

The Ukrainian pressure in Kherson combined with the rapid counter-offensive in Kharkiv presents the Russians with a terrible dilemma of time and space. Russia likely lacks sufficient reserve forces to complete the formation of a new defensive line along the Oskil River, as it is reportedly trying to do before Ukrainian forces continue their advance through that position if they so choose. Prudence would demand that Russia pull forces from other sectors of the battlespace to establish defensive lines further east than the Oskil River to ensure that it can hold the Luhansk Oblast border or a line as close to that border as possible. But Russian troops around Bakhmut and near Donetsk City continue offensive operations as if unaware of the danger to Luhansk, and Russian forces in Kherson still face attack and the threat of more attacks on that axis. Russian President Vladimir Putin risks making a common but deadly mistake by waiting too long to order reinforcements to the Luhansk line, thereby compromising the defense of Kherson or ending offensive operations around Bakhmut and Donetsk City without getting troops into position to defend against continuing Ukrainian attacks in Luhansk in time. The Ukrainian campaign appears intended to present Putin with precisely such a dilemma and to benefit from almost any decision he makes.

The current counter-offensive will not end the war. The campaign in northeast Ukraine will eventually culminate, allowing the Russians to re-establish a tenable defensive line and possibly even conduct localized counterattacks. Ukraine will have to launch subsequent counter-offensive operations, likely several, to finish the liberation of Russian-occupied territory. The war remains likely to stretch into 2023.

Ukraine has turned the tide of this war in its favor. Kyiv will likely increasingly dictate the location and nature of the major fighting, and Russia will find itself increasingly responding inadequately to growing Ukrainian physical and psychological pressure in successive military campaigns unless Moscow finds some way to regain the initiative.

Russian officials and milbloggers involved with the Russian war in Ukraine are increasingly blaming the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) for Russian failures on the frontlines. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov stated that if there are no changes to the Russian “special military operation” today or tomorrow, then he will contact the Kremlin to “explain the situation on the ground.”[3] Kadyrov’s statement is a thinly veiled criticism of the Russian MoD for its lack of situational awareness (or honesty) and highlights the MoD’s preoccupation with maintaining the façade of a successful and swift Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Russian MoD has not acknowledged the successful Ukrainian counteroffensive operations around Kharkiv Oblast, instead promulgating a clearly false narrative of a deliberate Russian repositioning without any meaningful justification. A milblogger also noted that a civilian such as the head of the Wagner Group private military company Yevgeniy Prigozhin should replace Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu because civilians can better handle the harmful nature of the military bureaucracy.[4] The intensifying public attacks on Shoigu and the Russian MoD shield Russian President Vladimir Putin from the responsibility for setting unattainable goals for the invasion and likely micromanaging military operations by pinning all the blame for Russian failures on the MoD and higher military command. Putin may accept and even support these attacks to continue this diversion of blame from him.

The Kharkiv Oblast counter-offensive is already damaging the Kremlin’s relationship with the Russian MoD, further alienating Putin from the higher military command. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated that Putin has postponed all his meetings with the leadership of the Russian MoD and representatives of the Russian defense industry in Sochi—a bizarre decision in the face of the military operational and defense industrial crisis facing Russia.[5]

The Russian defeat in the Battle of Kharkiv Oblast will only intensify public criticism of Shoigu and the MoD, which may lead to personnel changes. The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported that the western grouping of forces has been placed under the command of the Commander of the Central Military District Colonel General Alexander Lapin who is currently commanding the central group of forces in Ukraine.[6] The GUR added that the Kremlin is looking for a replacement for the commander of the western grouping of forces Lieutenant General Roman Berdnikov, who had just replaced Lieutenant General Andrey Sychevoy on August 26.

Ukrainian authorities shut down the last active reactor at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) on September 11. Ukrainian nuclear energy agency Energoatom announced that it began to prepare nuclear reactor no. 6 for a cold shutdown after Energoatom restored a backup powerline connecting the ZNPP to the Ukrainian power grid on September 11.[7] Energoatom stated that the reactor had been producing energy at 10-15% of its capability, the bare minimum necessary to sustain ZNPP operations.[8] Energoatom stated that a cold shutdown is the safest state for the ZNPP as frequent Russian shelling continues to damage power lines necessary to operate the plant safely.[9] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Ukrainian forces shell the ZNPP as part of a broader campaign against energy infrastructure in occupied territories and Russian milbloggers amplified this narrative.[10] Energoatom and the International Atomic Energy Agency reiterated that shelling the ZNPP must end and that Russian authorities must demilitarize and declare a safe zone around the ZNPP.[11]

Russian forces conducted a wave of precision strikes against Ukrainian energy infrastructure on September 11 causing widespread power outages.[12] The attacks are likely meant to let Moscow claim that it is launching a new phase of offensive operations even as it loses on the ground, and possibly also to punish Ukraine for shutting down the ZNPP despite Russia’s desire to keep it operating.

Key Takeaways

Ukrainian forces have inflicted a major operational defeat on Russia, recapturing almost all Kharkiv Oblast in a rapid counter-offensive
Ukrainian authorities shut down the last active reactor at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant on September 11.
The Russian Ministry of Defense confirmed that Russian forces are withdrawing from positions throughout all but easternmost Kharkiv Oblast.
Russian milbloggers have defined the Oskil River that runs from Kupyansk to Izyum as the new frontline following Russian withdrawal from positions in eastern Kharkiv Oblast.
Ukrainian forces have advanced into Vovchansk and Velykyi Burluk, just south of the international border.
Ukrainian forces continue to fight positional battles and conduct strikes on Russian military, logistics, and transportation assets along the Southern Axis.
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks in the Avdiivka and Bakhmut areas.
Russian authorities are continuing to pull combat power from various external sources to support operations in Ukraine and are struggling to compensate volunteers.
The success of recent Ukrainian counteroffensives likely contributed to the Russian announcement that annexation referenda will be indefinitely postponed.

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 1- Kharkiv City (this axis will not appear in this or future ISW reports)
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)

The Russian Ministry of Defense’s September 11 briefing map confirmed that Russian forces are withdrawing from settlements around Kharkiv City, from northern Kharkiv Oblast, and settlements on the western bank of the Oskil River.[13] Russian sources and milbloggers have identified the Oskil River that flows through Kupyansk and Izyum as the new front line on the axis, and Russian forces are likely also continuing to operate on the eastern bank of the Siverskyi Donets River southeast of Izyum.[14] Geolocated and social media footage confirmed that Ukrainian forces have entered Vovchansk and Velykyi Burluk severing Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) along the T2104 highway and have reached the international border north of Kharkiv City.[15] Geolocated footage also shows that Ukrainian forces took control of Izyum and settlements south and southwest on September 11.[16] 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.[17] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian troops are continuing efforts to cross the Siverskyi Donets River northeast of Slovyansk and enter Lyman. A Russian milblogger indicated that Russian troops are targeting Ukrainians around Lyman, but that Russian troops retain control of the settlement despite attempted Ukrainian advances.[18] Combat footage taken in Bilohorivka, Luhansk Oblast, on September 11 confirms that Ukrainian troops have retaken ground in Luhansk Oblast. The Ukrainian soldiers in the footage appear to be hiding from artillery strikes, which indicates that Russian troops are now targeting positions in Bilohorivka.[19]

Southern Ukraine: (Kherson Oblast)

Granular tactical and operational-level visibility on the progress of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson Oblast has been degraded over the last few days as the focus of coverage has shifted to the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv Oblast. This shift in the information space is not likely reflective of a pause in Ukrainian operations in the south, and Ukrainian troops are likely to continue counter-offensive operations in Kherson Oblast based on the limited reporting that is available.

Ukrainian military officials stated that Ukrainian forces continued positional battles and strikes on Russian transportation, logistics, and military assets throughout the Southern Axis on September 11. Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reiterated that Ukrainian troops are engaged in positional battles in unspecified areas along the Kherson-Mykolaiv frontline and carried out over 130 fire missions over the day.[20] The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Ukrainian troops have carried out over 28 major strikes and hit approximately 19 concentrations of Russian manpower and military equipment within the last 24 hours.[21] Ukrainian military officials indicated that Ukrainian troops focused on hitting Russian bridges and alternative river crossings to disrupt Russian transportation capabilities across the Dnipro River.[22]

Footage taken by residents of Kherson Oblast on September 10 and 11 corroborates statements made by Ukrainian officials regarding the continued Ukrainian interdiction campaign along the Southern Axis. Social media users reported explosions near Kakhovka and Nova Kakhovka (about 60km east of Kherson City), which substantiates statements made by Ukrainian military officials that Ukrainian troops hit an ammunition depot and ferry crossing in this area on the night of September 10.[23] Residents of Kherson City additionally posted images of smoke in the wake of a Ukrainian strike on a Russian headquarters within Kherson City on September 10.[24] Ukrainian forces also continued to target Russian rear areas south of the Dnipro River and reportedly struck Russian positions in Razdolne, about 15km southeast of Nova Kakhkovka.[25]

Neither Russian nor Ukrainian sources discussed specific kinetic activity along the Kherson-Mykolaiv frontline on September 11. A Russian milblogger stated in vague terms that Ukrainian forces are engaged in positional battles in unspecified locations.[26] Despite the lack of concrete descriptions of fighting in specific areas, however, Ukrainian troops likely are continuing to threaten Russian control of terrain along the frontline. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian troops struck Ukrainian positions in Bruskynske, about 75km northeast of Kherson City along the critical T2207 highway that runs into Nova Kakhovka.[27] This strike may indicate that Ukrainian forces are pushing east of the nearby Sukhyi Stavok pocket and continuing efforts to interdict Russian ground lines of communication in western Kherson Oblast.

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) continued to highlight excessive and likely overblown estimates of Ukrainian losses in Kherson Oblast on September 11 and did not make any additional claims on the status of the counter-offensive. 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)

Russian forces continued ground attacks in Donetsk Oblast on September 11. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground assaults in various settlements near Bakhmut and Avdiivka.[28] The continued allocation of Russian forces to relatively small and insignificant settlements in Donetsk Oblast will likely harm Russian forces’ ability to reinforce positions to defend against the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv Oblast. Continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut and Avdiivka area cannot offset Russian losses in southern Ukraine and Kharkiv Oblast or achieve significant enough gains to justify continuing them. Russian military leadership is seemingly unable to adapt to this reality as it continues to impale troops in attacks on tiny villages near Bakhmut and Avdiivka. Russian sources also claimed that Ukrainian forces began reinforcing and demining the Vuhledar area in western Donetsk Oblast. Russian forces continued routine shelling along the line of contact in Donetsk Oblast.[29]

Supporting Effort #1- Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Prevent Ukrainian forces from reaching the Russian border)

Note: The successful Ukrainian counter-offensive in Kharkiv Oblast has rendered this section unnecessary. It will not appear in future updates.

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

Russian forces conducted air, artillery, and missile strikes along the line of contact in southern Ukraine on September 11. Russian forces targeted Dnipro City, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Mykolaiv City, and Voznessensk, Mykolaiv Oblast with cruise missiles and airstrikes.[30] Russian forces fired on Nikopol and Marhanets, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast with multiple launch rocket systems, likely from positions near Enerhodar on the opposite bank of the Kakhovka Reservoir.[31]

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

Russian authorities are continuing to pull combat power from various external sources to support operations in Ukraine. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that occupation authorities are planning to prevent men from leaving occupied territories to forcibly mobilize them.[32] Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov announced on September 12 that the Chechen Republic has finalized the formation of a regiment and three new battalions totaling 3,180 combat-ready personnel.[33] Kadyrov stated that 580 personnel compose each battalion, and 1,500 personnel compose the regiment.[34] These units likely refer to Chechen Rosgvardia “Sever” Regiment, and the “Vostok,” “Zapad” and “Yug” Akhmat Battalions deployed to Ukraine.[35]

Russian authorities are likely struggling to pay military volunteers their promised salaries. Rostov Oblast outlet Rostov Tsargrad reported that Russian BARS-4 volunteers who served in Ukraine and returned to Russia are facing issues receiving their salaries and health benefits.[36] One BARS-4 volunteer reported receiving disparate treatment for his battlefield injuries and claimed that Russian authorities deleted all records of him ever suffering an injury in Ukraine and that other BARS volunteers face similar issues.[37]

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)

The success of the Ukrainian counteroffensives is likely impacting the will and ability of Russian authorities to conduct annexation referenda. Latvia-based Russian-language outlet Meduza reported that the Kremlin decided to indefinitely postpone annexation referenda of all occupied Ukrainian territories as of September 11.[38] Meduza cited sources close to the Kremlin that claimed that the Kremlin only decided to postpone annexation referenda due to the counteroffensive and that the Kremlin pulled its political technologists who had been organizing the referenda in Kharkiv and Zaporizhia Oblasts back to Russia.[39] Ukrainian Mayor of Melitopol Ivan Fedorov stated that fewer than 10% of Melitopol residents (where the current total population is roughly 50% of the pre-war population) are willing to vote in an annexation referendum and that continued partisan movements and Ukrainian military victories are driving Russian authorities to postpone the referenda.[40]

Occupation authorities may be fleeing from occupied Ukraine to Russia as Ukrainian forces advance towards Russian rear areas. Mariupol Mayoral Adviser Petro Andryushenko stated that Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Head Denis Pushilin and DNR Mayor of Mariupol Konstantin Ivashchenko were supposed to attend a military parade in Mariupol on September 11 but did not and that their current whereabouts are unknown.[41] Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai stated that occupation authorities are fleeing from occupied territories, including those that Russian proxy authorities have held since 2014.[42] Ukrainian Mayor of Enerhodar Dmytro Orlov posted a screenshot of a Telegram post made by an unspecified occupation authority that called on civilian collaborators to leave occupied territories for Russia.[43]

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.

[1] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-april-3

[2] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-25; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-3

[3] https://t.me/mod_russia/19754

[4] https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1568912396663640064; https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1568917138621997058; https://t.me/RtrDonetsk/9221; https://t.me/vladlentatarsky/16037 ; https://t.me/rybar/38599; https://t.me/vladlentatarsky/16041; https://t.me/rybar/38606; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/40207; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/40203; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/40186; https://t.me/aleksandr_skif/2373

[5] https://www dot oreanda.ru/v_mire/peskov-sochinskie-soveschaniya-putina-sdvigayutsya-vpravo/article1447068/; https://www dot moscowtimes.ru/2022/09/11/polnii-krah-putin-otmenil-soveschanie-s-generalami-posle-krupneishego-porazheniya-armii-s-nachala-voini-a24146

[6] https://www.facebook.com/DefenceIntelligenceofUkraine/posts/pfbid0GXZRnD7Eh1FGMN6rqoNhg74tx9beeat5Yh3qMPLWobzHFj6eZfgf8VrfbwEkikbsl

[7] https://t.me/energoatom_ua/9541

[8] https://t.me/energoatom_ua/9541

[9] https://t.me/energoatom_ua/9541

[10] https://t.me/kommunist/9233; https://t.me/vrogov/4802; https://t.me/NeoficialniyBeZsonoV/17532; https://t.me/MedvedevVesti/11209; https://t.me/vrogov/4810; https://t.me/mod_russia/19755

[11] https://t.me/energoatom_ua/9541; https://twitter.com/iaeaorg/status/1568983376157196289; https://twitter.com/iaeaorg/status/1568983380330422275

[12] https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-zelenskyy-kyiv-kharkiv-77988f0d236f26025159709918f78181; https://twitter.com/IntelCrab/status/1569024330259992580; https://twitter.com/InnaSovsun/status/1569018854952640515; https://twitter.com/tinso_ww/status/1569022121795534849; https://twitter.com/MarQs__/status/1569020734055522306; https://twitter.com/GoncharenkoUa/status/1569017273171558401; https://twitter.com/yarotrof/status/1569014962177323008

[13] https://twitter.com/COUPSURE/status/1568927566936920064/photo/1

[14] https://t.me/rybar/38595; https://t.me/rybar/38607

[15] https://twitter.com/WhereisRussia/status/1568956511434735617; https://twitter.com/GeoConfirmed/status/1568630405267431428; https://twitter.com/GeoConfirmed/status/1568628163797782528; https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1568980134090121217; https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1568980686358614017; https://twitter.com/GeoConfirmed/status/1568982253484531713

[16] https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1568987981213581317; https://twitter.com/Noobieshunta_/status/1568993365802237952; https://twitter.com/Caucasuswar/status/1568601447213703168; https://twitter.com/GeoConfirmed/status/1568610297455206400

[17] https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1568877872533721093; https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1568886801460350976; https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1568922940326006784; https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1568923876091957248; https://twitter.com/azyakancokkacan/status/1568937242533453824; https://t.co/82f78wAmdC

[18] https://t.me/kommunist/9234 https://t.me/NeoficialniyBeZsonoV/17530; https://t.me/epoddubny/12240; https://t.me/rybar/38584; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/40219; https://t.me/wargonzo/8219; https://t.me/vladlentatarsky/16044

[19] https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1568836905562783744

[20] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=626385815873401

[21] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid051JYQ5tHzrgNT5V1RrGoZ7oip49qFSSUYH4WLfx5E9nJrD8v4tngCAxT78Bd6KZQl; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0MxdZAuX3345FGdZtrHddMWdVygTYuje5vYb5h6axo7wcASyLDe8YNKvokxNS2me2l

[22] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=626385815873401; https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=489567249312453; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0MxdZAuX3345FGdZtrHddMWdVygTYuje5vYb5h6axo7wcASyLDe8YNKvokxNS2me2l

[23] https://t.me/hueviyherson/25734; https://t.me/hueviyherson/25727; https://t.me/hueviyherson/25722; https://t.me/hueviyherson/25721; https://t.me/hueviyherson/25719; https://t.me/hueviyherson/25705; https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1568853384421150722; https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1568878637415559169. https://twitter.com/auditor_ya/status/1568947769032982532

[24] https://t.me/hueviyherson/25703; https://twitter.com/auditor_ya/status/1568947765220352001

[25] https://t.me/hueviyherson/25735

[26] https://t.me/strelkovii/3213

[27] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0MxdZAuX3345FGdZtrHddMWdVygTYuje5vYb5h6axo7wcASyLDe8YNKvokxNS2me2l

[28] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid051JYQ5tHzrgNT5V1RrGoZ7oip49qFSSUYH4WLfx5E9nJrD8v4tngCAxT78Bd6KZQl; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0MxdZAuX3345FGdZtrHddMWdVygTYuje5vYb5h6axo7wcASyLDe8YNKvokxNS2me2lhttps://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0MxdZAuX3345FGdZtrHddMWdVygTYuje5vYb5h6axo7wcASyLDe8YNKvokxNS2me2l

[29] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0MxdZAuX3345FGdZtrHddMWdVygTYuje5vYb5h6axo7wcASyLDe8YNKvokxNS2me2l; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0MxdZAuX3345FGdZtrHddMWdVygTYuje5vYb5h6axo7wcASyLDe8YNKvokxNS2me2l; https://t.me/pavlokyrylenko_donoda/4801

[30] https://t.me/aleksandr_skif/2373; https://t.me/mod_russia/19754; https://t.me/rybar/38603; https://t.me/energoatom_ua/9547; https://t.me/mykolaivskaODA/2537; https://t.me/NeoficialniyBeZsonoV/17536; https://t.me/boris_rozhin/63437; https://twitter.com/DemeryUK/status/1569003398930001921; https://twitter.com/DemeryUK/status/1569002989653827584; https://twitter.com/GeoConfirmed/status/1569018231301574657; https://t.me/Bratchuk_Sergey/18444; https://t.me/dnipropetrovskaODA/1816; https://t.me/dnipropetrovskaODA/1808; https://t.me/mykola_lukashuk/1445; https://t.me/mykola_lukashuk/1446; https://t.me/dnipropetrovskaODA/1815; https://t.me/Yevtushenko_E/768; https://t.me/kommunist/9241; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/40209

[31] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=489567249312453; https://t.me/dnipropetrovskaODA/1808; https://t.me/mykola_lukashuk/1445; https://t.me/vilkul/1898; https://t.me/Yevtushenko_E/760

[32] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0MxdZAuX3345FGdZtrHddMWdVygTYuje5vYb5h6axo7wcASyLDe8YNKvokxNS2me2l

[33] https://t.me/kommunist/9246; https://t.me/RKadyrov_95/2809

[34] https://t.me/kommunist/9246; https://t.me/RKadyrov_95/2809

[35] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-8

[36] https://rostov dot tsargrad.tv/articles/a-chto-vy-tam-delali-chinovniki-vojujut-s-dobrovolcami-specoperacii_621824

[37] https://rostov dot tsargrad.tv/articles/a-chto-vy-tam-delali-chinovniki-vojujut-s-dobrovolcami-specoperacii_621824

[38] https://meduza.io/feature/2022/09/11/kreml-postavil-na-stop-referendumy-o-prisoedinenii-okkupirovannyh-territoriy-k-rossii-utverzhdayut-istochniki-meduzy

[39] https://meduza.io/feature/2022/09/11/kreml-postavil-na-stop-referendumy-o-prisoedinenii-okkupirovannyh-territoriy-k-rossii-utverzhdayut-istochniki-meduzy

[40] https://t.me/ivan_fedorov_melitopol/549; https://t.me/ivan_fedorov_melitopol/545

[41] https://t.me/andriyshTime/2834; https://t.me/andriyshTime/2832; https://t.me/andriyshTime/2839

[42] https://t.me/luhanskaVTSA/5697; https://t.me/luhanskaVTSA/5689

[43] https://t.me/orlovdmytroEn/1013

iswresearch.org · by Alexander Mitchell · September 12, 2022

2. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (11.09.22) CDS comments on key events

CDS Daily brief (11.09.22) CDS comments on key events

Humanitarian aspect:

Mykolaiv was heavily shelled on the night of September 10-11. Nine wounded civilians were reported.

During the past day and night, the Russian military shelled the Mykolayivsky (1 dead), Bashtansky (5 wounded) and Voznesensky districts of the Mykolayiv Oblast. As a result, there are damaged and destroyed residential buildings.

During September 10, the occupiers shelled the Polohy, Zaporizhzhya, and Vasyliv districts of the Zaporizhzhya Oblast. 30 objects of civil infrastructure were damaged.

In Donetsk Oblast, on September 10, 10 civilians were killed by enemy shelling: 4 - in Pokrovsk, 3 - in Krasnohorivka, 2 - in Bakhmut, and 1 - in Raigorodok. Another 19 people were injured. During the day, the Russian military hit three Donetsk Oblast cities simultaneously. Kramatorsk, Slavyansk and Nikolaevka came under enemy fire. Damaged high-rise buildings, gas stations, industrial facilities and Administrative services center. At least one person was injured, Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of the Donetsk Military Administration, said.

At night, the enemy shelled Dnipro (1 wounded) and Nikopol (3 wounded) cities in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Administrative buildings, shops, a market, warehouses and residential buildings were damaged in Dnipro. In Nikopol, 35 high-rise and private buildings, several educational institutions, a healthcare facility, an object of industrial infrastructure, cars, gas pipelines and power lines were damaged.

During September 10, the enemy shelled Kharkiv (1 killed, 4 wounded), Kharkivskyi, Chuguyivskyi (2 wounded), Kupyanskyi (2 wounded) and Izyumskyi (1 wounded) districts of the Kharkiv Oblast.

On the evening of September 11, the Russian military hit the critical infrastructure of Kharkiv and the Kharkiv region, disrupting electricity in many eastern regions of Ukraine. As a result, many districts lost electricity and water supply, including Sumy Oblast, Poltava Oblast, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and Zaporizhzhya. In addition, a number of trains from/to Kharkiv, Sumy, and Poltava were delayed.

According to local media reports, Russin missiles hit Kharkiv's Thermal Power Plant-5, one of the largest in the country, and a major fire at Kharkiv TPP-5 was reported. It is currently being liquidated, said Oleh Synehubov, the head of Kharkiv Military Administration. At least one person died due to the shelling.

According to Ukrainian Air Force Command "East" information, 11 enemy missiles were launched, of which seven were shot down over Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and 2 - over Poltava Oblast.

Ukrainian power supply company "Ukrenergo" stated that areas were switched to reserve power transmission lines. Repair work will begin as soon as the fire is extinguished.

Electricity supply in the Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk and Poltava Oblasts were restored. Now experts are stabilizing the voltage level, the head of the Poltava Military Administration, Dmytro Lunin, reported. Also, electricity has already been restored in the suburbs of Kharkiv. Power engineers are working to restore the power system.

Operational situation

It is the 200th 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 the captured parts of Kherson, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhya, and Mykolaiv Oblasts.

The enemy conducts aerial reconnaissance, constantly tries to improve the tactical position, takes measures to improve its units' logistical support, and conducts attacks on the positions of Ukrainian troops along the entire contact line.

A further threat of the enemy air and missile strikes remains on the entire territory of Ukraine. Over the past 24 hours, the enemy has carried out 16 missile and 34 air strikes on military and civilian objects on the territory of Ukraine. 28 Ukrainian towns and villages were affected, particularly Slavhorod, Velyka Pysarivka, Velyki Prokhody, Avdiivka, Nevelske, Maryinka, Neskuchne, Velyka Novosilka, Dnipro, and Bruskinske.

Enemy shelled Bilopollia, Lynove and Hrabovsky area of Sumy Oblast.

In response to the successful actions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Russians are carrying out "countermeasures". In the temporarily occupied territories of Kharkiv and Kherson regions, the Russian occupiers are strengthening the administrative and policing regime, entry and exit from settlements are prohibited, and a curfew has been introduced.

At the same time, Ukrainian Defense Forces repelled enemy attacks in the areas of Sosnivka, Mayorsk, Mykolaivka Druga, Zaitseve, Vesela Dolyna, Soledar, Bakhmut, Pisky, Pervomaiske and Novomykhailivka.

During the day, to support the actions of the ground groupings, the aviation of the Ukrainian Defense Forces carried out 23 strikes. It destroyed four enemy anti-aircraft missile systems and hit four strongholds and fifteen places of the enemy's manpower and equipment concentration. In addition, Ukrainian air defense units destroyed two aircraft (Su-25 and Su-34), one Ka-52 helicopter, two UAVs and one guided air missile.

Ukrainian missile troops and artillery continue to perform tasks of counter-battery combat, fire damage to enemy manpower and combat equipment, and disruption of the enemy's command

and control system and logistical support. As a result, two enemy control points of unmanned aircraft, strongholds, accumulations of weapons and military equipment were hit during the day. In addition, an enemy pontoon crossing and watercraft with military equipment were also affected.

The morale and psychological state of the personnel of the invasion forces are significantly deteriorating due to significant losses and reluctance to fight; the number of deserters in the occupation units is increasing.

The number of self-harms has increased among enemy personnel arriving in Ukraine for reinforcements. The Russian leadership is constantly looking for new sources of replenishment of reserves. Promising a high salary and a social package, they try to recruit "volunteers" among retired military personnel in the Kyrgyz Republic through social media groups.

Due to significant losses in manpower, the Russian invaders plan to carry out the so-called "mobilization" of the male population in the temporarily occupied territories. Now men are forbidden to leave their place of residence.

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 enemy fired from tanks, mortars, barrel and rocket artillery in the areas of Lyutivka, Timofiivka, Dementiivka, Zolochiv, Sosnivka, Pytomnyk, Ruski Tyshki, Cherkaski Tyshki and Borshcheva.

Ukrainian SOF units conducted the raid and reconnaissance of Velikiy Burluk, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine stormed the town.

Ukrainian Defense Forces liberated Lyman by attacking from three directions, took control of Kupyansk, Izyum, Kamianka, Bakhtin, and Senkove, and seized the crossing over the Oskil River, which could be used to develop an offensive in the direction of Svatove and further east. Ukrainian 113th separate territorial defense brigade freed Vasylenkove and Artemivka.

Enemy units from the 3rd motorized rifle division of the 20th Combined Arms Army were left without support; the personnel is panicking. It is known about numerous losses of the enemy in this direction. During the previous day, more than 75 wounded Russian soldiers were evacuated to the village of Valuyky in the Belgorod region (Russia), and more than a hundred Russian personnel were evacuated [further] from Belgorod to Moscow.

Russian reserves (with the forces of three BTGs of the 144th motorized rifle division of the 20th Combined Arms Army and the 18th motorized rifle division of the 11th Army Corps) tried to stop the advance of the Ukrainian Armed Forces with an attack from the east, but they failed.

In general, in recent days, about two thousand square kilometers of Ukrainian territory have been freed from Russian occupation. The liberation of villages and towns in Kupyansk and Izyum districts continues.

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 enemy shelled the positions of Ukrainian units with barrel and rocket artillery and tank weapons in the areas of Sloviansk, Dolyna, Krasnopillya, Velyka Komyshuvakha, Dovhenke, Dmytrivka, Kryva Luka, Pyskunivka, Sydorovka, and Rozdolivka.

Ukrainian Defense Forces advanced to Lysychansk from Siversk through Verkhnokamyanka.

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 enemy shelled the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces in the areas of Vesela Dolyna, Soledar, Bakhmutske, Bakhmut, Yakovlivka, Belohorivka, Vesele, Avdiivka, Opytne, Vodyane, Pervomaiske, Karlivka and Krasnohorivka.

Ukrainian Defense Forces successfully repelled enemy offensives in the areas of Sosnivka, Mayorsk, Mykolayivka Druga, Zaitseve, Vesela Dolyna, Bakhmut, Pervomaiske and Novomykhailivka.

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.

The enemy shelled the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces in the areas of Velyka Novosilka, Shevchenko, Vuhledar, Maryinka, Hulyaipole, Rivnopilla, Novosilky, Vilne Pole, Chervone and Malynivka.

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.

The operational situation is unchanged. In Kherson, the enemy occupation forces searched the residential premises of the Skhidniy [East] district, from which the Antoniv bridge can be seen. The Russian military warned local residents of Kakhovka and Kozatskyi of an open fire on them if they approached the crossings.

With the approach of the Ukrainian Defense Forces, the command of the Russian occupying forces is trying to strengthen the city of Kherson by moving reserves [there]. New enemy units are recorded in the city. Arrived Russian servicemen are poorly oriented in the city.

The Russian troops are trying to restore traffic across the Kakhovka HPP bridge, the section of which is under the fire control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In Nova Kakhovka, the invaders strengthened filtering measures with the participation of FSB officers of the Russian Federation

- they check mobile devices and search for citizens who help the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The situation is similar in Energodar, Zaporizhzhya Oblast.

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 enemy shelled the Ukrainian Defence Forces' positions in Myrne, Stepova Dolyna, Bila Krynytsia, Sukhy Stavok, Lyubomirivka, Bezimenne and Nova Zorya.

Enemy units of the 106th airborne division of the Russian Airborne Forces lost more than 58 people killed in the previous day alone. Russian command is trying to restore the 1st Army Corps' combat capability by transferring the personnel who survived the hostilities to other units. Thus, according to available information, the remnants of personnel from the so-called "Khan" SOF battalion were transferred to the 9th separate assault marines regiment.

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 two enemy cruise missile carriers, a frigate and a small missile ship. Up to 16 enemy Kalibr missiles are ready for a salvo. Additionally, eleven 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.

All large amphibious ships 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.

One enemy project 636.3 submarine is on high alert in Sevastopol; three submarines are in Novorossiysk.

Enemy aviation continues to fly from Crimean airfields Belbek and Gvardiyske over the northwestern part of the Black Sea. Over the past day, 9 Su-27, Su-30 and Su-24 aircraft from Belbek and Saki airfields were involved.

Attacks on Mykolaiv continue, for which the enemy launched anti-aircraft missiles of the S-300 air defense complex and Kh-22 missiles from Tu-22M3 strategic bombers from the airspace in the Crimea region.

A new ship name "Cherkasy" has appeared on board one of the two British minesweepers of the Sandown type, which are due to arrive in Ukraine at the end of 2023. This is in honor of the Ukrainian naval minesweeper "Cherkasy" (U-311), whose crew distinguished itself during the Crimean events of 2014.

Due to weather conditions on September 11, the grain corridor was not operational, and ships did not go to sea. About a dozen ships are standing by on the long route of Odesa - PAULINE, KAFKAMETLER, GLORY DINA, CPT.AHMAD, ANNABELLA, DERG, ATA OCEAN, INCE AKDENIZ, EIDER

S and HORUS arrived yesterday but could not enter the ports due to bad weather. Another caravan of five ships arriving from the mouth of the Danube is also approaching the Odesa formation zone. These are dry cargoes NORAH, IKARIA ANGEL, TAMREY S, ASTRA CENTAURUS and CS CIHAN.

Operational losses of the enemy from 24.02 to 11.09

Personnel - almost 52,650 people (+400);

Tanks – 2,154 (+18);

Armored combat vehicles – 4,617 (+33);

Artillery systems – 1,263 (+4);

Multiple rocket launchers (MLRS) - 311 (0); Anti-aircraft warfare systems - 162 (0); Vehicles and fuel tanks – 3,445 (+19); Aircraft - 242 (+3);

Helicopters – 213 (+1);

UAV operational and tactical level - 902 (+4); Intercepted cruise missiles - 216 (+1);

Boats / ships - 15 (0).

Ukraine, general news

The Ukrainian government plans to reduce the budget deficit in 2023 to $3 billion per month, compared to $5 billion this year. Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal stated this at the 17th annual meeting of the Yalta European YES strategy, Interfax-Ukraine reports.

"Ukraine plans to become a member of the EU within two years," said Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal.

Ukraine lost 50% of its steel production due to the war, Deputy Finance Minister of Ukraine Oleksandr Kava said. "In Mariupol, we lost half of our state's steel-smelting capacity. Azovstal and the Ilyich Mariupol Metallurgical Plant collectively smelted half of all steel in Ukraine."

International diplomatic aspect

After operating in "island mode" for several days, generating electricity for crucial cooling systems by and for the remaining operational reactor, the last unit of the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant was shut down. Nuclear operator Energoatom explained that the decision for a cold shutdown was made due to the high risk that outside power would be cut again, requiring emergency diesel generators to keep the reactors cool and prevent a nuclear meltdown.

The French President called his Russian colleague to discuss the situation at the ZNPP. In traditionally absurdist style, Vladimir Putin “stressed the need to influence the Kyiv authorities,” a euphemism for the legitimate government of Ukraine, to stop “the shelling” of the Ukrainian nuclear power station Russia had illegally captured. In turn, Emmanuel Macron stressed the need to ensure the safety of the ZNPP and asked Russian forces to withdraw their heavy and light weapons from the site. The French President was short of demanding the de-militarization of the ZNPP but bold on recalling that “the Russian occupation was the cause of the risks weighing today on the integrity of the Zaporizhzhya plant."

Not long after the conversation, Russian missiles attacked the Kharkiv Thermal Power Plant that caused a total blackout in the Kharkiv and Donetsk regions and a partial one in the Zaporizhzhya, Dnipropetrovsk and Sumy regions.

Though "there is a risk of Kremlin using a nuke in this situation [military defeat in Ukraine]," it's unlikely the Kremlin would go that way, believes a former commander of the US forces in Europe, Ben Hodges. However, he argues that the "US would respond to Russian use of a nuke because China, NK, Iran are watching. If we don't respond, then they are emboldened." There has been clear messaging to Moscow that going nuclear is entirely unacceptable and "it will have unimaginable outcomes."

Amid the humiliating retreat of the Russian invasion forces from the Kharkiv Oblast, Sergey Lavrov stated, "Russia does not refuse negotiations with Ukraine, but the longer the process is postponed, the more difficult it will be to agree on peace." His words contradict those of the Kremlin's spokesperson that negotiations would only occur if the Kremlin's conditions were met. However, President Volodymyr Zelensky ruled out any talks short of returning all illegally occupied territories, including Crimea.

“Putin’s genocidal plan to wipe Ukraine off the map has failed. He is in no position to negotiate. The war must end with his unconditional surrender,” twitted the Lithuanian Foreign Minister.

There are many reasons why the recent brilliant Ukrainian military success in places that many foreigners find hard to locate on the map is a significant development on an international scale. One of the reasons is that the Russian military defeat brings moral satisfaction to the nations who suffered Russian viciousness directly and indirectly.

The encouraging news from the battlefields gave another impetus for German politicians to demand more robust military aid for Ukraine from the Chancellor. "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," said Michael Roth, the head of the foreign affairs committee and a member of Olaf Scholz's SPD party. He believes it's increasingly realistic "that Ukraine can win this war, and do so as a free, democratic country while preserving its territorial integrity." Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, the head of the defense committee, argued that Germany had an obligation to help preserve democracy. "Germany must immediately play its part in Ukraine's successes and supply protected vehicles — the Marder infantry fighting vehicle and the Leopard 2 main battle tank," she said.

"If Ukraine were dependent on Germany within the framework of a European defence policy, it would no longer exist today," the Polish Prime Minister told Spiegel. Mateusz Morawiecki said that Berlin's position during the first months of the war was very disappointing. Commenting on the German defence assistance, he said that "Ukraine drove the enemy back faster than the Germans were able to make decisions". He also criticized financial aid being provided to Ukraine, which is "fighting not only for its own survival but for Europe's freedom", contrary to fast-track assistance to Türkiye during the refugee crisis of 2016. "Berlin's hesitation, its inaction, seriously calls into question the value of the alliance with Germany. And we are not the only ones saying that," summarized the head of the Polish government.

Meeting the Russian President, the top Chinese legislator urged greater cooperation on "fighting against external interference, sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction." Beijing is not supportive of the world democracies sanctioning Russia for its illegal annexation of Crimea and the genocidal war in Ukraine. On the other hand, Russia backs China in the international arena on Uyghurs suppression and Taiwan. Moreover, Russia increased its economic and technological dependence on Beijing, mitigating the negative impact of sanctions and isolation. But the point of Taiwan is a bit complicated. Russia fully supports Chinese sovereignty over the island, but China hasn't recognized Moscow's illegal annexation and reiterates its support for all countries' sovereignty and territorial integrity. So while de facto Beijing supports Moscow in its withstanding with the West, it isn't willing to undermine its strategic interest in Taiwan, considering it a purely internal matter, contrary to the annexation.

Russia offers India to supply oil at lower prices and, in return, asks New Delhi to withdraw its support for the initiative of the G7 countries to establish ceiling prices for oil. The Indian

newspaper Business Standard writes about this with reference to its sources in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of India. The article claims that the "significant discounts" on oil from Russia will be greater than those offered by Iraq in the past few months.

Centre for Defence Strategies (CDS) is a Ukrainian security think tank. We operate since 2020 and are involved in security studies, defence policy research and advocacy. Currently all our activity is focused on stopping the ongoing war.

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3. Ukraine keeps initiative, claims it reached Russian border

This could get dicey. If Ukraine is restricted from attacking across the Russian border the Russians will have a sanctuary from which to continue stand off attacks. To properly defend Ukraine at the Russian-Ukrainian border Ukrainian forces will need the right rules of engagement.

A most important question is are the conditions being created for negotiations favorable to Ukraine? Or is it too soon?

Ukraine keeps initiative, claims it reached Russian border

AP · by ELENA BECATOROS and HANNA ARHIROVA · September 12, 2022

KHARKIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine kept the counteroffensive momentum in its war against Russia going Monday, saying it liberated one village after another and claiming that in one region it pushed the invaders back right up to the border in a lightning military move that stunned many.

“In some areas of the front, our defenders reached the state border with the Russian Federation,” said the regional governor of the northeastern Kharkiv region, Oleh Syniehubov. Russian troops crossed the border in the region on Feb. 24, the first day of the invasion.

Russia acknowledged the military developments by saying it was regrouping. As throughout the war, military claims were hard to verify independently.

After Sunday’s attacks by Russia on power stations and other infrastructure that knocked out electricity in many place across Ukraine, Kyiv authorities also said that electric power and water supplies have been restored to some 80 percent in the Kharkiv region.

“You are heroes!!!, wrote Kharkiv mayor Ihor Terekhov early in the morning on Telegram, highlighting the ebullient mood in the nation that has endured more than 200 days of war and occupation. “Thanks to everyone who did everything possible on this most difficult night for Kharkiv to normalize the life of the city as soon as possible.”

Russia-Ukraine war

The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said that its troops had liberated more than 20 settlements within the past day.

The buoyant mood was also captured by a defiant President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on social media late Sunday, comments that immediately went viral.

“Do you still think you can intimidate, break us, force us to make concessions? Did you really not understand anything? Don’t understand who we are? What we stand for? What we are talking about,” Zelenskyy exhorted.

“Read my lips,” he continued. “Cold, hunger, darkness and thirst for us are not as scary and deadly as your ‘friendship’ and brotherhood.’”

He added: “We will be with gas, lights, water and food… and WITHOUT you!”

Yet even amid the ebullience, the casualties kept mounting. Ukraine’s presidential office said Monday that at least four civilians were killed and 11 others were wounded in a series of Russian attacks in nine regions of the country. The U.N. Human Rights Office said last week that 5,767 civilians were killed so far.

The Russians continued shelling Nikopol across the Dnieper from the Zaporizhzhia power plant, damaging several buildings there and leaving Europe’s largest nuclear facility in a precarious position.

The turn of events and all-important reversal of initiative was backed up by international observers who warned of dire times ahead for Russian troops. It stood in sharp contrast to the first days of the war when Russian troops were moving toward Kyiv’s doorstep.

“In the face of Ukrainian advances, Russia has likely ordered the withdrawal of its troops from the entirety of occupied Kharkiv Oblast west of the Oskil River,” the British defense ministry said Monday, signifying a major advance by Kyiv. “Ukraine has recaptured territory at least twice the size of Greater London,” it said.

The British said that likely will further deteriorate the trust Russian forces have in their commanders. Ukraine’s initial move on the southern Kherson area, drawing the attention of enemy troops there, before pouncing on more depleted Russian lines in the northeast beyond Kharkiv has been seen as a great military move so far.

Even around Kherson, Russia is struggling to bring forces across the Dnipro River to stop the Ukrainian offensive there, the British military said.

It added: “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 Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said Monday that Russia likely lacks the reserve forces it needs to bolster its defenses in Ukraine.

While the war likely will stretch into next year, the institute believes that “Ukraine has turned the tide of this war in its favor” by effectively using Western-supplied weapons like the long-range HIMARS missile system and strong battlefield tactics. “Kyiv will likely increasingly dictate the location and nature of the major fighting.”

Seeking to contain its loss of momentum, Russia fired missiles at power plants and other critical infrastructure, immediately meeting with Ukrainian and U.S. criticism for centering on civilian targets.

The bombardment ignited a massive fire at a power station on Kharkiv’s western outskirts and killed at least one person. Zelenskyy denounced the “deliberate and cynical missile strikes” against civilian targets as acts of terrorism.

“Russia’s apparent response to Ukraine liberating cities and villages in the east: sending missiles to attempt to destroy critical civilian infrastructure,” U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget A. Brink wrote.

Separately, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in the Russia-occupied south completely shut down in a bid to prevent a radiation disaster as fighting raged nearby.

___

Arhirova reported from Kyiv.

____

Follow AP war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

AP · by ELENA BECATOROS and HANNA ARHIROVA · September 12, 2022

4. It’s Time to Prepare for a Ukrainian Victory

I am reminded:

“If you concentrate exclusively on victory, while no thought for the after effect, you may be too exhausted to profit by peace, while it is almost certain that the peace will be a bad one, containing the germs of another war.” B.H. Liddel-Hart

“If in taking a native den one thinks chiefly of the market that he will establish there on the morrow, one does not take it in the ordinary way.” Lyautey: The Colonial Role of the Army, Revue Des Deux Mondes, 15 February 1900

“Victory will come to the side that outlasts the other.” Marshall Foch, Battle of the Marne, 1914

But this is an ominous warning from Ms. Applebaum:

The possibility of instability in Russia, a nuclear power, terrifies many. But it may now be unavoidable. And if that’s what is coming, we should anticipate it, plan for it, think about the possibilities as well as the dangers. “We have learned not to be scared,” Reznikov told his Kyiv audience on Saturday. “Now we ask the rest of you not to be scared too.”

It’s Time to Prepare for a Ukrainian Victory

The liberation of Russian-occupied territory might bring down Vladimir Putin.

The Atlantic · by Anne Applebaum · September 11, 2022

Over the past six days, Ukraine’s armed forces have broken through the Russian lines in the northeastern corner of the country, swept eastward, and liberated town after town in what had been occupied territory. First Balakliya, then Kupyansk, then Izium, a city that sits on major supply routes. These names won’t mean much to a foreign audience, but they are places that have been beyond reach, impossible for Ukrainians to contact for months. Now they have fallen in hours. As I write this, Ukrainian forces are said to be fighting on the outskirts of Donetsk, a city that Russia has occupied since 2014.

Phillips Payson O’Brien: Ukraine is waging a new kind of war

Many things about this advance are unexpected, especially the location: For many weeks, the Ukrainians loudly telegraphed their intention to launch a major offensive farther south. The biggest shock is not Ukraine’s tactics but Russia’s response. “What really surprises us,” Lieutenant General Yevhen Moisiuk, the deputy commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, told me in Kyiv yesterday morning, “is that the Russian troops are not fighting back.”

Russian troops are not fighting back. More than that: Offered the choice of fighting or fleeing, many of them appear to be escaping as fast as they can. For several days, soldiers and others have posted photographs of hastily abandoned military vehicles and equipment, as well as videos showing lines of cars, presumably belonging to collaborators, fleeing the occupied territories. A Ukrainian General Staff report said that Russian soldiers were ditching their uniforms, donning civilian clothes, and trying to slip back into Russian territory. The Ukrainian security service has set up a hotline that Russian soldiers can call if they want to surrender, and it has also posted recordings of some of the calls. The fundamental difference between Ukrainian soldiers, who are fighting for their country’s existence, and Russian soldiers, who are fighting for their salary, has finally begun to matter.

That difference might not suffice, of course. Ukrainian soldiers may be better motivated, but the Russians still have far larger stores of weapons and ammunition. They can still inflict misery on civilians, as they did in today’s apparent attack on the electrical grid in Kharkiv and elsewhere in eastern Ukraine. Many other cruel options—horrific options—are still open even to a Russia whose soldiers will not fight. The nuclear plant in Zaporizhzhia remains inside the battle zone. Russia’s propagandists have been talking about nuclear weapons since the beginning of the war. Although Russian troops are not fighting in the north, they are still resisting the Ukrainian offensive in the south.

But even though the fighting may still take many turns, the events of the past few days should force Ukraine’s allies to stop and think. A new reality has been created: The Ukrainians could win this war. Are we in the West really prepared for a Ukrainian victory? Do we know what other changes it could bring?

Back in March, I wrote that it was time to imagine the possibility of victory, and I defined victory quite narrowly: “It means that Ukraine remains a sovereign democracy, with the right to choose its own leaders and make its own treaties.” Six months later, some adjustments to that basic definition are required. In Kyiv yesterday, I watched Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov tell an audience that victory should now include not only a return to the borders of Ukraine as they were in 1991—including Crimea, as well as Donbas in eastern Ukraine—but also reparations to pay for the damage and war-crimes tribunals to give victims some sense of justice.

These demands are not in any sense outrageous or extreme. This was never just a war for territory, after all, but rather a campaign fought with genocidal intent. Russian forces in occupied territories have tortured and murdered civilians, arrested and deported hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed theaters, museums, schools, hospitals. Bombing raids on Ukrainian cities far from the front line have slaughtered civilians and cost Ukraine billions in property damage. Returning the land will not, by itself, compensate Ukrainians for this catastrophic invasion.

George Packer: Ukrainians are defending the values that Americans claim to hold

But even if it is justified, the Ukrainian definition of victory remains extraordinarily ambitious. To put it bluntly: It is hard to imagine how Russia can meet any of these demands—territorial, financial, legal—so long as its current president remains in power. Remember, Vladimir 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. Two days after the launch of the failed invasion of Kyiv, the Russian state-news agency accidentally published, and then retracted, an article prematurely declaring success. “Russia,” it declared, “is restoring its unity.” The dissolution of the U.S.S.R.—the “tragedy of 1991, this terrible catastrophe in our history”—had been overcome. A “new era” had begun.

That original mission has already failed. There will be no such “new era.” The Soviet Union will not be revived. And when Russian elites finally realize that Putin’s imperial project was not just a failure for Putin personally but also a moral, political, and economic disaster for the entire country, themselves included, then his claim to be the legitimate ruler of Russia melts away. When I write that Americans and Europeans need to prepare for a Ukrainian victory, this is what I mean: We must expect that a Ukrainian victory, and certainly a victory in Ukraine’s understanding of the term, also brings about the end of Putin’s regime.

To be clear: This is not a prediction; it’s a warning. Many things about the current Russian political system are strange, and one of the strangest is the total absence of a mechanism for succession. Not only do we have no idea who would or could replace Putin; we have no idea who would or could choose that person. In the Soviet Union there was a Politburo, a group of people that could theoretically make such a decision, and very occasionally did. By contrast, there is no transition mechanism in Russia. There is no dauphin. Putin has refused even to allow Russians to contemplate an alternative to his seedy and corrupt brand of kleptocratic power. Nevertheless, I repeat: It is inconceivable that he can continue to rule if the centerpiece of his claim to legitimacy—his promise to put the Soviet Union back together again—proves not just impossible but laughable.

To prepare for Putin’s exit does not mean that Americans, Europeans, or any outsiders intervene directly in the politics of Moscow. We have no tools that can affect the course of events in the Kremlin, and any effort to meddle would certainly backfire. But that doesn’t mean we should help him stay in power either. As Western heads of state, foreign ministers, and generals think about how to end this war, they should not try to preserve Putin’s view of himself or of the world, his backward-looking definition of Russian greatness. They should not be planning to negotiate on his terms at all, because they might be dealing with someone else altogether.

Anne Applebaum: ‘Lukashenko is easier to unseat than Putin’

Even if they prove ephemeral, the events of the past few days do change the nature of this war. From the very beginning, everybody—Europeans, Americans, the global business community in particular—has wanted a return to stability. But the path to stability in Ukraine, long-lasting stability, has been hard to see. After all, any cease-fire imposed too early could be treated, by Moscow, as an opportunity to rearm. Any offer to negotiate could be understood, in Moscow, as a sign of weakness. But now is the time to ask about the stability of Russia itself and to factor that question into our plans. Russian soldiers are running away, ditching their equipment, asking to surrender. How long do we have to wait until the men in Putin’s inner circle do the same?

The possibility of instability in Russia, a nuclear power, terrifies many. But it may now be unavoidable. And if that’s what is coming, we should anticipate it, plan for it, think about the possibilities as well as the dangers. “We have learned not to be scared,” Reznikov told his Kyiv audience on Saturday. “Now we ask the rest of you not to be scared too.”

The Atlantic · by Anne Applebaum · September 11, 2022

5. The Russian Army Is Losing A Battalion Every Day As Ukrainian Counterattacks Accelerate

A battalion a day? That is quite an amazing statistic if true.

Excerpts:

The unhappy truth, for the Kremlin, is that it still hadn’t made good its losses from this spring when the Ukrainians counterattacked late last month, disrupting Russian efforts to reconstitute the force.

The Russians lost thousands of men and hundreds of armored vehicles trying, and failing, to encircle Kyiv starting in late February. This summer the Kremlin launched a nationwide recruitment drive, lifting age caps for new army recruits and offering rich cash bonuses in a desperate bid to stand up scores of new battalions.

Recruitment fell short of goals, but the Russian army did manage to form the new 3rd Army Corps with 10,000 or more troops and hundreds of T-80 and T-90 tanks and BMP-3 fighting vehicles. The 3rd AC raced into northeast Ukraine last week—and immediately suffered heavy losses, essentially resetting the Kremlin’s reset effort.

Now the Russian army in Ukraine is reeling. The Ukrainian army has the momentum and, in critical sectors, numerical and firepower advantages, as well. And short of a total national mobilization—a move that could spark a political crisis—Russia has run out of easy sources of fresh troops and equipment.

The Russian Army Is Losing A Battalion Every Day As Ukrainian Counterattacks Accelerate

Forbes · by David Axe · September 11, 2022

Abandoned Russian vehicles near Izium.

Via social media

The Russian army is losing at least a battalion’s worth of vehicles and men a day as twin Ukrainian counteroffensives roll back Russian territorial gains in eastern and southern Ukraine. That’s hundreds of casualties and scores of vehicle write-offs every day.

These losses are catastrophic for Russia. The Russian army barely was sustaining a little over 100 under-strength battalions in Ukraine before Kyiv’s forces counterattacked in the south on Aug. 30 and in the east eight days later.

In just under two weeks of brutal fighting, the Ukrainians have destroyed, badly damaged or captured 1,200 Russian tanks, fighting vehicles, trucks, helicopters, warplanes and drones, according to the Ukrainian general staff. Independent analysts scouring social media for photos and videos have confirmed nearly 400 of the Russian losses.

Around 5,500 Russian troops have died in Ukraine since Aug. 29, according to Ukrainian officials. It’s possible the Ukrainians are overstating the death toll, but it’s worth noting that recent U.S. estimates of Russian losses have been only slightly lower than Ukrainian estimates.

To put these numbers into perspective, Russian losses in Ukraine have swelled by a tenth in around 10 days—in a war that’s 200 days old. The rate of Russian casualties and vehicle write-offs doubled then tripled as the Ukrainians launched their counterattacks.

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Worse for the Russians, in their faltering defense of the south—and total rout in the east—they’ve failed to inflict heavy losses on the attacking Ukrainian brigades. Rough estimates have the Ukrainians losing one-tenth as many troops and vehicles since Aug. 30.

Worse still, captures account for half the Russian vehicle losses. The Ukrainian army in just the last week and a half has seized enough Russian tanks, fighting vehicles and artillery to equip an entire brigade. In other words, the Ukrainian army actually has more vehicles now than it did before launching its counteroffensives.

The Ukrainians meanwhile have taken so many Russian prisoners of war—potentially thousands—that they’re struggling to accommodate them. “We have nowhere to keep all the POWs,” Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said Friday.

The steep Russian losses swiftly have reshaped the war. The Russians were short of trained troops and modern equipment before the Ukrainians swept through northeastern Ukraine last week, liberating dozens of settlements spread across thousands of square miles. Ukrainian advances so far have been somewhat less dramatic in the south.

The unhappy truth, for the Kremlin, is that it still hadn’t made good its losses from this spring when the Ukrainians counterattacked late last month, disrupting Russian efforts to reconstitute the force.

The Russians lost thousands of men and hundreds of armored vehicles trying, and failing, to encircle Kyiv starting in late February. This summer the Kremlin launched a nationwide recruitment drive, lifting age caps for new army recruits and offering rich cash bonuses in a desperate bid to stand up scores of new battalions.

Recruitment fell short of goals, but the Russian army did manage to form the new 3rd Army Corps with 10,000 or more troops and hundreds of T-80 and T-90 tanks and BMP-3 fighting vehicles. The 3rd AC raced into northeast Ukraine last week—and immediately suffered heavy losses, essentially resetting the Kremlin’s reset effort.

Now the Russian army in Ukraine is reeling. The Ukrainian army has the momentum and, in critical sectors, numerical and firepower advantages, as well. And short of a total national mobilization—a move that could spark a political crisis—Russia has run out of easy sources of fresh troops and equipment.

Forbes · by David Axe · September 11, 2022

6. Putin’s strategy to weaponize winter

It looks like this is an obvious element of Putin's strategy.

So if everyone knows it then what can we do to attack and defeat this strategy?

We are recognizing, understanding, and exposing the strategy. How do we attack it?

Putin’s strategy to weaponize winter

BY JONATHAN SWEET AND MARK TOTH, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 09/11/22 1:00 PM ET

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

The Hill · by Mike Lillis · September 11, 2022

As the summer war in Ukraine transitions into autumn and the harvesting of sunflowers begins, repeated Russian military setbacks in the Donbas region and Kherson Oblast are forcing Vladimir Putin to show his hand. Impatient to reverse course on the battlefield, the Russian president is signaling that Moscow fully intends to weaponize Europe’s winter energy needs — for not just Ukraine but the entire European Union.

Under the current circumstances, though, Russian ground forces may not make it to winter. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky possesses the Valyrian steel sword; he just requires the Biden administration’s full confidence and support to wield it decisively and bury Putin’s “special military operation” in the fields of Ukraine.

Despite long-range weather forecasts to the contrary, Putin is gambling on a brutally cold and snowy winter like that of 1941, which helped derail the German army’s attack on Moscow during Operation Barbarossa. Theoretically, the Kremlin’s strategic aim is to produce an energy crisis in the dead of a European winter to break the will of NATO from continuing to militarily and economically support Kyiv. The underlying assumption is that Europeans would choose warmth and comfort over Ukraine’s independence.

Putin couldn’t be more wrong.

The U.S., NATO and the EU need to put on their best game face and shut down this course of action now. Putin is in trouble and the alliance has a small window of opportunity to drive Russia out of Ukraine before winter sets in.

The Russian offensive largely has stalled and, according to the Institute for the Study of War, the “Ukrainian counter-offensive is making verifiable progress in the south and the east. Ukrainian forces are advancing along several axes in western Kherson Oblast and have also secured territory across the Siverskyi Donets River in Donetsk Oblast.” Russian ground forces are digging in; however, their supply lines cannot sustain them, and they are losing ground. Putin is still intent on capturing Donetsk, extending his deadline for that to Sept. 15, but his commanders on the ground lack sufficient combat power.

Putin neither understands, nor appreciates, the condition of his soldiers, as evidenced by a United Kingdom Ministry of Defense intelligence report claiming a unit from the Luhansk People’s Republic delivered a “declaration outlining their refusal to be deployed as part of offensive operations in Donetsk Oblast.” The report specified that they had “done their duty securing the Luhansk Oblast” but were unwilling to fight in Donetsk. Another report said the 127th Regiment, a unit stood-up in April with men forcibly mobilized from Donetsk and Luhansk, refused to fight over a “lack of vital supplies.”

Elsewhere, Putin’s war is largely limited to holding terrain and attempting to push through referendums to join Russia as expeditiously as possible, a reality not lost upon Moldova’s prime minister, Natalia Gavrilita, who, fearing the same, acknowledged, “If a country can start an annexation war without any regard for international law, then in this sense, nobody is safe.”

The Russian 3rd Army Corps, composed mostly of minimally trained volunteer battalions, is being sent to the front to shore up defenses and buy time, but it may take until November to get them and their decrepit equipment in position. While they await a cavalry, Russia once again will turn to its artillery to keep Ukraine’s military at arm’s length and continue the reign of terror against unarmed civilians in Kharkiv, Odesa and other towns in southern Ukraine. The undermanned, ill-equipped, and shell-shocked Russian forces tasked to “die in place” cannot survive without artillery support, and if it comes down to a close fight, their courses of action are fight, flight or surrender.

The High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems provided by the U.S. and increased range of munitions provided by Germany make the latter two courses of action more likely. Ukrainian fighters continue to suppress Russia’s artillery and maneuver to close in on an army whose will largely has been broken.

The linchpin to Putin’s “winterization” strategy, though, is energy — natural gas, and nuclear-powered electricity — and he needs a cold winter to play it. He built European dependence on Russian gas brilliantly over the past decade and is prepared to use it as leverage against NATO and EU countries supporting Ukraine. On Sept. 3, Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom announced it was shutting down the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which distributes natural gas to Europe through Germany, and that “the pipeline will not resume in full until the collective West lifts sanctions against Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine.”

The impact will be felt throughout Europe. The EU needs a plan to offset this supply issue now, not in November or December. The plan must include reinvestment in fossil fuels and nuclear power, and a Pattonesque type of prayer, the “Weather Prayer” composed and delivered by Catholic chaplain James Hugh O’Neill at the request of Gen. George S. Patton, to stop the rains and allow his Army to defeat Adolf Hitler at the Battle of the Bulge.

Putin’s most viable course of action, the one he appears to be implementing now, is the weaponization of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP). It won’t win the war; it’s more akin to a desperate criminal who, cornered, grabs a hostage to negotiate this escape. The plant lost connection to its last external power line on Sept. 4 during shelling while International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors were present. Only one of its six reactors remains in operation. The ZNPP generates revenue for Ukraine, which exports electricity to Moldova, Romania, Slovakia and Poland. Ukraine recently offered to export electricity to Germany to help end its dependency on Russian energy.

Neither the German Blitz nor the Battle of Britain were able to force England to negotiate with or surrender to Hitler. Nor will Putin’s efforts to “freeze out” Europe this winter bring Ukraine or the EU to the negotiating table. Germany and Belgium recently announced measures to “get through the winter,” and Liz Truss, the United Kingdom’s new prime minister, has proclaimed, “As strong as the storm may be, I know the British people are stronger.”

Regardless, it will be an uncomfortable winter, but the people of Ukraine, the Baltic states, Poland, Moldova, Georgia and other countries once under Russia’s thumb understand the alternative. They are prepared to go the distance.

The EU must impose measures to lessen the blow of Putin’s plan to weaponize winter. Belgium Prime Minister Alexander De Croo perhaps said it best: The EU needs to “stop the bleeding” of high energy prices. Its energy ministers must work with Ukraine, NATO and the International Atomic Energy Agency to prepare for the possibility of a nuclear disaster at the ZNPP, its containment and clean-up.

Religion and Samuel Alito’s time bomb How international law should guide post-Roe America

This war is bigger than Ukraine and victory can be secured only through offensive action. The Russian military is approaching its most vulnerable moment.

Jonathan Sweet, a retired Army colonel, served 30 years as a military intelligence officer. His background includes tours of duty with the 101st Airborne Division and the Intelligence and Security Command. He led the U.S. European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012-14, working with NATO partners in the Black Sea and Baltics. Follow him on Twitter @JESweet2022.

Mark Toth is a retired economist, historian and entrepreneur who has worked in banking, insurance, publishing and global commerce. He is a former board member of the World Trade Center, St. Louis, and has lived in U.S. diplomatic and military communities around the world, including London, Tel Aviv, Augsburg and Nagoya. Follow him on Twitter @MCTothSTL.

The Hill · by Mike Lillis · September 11, 2022

7. ‘Ammo! Ammo!’ Video shows close combat in Ukraine offensive

Videos at the link. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/10/ukraine-combat-videos-us-weapons/?utm

First person shooter video games do not have to reload like real soldiers.

‘Ammo! Ammo!’ Video shows close combat in Ukraine offensive

The Washington Post · by Alex Horton · September 10, 2022

Ukrainian forces have mobilized fleets of Western-provided armored vehicles to conduct daring offensive assaults using machine guns and antitank weapons, according to video circulating on social media and verified by The Washington Post, striking imagery that provides a rare glimpse of close combat in a war largely defined by long-range artillery.

A set of first-person videos filmed Thursday in southern Ukraine shows a gunner mounted atop an armored Humvee, furiously firing a .50-caliber M2 Browning machine gun and raking nearby buildings with rounds roughly the size of cigars. The vehicle then stops and the gunner, an American volunteer in Ukraine swings his barrel toward muzzle flashes, squeezing the last few rounds from the ammunition belt.

“Ammo! Ammo!” Paul Smith screams in English, struggling with the feed tray cover he must lift before loading another belt.

The footage underscores the scope of U.S. support for Ukraine, consisting of billions of dollars in weapons and equipment that, in many respects, have allowed the outmanned, outgunned Ukrainian military to keep pace with, and in some cases outwit, the heavier-armed Russian military. It also reveals the reality of combat: heavy artillery rounds fired from miles away can batter an enemy, but to win back terrain, ground forces must find and kill adversaries at close range.

The Post used geolocation to verify the battle filmed in Ternovi Pody, a village midway between Mykolaiv and Kherson, the strategic cities at the heart of Ukraine’s offensive to retake ground in the south. In the east, advancing Ukrainian forces blitzed into the Donbas region, forcing Russian troops into a retreat.

Hundreds of Americans and Europeans — some with prior military experience, others not — have joined the war on Ukraine’s side. At least half a dozen U.S. citizens are believed to have been killed in the fighting while two others, both military veterans, were taken captive and remain in the custody of Russian proxies. A third was reported missing in April and his status remains unknown.

Smith said in an interview with The Post that he is a U.S. Army veteran who lived in Ukraine several times over the last decade, where he provided training and other support to war efforts in the east of the country.

In March, Smith and other volunteers were attached to a unit of the Ukrainian army that was stationed in the Mykolaiv region. He said Ukrainian forces had captured front lines in the vicinity of Ternovi Pody in the days before it was assaulted, but the village remained a “fall back” position for Russian forces.

Ukrainian forces had drawn up plans with him in the lead Humvee for the morning raid, delivering suppressing fire on a building the Ukrainians suspected could hold antiarmor weapons.

In the video, Smith reaches for a tool to pry open the feed tray cover, looking to load a fresh belt of ammunition. Instead of more rounds, though, another soldier inside the Humvee passes up an AT-4, a point-and-shoot antitank rocket.

“He panicked a little bit, thought that I had seen the BTR, so he hands me the rocket,” Smith said, referring to a Russian armored personnel carrier. In the video, he fires the weapon at a target so close the launch and the impact are nearly simultaneous.

As small-arms fire zips overhead and punches into the dirt around the Humvee, Smith pleads for fresh rounds as he prepares to fire another AT4 handed to him from inside the vehicle. “Fifty-cal ammo!” he yells. “We’re taking shots!”

Weapons like the AT4 antitank launcher are meant for close fights with a maximum effective range of about 300 meters for rounds launched from a single-use tube. The United States has provided thousands of such rounds to Ukraine along with armored Humvees.

As the videos suggest, this operation was particularly daring, with movement across flat, open terrain in vehicles not designed to withstand heavy antiarmor weaponry.

The Humvee parks at one point, becoming a fixed target for would-be attackers. The glass inside the vehicle is shown blasted but intact.

The video also reflects the candid moments in combat that rarely make it into war films. Smith, experienced running a machine gun, struggles at times to work his adrenaline-dampened fine motor skills, working the gun’s mechanics through the thin black gloves he’s wearing to protect his hands from heat and cuts.

The brass slips through his fingers on one attempt to reload before he gets it right and, seconds later, shoves the lid back onto the feed tray. Though only a few moments, for those inside the vehicle it likely felt like an eternity with Russian forces nearby. Smith presses down on the butterfly trigger for another barrage of gunfire before it jams again, forcing him to start the process over.

This time, he is more deliberate about a technique taught to soldiers, holding the beginning of the belt firmly against the left side of the gun before slamming down the cover.

Smith calling out for machine gun rounds, only to be handed an AT4, was a lighthearted note discussed on social media in an otherwise harrowing exchange.

“I was like, technically that rocket is a round of ammo, so, should have been more specific,” he said.

Another video from what appears to be the same operation suggests the soldiers are not much concerned with the possibility Russian forces will punch back with antiarmor weapons. Such munitions would easily destroy Humvees. But as the video shows, a swarm of Ukrainian vehicles streams toward a group of buildings under fire as dismounted troops move toward them. No glimpses of the enemy can be seen.

Analysts with the Institute for the Study of War said that the footage indicated Ternovi Pody had been recaptured by Ukraine.

The Washington Post · by Alex Horton · September 10, 2022

8. On the eastern front, a stunning week of Ukrainian success and Russian failures

On the eastern front, a stunning week of Ukrainian success and Russian failures

CNN · by Analysis by Tim Lister and Darya Tarasova, CNN

(CNN)The last week has seen a stunning transformation of the battlefield in eastern Ukraine, as a swift armored offensive by Ukrainian forces rolled through lines of Russian defenses and recaptured more than 3,000 square kilometers of territory.

That is more territory than Russian forces have captured in all their operations in Ukraine since April.

As much as the offensive was brilliantly conceived and executed, it also succeeded because of Russian inadequacies. Throughout swathes of the Kharkiv region, Russian units were poorly organized and equipped -- and many offered little resistance.

Their failures, and their disorderly retreat to the east, has made the goal of President Vladimir Putin's special military operation to take all of Luhansk and Donetsk regions considerably harder to attain.

Over the weekend, the Russian retreat continued from border areas that had been occupied since March. Villages within five kilometers of the border were raising the Ukrainian flag.

Live updates: Russia's war in Ukraine

The collapse of Russian defenses has ignited recriminations among influential Russian military bloggers and personalities in Russian state media.

As the Ukrainian flag was raised in one community after another over the last several days, one question came into focus: how does the Kremlin respond?

A lightning operation

Ukrainian officials had telegraphed that an offensive was imminent -- but not where it actually happened. There was plenty of noise about a counter-attack in the south, and even US officials talked about Ukrainian operations to "shape the battlefield" in Kherson. Russian reinforcements -- perhaps as many as 10,000 -- streamed into the region over a period of weeks.

Ukrainian forces enter key city of Izium in a sign Kyiv's new offensive is working

There was indeed a Ukrainian assault in Kherson, but one whose intention appears to have been to fix Russian forces, while the real effort came hundreds of miles to the north. It was a disinformation operation the Russians might have been proud of.

Kateryna Stepanenko at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based analytical group, says the deception worked.

"Ukrainian military officials reported that (Russian) Eastern Military District elements that had previously supported offensive operations towards Sloviansk had redeployed to the Southern Axis," she told CNN.

Their replacements were clearly not up to the job -- a mixed bag, Stepanenko said, of "Cossack volunteers, volunteer units, DNR/LNR militia units, and the Russian Rosgvardia (National Guard). Such forces were not sufficient to defend a vast and complex front line."

The Ukrainians picked the weakest spot in Russian defenses for their initial thrust -- an area controlled by the Luhansk militia with Russian National Guard units further back. They were no match for a highly mobile armored assault that quickly rendered artillery irrelevant.

Igor Strelkov, formerly the head of the Donetsk People's Republic militia and now a caustic critic of Russian military shortcomings, noted the poor training of these units and "the exceptional caution of the actions of Russian aviation." In short, Russian front-line units were hung out to dry without sufficient air support.

Multiple videos geolocated and analyzed by CNN, as well as local accounts, depict a chaotic withdrawal of Russian units, with large amounts of ammunition and hardware left behind.

The poor quality of Russian defenses along a critical north-south axis sustaining the Donetsk offensive is hard to fathom. Once underway, the intent of the Ukrainian offensive was crystal clear -- to destroy that artery of resupply. Within three days, they had done so -- not least because Russian reinforcements were slow to be mobilized.

Ukrainian flags are placed on statues in a square in Balakliya on Saturday.

Recriminations begin

The Russian Defense Ministry on Saturday sought to portray the abandonment of Kharkiv as a planned redirection of efforts to the Donetsk region -- but it actually complicates those efforts.

As Ukraine pushes southern offensive, it also hits Russia in the northeast

Until this week, the Russians were able to attack Ukrainian defenses in Donetsk from three directions: north, east and south. The northern axis is now gone: the threat to the industrial belt in and around Sloviansk has much diminished, as has the prospect of Ukrainian defenses being surrounded.

Simply put, the battlefield in eastern Ukraine has been redrawn in days.

The most influential -- and perhaps surprising -- public critic of the situation was Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who has supplied thousands of fighters to the offensive. In a Telegram post Sunday, he said he would be contacting senior officials at the Defense Ministry to spell out his message.

"It's clear that mistakes were made. I think they will draw a few conclusions," he said.

Hinting at disarray among commanders, Kadyrov said that "if Russia's General Staff did not want to leave, the (troops) wouldn't back out" -- but Russian soldiers "didn't have proper military training" and that led to them to retreat.

Influential military bloggers in Russia have been even more blunt. Zakhar Prilepin, whose Telegram channel has more than 250,000 subscribers, reposted a commentary that described events in Kharkiv as a "catastrophe" and a wholesale failure of intelligence.

Hear what Zelensky would tell Trump about Putin 02:02

"Now we can observe the result of the criminal irresponsibility of those who were responsible for this direction," the post reads, before concluding: "The special military operation is long over. There is a war going on."

Another pro-Putin blogger who goes by the name Kholmogorov reposted an equally scathing account by the Partizan Telegram channel from the front lines, which that essentially accused the Russian authorities of abandoning the troops.

"The soldiers were on foot with one machine gun and a sack. Abandoned by the command, not knowing the way, they walked at random," the post said.

The poster, who describes himself as a Russian Orthodox nationalist, says that while hatred of the enemy grows, "hatred of the government and command is growing even more."

Adding his own thoughts, Kholmogorov said: "Lord, save the Russian soldiers from blows from the front and even more from blows in the back."

A similar analysis came from the Telegram channel of Pyotr Lundstrem.

"There are NO thermal imagers, NO bulletproof vests, NO reconnaissance equipment, NO secure communications, NOT enough copters, NO first aid kits in the army."

Referring to commemorations in Russia this weekend for the Day of Moscow, the city's birthday, he added: "You are celebrating a billionth holiday. What's wrong with you?"

On Saturday, as the rout continued, Putin was inaugurating a ferris wheel in Moscow.

The Institute for the Study of War notes the "withdrawal announcement further alienated the Russian milblogger and Russian nationalist communities that support the Kremlin's grandiose vision for capturing the entirety of Ukraine."

Ukrainian forces have liberated the town of Balakliya.

Putin's next move

Prominent media figures in Russia are trying to spin this week's calamity as a planned operation. Television host Vladimir Soloviev reposted a Telegram commentary that insisted the "enemy, buying into an easy advance on a given sector of the front, drives into a trap."

"Currently, Russian units are purposefully regrouping," the commentary added, even though there is little sign of that.

That begs the question as to how the Kremlin prosecutes the war after suffering its worst week of the entire campaign. It appears to be short of high-quality units. Some existing battalion tactical groups have been reconstituted; volunteer battalions have been raised across Russia to form a Third Army Corps. US officials say the Russians are running short of munitions, even turning to North Korea for supplies.

Ukraine's surprising comeback could be giving markets a boost

Stepanenko, at the Institute for the Study of War, told CNN that the remarkable success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive will force a reappraisal of how the new army corps is used.

Stepanenko, who studies the recruitment and organization of the Russian military, says the Russians "might still attempt to use these units to stop the Ukrainian counter-offensive in Kharkiv, although rushing ill-trained and unprepared raw units into such operations would be a highly dangerous endeavor."

She believes that given the Russian need for fresh manpower, "it is likely that the Russian forces are deploying these elements directly onto the front lines in any case based on the reports that some volunteer battalions are already fighting on the Kherson front lines."

The Russian military can still bring considerable power to bear in terms of its rocket, artillery and missile forces. But despite one shuffle of the high command already, its ground operations seem poorly organized, with little autonomy devolved to commanders. The last week has laid bare issues of motivation and leadership.

Russian bloggers who have supported the offensive say a radical rethink is required. One commented: "A change of approach to the war in Ukraine is needed. Mobilization of the economy and industry. Creation of a political control center for war."

Strelkov came to the same conclusion, saying it is time to "start fighting for real (with martial law, the mobilization of the army and the economy.)"

Throughout the conflict, Putin has avoided a general mobilization, which might be unpopular at home.

It's impossible to know whether the Kremlin will now double down in an effort to complete the special military operation or begins to look for a negotiated settlement.

The first option looks a tall order given the events of the last week; the second would be humiliating. The third possibility, perhaps the most likely, is that Russia will persist with its grinding inch-by-inch onslaught while taking little to no additional territory. But it now faces an adversary with the wind in its sails and fresh infusions of Western military aid being prepared for the winter months.

Ukraine's battlefield advances have rejuvenated allied support, with a meeting in Germany this weekend producing further pledges of long-term support.

CNN · by Analysis by Tim Lister and Darya Tarasova, CNN

9. Putin 'sacks' general of '16 days' after crushing Ukraine defeat

A lot to parse here.

Excerpts:

Unusually, the propaganda-led Russian defence ministry confirmed its retreat from these towns, but said its troops were ‘regrouping’ to defend the Donetsk region, where Ukraine will advance towards next.

Ukraine’s military chief, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, said yesterday his forces had liberated about 1,160 square miles since the beginning of September – triple the amount of regained territory claimed by Mr Zelensky just two days previously.

If correct, this is the biggest battlefield success for Ukrainian forces since they thwarted Putin’s attempt to seize Kyiv and other central areas of the country not long after the initial invasion in late February.

After that setback Russia regrouped to concentrate on the Donbas region in the east, but that too is now in the sights of advancing Ukrainian troops.

The US-based Institute for the Study of War said Ukraine had retaken more territory in five days than Russia had since April.

Putin 'sacks' general of '16 days' after crushing Ukraine defeat

Putin 'sacks' top ranking general after '16 days' following crushing defeat in eastern Ukraine which has seen Ukrainian forces push to within 30 miles of the Russian border - and panicked troops abandoning tanks, weapons and supplies

Russian president is reported to have sacked Lieutenant General Roman Berdnikov after just 16 days in the job
It comes after Ukrainian forces took 1,000 square miles of territory in just days as part of a counter-offensive
There are reports Russian troops have abandoned tanks, weapons and supplies as they flee from the advance

By MATTHEW LODGE FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: 22:01 EDT, 11 September 2022 | UPDATED: 02:06 EDT, 12 September 2022

Daily Mail · by Matthew Lodge For Mailonline · September 12, 2022

Vladimir Putin is reported to have sacked a top ranking general just 16 days after appointing him following his crushing defeat in eastern Ukraine.

The Russian president is thought to have relieved Lieutenant General Roman Berdnikov of his duties over the failure of Kremlin troops to keep hold of vast swathes of Ukrainian territory over the last few days.

A counter-offensive by Ukrainian forces has seen troops push to within 30 miles of the border, amid reports panicked Russian troops have been abandoning tanks, weapons and supplies.

The have been claims from some sources that Russian soldiers have 'literally run from their positions', even leaving behind their clothes as they run away from the advancing Ukrainian army in the Kharkiv oblast in the north east of the country.

It comes as Ukrainian soldiers surge into the east of the country in an effort that has seen them take more than 1,000 square miles of territory in a matter of days, in a period of time that could prove to be a turning point in the war.

It came after a sustained Ukrainian ‘disinformation campaign’ about a counter-offensive in the south, which succeeded in diverting Russian troops in that direction and leaving the north east vulnerable to attack.

The main advance in the area began six days ago and has forced Moscow to withdraw its troops to prevent them being surrounded.

Lieutenant General Roman Berdnikov has reportedly been sacked by Vladimir Putin after the rout of his troops in eastern Ukraine

A Ukrainian soldier passes by a Russian tank damaged in a battle in a just freed territory on the road to Balakleya in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine

Abandoned Russian military equipment during the Ukarinian Army counter-offensive in Kharkiv region, amid the Russian military invasion of Ukraine

A counter-offensive by Ukrainian forces has seen troops push to within 30 miles of the border, amid reports panicked Russian troops have been abandoning tanks, weapons and supplies

According to the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Lt General Berdnikov was appointed as commander of the Western Armed Forces on August 26, 2022.

However, it seems his time in charge was short lived, with Ukrainian intelligence saying he has been sacked by Putin due to the rout in Kharkiv. There has been no confirmation from the Kremlin on this.

This came after unconfirmed reports back in June that he had been killed during fighting in the Donbas region of Ukraine.

As Russian troops desperately scrambled to get clear from oncoming forces in recent days, one Ukrainian unit said the chain of command had been broken and Kremlin troops were running away without even attempting to fight back.

The source told the Telegraph that many had changed into civilian clothes to avoid being spotted by Ukrainian troops and have left behind a 'huge amount of vehicles and ammunition'.

He said: 'They were really afraid, their chain of command was in chaos. Officers left the area before the fighting began.

'There were a lot of uniforms lying around. We caught some of these guys trying to escape in civilian clothes, they were telling some incredible bull***t trying to save themselves.'

A Ukrainian flag set up in the town of Balakliya in southeastern Kharkiv oblast after it was retaken by Ukrainian troops yesterday

A Ukrainian soldier gestures shouts 'Glory to Ukraine' as a military convoy passes by Husarivka towards eastern Ukraine on Saturday

In an attempt to hit back, Russia last night struck at Ukrainian infrastructure in what president Volodymyr Zelensky said was an attack to 'deprive people of light and heat'.

Missiles strikes knocked out power and water to much of Kharkiv city, with blackouts in Bnipro, Poltava and other eastern cities potentially affecting millions of people.

This prompted President Zelensky to brand Russia a 'terrorist state' and he launched into a fiery speech railing against the Kremlin.

He said: 'Do you still think we are one people? Do you still think you can scare us, break us, force us to make concessions? Don't you really get it? Don't you understand who we are? What we stand for? What we are all about?

'Read my lips: 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 frightening and deadly for us as your friendship and brotherhood. But history will put everything in its place. And we will be with gas, light, water and food... and without you!'

In a tweet President Zelensky he added: 'A total blackout in the Kharkiv & Donetsk regions, a partial one in the Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk & Sumy regions.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky sent a message to Russia after it attacked critical civilian infrastructure last night, saying 'Cold, hunger, darkness and thirst are not as frightening and deadly for us as your friendship and brotherhood'

On his official Twitter account, President Zelensky branded Russia a 'terrorist state' and that it is attempting to 'deprive people of light and heat'

'RF terrorists remain terrorists & attack critical infrastructure. No military facilities, the goal is to deprive people of light & heat. #RussiaIsATerroristState'

Earlier in the day, which is the 200th in the war, president Zelensky mocked the Russian retreat in a video address to the nation, saying that ‘the Russian army in these days is demonstrating the best that it can do – showing its back’.

Yesterday he posted a video of Ukrainian soldiers hoisting the national flag once again over the town of Chkalovske. More crucially, they entered the Russian-held supply towns of Izyum, Kupiansk and Balakliya.

Unusually, the propaganda-led Russian defence ministry confirmed its retreat from these towns, but said its troops were ‘regrouping’ to defend the Donetsk region, where Ukraine will advance towards next.

Ukraine’s military chief, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, said yesterday his forces had liberated about 1,160 square miles since the beginning of September – triple the amount of regained territory claimed by Mr Zelensky just two days previously.

If correct, this is the biggest battlefield success for Ukrainian forces since they thwarted Putin’s attempt to seize Kyiv and other central areas of the country not long after the initial invasion in late February.

After that setback Russia regrouped to concentrate on the Donbas region in the east, but that too is now in the sights of advancing Ukrainian troops.

The US-based Institute for the Study of War said Ukraine had retaken more territory in five days than Russia had since April.

Ukrainian defence minister Oleksii Reznikov said that the Russians have been cut off from vital supply lines and predicted more rapid gains. ‘It will be like an avalanche,’ he said, ‘One line of [Russian] defence will shake, and it will fall.’

Russia still controls around 20 per cent of Ukraine, and military analysts are warning the war will at least continue through the long cold winter.

Mr Zelensky agreed with this forecast, saying at the weekend: ‘Ahead are 90 days that will determine more than 30 years of Ukrainian independence... The winter will determine our future.’

Ukrainian troops load an abandoned Russian military vehicle onto a trailer during their counter-offensive in the Kharkiv region

Ukrainian troops stand in a group, amid Russia's invasion of the country, at a location given as Hoptivka, Ukraine in this picture obtained from social media and released on September 11

Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said the recent gains were only possible thanks to hi-tech weapons supplied by the UK and other western allies, and added that victory is within sight if the support continues.

He added: ‘The more weapons we receive, the faster we will win and the faster this war will end.’

Throughout July and August, Ukraine’s political and military leaders had declared very openly that they would launch a major counter-offensive in the south.

Taras Berezovets, press officer for the Bohun brigade of Ukraine’s special forces, said: ‘It was a big special disinformation operation. The offensive happened where they least expected, and this caused them to panic and flee.’

Lieutenant-General Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya who has supplied thousands of troops for the Russian invasion, said the Kharkiv retreat resulted from leadership blunders.

‘They have made mistakes,’ he said.

‘If they don’t make changes... I will be forced to contact the leadership of the country to explain the real situation on the ground.’

Russian political analyst Sergei Markov criticised Putin’s attendance at Moscow’s 875th ‘birthday’ celebration on Saturday.

‘The fireworks in Moscow on a tragic day of Russia’s military defeat will have extremely serious political consequences,’ he said.

Daily Mail · by Matthew Lodge For Mailonline · September 12, 2022

10. Ukraine Takes the Offensive

The $64,000 question. How will Putin react? Will he go nuclear?

Ukraine Takes the Offensive

The wild card is how Putin responds. Will he use a nuclear weapon?

By The Editorial BoardFollow

Updated Sept. 11, 2022 7:06 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-takes-the-offensive-nuclear-weapons-war-russia-nato-military-intelligence-putin-troops-territory-invasion-retreat-soldier-11662922714

Ukraine’s counter-offensive against invading Russian forces is an important turn in the war, though not without peril as Vladimir Putin calculates how to respond. Western leaders have to be prepared that he will use nuclear weapons, or attempt to involve NATO directly in the conflict.

In less than a week, Ukrainian forces have retaken some three thousand square kilometers from the Russian invaders. That’s more Ukrainian territory than Russia has seized since April. “The Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv Oblast is routing Russian forces and collapsing Russia’s northern Donbas axis,” says the Institute for the Study of War, which has ably tracked the conflict.

***

The counter-offensive’s early success is notable for its planning and deception. Ukraine advertised for months that it was planning to advance in the country’s south, around the city of Kherson, and Russia sent reinforcements there. Ukraine has made some gains in the south, but it seems to have caught the Russians by surprise around Kharkiv. Ukraine’s military intelligence, no doubt with U.S. help, seems to be better than Russia’s.

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Also striking is the chaotic Russian retreat in the Kharkiv region, suggesting poor morale and military leadership. A Ukrainian soldier fighting near Balakliya and Izyum texts our Jillian Melchior: “We knew that there were morale [problems] within Russian troops. But we were shocked how much tanks and armored vehicles etc. they drop behind. Fight is over. They’re afraid to be surrounded. That’s why they run so quickly. We need to push harder.”

The desire to push harder suggests how much the Russian retreat is helping Ukrainian morale. Superior Ukrainian military esprit in defense of the homeland has been an advantage from the beginning. This is in contrast to Russian troops, who are dying by the thousands in a campaign in a foreign country.

The territorial gains are strategically significant because they complicate Russia’s ability to reinforce its troops. The Institute for the Study of War said Sunday that Ukraine has taken the city of Izyum, which is a necessary step toward liberating Ukrainian troops that have been pinned down in Slovyansk. The advances build on one another.

The offensive vindicates Ukraine’s assurances that with enough advanced Western weapons it could retake territory. After Ukraine’s early victory in defense of Kyiv, the U.S. and Europe let Russia gain an artillery advantage in the Donbas. But once the U.S. supplied longer-range rockets and artillery, especially precise Himars, it has become a more even fight. Ukraine’s recent advances show the U.S. should supply even more Himars platforms, and not merely more rockets for the 16 platforms Ukraine currently has.

***

Ukraine’s advances raise the stakes for Mr. Putin. Russian military bloggers are sounding the alarm, but Mr. Putin has been reluctant to mobilize the entire country for his “special military operation,” lest he court more domestic opposition. Russia’s response on Sunday to its recent losses was to attack power stations in Kharkiv and other cities. This is an attack on electricity for civilians.

The Russian is capable of anything. He could engage NATO forces in some fashion that he would blame on the West and use to justify a military draft. He’s meeting this week with Chinese President Xi Jinping and is likely to seek direct military aid that the U.S. says Beijing hasn’t provided so far. He’s also likely to cut off energy supplies to Europe even more than he has to keep the pressure on the West as cold weather arrives.

Russia’s use of chemical and tactical nuclear weapons also can’t be ruled out. The use of battlefield nukes is part of standard Russian military doctrine. Rather than lose in humiliating fashion, Mr. Putin may calculate the military benefits are worth the risks.

We hope Western leaders have been mulling how to respond rather than thinking it can’t happen. One point to make clear is that the fault would be all Mr. Putin’s, not Ukraine’s. Factions in the West, on the right and left, believe Ukraine should be left to its fate without Western aid, and they will blame Ukraine for having the nerve to defend itself against a brutal invader.

A nuclear escalation can’t be accepted as normal warfare. Radiation fallout could reach NATO territory. NATO will have to increase its military aid and let Ukraine take the fight inside Russia. We hope Western leaders are making clear to Mr. Putin that he will become a global pariah if he does go nuclear.

The prospect is horrific to contemplate, but this is the reality of a world with dictators on the march after decades of Western complacency. Ukraine’s advances are encouraging, but Mr. Putin’s threat to the world is far from over.

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Sorting Through the Noise: The Evolving Nature of the Fog of War

Dennis Murphy September 10, 2022

thestrategybridge.org · September 10, 2022

Earlier this year, The Strategy Bridge asked civilian and military students around the world to participate in our sixth annual student writing contest on the subject of strategy.

Now, we are pleased to present an essay selected for Honorable Mention from Dennis Murphy, a student at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs.

In June 2021, an automated identification system tracked two NATO ships close to Russian-occupied territory. Such a system is designed to track and monitor the location of ships while at sea. The usefulness of such a tool is intuitively obvious to anyone who wishes to engage in platform-heavy domains of conflict, or to intuit the strategic and operational inclinations of adversaries. There was only one problem: their location was falsified.[1] This was not the first time, and it will certainly not be the last. In July, Mark Harris warned that phantom ships are rapidly becoming the “latest weapons in the global information war.”[2]

Misinformation in naval warfare, or military statecraft more broadly, is far from new. Leading one’s adversaries into thinking you possess a greater number of vessels, or that the bulk of your forces are deployed to a different location, was standard practice in pre-modern naval campaigns. Though satellite tracking has largely made transparent the location of surface vessels, submarines continue the tradition of stealth. Under the sea, the fog of war remains as prevalent today as it ever was.

Unfortunately, there exists a troubling mindset, all too common among modern practitioners of strategy and operations. This pedagogy is increasingly incompatible with the fog of war. In this mindset, the idealization of the future of warfare is one where command and control is increasingly centralized, local commanders have near total battlespace awareness, and all-knowing algorithms will enable the near erasure of the fog of war. All decisions, from the grand strategic down to the tactical, will be informed by near-total domain awareness.

Such a mindset is understandable. Increased coordination, battlespace awareness, and reliance on algorithms has been central to the modern American way of war. Recent efforts surrounding Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) are merely the latest in a long line of innovations comprising this trend.[3]

White Noise (Jorge Stolfi/Wikimedia)

There’s just one major flaw: noise.

The Infinite Nature of Facts

We often forget that the potential points of information one can state about a particular thing are nearly infinite. While this may seem strange at first, it is a problem known in other disciplines as well. There is a well-known paradox about the mapping of coastlines and rivers. With every level of granularity, the length of the coastline increases. At a certain point, our measurements rise almost to infinity. As such, there is a point at which we must throw our hands up in the air and say that we have understood what is an acceptable amount of information about a particular environment. The coastline of Tonga is not nearly infinite, and not at all comparable to the United States. We know this to be true, but we do not seem to be aware that this same paradox emerges when discussing nearly any aspect of data.

As our tools become capable of picking up more information, we will see exponential growth in the number of derivable facts from those tools. For satellite imagery, this could be a combinatorially explosive number of pixels in a given area. For other sensors, this could mean picking up increasing variation in radio telemetry. Regardless of the instrument employed, this pattern will hold true. At a certain point, increasing our awareness of precise fluctuations in the surface of the world’s oceans or of the grains of sand on a beach will become useless, even if we could reliably know and understand everything we are seeing. More than that, algorithms trained on possessing monstrously large quantities of data will be flawed when employed in low-information conditions. Given that understanding everything that we see is impossible, we are increasingly forced to rely on algorithms to sort information into usable forms. This is a disaster waiting to happen.

In our quest to preempt strategic surprise, we are fostering the development of a system that will need to sort through truly unwieldy quantities of information. At a large level, human beings can verify most information that comes in, but as the amount of information grows, so too will the manpower required to understand it. Given limitations on the number of strategic thinkers and analysts that can be employed, tools enabled by artificial intelligence will be required. With every additional level of granularity acquired, so too will there be a greater reliance upon the tools we use to create order out of this chaos of our own making. This creates two vulnerabilities from within the system, and fosters another major vulnerability from outside of it.

Calculators Are Not Wise

The first vulnerability lies within the algorithms themselves. Too often, there is a romantic techno-fetishism permeating those who work with technology. That is, they believe the algorithm can do whatever they want, and it will work as intended. This is, of course, rubbish. Most algorithms are only as good as the programmer who creates them. At the heart of all artificial intelligence tools is a calculator. The calculator has no awareness of its action. It can only do what it is asked to do, and it will do so correctly. A major issue arises if there are no error signals when the algorithm is superficially correct, but catastrophically wrong at a systematic level. When dealing with simple units of analysis, or when the algorithms are constantly checked against the real world, catastrophic errors are potentially easily detectable. This is not true when algorithms deal with increasingly complex data.

When there is too much information to sort through, the programmers lose the ability to understand their machines. As we increase the power of our tools, we necessarily forfeit some fraction of our ability to double check our machines. This is not a new problem; we have known about it for years.[4] Given the amount of information some practitioners want our systems to be able to go through and understand, we will likely not be able to understand that something has gone wrong until we fail to engage with the adversary effectively, or some error emerges after months have gone by.

It is an irony for the ages that as our confidence in our ability to obtain a greater understanding of the strategic landscape of the twenty-first century grows, our real understanding will necessarily decrease. The armies of the future will make life and death decisions based on algorithms we do not, and cannot, fully understand. As we are increasingly pressured to reduce the presence of humans in conflict, from unmanned aircraft and vessels to an increased reliance on special forces, we will continually lose our ability to check in real time the validity of the artificial construction of reality our algorithms generate. If we ever fully make such a transition, we will be like the blind men who thought themselves to be all-seeing in ancient times.

Your Discriminators Can (and Will) Be Tricked

There is a never-ending war being waged among the algorithms involved in machine learning. This conflict is fought between generators and discriminators. The goal of the generator is to create something that can fool the discriminator. The goal of the discriminator is to detect the generator. This is a process that is integral to machine learning, and it is what makes spoofing possible at a higher level. As the generator gets better at faking results, the discriminator must get better at detecting them. This is how it is possible for artificial intelligence to generate realistic images of fake persons.[5] It is simple and easy to think of ways this can be used to foster wide-spread disinformation campaigns, and I wrote some sketches about the possibility in 2019. This has practical implications for the battlefield as well.

Machine learning requires the ability to recognize novel information. When you teach an algorithm to detect an object and correctly classify that object, you are training a discriminator. When one wants to be able to tell that an F-35 is, indeed, an F-35, you need to provide your algorithm with an enormous amount of training data on the F-35. You then test your algorithm by exposing it to new variations of data containing an F-35. As your discriminator improves, it is able to increase its accuracy on picking up instances of an F-35. In a world where everything is what it appears to be, this is where one might be tempted to stop. If something is an F-35, your discriminator should eventually get good enough to detect that it is, indeed, an F-35.

F-35 (Liz Kaszynski/Lockheed Martin)

When you want to see if you can generate fake data that will trick your discriminator into thinking an F-35 is present where it is not, you will employ a generator. The generator, when trained against a discriminator, will be able to detect patterns your discriminator is using in order to understand how to trick it. And just as one can trick the algorithm into seeing something that is not there, an adversary can camouflage itself. Since the amount of information these algorithms receive is mind-blowingly large, some hideously simple patterns may emerge to break the discriminator. Such a thing would never pass visual inspection, but visual inspection is rendered impossible because of the amount of data one would need to sort through. You will not know that such an exploit exists until you are either incredibly lucky, or something blows up.

False positives for ships at sea can be the result of either your algorithms screwing up naturally on their own, or of adversarial intent. Unless you are in a competitive environment, you will have no reason to know for sure whether your algorithms were tricked or if they were merely stupid. As command-and-control systems become increasingly centralized, either error will be magnified. If a command thinks there is an adversarial fleet just off the shore of Alaska, it may devote air and sea resources to oppose it. Such an ability would naturally compromise our strategic and operational effectiveness elsewhere. Given events in the Black and North Seas, this is a vulnerability we should be especially on guard against. Strategic plans predicated on flawed or manipulated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities will be doomed to fail.

Every time we react to something we think we see, we are providing information to the adversary about the vulnerabilities within our systems. Unless our systems are compromised and the adversary can infiltrate our communications and our artificial intelligence tools, an opposing state should have limited abilities to determine the efficacy of their spoofing attempts. If we ever start seeing complex spoofing efforts that lead us to believe platforms are present where they are not, we should not overreact. Rather, we should quietly analyze what caused the error, and correct for that error while making sure we maintain heightened levels of secrecy at every step.

If our systems ever do become compromised, however, it would be utterly disastrous. Should we ever succeed in completing our centralization of command and control, then if that were to be compromised, even for a moment, an adversary would know the location, capabilities, mission, and personnel of our forces to the same degree that our command and control did. This, coupled with hypersonic weapons, could be the short-term precursor to an imminent military defeat. This is a topic for another day, however.

Abundant Information is Habit Forming

When one’s decision-making paradigm is centered around possessing large amounts of information, its ability to function in low-information environments will become compromised. A JADC2 model of warfare is incompatible with information black-out conditions. If our commanding officers are trained to act as if they always possess information about the location of both adversarial and allied forces, it is worth questioning whether that training will serve them well in an environment where both friend and foe are uncertain. This is a necessary drawback of employing a system that seeks to banish the fog of war from war: what do you do when that system fails?

So much of our modern world is connected to the internet of things that it is often difficult to imagine an environment where the internet of things falls apart. Complicated relay information through satellite communications could be rendered impossible shortly after the onset of hostilities with a near-peer adversary. While a more localized form of command and control could be established around a particular fleet, this too can be disrupted through sophisticated and novel jamming technologies. Small drones that are difficult to target may be employed to damage the fidelity of communications and on-ship sensory capabilities, for instance.

So much of our modern world is connected to the internet of things that it is often difficult to imagine an environment where the internet of things falls apart.

Warfighting abilities would necessarily revert to older, slower, and less reliable means of communication and coordination to function in such an environment. Leaders would need to be comfortable with making high stakes decisions with low amounts of reliable information. The cloud is not permanent. Systems are vulnerable,[6] and often the technology that underpins them can be unreliable.[7] The type of omniscience that some practitioners desire is only possible in the most idealized conditions when facing a non-peer adversary. With that in mind, we can start to understand this mindset as a product of the Gulf War and the Global War on Terror. If we do not find a way to discard this liability, then our first conflict with a near-peer adversary will be yet another casualty of the twenty years of war we fought in Afghanistan.

Problems at the operational level will become magnified at the strategic level as policy planners continue to develop long-term plans based upon flawed or compromised models. How many disasters in human history have come about because leadership implemented strategies based upon groundless certainties? As we move to pursue all-of-government efforts to develop grand strategic plans, our efforts will be doomed to fail if we predicate our long-term plans on always knowing nearly everything about the balance of power across all DIME-FIL (Diplomatic, Information, Military, Economic, Financial, Intelligence, and Law enforcement) domains.

Sorting Through the Noise

It will be necessary for the modern strategist and military commander, regardless of which domain in which they operate, to be comfortable with the inherent fallibility of their tools. While sophisticated algorithms can generate convincingly granular models of reality, commanders should always maintain a healthy degree of skepticism regarding the information they receive. There is a natural trade-off between the volume of data and the ability of one’s staff to verify what they are reporting. Information sorted by artificial intelligence at high scales largely operates outside of programmer’s awareness, and is thus well beyond the capabilities of any individual commander to completely understand.

This imperfect awareness necessarily means the models used will generate false positives. Tricking the system is a natural way an adversary will attempt to influence the battlespace of the future, either through spoofing or by camouflaging one’s own forces. Even if such threats could be mitigated, there is no system that is invulnerable. Disruptive technologies could very well be employed to dramatically reduce the efficacy of our tools, perhaps to the point where they become inoperable. Therefore, the modern military commander should also be comfortable operating in low information environments.

Contemporary strategists are at risk of losing sight of the real world when they uncritically embrace the fruits of the information revolution without understanding the fragility and vulnerabilities of the infrastructure of artificial intelligence that underpins it.

It is unfortunate that this is necessary not because of a lack of technology that we could make up for, but rather that it is an inherent problem of the very systems and paradigms we are employing to navigate the future of warfare. This does not mean we should abandon our approach. Instead, we must ensure that we are resilient in our approach to modern warfare.

We are at our most vulnerable when we believe unquestioningly both in the efficacy of our tools, and in the permanence of their presence.

Dennis Murphy is a PhD student at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. He previously attended Johns Hopkins SAIS’ Strategic Studies and Tsinghua University’s Chinese Politics and Foreign Policy graduate programs. He is researching the implications of emerging technology on international security and strategy.

The Strategy Bridge is read, respected, and referenced across the worldwide national security community—in conversation, education, and professional and academic discourse.

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Header Image: Tree in field during extreme cold with frozen fog. (Ian Furst/Wikimedia)

Notes:

[1] Sutton, HI. Positions of Two NATO Ships Were Falsified Near Russian Black Sea Naval BaseUSNI News, June 21, 2021 https://news.usni.org/2021/06/21/positions-of-two-nato-ships-were-falsified-near-russian-black-sea-naval-base

[2] Harris, Mark. “Phantom Warships Are Courting Chaos in Conflict Zones” WIRED, July 29, 2021 https://www.wired.com/story/fake-warships-ais-signals-russia-crimea/

[3] Tucker, Patrick. “The Future the US Military is Constructing: a Giant, Armed Nervous System” Defense One, September 17, 2017 https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2017/09/future-us-military-constructing-giant-armed-nervous-system/141303/

[4] Knight, Will. “The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI” MIT Technology Review, April 11, 2017 https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/04/11/5113/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/

[5] “This Person Does Not Exist” https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

[6] Schneier, Bruce. “Vulnerabilities in Weapons Systems” Scheier on Security, June 8, 2021 https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/06/vulnerabilities-in-weapons-systems.html

[7] Tucker, Patrick. “Pentagon’s Accelerating ‘Connect-Everything’ Effort Hinges on Uncertain Cloud Program” Defense One, June 7, 2021 https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2021/06/pentagons-accelerating-connect-everything-effort-hinges-uncertain-cloud-program/174528/

thestrategybridge.org · September 10, 2022

12. The Pentagon’s Reckoning with Civilian Casualties Is a Good Start—But It’s Only a Start

Excerpts:

The CHMR-AP signals the US military’s renewed commitment to protecting civilians on the battlefield. Indeed, experts contend that preventing collateral damage is one of the most important military objectives in contemporary warfare. At the same time, the plan doesn’t go far enough to fulfill this obligation. To implement meaningful change, military leaders need to do more to shape the policies that govern operations. And they need to hold subordinate commanders publicly accountable for preventable targeting errors.

The Pentagon’s Reckoning with Civilian Casualties Is a Good Start—But It’s Only a Start - Modern War Institute

mwi.usma.edu · by Paul Lushenko · September 12, 2022

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On August 25, the US Department of Defense announced sweeping changes to help minimize civilian casualties in war. The “Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan,” or CHMR-AP, followed the botched drone strike in Afghanistan in August 2021, which killed ten civilians. Following this tragedy, a flurry of investigations exposed the hidden costs of the US drone program and pushed Congress to demand more accountability for collateral damage during military operations.

The thirty-six-page plan institutes a dramatic set of adjustments. Among these, it defines the “civilian environment” as the context for military operations, which includes civilians and the infrastructure upon which their livelihoods depend. It introduces “Civilian Environment Teams” in combatant commands to help commanders understand how operations affect civilians. And it establishes “red teams”—consisting of experts who play devil’s advocate and challenge an organization’s assumptions—to minimize cognitive biases that can result in preventable targeting errors.

The CHMR-AP institutes a new architecture across the US military, overseen from the Pentagon, to implement these broad doctrinal, planning, and training changes to mitigate civilian casualties during future wars. And Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin emphasized the plan applies not only to drone strikes but to large-scale combat operations against major powers as well.

Unfortunately, these changes only address symptoms rather than two larger causes of civilian casualties in war—policy and accountability. To further prevent civilian casualties, US military leaders must address these underlying drivers. If not, even sophisticated targeting technologies such as drones will do little to prevent collateral damage on the battlefield.

The Politics of Civilian Casualties

Civilian casualties may be inevitable in war and individual cases may be the result of genuine accidents. At the same time, they can also result from a military’s organizational culture as well as policies set by elected officials. The CHMR-AP acknowledges the former form of “systemic collateral damage,” noting “targeting processes have largely focused on analyses of effects on adversaries, with fewer resources dedicated to understanding the effects on collateral objects and the civilian environment.”

The CHMR-AP fails to address the latter—politicized—form of risk imposition on civilians, which Neta Crawford describes as “foreseen collateral damage.” In this case, civilian casualties in war are a function of decisions made by elected officials. They, not military leaders, set policies that impose varying degrees of risk on civilians during war—risks that they seek to balance against the anticipated security gains. Even the “impressive” changes instituted by the CHMR-AP, then, may do little to address the broader political factors that can contribute to civilian casualties.

Indeed, elected officials don’t just contribute to civilian casualties in war; they are often decisive. This is because their policies for risk mitigation shape the rules of engagement for commanders. These tactical-level directives explain who can be harmed, why they can be harmed, when they can be harmed, and where they can be harmed.

In the context of drones, for example, US presidents adopt different constraints of “reasonable” or “near” certainty of no civilian casualties during strikes. Research suggests the implications of these constraints are significant for civilian protection in war. Prior to 2011, US President Barack Obama authorized 263 strikes in Pakistan under the reasonable certainty standard, resulting in 607 civilian casualties. After 2011, Obama shifted to the near certainty standard, authorizing 167 strikes that killed 90 civilians.

This policy adjustment, then, resulted in a dramatic reduction in civilian casualties and markedly enhanced the precision of strikes. So much so, in fact, that many Pakistani citizens in the targeted areas came to see the strikes as legitimate. “The drone is a justice-delivering technology,” one Pakistani citizen reported.

There are several ways US military leaders can help shape the policies that govern civilian casualties in war. First, they can use empirical evidence on the implications for civilian protection given different targeting standards when providing their best military advice to elected officials. Second, they can use surrogates, including retired military officials, to provide experientially based observations on the collateral effects of different targeting standards. This approach has the added benefit of reinforcing civil-military relations because it provides additional inputs into the policy formation process. In the event senior leaders felt civilian casualties were doing irrevocable harm to the US war effort, they could resign, in the hope that a signal of profound disagreement with the policies set by elected officials during war might encourage a changed approach to targeting.

Accountability for Civilian Casualties

It is also unclear how the CHMR-AP’s proposed changes affect accountability for preventable errors. Holding commanders responsible for egregious mistakes, despite the permissive targeting standards that elected officials may set, is central to the perceived legitimacy of US military operations. Following the botched strike in Afghanistan, for example, no commander was punished, at least publicly, further undermining the legitimacy of US drone strikes.

To some degree, the CHMR-AP does address accountability down the chain of command if an operation is suspected to have resulted in civilian casualties. It establishes procedures for investigating the circumstances of collateral damage, responding to criticisms from human rights advocates for a lack of transparency in the US military’s adjudication of civilian casualty claims. It also issues guidance for the public acknowledgement of civilian casualties, including condolence payments to those harmed during US military operations.

These initiatives carry important implications for the prospects of military success in protracted conflicts. They help manage blowback that often results from civilian casualties, including heightened terrorist recruitment and more brazen attacks, such as suicide operations. At the same time, research shows that punitive action is most important in demonstrating sincere remorse.

By this measure, the CHMR-AP falls short. It does not take the crucial steps of pledging to hold commanders responsible for preventable errors and committing to issue condolence payments commensurate with the economic, psychological, and social costs imposed on the families of unintended victims.

Rather, the CHMR-AP only promises to establish procedures that enhance the US military’s “ability to identify instances where institutional or individual accountability may be appropriate,” therefore preserving “decision space for commanders while mitigating civilian harm.” The plan also emphasizes that condolence payments are “not for the purpose of providing assistance, compensation, or relief.” Yet research shows that targeting errors often result in significant economic costs for victims’ families by removing key sources of income, and that compensating for these hardships can reduce the level of violence in conflict zones.

The CHMR-AP signals the US military’s renewed commitment to protecting civilians on the battlefield. Indeed, experts contend that preventing collateral damage is one of the most important military objectives in contemporary warfare. At the same time, the plan doesn’t go far enough to fulfill this obligation. To implement meaningful change, military leaders need to do more to shape the policies that govern operations. And they need to hold subordinate commanders publicly accountable for preventable targeting errors.

Paul Lushenko is a lieutenant colonel in the US Army, senior fellow at the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University, Council on Foreign Relations term member, and coeditor of Drones and Global Order: Implications of Remote Warfare for International Society.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: J.M. Eddins Jr., US Air Force

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mwi.usma.edu · by Paul Lushenko · September 12, 2022

13. As Ukraine counterattacks, Russia’s military facing steep artillery, resupply challenges

It is all about logistics. (no surprise)

As Ukraine counterattacks, Russia’s military facing steep artillery, resupply challenges - Breaking Defense

Even before this weeks' gains by Ukraine, there were signs that Russia's artillery is wearing down, and that it is running low on munitions - potentially limiting Moscow's options.

breakingdefense.com · by Reuben Johnson · September 11, 2022

Tank and motor artillery systems, captured by Ukrainian forces during the war against Russia, are exhibited on Khreshchatyk street ahead of Ukraine’s Independence Day in Kyiv, Ukraine on August 22, 2022. (Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

WARSAW — The rapid success of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in recent days has left Russian forces retreating and yet more videos on social media of abandoned tanks and artillery units. And for Russia, every piece of hardware destroyed or abandoned on the battlefield underlines a growing consensus among Russia watchers that Moscow’s losses of both personnel and equipment in Ukraine are reaching a potential breaking point.

In discussions with Breaking Defense and in public writings, analysts particularly point to industrial challenges facing Russia’s military. Six months into what was expected to be a quick strike campaign, facing a Ukraine push that has reportedly liberated the key Russian logistics hub of Izium, Russia’s ability to resupply for its own counter is deeply in question.

Pavel Luzin, a Russian defense sector analyst from the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), has compared Moscow’s declining production in the defense industrial sector and sinking manpower levels with the rate of consumption of munitions and personnel losses in the war in Ukraine. He came to the inescapable conclusion that the Russian war machine will soon be unable to function due to a lack of both.

“For Russia, six months of war have led not only to colossal irreplaceable losses in manpower, but also to a huge waste of weapons and military equipment: guided missiles are already very scarce, shells for artillery and armored vehicles will be exhausted by the end of the year, and the state of military aviation precludes a full-scale air campaign,” Luzin wrote in an Aug. 30 analysis. “Because of the sanctions, Russia cannot continue full industrial production of weapons and replenish its arms stockpiles, which are rapidly running out.”

There are plenty of anecdotes to back up the idea that Russia is having a hard time keeping its forces supplied. One recent video shows two Ukrainian soldiers inspecting a Russian T-80BVM model tank produced at the Omsk plant. They reveal that none of the reactive armor compartments were loaded with the explosive charges that are supposed to detonate and destroy an incoming ATGM before it can penetrate the hull.

“Look at this, they are all like this,” one of the two Ukrainians says as he opens the reactive armor blocks one after the other and finding them filled with rubber quadrangles roughly the size and thickness of the average mousepad. “These would not protect against anything.” The other Ukrainian soldier then comments that the turret is not a standard T-80 design but from an older-model T-64 and that the commander’s machine gun model on the turret lacks the required range.

Other photos taken earlier in the year show upgraded T-72B3 and T-80 models fitted with “skirt armor,” which are soft-sided pouches attached to the chassis, filled with sand and composite “egg-carton” shape forms designed to add rigidity to the individual protective pouches. A few years ago Russian state agencies were reporting that there were some 1,000 tanks equipped with this kind of external protective, ignoring the fact that simple sand and composite inserts are obsolete protection against current-day ATGMs.

Asked about the takeaway from those photos and videos, a former US Army special forces operative now serving in one of the international legions in southern Ukraine confirmed such equipment has become fairly common on the battlefield

“Yeah, we have seen the same kind of unprotected tanks,” he told Breaking Defense. “The [reactive armor] compartments are filled with nothing but cardboard in some cases. It is obvious how pervasive the corruption has been. Everyone — including up to the generals — has been stealing everything in sight.”

Asked how long Russian combat operations could be sustained in light of the dismal state of the units in the field he had been he answered confidently: “This will be over by the Spring. Maybe even by the end of the year.”

Artillery Concerns

Going through open-source reporting, public analyses from researchers, discussions with sources and what little reliable information still comes out from Russia, it is clear there are major challenges ahead for Russia when it comes to a key part of its military strategy: conventional artillery.

In the six months since the Feb. 24 invasion, Moscow’s military has expended, per best estimates, no less than seven million shells. Add to this consumption the number of artillery rounds lost due to Ukrainian strikes on Russian ammunition stockpiles located close to the front lines. If the conflict continues at the pace seen thus far, Russia’s military will find itself running short of shells by the end of the year and will have to conserve their use.

Another issue is that artillery and tank gun barrels wear out after a finite number of rounds have been fired. Russian troops are not known for being diligent about the maintenance of these systems, so the most likely outcome is that the shortage of artillery rounds will be accompanied by a drop-off in the number of useable artillery pieces as well. A sign that the shortage of useable tubes has already begun may be Moscow’s recent increased use of Almaz-Antei S-300 and S-400 missiles in their secondary surface-to-surface ballistic missile mode rather than as air defense weapons.

Ukrainians arrive at Khreschatyk Street to see the seized military equipment and weapons including tank and motorized artillery systems belonging to the Russian army displayed by Ukraine ahead of the country’s 31st anniversary of Independence Day in Kyiv, Ukraine on August 21, 2022. (Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Another indicator of Russia’s concern about supplies? Russia has reportedly turned to North Korea to purchase millions of artillery rounds, chiefly 152mm shells, and other munitions from the isolated Stalinist dictatorship. While North Korea has a long-standing emphasis on conventional artillery, that Russia’s vaunted military would have to turn to Pyongyang for military aid speaks volumes.

“The only reason the Kremlin should have to buy artillery shells or rockets from North Korea or anyone is because [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has been unwilling or unable to mobilize the Russian economy for war at even the most basic level,” Frederick W. Kagan from the American Enterprise Institute told the New York Times. “This is very likely an indication of a massive failure of the Russian military industrial complex that likely has deep roots and very serious implications for the Russian armed forces.”

Meanwhile, there are scant indications that Russia’s defense industrial sector can keep pace with the marked spike in demand the op-tempo of the war in Ukraine is creating.

One of the most important suppliers at the bottom of the munitions food chain is the Kazan Gunpowder Plant, which in 2014 purchased manufacturing equipment from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. This required the plant to acquire chemical components for its production from foreign suppliers as well, the purchase of which is now denied due to sanctions. Similar acquisitions of foreign-design machinery were made by the Federal Research and Production Center (FNPTs) Altai and the other Russian developers and suppliers of gunpowder and solid rocket propellants.

The assessment of several Russian analysts is that the ties with these foreign suppliers deteriorated in 2014 after Moscow’s invasion of Crimea. The production equipment acquired also began to show wear and tear before it could be properly serviced or modernized. The plants also began to lose personnel due to the “peaks and valleys” nature of defense procurement and production costs began to increase. A subsequent corralling of several of these munitions enterprises under one management structure enhanced neither quality levels nor productivity. Labor efficiency levels sank to levels 9-10 times lower than that of American counterparts to these firms, according to one estimate.

In the last week of August these gunpowder plants saw a sudden, unscheduled visit by the Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the defense sector, Denis Manturov, and Deputy Chairman of Russia’s National Security Council, Dmitri Medvedev, who was formerly Russian president from 2008-2012 and Prime Minister from 2012 to 2020.

“Inspections by officials at this level are tell-tale signs that there are serious deficiencies in the production levels,” said a Russian defense specialist in Moscow who spoke with Breaking Defense. “There is also very little chance that these senior officials — no matter how forcefully they lean on the management teams at these enterprises — are going to inspire the workforce to magically become more capable and efficient.”

Imported Parts Becoming A Challenge

Beyond these manufacturing shortcomings are the multiple failures of Russian defense firms to reduce their dependence on imported components. Citing the work of several foreign analytical reports, Luzin points out that Russia’s industry has become progressively more dependent on foreign-made electronic systems, due in no small part to the fact that import substitution it is flawed concept.

“The very notion of import substitution and autarchy is a dead-end, unreasonable, and generally false idea that simply rejects the division of labor and the benefits of international cooperation,” he writes. “For an authoritarian system and the command-administrative economic model, the path to self-isolation and inevitable self-destruction is predetermined.”

This has proven to be the case with the most sophisticated systems in Moscow’s arsenal. According to a Ukrainian missile guidance system designer who spoke to Breaking Defense at the beginning of the war, who is very familiar with its design, some 70 percent of the components used in the now-famous Kalibr cruise missile (9M729) are of foreign origin. “There is now virtually no way for Russia to re-start a production line at this point,” was his assessment in early March.

Moreover, even prior to Moscow’s invasion and the subsequent sanctions regime imposed by the US, the EU and others, the production of this missile and other munitions with a range in excess of 300 km was no more than 225 per year, per sources. Russia has tried to compensate for the small numbers of modern systems available by bombarding Ukrainian cities with the nearly obsolete Raduga Kh-22 cruise missile — a 1960s-era design. These are typically launched from Tupolev Tu-22M bombers while they are still safely cruising in Belarusian air space.

However, these long-range missiles are no longer being manufactured and the Kh-32 that was developed to replace it began series production only four years ago at a rate of about 20 per year. There are today no options for a dramatic increase in missile output, causing the use of long-range missile systems to drop from the dozens per day that were fired in the beginning of March to a parsimonious launch rate of only one missile every few days.

Russian T-72B tank and 2S19 Msta self-propelled howitzer destroyed on the battlefields of Ukraine are seen as part of a display ‘For Our Freedom and Yours’ at Royal Castle Square. Warsaw, Poland on July 2nd. 2022. The exhibition showing damaged military hardware is intented to prove that Russia can be defeated. Later it will travel to other European capitals. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Armor And Air

The same culprits bedeviling Russian munition production are factors in any attempt to replace tanks or aircraft lost in the fight. And if you look at the almost daily videos that pop up online, it is clear the losses are real.

When the war began, only 2,000 of the roughly 3,300 tanks in Russian army service were rated as modern or upgraded. Although numbers vary, even conservative estimates put the loss of Russian tanks to date at more than 1,000 units. Ukrainian reports are that at least 34 percent of the tanks lost by Russia are due to them being abandoned by their crews, a significantly higher rate than the norm for combat operations.

Aviation losses have been lower than in the armored vehicle community, but production of new combat aircraft has all but halted. The support of existing platforms in operation is also severely impacted by the same sanctions against the importation of foreign electronics that cripples Russian missile production.

One source with knowledge of Russia’s industrial status told Breaking Defense that production of the Sukhoi Su-35 had declined precipitously from a planned 120 aircraft in 2021 to an actual number of 10-12 units. What remains of the aircraft industry at this point is only capable of manufacturing a small number of essentially hand-assembled aircraft with whatever production materials that remain on-site and with a complete loss of any economies of scale.

Combat losses to Ukraine’s own tactical airpower and air defense units has the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) unable of establishing air superiority in the conflict. Pilots are staying within safe corridors or “bubbles” provided by their own SAM units close to their lines and do not place themselves in harm’s way.

The lack of confidence in their survivability is demonstrated in the difference between their operational profile in the Ukraine theatre and how they perform in the Vostok 2022 joint training exercises currently taking place in the Russian Far East. In Ukraine, VKS Sukhoi Su-25s tend to fly at very low altitude and fire unguided rockets to reduce the probability of being engaged by the Ukrainian Air Forces. Meanwhile, in the Vostok exercises, the same model Su-25s drop unguided bombs from medium altitudes as per standard procedure — as their targets are only mockups representing “SAM systems of the conditional adversary” that do not shoot back.

Desperate Measures

In April, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London published an assessment that included details of how Russia intends to try and evade the sanctions regime imposed on them by the West. Moscow’s basic strategy is to re-invigorate the channels for illegal procurement of foreign technology that were utilized by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The difference between today and the Cold War period is that there is no nation more familiar with the tricks used by Russia to circumvent this technology export bans than Ukraine itself, which is determined to see Moscow thwarted. Its intelligence services have been able to procure detailed knowledge of Russian operations, to include Russian defense industry’s high-tech “shopping list” of high-technology components, copies of which have been provided to the US publication Politico.

Nations that maintain ties with Russia at one level or another — the Czech Republic, Serbia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Turkey, India, and the UAE — have also been mentioned as potential third-party pass-throughs that could place large orders for these electronic systems and then illegally transship them to Russia.

China has additionally been identified as another portal that could be used for Moscow as a mechanism for financing these purchases. Zongyuan Liu, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, has stated that “Russia could take advantage of Chinese ‘burner banks’,” a reference to the “burner phones” used by drug traffickers and other criminal operatives, “which facilitate illegal transactions but are then liquidated or reconstituted before their activities are discovered.”

“This is an established model,” she recently wrote in the Financial Times, “and it is already used by North Korea (DPRK) and the Iranians.” If the Russians begin to operate this way on a large scale it will have to involve Beijing — creating a situation where “China could have more leverage over Russia in negotiating oil and gas deals, meaning it could buy Russian oil and gas at heavy discounts.”

And of course, both North Korea and Iran could lend their support and expertise to Russia on the best way to get around sanctions. Increased military ties to Russia — North Korea through artillery sales, Iran through drone sales — likely comes with greater political discussions as well.

Six months in, the fight in Ukraine is far from finished. But for those in Kyiv and its supporters, even before the success of the last few days, there are signs the Russian military machine could run out of steam, limiting Putin’s options to push back and reclaim territory.

14. Old World Order

Conclusion:

That’s precisely Zarakol’s point: studying societies outside Europe that aspired to create world orders before 1500 reveals much about the modern world. The world orders that earlier rulers outside Europe established remain deeply relevant because the people who live in those regions today recall those past exploits and systems and sometimes try to recreate them. Paying attention to the diplomatic practices that earlier rulers, including the Chinggisids, developed provides a valuable counterbalance to the singular focus on the Westphalian order. In this multipolar world, U.S. leaders spend their days considering the next moves of their counterparts in Ankara, Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, and Tokyo. And yet they rarely consider the histories of these parts of the world. The time has come for more people to follow Zarakol’s lead and study the past of the many political and economic centers outside Europe.

Old World Order

The Real Origin of International Relations

By Valerie Hansen

September/October 2022

Foreign Affairs · by The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began · September 6, 2022

How old is the modern world? Scholars of international relations tend to date the beginning of their field of study to around 500 years ago, when a handful of states in western Europe began to establish colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In their view, the transformations unleashed by European colonialism made the world what it is today. So, too, did the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, two treaties signed by feuding European powers that ended a series of bloody wars. That was the moment international relations truly began, the argument runs. Thanks to this settlement, states for the first time formally agreed to respect their mutual sovereignty over demarcated territories, laying the groundwork for the abiding “Westphalian order” of a world divided into sovereign nation-states.

This rather Eurocentric view of the past still shapes how most international relations scholars see the world. When searching for the history relevant to today’s world events, they rarely look beyond the European world order constructed after 1500. Before then, they reason, politics did not happen on a global scale. And states outside Europe did not adhere to Westphalian principles. As a result, international relations scholars have deemed vast tracts of history largely irrelevant to the understanding of modern politics.

An exclusive focus on a world in which Europeans armed with guns and cannons dominated the various peoples they encountered misses much of what happened outside Europe and the places Europeans colonized. This focus reads history backward from the primacy of the West, as if all that happened before led inevitably to the hegemony of a handful of European and North American states. The rise of non-Western powers, such as China, India, and Japan in recent decades, has revealed how misguided such an approach is.

Eurocentric view of the past shape how most international relations scholars see the world.

In Before the West, Ayse Zarakol, a professor of international relations at the University of Cambridge, proposes an ingenious way out of this intellectual impasse. Writing in clear, forceful prose, she considers the experience of earlier non-Western empires that sought to create world orders. Doing so makes it possible to present a new history of international relations beyond the Westphalian order. Her study reveals the telling ways that polities in non-Western parts of the world interacted with one another in the past, shaping how modern political leaders understand the international order today.

Zarakol challenges the view that the modern international system began in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia. Instead, she proposes a provocative alternative, dating the beginning of the modern world order to 1206, when Genghis Khan was acclaimed ruler of all the Eurasian steppe peoples. Zarakol chooses to focus on the “Chinggisid order” he and his various successors brought into being. (Genghis Khan’s name in Mongolian is Chinggis Khan, so scholars use the adjective Chinggisid to describe anything associated with him.)

She presents a stirring and original thesis but overlooks some crucial primary sources about diplomacy in the Mongol empire. Such evidence would sharpen her account of precisely how the Mongols and their successors interacted with diplomats from neighboring states in this fledgling world order.

Zarakol is right to point out the importance of the Chinggisid order as a parallel to the Westphalian order. Starting in the thirteenth century under Genghis Khan and his successors, the Mongols created the world’s largest contiguous empire, which extended across the steppe from Hungary in the east to China in the west. Genghis Khan aspired to rule the entire world, and he conducted diplomatic relations with his neighbors on that basis. None of his successors managed to control as large a territory, but taking the Mongols as their model, they would create the Ming, Mughal, Safavid, and Timurid empires respectively in present-day China, India, Iran, and Uzbekistan. Most important for modern international relations today, the peoples now living in the former Mongol empire are fully aware of this past, as exemplified by the ambitions of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

THE WORLDS GENGHIS MADE

Zarakol’s decision to focus on the Mongols allows her to break with Eurocentric conventions of diplomatic and international history in refreshing ways. Interested in Asian polities, she does not assume that their interactions with European actors were more important than their relations with one another. Nor does she make the mistake of assuming that earlier Asian powers were only regional powers. Genghis Khan and his successors all aspired to rule the globe as they knew it. True, they did not succeed (nor, for that matter, did any European power), but they led sprawling armies powered by mounted warriors and established empires that engaged in diplomacy with multiple neighbors and with states far from the Eurasian steppes—a lasting model for subsequent Asian rulers.

The Chinggisid order, as Zarakol describes it, persisted for nearly 500 years (longer than its Westphalian counterpart to date) and had three different phases. The first was from around 1200 to 1400. It comprised both the unified Mongol empire ruled initially by Genghis Khan and, after the empire broke apart in 1260, its four successor states in modern-day China, Iran, Russia and Ukraine, and Central Asia. The rulers of the three western successor states eventually converted to Islam, while Kublai Khan, the ruler of the easternmost quadrant in modern-day China and Mongolia, supported Buddhists, Daoists, and Confucians, among other religious figures.

The peaceful coexistence of these quadrants in the fourteenth century marked “the beginning of modern international relations . . . when rational state interest trumped religious affiliation.” Here, Zarakol overstates her claim: religious affiliation was often interwoven with “rational state interests” in polities of that time. A ruler’s choice of which religion, or indeed religions, to patronize largely determined the choice of his political allies.

Eurocentric view of the past shape how most international relations scholars see the world.

The second Chinggisid world order comprised the Timurid empire of Timur the Lame (also known as Tamerlane), who lived from 1336 to 1405, and the Ming dynasty in China, which reigned from 1368 to 1644. Timur modeled his state on that of Genghis Khan and even married one of his descendants to strengthen his association with the great khan. In sharp contrast, the rulers of the Ming dynasty in China concentrated all their resources on defeating various Mongol and Turkic adversaries (including Timur’s warriors). Even so, the Ming emperors hoped to establish themselves as successors to the land empire of the Mongols, and they dispatched a fleet of treasure ships carrying 28,000 men as far as East Africa to display their might to the world. As different as their views of the Mongols were, Timur and the early Ming emperors all aspired to rule empires as large and as impressive as Genghis Khan’s.

The third world order Zarakol proposes encompassed the millennial sovereigns, or sahibkiran, of the Mughals, the Ottomans, and the Safavids. With no family ties to the Mongols, these rulers did not explicitly style themselves after Genghis Khan, but all hoped to govern the world. They succeeded in harnessing the power of mounted warriors to conquer large spans of territory in modern-day India, Turkey, and Iran respectively, and their empires all posed serious competition to the European colonial powers. Appropriately, Zarakol ends her book with the weakening of these three dynasties around 1700.

Spanning five centuries, these Chinggisid states shared certain key features. Rather than choosing their ruler by primogeniture, as many European powers did, they selected new rulers through a system of “tanistry,” a term (borrowed from the historical practices of Celtic tribes in the British Isles) that means that the best qualified individual should rule the group after the death of a leader. Although this sounds vaguely democratic, it was anything but. In practice, it meant that anyone seeking power had to prevail in a violent free-for-all that could last years before all the warriors gathered to acclaim a new leader. The Mongols believed that heaven, or the cosmos, selected the ultimate victor in these succession struggles, and in their efforts to understand heaven better, the Chinggisid rulers invited foreign astronomers to visit their courts and financed the construction of massive observatories.

According to Zarakol, the Chinggisid rulers over the centuries shared “a particular vision of the whole world” and created, modified, and reproduced “political, economic, and social institutions.” Historians have paid more attention to the granular reality of this political and institutional history, but Zarakol does a service by bringing it to the attention of scholars of international relations. In so doing, she moves beyond a Eurocentric vision of international relations by studying actors, specifically those in modern-day China, India, Iran, Russia, and Uzbekistan, who aspired to create world empires as impressive as that of the Mongols. Getting past narratives that are limited to a single country, race, or religion, she explains how different rulers in Asia interacted with each other and in the process created a diplomatic system comparable to the Westphalian order.

FELT BOOTS AND METAL Passports

Five centuries is a long timespan to cover, and the first part of Before the West bogs down as it recounts the major events of multiple dynasties and explains why they qualify (or do not) as Chinggisid. But rather striking in her survey is the lack of much material about diplomacy, the book’s stated subject.

This omission is surprising because two detailed eyewitness accounts of diplomatic visits to Chinggisid rulers are widely available in English translation. These narratives describe how the Chinggisid diplomatic order actually functioned—in contrast to Zarakol’s often rosy-eyed claims about the efficiency of Mongol rule.

William of Rubruck, a Franciscan monk originally from Belgium, visited the court of Mongke, a grandson of Genghis Khan, near Karakorum in modern-day Mongolia between 1253 and 1255. The French crusader King Louis IX sent William as a missionary—and not an envoy—to the Mongols, but when he arrived at the port of Soldaia on the Black Sea, his Mongol hosts had already heard from local merchants that he was a diplomat. William decided to accept the privileges offered to emissaries rather than try to explain his hope to missionize. Like all Franciscan friars, he wore a brown robe and went barefoot, attire that made his trip across the freezing steppe especially difficult. (Eventually, he gave in and donned fur clothing and felt boots.)

Although much less well known than Marco Polo’s travelogue, which was written some 50 years later, William of Rubruck’s account runs nearly 300 pages in the 1990 translation by Peter Jackson. It offers the most perceptive and the most detailed description of the Mongol empire available today. An attentive observer, William wrote his dispassionate report for a one-person audience, his sponsor, Louis IX. As he explained of the Mongols, “When I came among them I really felt as if I were entering some other world.” His account shows exactly how the Mongols treated the diplomats who entered their realm.

A statue of Genghis Khan near Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, September 2019

B. Rentsendorj / Reuters

The Mongols granted a metal tablet of authority to all visiting envoys that entitled them to food and fresh horses at the postal stations located every 30 miles or so along the main roads traversing the empire. Those carrying such tablets could also spend the night at the postal stations. The system worked well but not flawlessly, as William discovered when he crossed the Don River and the locals refused him assistance. It took three days for him to obtain a fresh horse. Travel conditions were arduous. Once William began to travel at the pace of a Mongol warrior, he could cover 60 miles each day, changing horses two or three times. Breakfast was either broth or a light grain soup, and there was no lunch; the only solid food travelers received was at dinner.

In July 1253, when he arrived at the court of Batu, a great-grandson of Genghis Khan, William requested official permission to preach among the Mongols (some of whom already followed the teachings of the Church of the East, the branch of Christianity that spread through much of Asia after the fifth century ad.) Batu sent William to the capital at Karakorum, where his father Mongke, the great khan, presided over the Mongol empire. William does not explain Batu’s decision, but presumably Batu, as a regional leader, handled all domestic matters related to his own jurisdiction but had to refer matters of international diplomacy to the great khan. Zarakol overstates the efficiency of Chinggisid rule: only the khan could make decisions on certain topics. If he was not available, no one else could decide for him.

William arrived at Mongke’s winter court on the River Ongin in modern Mongolia; there, the great khan spent the season surrounded by his retinue and his own herds. William made his request to proselytize through an interpreter, but the interpreter and the khan were drunk, and William did not get a definite answer. Initially permitted to stay two months at the court, William remained there for three and spent an additional three at the Mongol capital of Karakorum. He participated in a debate over religion with Muslims, Buddhists, and other Christians—and for once he had a competent interpreter—but the debate was inconclusive, and William left without receiving permission to preach inside Mongol territory.

The modern world order began in 1206, when Genghis Khan became ruler of all steppe peoples.

William’s account captures the reality of Mongol governance. Mongol rulers may have aspired to create a world order, but their empire remained profoundly decentralized despite the efficient postal system that allowed messages and people such as William to cross the empire. The great khan did not administer his empire directly. Instead, he appointed local governors who ruled on their own, largely continuing the policies of whichever authorities had governed before the rise of the Mongols.

About 150 years later, a Spanish diplomat had an experience remarkably similar to William’s. Ruy González de Clavijo visited Timur in Samarkand, a major trading emporium in modern-day Uzbekistan, for two months in 1404. Dispatched by Henry III of Castile, who hoped to form an alliance against the Ottomans, Clavijo and his entourage delivered a letter and gifts to Timur. The wealth of Timur’s capital, where 50,000 of his supporters pitched their tents, impressed Clavijo deeply. Timur hosted the Spaniards generously, offering them ample supplies of meat and wine and inviting them to multiple receptions.

But when Timur fell ill, three of his advisers took over. Unable to exercise any real authority, they urged the Spaniards to return home—which Clavijo resisted because his mission was to obtain a response from Timur for Henry III. Just two months after he had arrived, the unsuccessful Clavijo set off for Spain, only to be caught in the conflicts that broke out among those who aspired to take over Timur’s empire. Clavijo’s experience mirrored William of Rubruck’s: the only person who could decide anything about foreign relations was the khan himself.

Zarakol credits Genghis Khan with “disseminating, through his own example, the norm of the political ruler as the exclusive supreme authority, legitimized by world domination.” She claims that he introduced “an extremely high degree of political centralization . . . subordinating all competing forms of authority to himself.” During military campaigns, the khan had the power to lead, and he rewarded his followers with plunder. But during peacetime, the ruler had much less power. Still, Zarakol’s views do not square with the experience of William of Rubruck and Clavijo. The khan maintained “supreme authority” in the sense that only he could decide on certain matters, such as giving a single Franciscan friar permission to preach or sending a letter to another ruler, but he never enforced policies that integrated the different parts of his empire in a meaningful way.

OTHER CENTERS, OTHER WORLDS

Scholars can debate whether a given interpretation of the past is accurate, but popular understandings of the past—especially among policymakers—often shape modern international relations. As Zarakol suggests, scholars need to ask of the period she covers, “What logics were operating in this era that are still operating in ours?” Her final chapter explores Eurasianism—a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century intellectual movement that identified non-European precedents for world orders spanning both Europe and Asia—and, more specifically, how intellectuals in Japan, Russia, and Turkey understood the long-term impact of Mongol rule on their own societies.

This focus is particularly timely. Since the 1920s, Russian scholars, such as Nikolai Trubetzkoy, George Vernadsky, and Lev Gumilyov, have debated how two centuries of Mongol rule affected modern Russia. They have called for modern leaders to emulate Genghis Khan and to unify Russians so that they can build a new empire that spans Europe and Asia. Such thinking has gained enormous popularity since the collapse of communism, and Putin is regularly compared to Genghis Khan. Putin’s advisers are not concerned with historical accuracy. In making the case for Eurasianism and how it will empower Russia, they invoke traditions that have nothing to do with the Treaty of Westphalia. Zarakol’s point is well taken: the history underlying Eurasianism helps make sense of the events occurring in the territory once ruled by the Mongols.

Vladimir Putin’s drive for a new Eurasian empire seeks to include the heartland of Russian orthodoxy.

Like any genuinely pioneering book, Before the West covers so much new ground that it does not get all the details straight. (In particular, it exaggerates the centralization of the Mongol empire.) Still, Zarakol has provided an important service: she has shown how the history of different parts of the world before 1500 informs the present and the future.

By starting in 1206, however, she risks overlooking the importance of even earlier events. When Prince Vladimir the Great (Putin’s namesake) converted to Eastern orthodoxy in around 988, his capital lay in Kyiv. The Russian president’s drive for a new Eurasian empire seeks to include the heartland of Russian orthodoxy, which formed in the late 900s.

That’s precisely Zarakol’s point: studying societies outside Europe that aspired to create world orders before 1500 reveals much about the modern world. The world orders that earlier rulers outside Europe established remain deeply relevant because the people who live in those regions today recall those past exploits and systems and sometimes try to recreate them. Paying attention to the diplomatic practices that earlier rulers, including the Chinggisids, developed provides a valuable counterbalance to the singular focus on the Westphalian order. In this multipolar world, U.S. leaders spend their days considering the next moves of their counterparts in Ankara, Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, and Tokyo. And yet they rarely consider the histories of these parts of the world. The time has come for more people to follow Zarakol’s lead and study the past of the many political and economic centers outside Europe.

Foreign Affairs · by The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began · September 6, 2022

15. How to Build a Better Order

Excerpts:

Managing U.S.-Chinese security competition has a multilateral dimension, as well. Although Asian countries are concerned by China’s rising power and want U.S. protection, they do not want to have to choose between Washington and Beijing. Efforts to strengthen the U.S. position in Asia are bound to be alarming to China, but the magnitude of its concerns and the intensity of its response are not predetermined, and minimizing them (to the extent possible) is in everyone’s interest. As Washington strives to shore up its Asian alliances, therefore, it should also support regional efforts to reduce tensions in Asia and encourage its allies to avoid unnecessary quarrels with China or with one another. U.S.-promoted regional trade deals, such as the newly launched Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, should focus on maximizing economic benefits rather than trying to isolate and exclude China.

Although we have emphasized state-to-state relations in this discussion, our approach could be equally productive for nonstate actors, civil society organizations, academics, thought leaders, and anyone with a stake in a particular issue area. It encourages members of the global community to go beyond the stark antinomy of conflict versus cooperation and focus on practical questions: What actions should be prohibited outright? What compromises or adjustments would be feasible and mutually beneficial? When is independent action to be expected and legitimate, and how can well-calibrated actions be distinguished from those that are excessive? And when will preferred outcomes require multilateral agreements to ensure that third parties are not adversely affected by the agreements or actions undertaken by others? Such conversations will not produce immediate or total consensus, but more structured exchanges on these questions could clarify tradeoffs, elicit clearer explanations or justifications for competing positions, and increase the odds of reaching mutually beneficial outcomes.

It is possible—some would say likely—that mutual suspicion, incompetent leadership, ignorance, or sheer bad luck will combine to produce a future world order that is significantly poorer and substantially more dangerous than the present one. But such an outcome is not inevitable. If political leaders and the countries they represent genuinely wish to construct a more prosperous and secure world, the tools to do so are available.

How to Build a Better Order

Limiting Great Power Rivalry in an Anarchic World

By Dani Rodrik and Stephen M. Walt

September/October 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Dani Rodrik and Stephen M. Walt · September 6, 2022

The global order is deteriorating before our eyes. The relative decline of U.S. power and the concomitant rise of China have eroded the partially liberal, rules-based system once dominated by the United States and its allies. Repeated financial crises, rising inequality, renewed protectionism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and growing reliance on economic sanctions have brought the post-Cold War era of hyperglobalization to an end. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may have revitalized NATO, but it has also deepened the divide between East and West and North and South. Meanwhile, shifting domestic priorities in many countries and increasingly competitive geopolitics have halted the drive for greater economic integration and blocked collective efforts to address looming global dangers.

The international order that will emerge from these developments is impossible to predict. Looking ahead, it is easy to imagine a less prosperous and more dangerous world characterized by an increasingly hostile United States and China, a remilitarized Europe, inward-oriented regional economic blocs, a digital realm divided along geopolitical lines, and the growing weaponization of economic relations for strategic ends.

But one can also envision a more benign order in which the United States, China, and other world powers compete in some areas, cooperate in others, and observe new and more flexible rules of the road designed to preserve the main elements of an open world economy and prevent armed conflict while allowing countries greater leeway to address urgent economic and social priorities at home. More optimistically, one can even imagine a world in which the leading powers actively work together to limit the effects of climate change, improve global health, reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction, and jointly manage regional crises.

Establishing such a new and more benign order is not as hard as it might sound. Drawing on the efforts of the U.S.-China Trade Policy Working Group—a forum convened in 2019 by New York University legal scholar Jeffrey S. Lehman, Chinese economist Yang Yao, and one of us (Dani Rodrik) to map out a more constructive approach to bilateral ties—we propose a simple, four-part framework to guide relations among major powers. This framework presupposes only minimal agreement on core principles—at least at first—and acknowledges that there will be enduring disagreements about how many issues should be addressed. Rather than imposing a detailed set of prescriptive rules (as the World Trade Organization and other international regimes do), this framework would function as a “meta-regime”: a device for guiding a process through which rival states or even adversaries could seek agreement or accommodation on a host of issues. When they do not agree, as will often be the case, adopting the framework can still enhance communication among them, clarify why they disagree, and offer them incentives to avoid inflicting harm on others, even as they seek to protect their own interests.

Crucially, this framework could be put in place by the United States, China, and other major powers themselves, as they deal with a variety of contentious issues, including climate change and global security. As has already been shown on several occasions, the approach could provide what a single-minded focus on great-power competition cannot: a way for rival powers and even adversaries to find common ground to maintain the physical conditions necessary for human existence, advance economic prosperity, and minimize the risks of major war, while preserving their own security.

Incentives to compete are ever present in a world lacking a central authority, and the strongest powers will no doubt continue to eye one another warily. If any of the major powers make economic and geopolitical dominance their overriding goal, the prospects for a more benign global order are slim. But systemic pressures to compete still leave considerable room for human agency, and political leaders can still decide whether to embrace the logic of all-out rivalry or strive for something better. Human beings cannot suspend the force of gravity, but they eventually learned to overcome its effects and took to the skies. The conditions that encourage states to compete cannot be eliminated, but political leaders can still take actions to mitigate them if they wish.

Fewer Rules, Better Behavior

According to many accounts, the international order that emerged in the 1990s has increasingly been eroded by the dynamics of great-power competition. Nonetheless, the deterioration of the rules-based order need not result in great-power conflict. Although the United States and China both prioritize security, that goal does not render irrelevant the national and international goals that both share. Moreover, a country that invested all its resources in military capabilities and neglected other objectives—such as an equitable and prosperous economy or the climate transition—would not be secure in the long run, even if it started out as a global power. The problem, then, is not the need for security in an uncertain world but the manner in which that goal is pursued and the tradeoffs states face when balancing security and other important goals.

It is increasingly clear that the existing, Western-oriented approach is no longer adequate to address the many forces governing international power relations. A future world order will need to accommodate non-Western powers and tolerate greater diversity in national institutional arrangements and practices. Western policy preferences will prevail less, the quest for harmonization across economies that defined the era of hyperglobalization will be attenuated, and each country will have to be granted greater leeway in managing its economy, society, and political system. International institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund will have to adapt to that reality. Rather than more conflict, however, these pressures could lead to a new and more stable order. Just as it is possible for major powers to achieve national security without seeking global primacy, it is possible and even advantageous for countries to reap the benefits of economic interdependence within looser, more permissive international rules.

In our framework, major global powers need not agree in advance on the detailed rules that would govern their interactions. Instead, as we have outlined in a working paper for the Harvard Kennedy School, they would agree only on an underlying approach to their relations in which all actions and issues would be grouped into four general categories: those that are prohibited, those in which mutual adjustments by two or more states could benefit all parties, those undertaken by a single state, and those that require multilateral involvement. This four-part approach does not assume that rival powers trust one another at the outset or even agree on which actions or issues belong in which category, but over time, successfully addressing disagreements within this framework would do much to increase trust and reduce the possibility of conflict.

A more stable order could rest on negotiation, not rules.

The first category—prohibited actions—would draw on norms that are already widely accepted by the United States, China, and other major powers. At a minimum, these might include commitments embodied in the UN Charter (such as the ban on acquiring territory by conquest), violations of diplomatic immunity, the use of torture, or armed attacks on another country’s ships or aircraft. States might also agree to forgo “beggar thy neighbor” economic policies in which domestic benefits come at the direct expense of harm done to others: the exercise of monopoly power in international trade, for instance, and deliberate currency manipulation. States will violate these prohibitions with some frequency, and governments will sometimes disagree on whether a particular action violates an established norm. But by recognizing this general category, they would be acknowledging that there are boundaries to acceptable actions and that crossing them has consequences.

The second category includes actions in which states stand to benefit by altering their own behavior in exchange for similar concessions by others. Obvious examples include bilateral trade accords and arms control agreements. Through mutual policy adjustments, rivals can reach agreements that benefit each other economically or eliminate specific areas of vulnerability, thereby making both countries more prosperous and secure and allowing them to shift defense spending to other needs. In theory, one could imagine the United States and China (or another major power) agreeing to limit certain military deployments or activities—such as reconnaissance operations near the other’s territory or harmful cyber-activities that could adversely affect the other’s digital infrastructure—in exchange for equivalent limitations by the other side.

When two states cannot reach a mutually beneficial bargain, the framework offers a third category, in which either side is free to take independent actions to advance specific national goals, consistent with the principle of sovereignty but subject to any previously agreed-on prohibitions. Countries frequently take independent economic actions because of differing national priorities. For example, all states set their own highway speed limits and education policies according to domestic preferences, even though higher speed limits can raise the price of oil on world markets and improving educational standards can affect international competition in skill-intensive sectors. On matters of national security, meaningful agreements among adversaries or geopolitical rivals are especially hard to reach, and independent action is the norm. Even so, the framework dictates that such actions must be well calibrated: to prevent tit-for-tat, escalatory steps that risk a destabilizing military buildup or even open conflict, remedies should be proportional to the security threat at hand and not designed to damage or punish a rival.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Lviv, August 2022

Murat Cetinmuhurdar / Presidential Press Office / via Reuters

Of course, what one country views as a well-calibrated response may be perceived as a provocation by an opponent, and worst-case estimates of a rival’s long-term intentions may make it hard to respond in a measured fashion. Such pressures are already apparent in the growing military competition between the United States and China. Yet both have powerful incentives to limit their independent actions and objectives. Given that both are vast countries with large populations, considerable wealth, and sizable nuclear arsenals, neither can entertain any realistic hope of conquering the other or compelling it to change its political system. Mutual coexistence is the only realistic possibility, and all-out efforts by either side to gain strategic superiority would simply divert resources from important social needs, forgo potential gains from cooperation, and raise the risk of a highly destructive war.

The fourth and final category concerns issues in which effective action requires the involvement of multiple states. Climate change and COVID-19 are obvious examples: in each case, the lack of an effective multilateral agreement has encouraged many states to free-ride, resulting in excessive carbon emissions in the former and inadequate global access to vaccines in the latter. In the security domain, multilateral agreements such as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty have done much to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. Because any world order ultimately rests on norms, rules, and institutions that determine how most states act most of the time, multilateral participation on many key issues will remain indispensable.

Viewed as a whole, our framework enables rival powers to move beyond the simple dichotomy of “friend or foe.” No doubt states will sometimes adopt policies with the express purpose of weakening a rival or gaining an enduring advantage over it. Our approach would not make this feature of international politics disappear entirely, neither for the major powers nor for many others. Nonetheless, by framing their relations around these four categories, rival powers such as the United States and China would be encouraged to explain their actions and clarify their motives to each other, thereby rendering many disputes less malign. Equally important, the framework increases the odds that cooperation would grow over time. A conversation structured along the lines we propose enables the parties to separate potential zones of cooperation from the more divisive or contentious issues, establish reputations, develop a degree of trust, and better understand the preferences and motives of their partners and rivals—as can be seen when considering concrete, real-world situations.

Strategic Transparency

Several recent conflicts clearly demonstrate the advantages of our approach. Consider the U.S.-Chinese competition over 5G wireless technology. The emergence of the Chinese company Huawei as a dominant force in global 5G networks has concerned U.S. and European policymakers not only because of the commercial consequences but also because of the national security implications: Huawei is believed to have close ties to the Chinese security establishment. But the hard-line response by the United States—which has sought to cripple Huawei’s international activities and pressure U.S. telecommunications operators not to do business with the company—has only ratcheted up tensions. By contrast, our framework, although it would allow Western countries considerable latitude in limiting the activities of Chinese firms such as Huawei within their own countries, largely on national security grounds, would also limit attempts by the United States and its allies to undermine Chinese industries through deliberate and poorly justified international restrictions.

In fact, the promise of a better calibrated strategy for dealing with the Huawei conflict has already been shown. In contrast to the actions taken by Washington, the British government entered an arrangement with Huawei in which the company’s products in the British telecommunications market undergo an annual security evaluation. The evaluations are conducted by the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre, whose governing board includes a Huawei representative along with senior officials from the British government and the United Kingdom’s telecommunications sector. If the annual evaluation finds areas of concern, officials must make them public and state their rationale. Thus, the 2019 HCSEC report found that Huawei’s software and cybersecurity system posed risks to British operators and would require significant adjustments to address those risks. In July 2020, the United Kingdom decided to ban Huawei from its 5G network.

Ultimately, the decision may have had less to do with the hcsec report than with direct U.S. pressure, but this example still illustrates the possibilities of a more transparent and less contentious approach. The technical reasoning on which a national security determination was made could be seen and evaluated by all parties, including domestic firms with a commercial stake in Huawei’s investments, the Chinese government, and Huawei itself. This feature alone can help build trust as each party develops a fuller understanding of the motives and actions of the others. Transparency can also make it more difficult for home governments to invoke national security concerns as a cover for purely protectionist commercial considerations. And it may facilitate reaching mutually beneficial bargains in the long run.

Nonetheless, most actions in the high-tech sector are likely to end up in our third category, in which states take unilateral measures to advance or protect their own interests. Here, our framework requires the responses to be proportionate to actual or potential harms rather than a means to gain strategic advantage. The Trump administration violated this principle by barring U.S. corporations from exporting microchips and other components to Huawei and its suppliers, regardless of where they operated or the purposes for which their products were used. Instead of seeking to protect the United States from espionage or some sort of cyberattack, the clear intention was to deliver a fatal blow to Huawei by starving it of essential inputs. Moreover, the U.S. campaign has had serious economic repercussions for other countries. Many low-income countries in Africa have benefited from Huawei’s relatively inexpensive equipment. Since U.S. policy has important implications for these countries, Washington should have engaged in a multilateral process that acknowledged the costs that cracking down on Huawei would inflict on others—an approach that would have conserved global goodwill at little cost to U.S. national security.

Acting, Not Escalating

Our framework also suggests how the troubled relationship between the United States and Iran might be improved to benefit both parties. For starters, the present level of suspicion could be reduced if both sides publicly committed not to attempt to overthrow the other and to refrain from acts of terrorism or sabotage on the other’s territory. An agreement along these lines should be easy to reach, at least in principle, given that such actions are already prohibited by the UN Charter; in addition, Iran lacks the capacity to attack the United States directly, and past U.S. efforts to undermine the Islamic Republic have repeatedly failed.

Although short-lived, the 2015 nuclear deal showed how even hardened adversaries can be brought together on a contentious issue through mutually beneficial adjustments. The deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was a perfect illustration of this negotiated approach: China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union agreed to lift economic sanctions linked to Iran’s nuclear program, and Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium and dismantle thousands of nuclear centrifuges, substantially lengthening the time it would take Tehran to produce enough weapons-grade uranium to build a bomb.

U.S. President Joe Biden speaking virtually with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Washington, November 2021

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

The JCPOA’s proponents hoped the agreement would lead to a broader discussion of other areas of dispute: subsequent negotiations, for example, could have constrained Iran’s ballistic missile programs and its other regional activities in exchange for further sanctions relief or the restoration of diplomatic relations. At a minimum, talks along these lines would have allowed both sides to explain and justify their positions and given each a clearer understanding of the other’s interests, redlines, and sensitivities. Unfortunately, these possibilities were foreclosed when the Trump administration unilaterally abandoned the JCPOA in March 2018.

Skeptics might claim that the fate of the JCPOA reveals the limits of this approach. Had the agreement been in both sides’ interests, they might argue, it would still be in effect today. But the shortsighted U.S. withdrawal clearly left both sides worse off. Iran is much closer to producing a bomb than it was when the JCPOA was in force, the two countries are if anything even more suspicious of each other, and the risk of war is arguably higher. Even an objectively beneficial agreement will not endure if one or both parties do not understand its merits.

Given the current state of relations, the United States and Iran will continue to act independently to protect their interests. Still, there is reason to believe that both sides understand the principle that unilateral actions should be proportional. When the United States left the JCPOA in 2018, for example, Iran did not respond by immediately restarting its full nuclear program. Instead, it adhered to the original agreement for months afterward, in the hope that the United States would reconsider or that the other signatories would fulfill its terms. When this did not occur, Iran left the agreement in an incremental and visibly reversible fashion, signaling its willingness to return to full compliance if the United States also did so. Iran’s reaction to the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign was also measured. For example, the U.S. assassination of the high-ranking Iranian general Qasem Soleimani by a drone strike did not lead Iran to escalate; on the contrary, its response was limited to nonlethal missile attacks on bases housing U.S. forces in Iraq. The United States has occasionally shown restraint as well, as when the Trump administration chose not to retaliate when Iran downed a U.S. reconnaissance drone in June 2019. Despite deep animosity, up to now both sides have recognized the risks of escalation and the need to carefully calibrate their independent actions.

From Aggression to Mediation

There is no question that Russia’s war in Ukraine has darkened the prospects for constructing a more benign world order. Moscow’s act of aggression was a clear violation of the UN Charter, and some Russian troops appear to be guilty of wartime atrocities. These actions demonstrate that even well-established norms against conquest or other war crimes do not always prevent them. Yet the international response to the invasion also shows that trampling on such norms can have powerful consequences.

The war also highlights the importance of our second category—negotiation and mutual adjustments—and what can happen when states do not exploit this option to the fullest. Western officials engaged with their Russian counterparts on several occasions before Russia’s invasion, but they did not address Moscow’s stated concern—namely, the threat it perceived from Western efforts to bring Ukraine into NATO and the EU. For its part, Russia made far-reaching demands that seemed to offer little room for negotiation. Instead of exploring a genuine compromise on this issue—such as a formal pledge by Kyiv and its Western allies that Ukraine would remain a neutral state combined with a de-escalation by Russia and renewed negotiations over the status of the territories Russia seized in 2014—both sides hardened their existing positions. On February 24, 2022, Russia launched its illegal invasion.

Even hardened adversaries can be brought together by mutual adjustment.

The failure to negotiate a compromise via mutual negotiation left Russia, Ukraine, and the Western powers in our framework’s third category: independent action. Russia unilaterally invaded Ukraine, and the United States and NATO responded by imposing unprecedented sanctions on Russia and sending billions of dollars of arms and support to Ukraine. In keeping with our approach, however, even amid this exceptionally brutal conflict, each side has thus far sought to avoid escalation. At the outset, the Biden administration declared that it would not send U.S. troops to fight in Ukraine or impose a no-fly zone there; Russia refrained from conducting widespread cyberattacks, expanding the war beyond Ukrainian territory, and using weapons of mass destruction. As the war has continued, however, this sense of restraint has begun to break down, with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin asserting that the United States has sought to weaken Russia over the long term and Russian officials hinting about the use of nuclear weapons and indicating that their war aims may be expanding.

Unilateral action in Ukraine has also caused significant harm to third parties. By dramatically raising the cost of energy, Western sanctions on Russia have dealt a severe blow to the economies of low- and middle-income countries, many of them already devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic. And Russian blockades of grain shipments out of Ukraine have exacerbated a growing world food crisis. Because the war has affected many other countries, ending the fighting and eventually lifting sanctions is likely to require multilateral engagement. Turkey has already helped mediate an agreement to allow the resumption of Ukrainian grain exports, and states that rely on these exports will no doubt seek arrangements that make future disruptions less likely. If a Ukrainian pledge to remain neutral is part of the deal, it will have to be endorsed by the United States and other NATO members. Kyiv will undoubtedly want assurances from its Western backers and other interested third parties or perhaps an endorsement in the form of a un Security Council Resolution.

Great Powers, Greater Understanding

The war in Ukraine is a sobering reminder that a framework such as ours cannot produce a more benign world order by itself. It cannot prevent states from blundering into a costly conflict or missing opportunities to improve relations. But using these broad categories to guide great-power relations, instead of trying to resurrect a U.S.-dominated liberal order or impose new norms of global governance from above, has many advantages. In part because the requirements for adhering to it are so minimal, the framework can reveal whether rival powers are seriously committed to creating a more benign order. A state that rejects our approach from the start or whose actions within it show that its expressed commitments are bogus would incur severe reputational costs and risk provoking greater opposition over time. By contrast, states that embrace the framework and implement its simple principles in good faith would be regarded by others more favorably and would likely retain greater international support.

Perhaps nowhere are the potential benefits of our framework more apparent than in U.S.-Chinese relations. Until now, the United States has failed to articulate a China policy aimed at safeguarding vital U.S. security and economic interests that does not also aim at restoring U.S. primacy by undermining the Chinese economy. Far from accommodating China within a multipolar system of flexible rules, the current approach seeks to contain China, reduce its relative power, and narrow its strategic options. When the United States convenes a club of democracies aimed openly against China, it should not be surprising that Chinese President Xi Jinping cozies up to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This is not the only way forward, however. Both China and the United States have emphasized the need to cooperate in key areas even as they compete in others, and our approach provides a practical template for doing just that. It directs the two rivals to look for points of agreement and actions that both recognize should be proscribed; it encourages them to seek mutually beneficial compromises; and it reminds them to keep their independent actions within reasonable limits. By committing to our framework, the United States and China would be signaling a shared desire to limit areas of contention and avoid a spiral of ever-growing animosity and suspicion. In addition to cooperating on climate change, pandemic preparedness, and other common interests and refraining from overt attempts to undermine each other’s domestic prosperity or political legitimacy, Washington and Beijing could pursue a variety of arms control, crisis management, and risk-reduction measures through a process of negotiation and adjustment.

Washington should encourage its allies to avoid unnecessary quarrels with China.

On the thorny issue of Taiwan, the United States should continue the deliberately ambiguous policy it has followed since the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué—aiding Taiwanese defense efforts and condemning attempts by Beijing at forced reunification while opposing unilateral Taiwanese independence. Abandoning this policy in favor of more direct recognition of Taiwan risks provoking a war in which no one would benefit. Our flexible approach would not help if China decides to invade Taiwan for purely internal reasons—but it would make it less likely that Beijing would take this fateful step in response to its own security concerns.

Managing U.S.-Chinese security competition has a multilateral dimension, as well. Although Asian countries are concerned by China’s rising power and want U.S. protection, they do not want to have to choose between Washington and Beijing. Efforts to strengthen the U.S. position in Asia are bound to be alarming to China, but the magnitude of its concerns and the intensity of its response are not predetermined, and minimizing them (to the extent possible) is in everyone’s interest. As Washington strives to shore up its Asian alliances, therefore, it should also support regional efforts to reduce tensions in Asia and encourage its allies to avoid unnecessary quarrels with China or with one another. U.S.-promoted regional trade deals, such as the newly launched Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, should focus on maximizing economic benefits rather than trying to isolate and exclude China.

Although we have emphasized state-to-state relations in this discussion, our approach could be equally productive for nonstate actors, civil society organizations, academics, thought leaders, and anyone with a stake in a particular issue area. It encourages members of the global community to go beyond the stark antinomy of conflict versus cooperation and focus on practical questions: What actions should be prohibited outright? What compromises or adjustments would be feasible and mutually beneficial? When is independent action to be expected and legitimate, and how can well-calibrated actions be distinguished from those that are excessive? And when will preferred outcomes require multilateral agreements to ensure that third parties are not adversely affected by the agreements or actions undertaken by others? Such conversations will not produce immediate or total consensus, but more structured exchanges on these questions could clarify tradeoffs, elicit clearer explanations or justifications for competing positions, and increase the odds of reaching mutually beneficial outcomes.

It is possible—some would say likely—that mutual suspicion, incompetent leadership, ignorance, or sheer bad luck will combine to produce a future world order that is significantly poorer and substantially more dangerous than the present one. But such an outcome is not inevitable. If political leaders and the countries they represent genuinely wish to construct a more prosperous and secure world, the tools to do so are available.

DANI RODRIK is Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
STEPHEN M. WALT is Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Foreign Affairs · by Dani Rodrik and Stephen M. Walt · September 6, 2022

16. Understanding global right-wing extremism

Excerpts:

Rise of the Extreme Right is an up-to-date and panoptic survey of the key processes, trends and narratives animating the global extreme right that aims to expand its readers’ horizons beyond a Eurocentric, electoral and externalised sense of threat. A key audience will be students and scholars of terrorism and extremism studies.

However, the book’s main audience will likely be journalists, practitioners and policymakers keen to sharpen their toolkits in dealing with right-wing extremist actors. In calling for a revision of our understanding of right-wing extremism, it stands as a corrective for stale and out-of-date thinking in this space. Khalil has forced us to reconsider the threat amid the anti-democratic, political headwinds that are now buffeting most Western and non-Western democracies, and therein lies the book’s greatest contribution.

Understanding global right-wing extremism | Lowy Institute

Tackling the threat first means appreciating the scope, appeal

and transnational character of the narratives driving it.

lowyinstitute.org · by William Allchorn

Book Review: Rise of the Extreme Right: The New Global Extremism and the Threat to Democracy, by Lydia Khalil (Penguin, 2022).

The rise of the global extreme right has been a phenomenon that has not slipped the attention of policymakers, keen extremism watchers and academics in recent years. Encapsulated in the growth of literature, research and policy programs on the topic, a lot of time and resources have (rightly) been devoted to understanding the dynamics, drivers and destabilising processes that have led to an uptick in cumulative extreme right-wing violence, from Christchurch to El Paso and from Halle to Buffalo.

With her new Lowy Institute Paper, Rise of the Extreme Right, Lydia Khalil, a former US-based national security expert and current research fellow at the Lowy Institute, enters this fray at what is however an inauspicious time for policy responses to the global extreme right.

As Khalil notes in the first two chapters of her book, there is a conceptual chaos among governments about how to approach right-wing extremism and a latent under-recognition of its mainstream and transnational nature of both violent and non-violent expressions of the phenomenon. As she states:

“while we don’t want to simplify or over-determine the linkages between these [global] movements, if we don’t understand and label them as part of the right-wing extremism spectrum, we miss seeing the through-lines.”

Khalil paints a vivid picture of the anti-democratic, revolutionary, exclusionary and conspiratorial elements that cut across the extreme right.

What unfolds in the Rise of the Extreme Right is a detailed discussion of the causal ruptures that have led to the blossoming of the global extreme right and a corrective to the received policy wisdom and thinking on the topic. Leveraging her own personal testimony of responses to extreme right-wing terror attacks, interviews with experts and former extremists, and primary source material and quotes from extremist actors and milieus, Khalil paints a vivid picture of the anti-democratic, revolutionary, exclusionary and conspiratorial elements that cut across the extreme right, from Australia to Germany and from India to Sri Lanka and Myanmar.

In doing so, Khalil explains the globalised narratives (white genocide/threat), organising principles (e.g., events, conventions, speaking tours) and interests (e.g., White Power Music, Mixed Martial Arts) that “facilitate a growing ideological convergence among national right-wing extremist groups” beyond national borders. Noting that “right-wing extremism has evolved into a transnational subculture”, Khalil adeptly canvasses – with key cases and examples – how these distinctly parochial movements have sought to develop “shared values, spaces, myths, images, slogans, symbols, idols, aesthetics and artefacts”. Such cultural touchstones contribute to the growth of extremism via the “hardening of views, the consolidation of exclusivist identities and an increasing susceptibility to conspiracy theories”.

Adopting a scholarly but accessible thematic approach, the book takes the reader on an insightful tour of several “hot topics” that have been provoking much debate among researchers and policymakers. The first two chapters provide a useful critique of media and policy debates around right-wing terror before immersing readers in the key drivers and personal appeals of the global extreme right. Later chapters compellingly argue for the equivalence of right-wing extremism and other forms of ethno-nationalist extremism (e.g., Buddhist and Hindutva varieties) in the East. The book concludes by circling the reader back to the threat posed to democracy by right-wing extremism through its erosion of democratic institutions and norms – making a pitch for the “renewal of global democracy” and a view of the phenomena as being at the “very centre of our democratic societies.”

In calling for a revision of our understanding of right-wing extremism, it stands as a corrective for stale and out-of-date thinking in this space.

Rise of the Extreme Right is an up-to-date and panoptic survey of the key processes, trends and narratives animating the global extreme right that aims to expand its readers’ horizons beyond a Eurocentric, electoral and externalised sense of threat. A key audience will be students and scholars of terrorism and extremism studies.

However, the book’s main audience will likely be journalists, practitioners and policymakers keen to sharpen their toolkits in dealing with right-wing extremist actors. In calling for a revision of our understanding of right-wing extremism, it stands as a corrective for stale and out-of-date thinking in this space. Khalil has forced us to reconsider the threat amid the anti-democratic, political headwinds that are now buffeting most Western and non-Western democracies, and therein lies the book’s greatest contribution.

lowyinstitute.org · by William Allchorn

17. Xi to meet Putin in first trip outside China since COVID began

Per my Chinese friends this may be an indication of Xi's strength and hold on power. If he was too weak he likely would not travel outside the country.

Xi to meet Putin in first trip outside China since COVID began

Reuters · by Guy Faulconbridge

LONDON/BEIJING, Sept 12 (Reuters) - Xi Jinping will leave China for the first time in more than two years for a trip this week to Central Asia where he will meet Russia's Vladimir Putin, just a month before he is set to cement his place as the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.

The trip, Xi's first abroad since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, shows he is confident about both his grip on power as he heads for a third term in office and about his role as a world leader at a time of renewed great power friction.

Against a backdrop of Russia's confrontation with the West over Ukraine, the crisis over Taiwan and a stuttering global economy, Xi is due on a state visit to Kazakhstan on Wednesday.

China's president will then meet Putin at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization's summit in the ancient Silk Road city of Samarkand in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and the Kremlin said. China confirmed the trip on Monday. read more

Putin's foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, told reporters last week that the Russian president was expected to meet Xi at the summit. The Kremlin declined to give details on their talks.

The meeting will give Xi an opportunity to underscore his clout while Putin can demonstrate Russia's tilt towards Asia; both leaders can show their opposition to the United States just as the West seeks to punish Russia for the Ukraine war.

"It is all about Xi in my view: he wants to show just how confident he is domestically and to be seen as the international leader of nations opposed to Western hegemony," said George Magnus, author of "Red Flags", a book about Xi's challenges.

"Privately I imagine Xi will be most anxious about how Putin’s war is going and indeed if Putin or Russia are in play at some point in the near future because China still needs an anti-western leadership in Moscow."

Russia suffered its worst defeat of the war last week, abandoning its main bastion in northeastern Ukraine. read more

The deepening "no limits" partnership between the rising superpower of China and the natural resources titan of Russia is a geopolitical development the West is watching with anxiety.

Once the senior partner in the global Communist hierarchy, Russia after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union is now a junior partner to a resurgent Communist China which is forecast to overtake the United States as the world's biggest economy in the next decade.

Though historical contradictions abound in the partnership, there is no sign that Xi is ready to drop support for Putin in Russia's most serious confrontation with the West since the height of the Cold War.

Instead, the two 69-year-old leaders are deepening ties. Trade soared by nearly a third between Russia and China in the first 7 months of 2022.

The visit "shows that China is willing to not only continue 'business as usual' with Russia but even show explicit support and accelerate the formation of a stronger China-Russia alignment," said Alexander Korolev, senior lecturer in politics and international relations at UNSW Sydney.

"Beijing is reluctant to distance itself from Moscow even when facing serious reputational costs and the risks of becoming a target of secondary economic sanctions."

XI SUPREME

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, China February 4, 2022. Sputnik/Aleksey Druzhinin/Kremlin via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY.

Xi is widely expected to break with precedent at a Communist Party congress that starts on Oct. 16 and secure his third five-year leadership term. read more

While Xi has met Putin in person 38 times since becoming China's president in 2013, he has yet to meet Joe Biden in person since the latter became U.S. President in 2021.

Xi last met Putin in February just weeks before the Russian president ordered the invasion of Ukraine which has left tens of thousands of people dead and sown chaos through the global economy.

At that meeting at the opening of the Winter Olympics, Xi and Putin declared their no limits partnership, backing each other over standoffs on Ukraine and Taiwan with a promise to collaborate more against the West.

China has refrained from condemning Russia's operation against Ukraine or calling it an "invasion" in line with the Kremlin which casts the war as "a special military operation".

"The bigger message really isn't that Xi is supporting Putin, because it's been pretty clear that Xi supports Putin," said Professor Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

"The bigger signal is that he, Xi Jinping, is going out of China for the first time since the pandemic in the run-up to the party congress. If there were going to be plottings against him this is when the plottings would happen. And he's clearly confident that the plottings are not going to take place because he is out of the country."

Xi, the son of a communist revolutionary, last left China in January 2020, before the world went into COVID lockdown. read more

KREMLIN CHIEF

After the West imposed on Moscow the most severe sanctions in modern history due to the war in Ukraine, Putin says Russia is turning towards Asia after centuries of looking to the West as the crucible of economic growth, technology and war. read more

Casting the West as a declining, U.S.-dominated coalition which aims to shackle - or even destroy - Russia, Putin's worldview chimes with that of Xi, who presents China as an alternative to the U.S.-led, post-World War Two order.

Putin aide Ushakov said the Xi-Putin meeting would be "very important". He did not give further details.

As Europe seeks to turn away from Russian energy imports, Putin will seek to boost energy exports to China and Asia.

Putin said last week that a major gas export route to China via Mongolia had been agreed. Gazprom (GAZP.MM) has for years been studying the possibility for a major new gas pipeline - the Power of Siberia 2 - to travel through Mongolia taking Russian gas to China.

It will carry 50 billion cubic metres of gas per year, around a third of what Russia usually sells Europe – or equivalent to the Nord Stream 1 annual volumes.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes Russia, China, India, Pakistan and four Central Asian states, is due to admit Iran, one of Moscow's key allies in the Middle East.

Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Additional reporting by Olzhas Auyezov in Almaty and Yew Lun Tian and Martin Quin Pollard in Beijing; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky, Alexander Smith and Frank Jack Daniel

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Guy Faulconbridge

18. Expanded Safety Net Drives Sharp Drop in Child Poverty

Expanded Safety Net Drives Sharp Drop in Child Poverty

By Maddie McGarvey JASON DePARLE The New York Times16 min

View Original

WASHINGTON — For a generation or more, America’s high levels of child poverty set it apart from other rich nations, leaving millions of young people lacking support as basic as food and shelter amid mounting evidence that early hardship leaves children poorer, sicker and less educated as adults.

But with little public notice and accelerating speed, America’s children have become much less poor.

A comprehensive new analysis shows that child poverty has fallen 59 percent since 1993, with need receding on nearly every front. Child poverty has fallen in every state, and it has fallen by about the same degree among children who are white, Black, Hispanic and Asian, living with one parent or two, and in native or immigrant households. Deep poverty, a form of especially severe deprivation, has fallen nearly as much.

In 1993, nearly 28 percent of children were poor, meaning their households lacked the income the government deemed necessary to meet basic needs. By 2019, before temporary pandemic aid drove it even lower, child poverty had fallen to about 11 percent.

More than eight million children remained in poverty, and despite shared progress, Black and Latino children are about three times as likely as white children to be poor. With the poverty line low (about $29,000 for a family of four in a place with typical living costs), many families who escape poverty in the statistical sense still experience hardship.

Still, the sharp retreat of child poverty represents major progress and has drawn surprisingly little notice, even among policy experts.

It has coincided with profound changes to the safety net, which at once became more stringent and more generous. Starting in the 1990s, tough welfare laws shrank cash aid to parents without jobs. But other subsidies grew, especially for working families, and total federal spending on low-income children roughly doubled.

To examine the drop in child poverty, The New York Times collaborated with Child Trends, a nonpartisan research group with an expertise in statistical analysis. The joint project relied on the data the Census Bureau uses to calculate poverty rates but examined it over more years and in greater demographic detail.

The analysis found that multiple forces reduced child poverty, including lower unemployment, increased labor force participation among single mothers and the growth of state-level minimum wages. But a dominant factor was the expansion of government aid.

In 1993, safety net programs cut child poverty by 9 percent from what it would have been absent the aid. By 2019, those programs had cut child poverty by 44 percent, and the number of children they removed from poverty more than tripled to 6.5 million.

“This is an astounding decline in child poverty,” said Dana Thomson, a co-author of the Child Trends study. “Its magnitude is unequaled in the history of poverty measurement, and the single largest explanation is the growth of the safety net.”

Renee Ryberg, another co-author, said the poverty reduction offered millions of children greater prospects of success. “A childhood free of poverty predicts better adult outcomes in just about every area you can imagine, including education, earnings and health,” she said.

The analysis excluded 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, because pandemic aid made it unrepresentative. Including it makes the decline since 1993 even greater, at 69 percent.

The plunge in child poverty is the opposite of what most liberal experts predicted a quarter-century ago when President Bill Clinton signed a law from a Republican Congress to “end welfare as we know it.”

Conservatives say the landmark law pushed more parents to work and call it the main reason child poverty declined. Progressives say many working families would still be poor without the expanded safety net, which grew in part to compensate for stagnant wages amid decades of rising inequality.

“I wouldn’t say poor but definitely not middle class — we’re below that. I don’t know what the definition of poor is. We have a roof over our head. But if my car breaks down, we’re not going to have a car for a while because we can’t pay for it. So I guess I am poor.”

Stacy Tallman

A patchwork of programs shaped by a century of political conflict and compromise, the safety net bears the imprint of both parties and commands the satisfaction of neither. Most Republicans want less spending, more local control and more rules requiring beneficiaries to work. Most Democrats want higher benefits for more people, as seen in their unsuccessful push this year to permanently turn the child tax credit, a workers’ subsidy, into a broader income guarantee.

Critics of all sorts, including those getting aid, complain of red tape.

Yet whatever its flaws, the safety net depicted in the Child Trends data lifts a record share of children from poverty. “The federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won,” President Ronald Reagan said a generation ago. With child poverty at a record low, that narrative of defeat appears obsolete.

“This decline in child poverty is very significant. I cannot say it enough,” said Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, a poverty expert at Brandeis University who reviewed the data. “If we still had the rates as we had in the 1990s, there would be 12 million more children in poverty.”

The income earned by Ms. Tallman and her partner fell by a quarter when they had to cut back on work to care for her son Jakob after he was in a car accident. Jakob went on to become the first in his family to graduate from high school.

Jakob shows the scars from a car accident. Medicaid paid for Jakob’s care and saved the family from bankrupting medical bills.

To see how the safety net protects children, consider the experience of Stacy Tallman, a mother of three in Marlinton, W.Va., who was working as a waitress last year when her teenage son, Jakob, suffered serious injuries in a car accident. Both Ms. Tallman and her partner, who has a maintenance job, missed work to care for him, and their income fell by about a quarter to $36,000.

After payroll taxes and other expenses the government takes into account when measuring poverty, their income was just below the poverty line. But the safety net delivered more than $16,000, not counting pandemic assistance. That included $8,000 in refundable tax credits and $6,500 from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps.

With the help of safety net programs, Ms. Tallman’s family was able to stay 50 percent above the poverty threshold. “I don’t know where I’d be right now if I didn’t have that help,” Ms. Tallman said.

Ms. Tallman’s partner, Justin Wilfong, and his daughter Emma. SNAP, the food subsidy program, and free school meals, eased Ms. Tallman’s anxiety about the children going hungry. Tax credits helped her complete a longstanding plan to buy the family’s first house.

Instead of falling into poverty, the family survived the crisis about 50 percent above the poverty threshold.

“I don’t know where I’d be right now if I didn’t have that help,” Ms. Tallman said.

Medicaid paid for Jakob’s care and saved the family from bankrupting medical bills. SNAP, the food subsidy, eased Ms. Tallman’s anxiety about the children going hungry, as did free school meals. Tax credits helped her complete a longstanding plan to buy the family’s first house.

A year after the accident, Jakob became the first in the family to earn a high school degree.

The patchwork of programs that helps families like Ms. Tallman’s has been shaped by a century of political conflict and compromise. The resulting safety net bears the imprint of both parties and commands the satisfaction of neither.

More Work Rules, More Aid

In measuring poverty, the analysis used the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, the yardstick that best accounts for government aid. Unlike the outdated Official Poverty Measure, the supplemental measure counts billions in tax credits, SNAP and other benefits, and adjusts for local living costs, providing a more accurate tally of household resources. While 2009 is the earliest year for which the Census Bureau produced the supplemental measure, researchers at Columbia University calculated it for earlier decades, and Child Trends drew on their data.

While the official measure shows child poverty falling 37 percent from a 1993 peak, the supplemental measure shows a 59 percent decline.

Most of the decline occurred in two periods of strong labor demand — the late 1990s and late 2010s — with poverty largely flat in between, even though that period includes the Great Recession.

In the two years before the pandemic, child poverty fell more than a quarter, a record pace.

The analysis examined multiple factors beyond the safety net that collectively explain about a fifth of the poverty decline. They included lower unemployment and a 23 percent increase in the average minimum wage, driven by state-level growth. (Adjusted for inflation, the federal minimum wage eroded.)

At the same time, the growing proportion of children who are part of Hispanic families and immigrant families appeared to slow the poverty decline, perhaps because those families face job discrimination or barriers to aid.

The decline of child poverty coincides with progress on another measure of children’s well-being. The share who lack health insurance fell by about two-thirds, mostly because of expansions of Medicaid and other government insurance. While those programs often improve children’s health, they do not directly reduce poverty because the government does not count insurance as income.

In comparing 1993 and 2019, the study examined different points in the business cycle — unemployment in the latter year was about half the earlier rate. That highlights the economy’s role in reducing poverty, but the analysis still found the aid expansion more important.

Arguing that the welfare law reduced child poverty, conservatives note the subsequent surge of employment among single mothers, the group most affected by restrictions on cash aid. The share of single mothers in the work force leaped to 79 percent, from 69 percent in the early ’90s.

“The system sent a message: You can’t live on welfare anymore,” said Robert Rector, a poverty researcher at the Heritage Foundation.

Most researchers think multiple forces explained rising work levels, including a strong economy and expanded tax credits, which made work more rewarding. Still many parents moved into jobs that paid poverty-level wages absent government help. The analysis found that increased labor force participation alone explained about 9 percent of the decline in child poverty.

While Mr. Rector agreed that tax credits magnified the poverty reduction, he argued that the era’s success shows that aid should be linked to work. “The lesson isn’t that ‘aid works’ — it’s that some aid is very harmful and some aid is helpful,” he said.

Whatever role the employment of single mothers played, it peaked by about 2000, while child poverty fell by another third. “Other factors had to be responsible,” Ms. Ryberg said, pointing to the continued safety net expansion.

Mishala Southwick of Okmulgee, Okla., has used a portion of the tax credits she receives to open savings accounts for her two daughters, hoping they find the upward mobility that so far has eluded her.

An Effective Patchwork

Almost every program that Child Trends examined does more to reduce child poverty than it did a quarter-century ago, either because it raised benefits, expanded eligibility or made it easier to enroll.

But each program expanded in its own way — some by congressional intent (tax credits) and others by demographic change (Social Security) or court order (Supplemental Security Income, which provides disability aid). A primary goal was to help low-wage workers, but there were also major expansions of programs with few if any work rules (SNAP and school meals).

The story of the safety net, in other words, is a story of safety nets — multiple programs with multiple aims, sometimes evolving in uncoordinated or accidental ways.

“The safety net is often criticized for being a patchwork of programs, but that’s also a strength,” Ms. Thomson said. “It reaches a variety of people in a variety of circumstances.”

The aid is often large. The average family lifted out of poverty received nearly $18,000 in benefits — more than 40 percent of its after-tax income.

Nothing better shows the aid expansion than the growth of two wage subsidies: the earned-income tax credit, which expanded greatly in the 1990s, and the child tax credit, which only recently extended significant help to low-income families.

“I know that we live check to check. I know that we have very little extra money. But we don't hardly ever not have enough. I think I would be slightly above poor — slightly.”

Mishala Southwick

By 2019, a parent who had two children and worked full time at the average minimum wage could receive about $8,300 from the programs — more than three times as much as in 1993, adjusted for inflation. The earned-income credit alone reduced child poverty by 22 percent, the analysis found, compared with 5 percent a generation ago.

Mishala Southwick of Okmulgee, Okla., considers the tax credits essential to her children’s futures. A receptionist at an auto body shop, she expects to earn about $30,000 this year while her husband cares for their 2-year-old twin daughters. Absent aid, their net income would leave them poor. With $9,000 in tax credits, they are not.

Ms. Southwick, 22, a member of the Muscogee Nation, uses much of the money to repair the dilapidated house on the reservation that she rents from her father and hopes to buy. “I have a 10-year plan for the house, and it all depends on the tax income,” she said. She installed central heating because she feared her daughters would start a fire playing with the space heaters. “It feels a lot more safe,” she said.

She also provided them savings accounts, hoping they find the upward mobility that so far has eluded her. After scoring high on a college-entrance exam, Ms. Southwick wanted to be a math professor, but early pregnancy and lack of money derailed her college plans. The accounts remind her of her faded aspirations.

“I just want them to have a better chance,” she said of her children.

“I just want them to have a better chance,” Ms. Southwick said of her 2-year-old twins.

Ms. Southwick uses much of the tax credit money to repair the dilapidated house that she rents from her father and hopes to buy. She installed central heating because she feared her daughters would start a fire playing with the space heaters.

Another program with growing impact is SNAP, which cut child poverty by 11 percent in 2019, compared with 5 percent a generation ago. While benefits changed little, eligibility grew, and enrollment swelled after bipartisan efforts in the early 2000s to make the program easier to use. An expanded school lunch program, which allows more schools to provide all students free meals, has also become a growing anti-poverty force.

Among the programs that most affected children is one aimed at retirees. Social Security cut child poverty by 14 percent, more than twice as much as it did a quarter-century ago, both because benefits grew and because more children now live with elderly parents or grandparents.

Cash aid — now called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — is the rare program whose anti-poverty effect seemingly declined. Benefits withered and enrollment plunged, as work rules made aid harder to get. But the analysis counts only the money the program provided, not whether it led more families to work and escape poverty on their own.

“It’s not just about the amount of dollars that flow into households from the program itself,” said Robert Doar, the president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “It’s about sending a message that going to work is the path out of poverty. That message got through.”

Mr. Doar said the welfare law, by encouraging work, made policymakers more inclined to support other aid expansions.

“If you work, we will help you — Americans like that message,” he said.

Ms. Southwick with her daughter Danieal and her mother.

Ms. Southwick said the tax credits she receives are at the heart of her 10-year plan to buy the house from her father.

While critics feared welfare limits would hurt the poor during recessions, the safety net performed better than in the past downturns — an unexpected finding. Even during the Great Recession, the worst economic crisis in 80 years, child poverty rose by just 4 percent (in part because Congress approved temporary help).

Likewise, despite fears of a rise in deep poverty (living on less than half the poverty line) has fallen by 56 percent.

While the Census Bureau’s methods tend to underestimate aid from some programs (SNAP) and overestimate others (tax credits), Robert Greenstein, a researcher at the Brookings Institution, said technical adjustments would not undercut the findings.

“The decline in child poverty is very, very impressive, and it is overwhelmingly due to the increased effectiveness of government programs,” he said.

Ruth Raudales, a single mother who works part time and attends college, said food aid for her son has both economic and psychological benefits. “Now it’s like if something happens, we’ll be OK,” she said.

Racial and Ethnic Gaps Remain

It may seem obvious that poverty hurts children. But researchers have long debated whether poverty itself harms children or if conditions that harm children, like parental addiction or depression, cause poverty. A panel of scholars, reviewing the evidence in 2019, forged a consensus: “poverty itself causes negative child outcomes,” and safety net programs “improve child well-being.” Aid helps children, they found, both by increasing what families can buy and by reducing severe levels of parental stress.

Ruth Raudales, a single mother in Houston, appreciates aid for both its material and psychological rewards. Ms. Raudales, 23, works part time and attends college while living with her mother, brother, and 4-year-old son. After taxes and expenses, household earnings of $32,000 would leave them poor, but with tax credits and other help they are not.

A legal immigrant from Honduras, Ms. Raudales arrived too recently to qualify for SNAP and hesitated to apply for her American-born son for fear it would harm her citizenship application. But she changed her mind after unexpected expenses left her worried about running out of food.

“It helps with the stress as parents. We know that we’re going to have food in the house. He loves strawberries, grapes, watermelon, oranges, apples, blueberries, carrots, cucumbers, potatoes.”

Ruth Raudales

Asked what difference SNAP made, Ms. Raudales recited the bonanza of fruit she buys, then resorted to a Honduran idiom — literally, “we’re breathing” — that translates colloquially as “we’re able to get by.”

“Before I had the SNAP, I was always afraid,” she said. “Now it’s like if something happens, we’ll be OK.”

In 1993, 49 percent of Black children and 52 percent of Hispanic children were poor — figures that now look like misprints. While poverty among both groups has plunged, gaps with white children remain.

“The decline in child poverty deserves to be lauded, but these disparities diminish the sense of progress,” said Starsky Wilson, the president of the Children’s Defense Fund.

Likewise, poverty fell at equal rates among immigrant and nonimmigrant households, but the children of foreign-born parents were almost twice as likely to be poor. That is partly because they have less access to aid. Most programs deny aid to undocumented migrants, and some restrict certain legal immigrants, too.

Ms. Raudales initially hesitated to apply for SNAP benefits for her American-born son for fear it would harm her citizenship application. But she changed her mind after unexpected expenses left her worried about running out of food.

Ms. Raudales and her 4-year-old son, Gabriel.

Banning assistance to the undocumented is meant to discourage illegal immigration. But many undocumented parents have American-born children affected by the limits on aid. Ms. Acevedo-Garcia, the Brandeis professor, found that 21 percent of poor children have an undocumented parent, and most of those children are citizens.

“They are here to stay,” she said.

Despite its progress, the United States still has more child poverty than many peer nations, though its rank depends on how poverty is defined.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental group, ranks the United States 36th out of 41 countries, defining poor children as those with less than half their country’s median income. But since the United States is unusually wealthy, its poor children may have higher incomes than some nonpoor children abroad.

Ms. Raudales with Gabriel and her mother and brother.

Ms. Raudales lives with Gabriel and her mother and brother. After taxes and expenses, household earnings of $32,000 would leave them poor, but with tax credits and other help they are not.

The United States looks better in comparisons that use the American poverty line as a common standard. Yet even with that definition, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2019 found the United States ranked fourth among five rich English-speaking countries, trailing Australia, Canada and Ireland.

“We could do a lot better,” said Hilary Hoynes, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, though she hailed the progress as evidence that solutions can be found.

“When we spend money, we make gains,” she said. “Providing more resources to low-income families changes children’s life trajectories.”

Asked what difference the SNAP program made, Ms. Raudales recited a Honduran idiom that translates colloquially to “we’re able to get by.”

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19. The Schrödinger's cat of public diplomacy

Matt Armstrong continues to. beat the drum about public diplomacy. Please go to the link to view the spreadsheet. https://mountainrunner.substack.com/p/the-schrodingers-cat-of-public-diplomacy?utm

The Schrödinger's cat of public diplomacy

Remembering the position of Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs actually exists... or does it?

mountainrunner.substack.com · by Matt Armstrong

Since 2011, I have been tracking the ridiculously short tenures of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. The average tenure of this high-level and allegedly important official is 517 days, with a median tenure of 477 days. I also tracked how often the office was empty, or more specifically, “unencumbered” with a person confirmed to the position to exclude the numerous acting officials (leaving aside whether any incumbents were acting is an offline discussion). Understandably, a position like this is stressful with some churn, but if you expected such a senior position to be filled quickly, you would be sorely disappointed. Through to the end of the Obama administration (to exclude the Trump and Biden administrations), the average number of days between the last day of one incumbent and the first day of the replacement was 219 days, with a median gap of 239 days. Today marks 600 (!) days the office has been vacant during the Biden administration. Without so much of a nomination to the office, the virtual dismantling of the position’s responsibilities, does the position exist or doesn’t it?

Returning to the churn for a moment, in December 2011, when I was the executive director of the currently virtually defunct-and-failing-to-provide-any-timely-or-meaningful-advice-or-oversight Advisory Commission for Public Diplomacy, my staff and I first looked at the turnover of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. At the time, there had been six confirmations to this office since 1999, when the office was established. During that same time, there were five Under Secretaries for Political Affairs, giving us a fair point of comparison. In what can only be a reflection in the relative priority of the two positions, the political affairs office lacked a confirmed appointment only 5% across the twelve years, while the public diplomacy chief was empty 30% of the time. Today, when adding the Trump and Biden administrations, the public diplomacy position has been vacant 44.3% over the past 23 years it has existed. When a position is vacant for nearly two weeks of every month, that each new incumbent raises new questions about how they will define the office and its mission, and most of the office’s authorities have been diluted or replaced, does the position still exist?

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With a recurring feeling of being in the movie Groundhog Day, this is a topic I’ve written on often, including in January 2012 and again in June 2021 to remind people this office was empty. (Might the advisory commission, whose three remaining commissioners have each been in their positions for more than 11 years, a length of time to make them potentially well-qualified and sought-out subject matter experts, might have some kind of thoughtful advice on this subject?)

Below is the incumbency chart I’ve maintained for the past 11 years as of today, 12 September 2022:

There is another measure of the relative importance of a position: how soon it is filled. This is not an absolute, but it is suggestive. In the Bush Administration, 254 days passed before the first Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs was confirmed. To be fair, the appointment lingered for months until 9/11 caused a sudden interest to fill the appointment. The Bush administration would see four appointments to this office during its eight years, with an overall vacancy rate of 37%. In the Obama Administration, the first confirmed appointment happened 124 days in. During Obama’s eight years, there were three public diplomacy chiefs, with an overall vacancy rate of 22%. Distorting things is the Trump Administration, which did appoint an Under Secretary 316 days in, though he only lasted 100 days, resulting in a 93% vacancy rate for that administration. This appointment was arguably not about public diplomacy but to fill a corporate communications role, which substantively was similar to why the first Bush appointee was selected.

The Biden Administration has yet to nominate an Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Though considering the consolidation of the (absent) under secretary’s operational elements of the Bureau of International Information Programs and the Bureau of Public Affairs to create the Bureau of Global Public Affairs, I'm personally at a loss to understand what substantive role the Under Secretary would have should one get appointed. I used to write the “and Public Affairs” part of the under secretary’s title in italics to reflect the reality the under secretary had no real leadership over the bureau of public affairs, a situation that seems to have come full circle with Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs, now “of Global Public Affairs,” virtually swelling its boss. The other operational entity of this under secretary, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, effectively declared “you’re not the boss of me” to the under secretary during the Obama administration, which is just another humorous and sad reflection of the state of affairs of public diplomacy at the State Department.

I heard a rumor last year that a nomination would “soon” be announced. Besides the reality no nomination has been announced to date, I’m not sure who would want this job. Surely any such candidate would make significant demands on promises of support and clarity on roles and responsibilities from above (i.e., the Secretary of State and the President) and laterally (i.e., other under secretaries at the department) to learn from the shortcomings and handicapping of past incumbents.

One could argue this office is no longer necessary, or that it does not even exist anymore. I have not seen one discussion around the need to continue or discontinue this office, substantive or otherwise. One would think the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, whose very job is to provide oversight and advocacy over “public diplomacy” might opine on this topic. It might at least raise a flag of concern or a nod of support, but as far as I have seen, they have nearly assiduously avoided this glaringly obvious situation. It is important that in the “bring back USIA!” genre that pretends a new organizational structure will cure all that ails, plus the latest spat of “we need to better react to foreign malign influence operations,” not a single article ever mentions this position. Does this office even exist anymore?

P.S.

If you haven’t, be sure to read this article by my friend Chris Paul and me on why the USIA is not the right example if you want to draw from history for an organizational model to move forward. I discussed that article in a previous substack post here.

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mountainrunner.substack.com · by Matt Armstrong

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

VIDEO "WHEREBY" Link: https://whereby.com/david-maxwell

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

V/R

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Phone: 202-573-8647

Personal Email: d avid.maxwell161@gmail.com

Web Site: www.fdd.org

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Subscribe to FDD’s new podcast, Foreign Podicy

FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

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