(Note that I will be in Korea for the next two weeks so my postings will be at odd hours.)

Quotes of the Day:

“We need to dispel the myth that empathy is ‘walking in someone else’s shoes.’ Rather than walking in your shoes, I need to learn how to listen to the story you tell about what it’s like in your shoes and believe you even when it doesn’t match my experiences”

- Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest -- forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of the centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become a major experience of their lives.”

- Hannah Arendt

“You're entitled to your own opinions in your own head. But if you choose to express them out loud, it's your responsibility to:

(1) ground them in logic and facts

(2) explain your reasoning to others

(3) change them when better evidence emerges”

- Adam M. Grant

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 17 (Putin's War)

2. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (17.09.22) CDS comments on key events

3. Ukraine depends on morale and Russia on mercenaries. It could decide the war

4. Is the Army Ready to Fight Behind Enemy Lines in Europe?

5. For Vladimir Putin, this is the beginning of the end

6. Ukraine Wants the U.S. to Send More Powerful Weapons. Biden Is Not So Sure.

7. Pressure on Russian forces mounts after Ukraine's advances

8. Six things to know as Xi Jinping moves to be China’s dictator for life

9. Why do Russian executives keep dying in mysterious ways?

10. Command by Lawrence Freedman review – inside the war room

11. ‘A Crisis Coming’: The Twin Threats to American Democracy

12. Russian military failures will force Putin to change war goals, says US intelligence

13. Partisanship Over Policy at the Heritage Foundation

14. Ukrainian strikes into Russia’s border towns compound Putin’s troubles

15. Japan, US Discuss Longer Range Missiles to Counter China

16. Can the West Shake Its Dependence on China’s Rare Earths?

17. Why Xi really traveled to Central Asia

18. Opinion: Anti-Americanism won't make Xi king of Asia

19. Ukrainian Success Will Not Be Catastrophic By Kori Schake

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 17 (Putin's War)

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-17

Key Takeaways

• Russian forces continue to prioritize strategically meaningless offensive operations around Donetsk City and Bakhmut over defending against continued Ukrainian counter-offensive operations in Kharkiv Oblast.
• Ukrainian forces liberated a settlement southwest of Lyman and are likely continuing to expand their positions in the area.
• Ukrainian forces continued to conduct an interdiction campaign in Kherson Oblast.
• Russian forces continued to conduct unsuccessful assaults around Bakhmut and Avdiivka.
• Ukrainian sources reported extensive partisan attacks on Russian military assets and logistics in southern Zaporizhia Oblast.
• Russian officials continued to undertake crypto-mobilization measures to generate forces for war Russian war efforts.
• Russian authorities are working to place 125 “orphan” Ukrainian children from occupied Donetsk Oblast with Russian families.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 17

Sep 17, 2022 - Press ISW

understandingwar.org

Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, Angela Howard, and Frederick W. Kagan

September 17, 9:30 pm ET

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Russian forces continue to conduct meaningless offensive operations around Donetsk City and Bakhmut instead of focusing on defending against Ukrainian counteroffensives that continue to advance. Russian troops continue to attack Bakhmut and various villages near Donetsk City of emotional significance to pro-war residents of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) but little other importance. The Russians are apparently directing some of the very limited reserves available in Ukraine to these efforts rather than to the vulnerable Russian defensive lines hastily thrown up along the Oskil River in eastern Kharkiv Oblast. The Russians cannot hope to make gains around Bakhmut or Donetsk City on a large enough scale to derail Ukrainian counteroffensives and appear to be continuing an almost robotic effort to gain ground in Donetsk Oblast that seems increasingly divorced from the overall realities of the theater.

Russian failures to rush large-scale reinforcements to eastern Kharkiv and to Luhansk Oblasts leave most of Russian-occupied northeastern Ukraine highly vulnerable to continuing Ukrainian counter-offensives. The Russians may have decided not to defend this area, despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s repeated declarations that the purpose of the “special military operation” is to “liberate” Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Prioritizing the defense of Russian gains in southern Ukraine over holding northeastern Ukraine makes strategic sense since Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts are critical terrain for both Russia and Ukraine whereas the sparsely-populated agricultural areas in the northeast are much less so. But the continued Russian offensive operations around Bakhmut and Donetsk City, which are using some of Russia’s very limited effective combat power at the expense of defending against Ukrainian counteroffensives, might indicate that Russian theater decision-making remains questionable.

Ukrainian forces appear to be expanding positions east of the Oskil River and north of the Siverskyi Donets River that could allow them to envelop Russian troops holding around Lyman. Further Ukrainian advances east along the north bank of the Siverskyi Donets River could make Russian positions around Lyman untenable and open the approaches to Lysychansk and ultimately Severodonetsk. The Russian defenders in Lyman still appear to consist in large part of BARS (Russian Combat Army Reserve) reservists and the remnants of units badly damaged in the Kharkiv Oblast counteroffensive, and the Russians do not appear to be directing reinforcements from elsewhere in the theater to these areas.

Key Takeaways

• Russian forces continue to prioritize strategically meaningless offensive operations around Donetsk City and Bakhmut over defending against continued Ukrainian counter-offensive operations in Kharkiv Oblast.
• Ukrainian forces liberated a settlement southwest of Lyman and are likely continuing to expand their positions in the area.
• Ukrainian forces continued to conduct an interdiction campaign in Kherson Oblast.
• Russian forces continued to conduct unsuccessful assaults around Bakhmut and Avdiivka.
• Ukrainian sources reported extensive partisan attacks on Russian military assets and logistics in southern Zaporizhia Oblast.
• Russian officials continued to undertake crypto-mobilization measures to generate forces for war Russian war efforts.
• Russian authorities are working to place 125 “orphan” Ukrainian children from occupied Donetsk Oblast with Russian families.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

• Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Southern and Eastern Ukraine
• Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts);
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)

Eastern Ukraine: (Vovchansk-Kupyansk-Izyum-Lyman Line)

Ukrainian and Russian sources indicated that Ukrainian forces are continuing to establish positions northwest and southwest of Lyman on September 17, while Russian forces have maintained their positions in Lyman and Yampil.[1] Geolocated footage showed Ukrainian forces raising a flag over Shchurove, situated on the eastern bank of the Siverskyi Donets River six kilometers southwest of Lyman.[2] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces crossed the Siverskyi Donets River and reached Studenok (approximately 25km northwest of Lyman) after Russian forces withdrew from the settlement on September 15.[3] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces shelled Oleksandrivka, which could indicate that Ukrainian forces advanced eight kilometers from Studenok.[4] Russian milbloggers also noted heavy fighting in Oleksandrivka and settlements northwest of Oleksandrivka.[5] The Ukrainian General Staff also noted that Russian forces fired artillery at Yarova (10km southeast of Studenok), while milbloggers noted fighting in the settlement, likely indicating a Ukrainian advance in the area.[6] Russian sources also claimed active combat in Dobrysheve, between liberated Shchurove and contested Yarova.[7]

Ukrainian and Russian sources also reported kinetic activity on the northern segment of the Oskil River in Kharkiv Oblast. The Ukrainian General Staff and the Russian Defense Ministry reported that Russian forces are shelling Dvorichna (about 17km northeast of Kupyansk), while milbloggers speculated that Ukrainian forces are preparing for an eastward counterattack from the settlement.[8] Geolocated footage showed Ukrainian artillery fire on Russian military equipment operating on the eastern bank of the Oskil River, approximately 38 northeast of Izyum.[9]

Southern Ukraine: (Kherson Oblast)

Ukrainian military officials maintained their operational silence regarding the progress of the counteroffensive on September 17 but noted the continuation of the Ukrainian interdiction campaign in Kherson Oblast. The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command reported that Ukrainian forces struck an alternative Russian pontoon crossing near Sadove (approximately 17km east of Kherson City), an electronic warfare (EW) station in Nova Kakhovka, and a Russian concentration area in Stara Zburyivka (about 23km southwest of Kherson City).[10] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are preparing retreat routes, including a new crossing in the area of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant, due to Ukrainian strikes on Russian crossings over the Dnipro River.[11] Ukrainian military officials noted that the Ukrainian strike on Kherson City on September 10 resulted in the deaths of over 180 Russian servicemen.[12] Social media footage corroborates Ukrainian official statements about the continuation of the interdiction campaign in Kherson Oblast. Residents reported smoke and explosions in Antonivka (on the left bank of the Dnipro River) and in Nova Kakhovka.[13]

Ukrainian and Russian sources reported kinetic activity in three main areas: northwest of Kherson City, near the Ukrainian bridgehead over the Inhulets River, and south of the Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border near Vysokopillya. The Russian Defense Ministry and Russian milbloogers claimed that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian “large-scale” attack on Pravdyne (approximately 28km northwest of Kherson City) on September 16.[14] Some milbloggers specified that Ukrainian forces advanced through Russian defenses Pravdyne with up to two reinforced companies (likely less than a battalion in strength), which is hardly a large-scale attack.[15] The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command also reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attempted to attack Stepova Dolyna (the next settlement north of Pravdyne) from Pravdyne.[16] A milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces are using helicopters to transfer troops to Sukhyi Stavok (about 12km southeast of the bridgehead), which if true, likely indicates the reduced capacity of Russian air defenses in the area.[17] Ukrainian and Russian forces noted that Russian forces continued to shell and launch airstrikes on Sukhyi Stavok.[18] Geolocated footage also showed Ukrainian forces firing at Russian positions in Davydiv Brid.[19] The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command reported that a Russian reconnaissance and sabotage group attempted a failed advance on Ukrainian-controlled Novovoznesenske (8km southeast of Vysokopillya) and conducted unsuccessful offensive operations in the direction of Arhanhelske-Ivanivka along the Inhulets RIver.[20]

Russian forces are intensifying filtration and social control measures in Kherson Oblast as a result of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the region. A local Kherson Oblast Telegram channel reported that Russian forces are conducting filtration measures on Chaykovskiy Street in Kherson City.[21] Russian Telegram channels published footage of Russian servicemen firing at unspecified targets near the Kherson City railway terminal, claiming that Russian forces were conducting a “counterterrorist operation.”[22]

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 operations and allocating reinforcements to offensive actions aimed at taking relatively small settlements in Donetsk Oblast rather than dedicating these forces to defending against ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensives. Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks and continued routine fire throughout Donetsk Oblast on September 17.[23] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground assaults on and south of Bakhmut, on and west of Avdiivka, and southwest of Donetsk City.[24] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces made incremental advances into the eastern and southern outskirts of Bakhmut.[25] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian ground attack on Berestove, 15km northeast of Soledar on the T1302.[26] Mariupol Mayoral Advisor Petro Andryushchenko reported on September 17 that Russian forces transported a column of 15 Russian tanks marked with the 3rd Army Corps symbol from Mariupol towards Donetsk City, likely to reinforce Russian positions along the Bakhmut-Donetsk City front line.[27]

Russian forces continued striking Ukrainian infrastructure facilities on September 17. Russian forces fired on the Slovyansk Thermal Power Plant, causing a fire and damaging the facility.[28] Ukrainian authorities also stated that Russian shelling of Mykolaivka interrupted the settlement’s water supply.[29]

Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) authorities and other Russian sources accused Ukrainian forces of striking government buildings in the Donetsk City center on September 17.[30] DNR Territorial Defense Headquarters claimed that Ukrainian forces fired six 155mm NATO artillery rounds at an administration building, the Ministry of Justice building, and the Central Post Office, killing four and injuring eight civilians.[31]

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

Russian forces did not conduct any ground attacks and continued routine fire in Zaporizhia Oblast west of Hulyaipole on September 17.[32] Russian sources stated that Russian forces struck unspecified infrastructure in Zaporizhzhia City, likely as part of a continued effort to target Ukrainian infrastructure.[33] Ukrainian authorities reported that Russian forces shelled Ochakiv, Mykolaiv Oblast (less than 10km from the Kinburn Spit in Kherson Oblast), throughout the night on September 16-17 and morning on September 17, and conducted air or missile strikes on the settlement during the day on September 17.[34]

Ukrainian sources reported extensive partisan attacks on Russian military assets and logistics in western Zaporizhia Oblast on September 17. Ukraine’s Resistance Center reported that (likely partisans) detonated explosives at the Nyzyany rail station (40km east of Tokmak), damaging rail lines on which Russian forces frequently transport military equipment and supplies from occupied Crimea.[35] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces struck the Nyzyany rail station with artillery, rockets, or HIMARS, but the high level of documented partisan activity and the inconsistent Russian narrative suggests that Ukrainian partisans likely conducted the attack.[36] Ukrainian Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov reported explosions (from likely partisan activity) in Bohatyr and Radivonivka (on the southwestern outskirts of Melitopol), where Fedorov reported that Russian forces have established a military base and are storing military equipment.[37] Russian occupation authorities claimed that “terrorists” (likely Ukrainian partisans) blew up power lines in southern Melitopol, damaging concrete supports on the M18/E105 highway connecting Melitopol to Crimea.[38]

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced on September 17 that Ukrainian authorities reconnected the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) to the Ukrainian power grid following repairs to the main external power lines on September 16.[39] Ukrainian state nuclear agency Energoatom announced on September 16 that a large convoy containing spare parts, chemical reagents, and diesel fuel traveled through Russian checkpoints and arrived at the ZNPP on September 16 that enabled Energoatom engineers to conduct the repairs necessary to reconnect the ZNPP to the Ukrainian power grid.[40] The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that Ukrainian forces “resumed provocations” by shelling the area around the ZNPP on September 17 but provided no evidence of the claimed shelling.[41] Russian forces continued routine strikes against areas on the north bank of the Kakhovka Reservoir opposite Enerhodar.[42]

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

Russian authorities are seeking warm bodies to confront Ukrainian counteroffensives in the absence of trained soldiers and are taking extreme measures to speed recruitment efforts. A recruitment poster in Sevastopol advertised a mere 10 days of training for recruits prior to deployment as a part of the 810th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade of the Black Sea fleet, which Ukrainian sources report has lost over 85% of its personnel.[43] The report noted that locals spotted similar posters in Bakhchysarai, Simferopol, Kerch, and Yalta, Crimea.[44] Ten days is not remotely enough time to provide even basic levels of military training. The commitment of such “troops” will more likely further degrade Russian forces’ capability to defend against Ukrainian forces and conduct their own offensive operations than add to Russian combat power.

Russian authorities continue to support major recruitment drives in prisons through private military companies (PMCs). BBC reported that the father of a prisoner in penal colony IK-6 stated that Wagner Group leadership is actively promoting military service with Wagner Group in exchange for pardons, including of narcotics and sexual crimes that previously disqualified individuals from Wagner Group employment.[45] Russian humanitarian group “Rus Sidyashiy” head Olga Romanova stated that Russian-led forces have recruited at least 7,000 prisoners to fight in Ukraine, visited roughly 35 penal colonies, and recruited an average of 200 new prisoners per visit.[46]

Conditions for Russian soldiers continue to vary depending on the soldiers’ contract status and Russian sources reported a systematic preference for “traditional” contract soldiers over reservists. The Russian Union of Paratroopers and a Russian milblogger posted a public call to action on September 14 that details the poor treatment of BARS personnel in receiving promised benefits, recording their contracts, and in the documentation and quality of their medical care.[47] The post claimed that the Russian milblogger has gathered nearly two dozen reports of such treatment from a single unit from Rostov-on-Don and that some BARS personnel were thrown on the streets with no money or supplies to get home and some returned home with untreated injuries.[48] The post appealed to the Russian Ministry of Defense to protect the rights of military personnel and prosecute the worst perpetrators of unequal treatment.[49]

Russian federal subjects are continuing to deploy military personnel to Ukraine. Russian Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov announced that more Chechen Spetsnaz, including an unspecified sniper platoon and reinforced mortar, anti-aircraft, sapper, and assault companies, left Grozny, Chechnya, for an unspecified location in Donbas on September 16.[50]

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)

Russian authorities reported that Ukrainian children forcibly deported to Russia for adoption have received Russian citizenship and may be separated from their siblings.[51] Russian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova stated that Russian authorities are working to place 125 “orphan” Ukrainian children from occupied Donetsk Oblast with Russian families but may have to separate siblings from families with over seven children.[52] Lvova-Belova stated that Russian authorities have already granted these children Russian citizenship and are conducting “psychological testing” to determine appropriate placement with Russian families.[53] As ISW has previously reported, the forcible transfer of children from one group to another “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.[54]

Russian authorities are intensifying measures to identify and detain Ukrainians who oppose the occupation regime. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Zaporizhia Oblast occupation authorities recently announced the strengthening of “sanctions” against patriotic Ukrainians and are threatening Ukrainian activists with forced deportation to occupied Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts where occupation authorities have deemed providing support to members of the Ukrainian resistance movement a crime punishable by death.[55] The Ukrainian General Staff also reported that occupation authorities in Kherson Oblast are conducting weekly inspections of Ukrainian businesses and are threatening to “nationalize” the businesses if they do not cooperate with the occupation regime.[56] Ukraine’s Resistance Center reported that occupation authorities are searching for patriotic Ukrainians in Kherson City by engaging in dialogues to fish for personal information, setting up fake fundraisers for Ukrainian forces, or asking about the deployment of Russian forces, after which occupation authorities detain the Ukrainians for filtration.[57] The Rosgvardia Press Service announced that Rosgvardia forces detained over 50 alleged “accomplices of the Ukrainian Armed Forces” in occupied Zaporizhia and Kherson Oblasts within the past week.[58]

Ukrainian officials stated on September 16-17 that Ukrainian partisans did not assassinate Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Prosecutor General Sergey Gorenko and Deputy Prosecutor General Yekaterina Steglenko. Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai claimed that LNR internal divisions, specifically the rift between Gorenko and LNR Head Leonid Pasechnik, caused Gorenko’s death.[59] Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Mikhail Podolyak suggested that local organized criminal groups could have assassinated Gorenko or that Russian authorities may be purging witnesses of Russian war crimes.[60] The Ukrainian government has offered an official response to the assassination as of September 17.[61] Various proxy officials claimed on September 16-17 that Ukrainian “terrorists” or “gangs” assassinated Gorenko and Steglenko.[62]

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.

[28] https://t.me/pavlokyrylenko_donoda/4918; https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/09/17/okupanty-obstrilyaly-slovyansku-tes-na-stancziyi-pozhezha/; https://t.me/Bratchuk_Sergey/18869; https://t.me/stranaua/64479; https... https://t.me/kommunist/9534; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/40507

[29] https://t.me/pavlokyrylenko_donoda/4918; https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/09/17/okupanty-obstrilyaly-slovyansku-tes-na-stancziyi-pozhezha/; https://t.me/Bratchuk_Sergey/18869

[35] https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2022/09/17/pid-melitopolem-pidirvaly-zaliznychnu-koliyu/

[43] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/09/16/u-krymu-nabyrayut-dobrovolcziv-dlya-neboyezdatnoyi-brygady-morskoyi-pihoty-rosiyi/; https://t.me/Bratchuk_Sergey/18860

[44] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/09/16/u-krymu-nabyrayut-dobrovolcziv-dlya-neboyezdatnoyi-brygady-morskoyi-pihoty-rosiyi/; https://t.me/Bratchuk_Sergey/18860

[57] https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2022/09/17/u-hersoni-rosiyany-posylyly-oblavy-na-proukrayinskyh-gromadyan/

[58] https://www.vesti dot ru/article/2946217; https://t.me/vrogov/4942

understandingwar.org

2. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (17.09.22) CDS comments on key events

CDS Daily brief (17.09.22) CDS comments on key events

Humanitarian aspect:

As of the morning of September 17, 2022, more than 1,145 Ukrainian children are victims of full- scale armed aggression by the Russian Federation, Prosecutor General's Office reports. The official number of children who have died and been wounded in the course of the Russian aggression is 389, and more than 756 children, respectively. However, the data is not conclusive since data collection continues in the areas of active hostilities, temporarily occupied areas, and liberated territories.

On September 14, a family with two daughters aged 8 and 12 died due to enemy shelling in Kherson. It became known that on September 5, due to shelling by Russian troops, a 14-year-old boy died in Nova Husarivka, Izyum district, Kharkiv region. During the recording of crimes committed by the Russian occupiers in Izyum, it became known about the death of a family with two girls aged 5 and 8 on March 9.

2,500 Ukrainian educational institutions were damaged due to bombing and shelling by the armed forces of the Russian Federation. Of them, 289 were completely destroyed.

In Donetsk Oblast, on September 16, 2 civilians were killed by enemy shelling in Sviatohirsk and Bakhmut. Another 11 people were injured. Russian military shelled the Sloviansk TPP this morning. As a result, the equipment on the station's territory was damaged, said Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of Donetsk Military Administration. Due to the shelling, water supply problems were reported in Mykolyivka.

5 wounded and 31 damaged houses were reported as the result of the Russian rocket attacks on Kramatorsk. According to the head of the Donetsk Military Administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko, the Russians used the S-300 complex. There is a child among the wounded. He added that the city is under shelling almost every day.

During September 16, thirty-seven civil infrastructure objects in Zaporizhzhya Oblast were damaged due to the Russian shelling. On the morning of September 17, the enemy launched a rocket attack on a village near Zaporizhzhya. The rocket attack destroyed a gymnasium, a sports club and a cultural center in Tavriyske. One person was wounded in Stepnohorsk, said the head of the Zaporizhzhya Military Administration, Oleksandr Starukh.

During the night of September 16-17, the enemy shelled the Nikopol district of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. The shellings damaged private houses, cars, a lyceum, a workshop of an industrial enterprise, gas pipelines and power lines.

At night, Russians shelled the Industrial District of Kharkiv. As a result of the strikes, a fire broke out at one of the enterprises. They also launched rocket attacks on Chuguiev, Kharkiv Oblast. An

11-year-old girl was injured; she later died in a hospital. Critical infrastructure, the private sector, an enterprise, and a gas station were damaged, the head of Kharkiv Military Administration, Oleh Synehubov, reported.

During September 16-17, the enemy shelled Mykolayiv Oblast. One civilian killed is reported. Wastewater treatment facilities and an electric substation were damaged.

Operational situation

It is the 206th 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 focus its efforts on attempts to fully occupy Donetsk Oblast, organizing defense, maintaining control over the temporarily captured territories and disrupting the offensive of the Ukrainian troops in certain directions.

The enemy fired at the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces along the contact line. Russian military takes measures to regroup troops in different directions, deploys reserves and conducts aerial reconnaissance.

The threat of air and missile strikes throughout the territory of Ukraine persists.

The enemy shelled residential areas and civilian infrastructure objects, violating the norms of International Humanitarian Law, laws and customs of war. Over the past 24 hours, the enemy has launched 4 missile strikes, 24 airstrikes and 72 shellings from rocket artillery systems.

The infrastructure of more than 58 towns and villages was damaged by the enemy air strikes, missile strikes and MLRS, including Kharkiv, Zolochiv, Druzhkivka, Siversk, Zakitne, New York, Veselyanka, Maryinka, Krasnohorivka, Poltavka, Mali Shcherbaky, Myrne, Velyke Artakove, Kryvyi Rih, Nikopol, Olhivske, Zaporizhzhya, Orihiv, Myrolyubivka, Ochakiv and Sukhyi Stavok.

Significant losses among units of the so-called "Union of Donbas Volunteers" have been confirmed. Wounded representatives of the battalion of this illegal armed formation, which took part in the storming of Avdiyivka, were denied medical care after they had been evacuated to Rostov-on-Don because they did not have the status of a regular military formation.

During the past day, the aviation of the Ukrainian Defense Forces struck 9 areas of concentration of enemy manpower and military equipment, 3 strongholds, a rear control post and 2 positions of anti-aircraft missile systems.

Air defense units of the Ukrainian Defense Forces destroyed one Su-24 aircraft, three cruise missiles and one enemy UAV in various directions.

The morale of the personnel of the invasion forces remains low.

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 shelled, including from the territory of the Russian Federation, the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces in the areas of Kudiivka, Hoptivka, Strilecha, Vilkhuvatka, Anyskyne, Synyok, Kamianka, Prystin, and Dvorichna.

Ukrainian troops have liberated all of Kupyansk and are continuing their offensive to the east of the Oskil River.

Ukrainian forces cut Russian land supply lines through the Kharkiv Oblast, forcing Russian forces to reroute logistics from large bases and concentration points around Belgorod via the Valuiky railway line. Permanent damage to this railway line would seriously complicate the logistical support of the Russian defense of the Luhansk Oblast and the eastern part of the Kharkiv Oblast.

The 206th regiment of the so-called "LPR" 2nd Army Corps is leading the defense near Valuiky from the territory of Russia. This indicates that Russia is deploying proxy forces to cover Russian logistics and further suggests that Russia is increasingly relying on proxy forces to perform tasks even in the territory of the Russian Federation.

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.

Russian troops maintain positions in Lyman.

Ukrainian troops struck an area of Russian troops' concentration, causing numerous casualties among Russian servicemen in Perevalsk of Luhansk Oblast.

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 LPR, PMCs.

The enemy shelled the positions of Ukrainian Defense Forces near Bilohorivka, Rozdolivka, Vyimka, Odradivka, Soledar, Mykolaivka Druga, Bakhmut, Bakhmutske, Yakovlivka, Vesela Dolyna, Vesele, Mayorsk, Avdiivka, Opytne, Netaylove, Zelene Pole, Poltavka and Novopil.

Over the past day, units of Ukrainian Defense Forces repelled enemy attacks, inflicting enemy losses in the areas of Bakhmut, Zaitseve, Avdiivka, Mykolaivka Druga and Novomykhailivka.

Russian troops used S-300 air defense missiles to attack Selidove.

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 did not take active action.

In the temporarily occupied [by Russians] territories of the Zaporizhzhya Oblast, the so-called head of the civil-military administration recently announced the strengthening of "sanctions" against patriotic Ukrainian citizens. Fearing the resistance movement, the occupiers and

collaborators intimidated local residents with imprisonment for supporting representatives of the resistance movement. The activists are threatened with forced deportation to the self- proclaimed "LDPR", where such activities are punishable by death.

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.

Five Ukrainian missiles hit the building of the Kherson administrative court, where the Russian occupation administration is located, and caused significant destruction.

Ukraine's blockade campaign in the Kherson Oblast continues to impair Russia's ability to manage the occupied territory and disrupts the logistical support of the Russian army.

Ukrainian strikes have cut off food and water supplies to Russian troops in Kherson. An unidentified Russian air assault unit based in Kakhovka is unable to supply its combat units.

The Ukrainian strikes significantly undermined the morale of Russian troops.

Ukrainian artillery units struck the concentration of Russians in Beryslav, Dar'ivka and Stara Zburivka, as well as the pontoon crossing in the Kozatsky district.

Kherson-Berislav bridgehead

● Velyka Lepetikha – Oleksandrivka section: approximate length of the battle line – 250 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces – 22, the average width of the combat area of one BTG –

11.8 km;

● Deployed BTGs: 108th Air assault regiment, 171st separate airborne assault brigade of the 7th Air assault division, 4th military base of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 429th motorized rifle regiment of the 19th motorized rifle division, 33rd and 255th motorized rifle regiments of the 20th motorized rifle division, 34th and 205th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 49th Combined Arms Army, 224th, 237th and 239th Air assault regiments of the 76th Air assault division, 217th and 331 Air assault regiments of the 98th Air assault division, 126th separate coastal defense brigade, 127th separate ranger brigade, 11th separate airborne assault brigade, 10th separate SOF brigade, PMC.

The Russian Forces shelled the contact line. As a result, more than 26 Ukrainian towns and villages were affected by the enemy fire.

The Russian occupiers left the village of Kiselyvka.

Russian troops fired cruise missiles from positions in the Black Sea at the port infrastructure in Ochakiv.

The enemy combatants of the "Volunteer Battalion named after Shaymuratov", which operates in the vicinity of Mykolaiv, have not been in contact with their relatives in Ufa (Russia) for more than a week.

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.

15 enemy warships and vessels of the auxiliary fleet of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and the Caspian Flotilla are at the Black Sea, providing reconnaissance and blockade of navigation in the Azov-Black Sea waters.

The probability of enemy missile strikes from sea, air and occupied land remains exceptionally high. Along the southern coast of Crimea, there are four enemy cruise missile carriers (including a submarine). Up to 28 enemy Kalibr missiles are ready for a salvo. After a week of relative calm, Russians resumed missile attacks on the ports of Odesa, Mykolaiv and Ochakiv. The enemy employs cruise missiles and MLRS.

Enemy aviation continues to fly from Crimean airfields Belbek and Gvardiyske over the northwestern part of the Black Sea. Over the past day, 12 Su-27, Su-30 and Su-24 aircraft from Belbek and Saki airfields were involved. Currently, 31 aircraft, including 11 Su-30SM and 12 Su- 24M, are located on the base of the 43rd Separate Marine Assault Aviation Regiment (military unit 59882, Novofedorivka village, Saky district). On the outskirts of Armyansk and Yevpatoria, the activation of air defense forces and means were recorded.

A group of 5 large amphibious ships conduct training near the southern coast of Crimea, ensuring the combat coordination of the Russian marines. The rest of the enemy amphibious ships are in the ports of Novorossiysk and Sevastopol for restocking and planned repairs. There are no signs of the direct formation of an amphibious landing force to land on the southern coast of Ukraine.

Three enemy submarines of project 636.3 are in the port of Novorossiysk.

The patrol ship of project 22160, "Pavlo Derzhavin", with the Tor-M2 air defense system on board, was towed from the sea mission area to the Sevastopol naval base due to engine failure. This ship is less than two years old. Due to Western sanctions, instead of German-made design

diesel engines (MTU company), it is equipped with Russian-made engines (from "Kolomensk Plant"), which have low reliability. Such breakdowns of ships with installed Russian or Chinese engines instead of German ones have been quite common in recent years.

Russian patrol ships and boats are on combat duty in the waters of the Sea of Azov on the approaches to the Mariupol and Berdyansk seaports.

A Russian merchant ship with military equipment and ammunition left the Sevastopol naval base to the Mariupol sea trade port.

The intensity of the movement of the enemy military equipment by road and rail transport in Crimea in the direction of the Kherson Oblast remains active. From the occupied Crimea, railway freight trains arrive in the territory of the Kherson Oblast, unloading military equipment and ammunition at the "Kalanchak", "Brylivka", and "Novooleksiiivka" stations.

The third dry cargo, chartered by the UN to transport Ukrainian agricultural products to African countries, left this morning from the port of Chornomorsk. The bulk carrier Ikaria Angel is to deliver about 30,000 tons of wheat to Ethiopia, where a humanitarian disaster is brewing. Due to the full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine and the blockade of the ports by the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation, Ukrainian food was not delivered to the countries of Asia and Africa in time. In partnership with the UN World Food Program, Ukraine has already sent three ships with more than 90,000 tons of wheat to the people of Ethiopia and Yemen. The plan is to export another 190,000 tons, which UN partners currently purchase.

Russian operational losses from 24.02 to 17.09 Personnel - almost 54,250 people (+200);

Tanks – 2,202 (+3);

Armored combat vehicles – 4,701 (+11);

Artillery systems – 1,306 (+4);

Multiple rocket launchers (MLRS) - 312 (0); Anti-aircraft warfare systems - 168 (0); Vehicles and fuel tanks – 3,571(+21); Aircraft - 251 (+1);

Helicopters – 215 (0);

UAV operational and tactical level - 911 (+3); Intercepted cruise missiles - 236 (+3);

Boats / ships - 15 (0).

International diplomatic aspect

"We're coming to a point right now where I think Putin is going to have to revise what his objectives are for this operation," said the US Defence Intelligence Agency director. Russian Armed Forces turned out to be incapable of defeating the UAF, capturing the capital of Ukraine, overthrowing the legitimate government and installing a puppet one, and annexing new

territories. On the contrary, the Ukrainian counteroffensive was highly successful and degraded Russia's capability for any large offensive operations anytime soon. Russia needs quite a long pause to replenish stockpiles of armaments and generate new forces. Unwilling to call for general mobilization for political reasons, Putin found it extremely difficult to bring new recruits to the Russian Armed Forces. He turned to hidden mobilization in depressed regions of Russia, private military companies (though outlawed in Russia), foreign mercenaries and even prisoners. In the coming weeks, he will increasingly need to find an opportunity to freeze conflict with at least some gains Russia got in February-March 2022.

While Russian propagandists still discuss possible ways of escalation of the war, foremost, missile strikes on energy and other critical infrastructure, as well as a tactical nuclear strike, Putin turned to a more cautious tone. "[Erdogan] proposes a meeting with President Zelensky, believing that it can lead to some positive result," said Putin after meeting Erdogan. "The first condition is that they [the Ukrainian side] agree, but they don't want to. Mr Zelensky ... publicly said that he was not ready and did not want to talk to Russia," continued the Russian President.

Indian Prime Minister delicately rebuffed Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, insisting that "now is not the time for war". Modi told Putin of the need to "move onto a path of peace" and reminded him of the importance of "democracy, diplomacy and dialogue". Mexican President said his government would present a plan to the United Nations to end Russia's war in Ukraine. His plan foresees a "mediation committee" that includes the Indian Prime Minister, the UN Secretary- General and Pope Francis.

However, the immediate freeze of the conflict would mean that Putin would be able to attack again within a year timeframe. This view is shared by the majority of foreign and security policy experts (47,1%) that took part in the recent opinion poll conducted by the Razumkov Centre, a Ukrainian think tank. Suppose Ukraine manages to free the territories occupied by Russia since February 24 and signs a security guarantee agreement with Russia that will trigger a winddown of the sanctions. In that case, the Kremlin most likely relaunch its war on Ukraine within five years period. This view is supported by 56,9% of the experts. More than ten years would be needed for Russia to relaunch its aggression against Ukraine, should Ukraine free all its territories, Russia pays the reparations and renews its compliance with the Adapted Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty. Such an opinion is shared by 52,9% of experts.

"I don't think we should underestimate Putin's adherence to his original agenda, which was to control Ukraine. I don't think we've seen any reason to believe he has moved off that," replied CIA Deputy Director David Cohen on the possible use of nuclear arms by Putin. Moreover, the US shouldn't underestimate Putin's "risk appetite," while Moscow, early in the war, he made allusions to Russia's nuclear arsenal and to massive retaliation in warning NATO not to get involved in the conflict. However, Mr Cohen said that the US intelligence community hasn't seen "concrete evidence of planning for the use of WMD.ʺ

Speaking to CBS News, Joe Biden said that nuclear arms would "change the face of war unlike anything since World War Two". However, POTUS hasn't revealed possible scenarios of actions, preserving strategic ambiguity.

"The Kremlin knows it would be impossible for the US not to respond if it uses a tactical nuke or chemical weapon in Ukraine. China, North Korea and Iran are watching. Pentagon will have provided a list of options to the President. Most are likely non-nuclear. All would be devastating for Russia," twitted Ben Hodges, a former commander of the US Forces in Europe. Lt. Gen Ben Hodges elaborated on a possible US reaction to Russia's nuclear attack during the University of North Carolina discussion at Chapel Hill. He believes the US may enter the Russian-Ukrainian war and defeat the invasion forces. The US might annihilate the Russian Black Sea Fleet, based in the illegally annexed Crimea or the Baltic Fleet in the Kaliningrad exclave.

Washington DC has been signaling Moscow of unprecedented consequences of such a suicidal decision of Putin to employ an ultimately forbidden weapon.

Ukraine, general news

Zaporizhzhya NPP was provided with the necessary spare parts, materials and fuel. A convoy of 25 trucks passed enemy checkpoints and brought to Energodar what was needed to repair damaged power lines and power units at the ZNPP, Energoatom reported. The supply of chemical reagents necessary for the ZNPP operation and fuel for diesel generators, which feed the plant in the event of a blackout, have also been restored.The IAEA reported that the ZNPP had been reconnected to the Ukrainian power grid. Engineers repaired one of the four main external power lines, which was damaged after shelling by Russians.

The Ukrainian budget received a grant of $ 1.5 billion. Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal noted that this is the last tranche of $4.5 billion from the World Bank Trust Fund. The funds will reimburse budgetary expenses for pension payments and social assistance programs.

The European Parliament voted to allocate 5 billion euros to Ukraine. This is the eighth package of financial assistance to Ukraine.

Ukrainian postal operator "Nova Poshta" brought parcels, internet from Starlink and a generator to the liberated Izyum. And tomorrow it will bring humanitarian aid, the company's press release says.

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3. Ukraine depends on morale and Russia on mercenaries. It could decide the war

Compare this with Antulio Echevarria's piece on Clausewitz and Ukraine I forwarded yesterday.

Conclusion:

Such a contrast between motivated and mercenary is likely to accentuate into next year and will play a critical factor as the war runs on, assuming western support for Ukraine continues. “I believe we are now on a trajectory for a Russian defeat in Ukraine next year,” Watling said.

Ukraine depends on morale and Russia on mercenaries. It could decide the war

Ukrainian soldiers feel they are fighting for national liberation, while the Russians appear to lack camaraderie. This contrast is critical

The Guardian · by Dan Sabbagh · September 17, 2022

The Ukrainian video begins with the Dunkirk beach scene from the film Atonement, the soldiers’ stirring rendition of Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. Until it transitions to several hundred Ukrainian troops, singing the country’s national anthem in the open air, ahead of last week’s successful Kharkiv offensive.

Life may be trying to imitate art, but in this case there is no clearer demonstration of Ukrainian national morale as the war heads towards the end of its seventh month. The unprovoked attack by their larger neighbour has unleashed a patriotic mobilisation that is having a transformational effect on the battlefield.

There is a stark contrast with the Russian defenders. Faced with a lightning Ukrainian attack that cut off the strategic city of Izium a week ago, some departed in haste, abandoning tanks and other munitions and engaging in looting generators, telephones, and computers they nominally withdrew from the frontline.

“Morale,” says Jack Watling, a land warfare expert at the Royal United Services Institute military thinktank, “is the most important factor for ground forces”.

“It is not just about how soldiers feel about their prospects relative to the enemy, it’s also about the experiences they have recently had and how they are anticipating into the future.”

On one side is an army – Ukraine’s – that considers itself to be fighting for the cause of national liberation. Having beaten off the Russians from Kyiv and pushed them back in Kharkiv, Ukraine increasingly believes it will one day win the war, helped by western intelligence, financing and above all artillery and other fresh munitions.

Morale cannot be detached from the wider military and political context, but it is also an important component to both. Reports from visiting wounded Ukrainian soldiers frequently emphasise that many want, if at all possible, to return to the frontline, and say that the fight against Russia is necessary, despite what has happened to them.

Set against them are the Russian invaders, a mixture of elite soldiers, recent recruits, and lightly armed and sometimes conscripted separatists who are often reluctant to fight outside their home provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, many of whom are exhausted having fought constantly, without rotation, for six-plus months.

While Ukraine has quietly trained large numbers of troops from its initial mobilisation, and replenished them with western-supplied weapons, Russia has done so far less and, the US says, is now buying weapons from North Korea. Winter is coming and how well each side is prepared will be critical.

“The Russians have poor morale, poor camaraderie, a lack of confidence in their command from the beginning. Most soldiers were not told a war was starting and many things they were told about Ukrainians were wrong,” Watling said. Since then there have been repeated examples of a reluctance by some Russian soldiers to fight, and difficulties Moscow is facing recruiting.

Russia would not be the first great power to be humbled by a smaller but more determined opponent in recent history. The Taliban ultimately regained power in Afghanistan last year because the US no longer had the appetite to fight a long, grinding war against an opponent not ready to concede. War can come down to which side is willing to sustain the most casualties, if a quick victory cannot be obtained.

Even Ukraine and its western supporters, though, have at times been surprised by the national determination to fight. As the war began, US officials feared that Kyiv could fall within days; at the very least western officials expected the city to be encircled. Senior Ukrainians in government have reported their surprise at how diligently orders were carried out, with one telling the Washington Post that since the invasion officials had “worked more efficiently than ever”.

Ideology, religion and nationalism all help win wars but a sense of justice is important too. Fresh reports that more than 440 bodies have been found at a single burial site near Izium are likely to be the beginning of grim revelations about the reality of Russian occupation – and will in turn act as a motivator for troops and others in Ukraine. Already visitors to Ukraine are often given a tour by politicians of the mass burial site in Bucha, north-west of Kyiv, to try to win them to the defenders’ cause.

Ukraine says victims from Izium mass grave show signs of torture

Read more

Contrast that, again, with the Russian side. This week a video emerged of mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin addressing a large group of prisoners, telling them “if you serve six months” in his Wagner group “you are free”, saying the war in Ukraine was “a hard war, not even close to the likes of Chechnya” and that their help was needed. While some Ukrainian soldiers are being trained in places like the UK, new recruits on the Russian side come from jail.

Such a contrast between motivated and mercenary is likely to accentuate into next year and will play a critical factor as the war runs on, assuming western support for Ukraine continues. “I believe we are now on a trajectory for a Russian defeat in Ukraine next year,” Watling said.

The Guardian · by Dan Sabbagh · September 17, 2022

4. Is the Army Ready to Fight Behind Enemy Lines in Europe?

Excerpt:

Networking and interoperability across allied militaries are key elements of large-scale exercises like Saber Junction 22. “Participants work through realistic scenarios together in a live maneuver space, building relationships across borders that could be called into action in a crisis,” a U.S. Army article on the exercise explained. If forces from such a wide range of countries can effectively share information across domains in real-time, the alliance’s operational effectiveness will be greatly enhanced in combat, allowing NATO to expand air and ground connectivity over large areas with dispersed, networked missions. Col. Tim Shaffer, officer in charge of training for the Southern European Task Force, Africa, highlighted the importance of enhancing interoperability, saying, “We can never get enough opportunity [to] work with our NATO allies and partners.”

Is the Army Ready to Fight Behind Enemy Lines in Europe?

Thousands of U.S. and NATO soldiers are currently training for offensive airborne attack and seizure operations.

The National Interest · by Kris Osborn · September 14, 2022

Thousands of U.S. and NATO soldiers are training for offensive airborne attack and seizure operations to ensure they are prepared in the event that they need to defend Eastern Europe. According to the Pentagon, around 4,400 participants from Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Georgia, Hungary, Italy, Kosovo, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia, Turkey, and the United Kingdom are participating in the Saber Junction 22 exercise, which is being held in Germany and will run until September 20. The U.S. Army explains that the exercise aims to assess “the readiness of European-based units, like the 173rd Airborne Brigade ‘Sky Soldiers,’ to execute unified land operations in a joint, combined environment with participating Allied and partner nations.” The Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade practiced key aspects of air-land attack preparations, including by air-dropping an M119A3 howitzer and a tactical vehicle from a C-130 cargo plane.

It is not surprising that allies located near Russia are preparing for forward-positioned offensive operations, which would be key to any possible engagement with the Russian military. For instance, in a conflict between NATO and Russia, such maneuvers could even be necessary to take control of areas near or within Russia. Being able to use cargo planes to drop supplies, weapons, and assault forces behind enemy lines would be critical in any sustained offensive operation. In particular, a force capable of airdropping artillery platforms and tactical vehicles behind enemy lines or over uneven terrain can maneuver in ways that pose serious challenges to hostile forces.

Networking and interoperability across allied militaries are key elements of large-scale exercises like Saber Junction 22. “Participants work through realistic scenarios together in a live maneuver space, building relationships across borders that could be called into action in a crisis,” a U.S. Army article on the exercise explained. If forces from such a wide range of countries can effectively share information across domains in real-time, the alliance’s operational effectiveness will be greatly enhanced in combat, allowing NATO to expand air and ground connectivity over large areas with dispersed, networked missions. Col. Tim Shaffer, officer in charge of training for the Southern European Task Force, Africa, highlighted the importance of enhancing interoperability, saying, “We can never get enough opportunity [to] work with our NATO allies and partners.”

Kris Osborn is the defense editor for the National Interest. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Image: DVIDS.

The National Interest · by Kris Osborn · September 14, 2022

5. For Vladimir Putin, this is the beginning of the end

​Until he pulls a Mark Twain and says something like reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated.

But if so, then what?

​

For Vladimir Putin, this is the beginning of the end

Newsweek · by William M. Arkin · September 16, 2022

The collapse of Vladimir Putin's Ukraine campaign has been so dramatic, U.S. intelligence officials who are normally gun-shy about making predictions are ready to look ahead. Three American government officials tell Newsweek that the Russian leader is in serious trouble at home as a result of Kyiv's successful counteroffensive. Angered by the rising cost of the war, by soldiers' deaths and the economic pain of sanctions, Russian politicians and social media influencers are speaking out openly in opposition. "Even pro-Kremlin voices—even state media—are questioning the war for the first time," says one high-ranking intelligence official. "[They're] pushing Putin into a corner."

Ukraine's victories are the beginning of the end for President Putin.

For Vladimir Putin, Ukraine's victories are the beginning of the end. The Russian president on September 10, 2022, in Moscow, Russia. Contributor/Getty Images

"The past week should convince even skeptics that Russia is done," says a second source, a senior State Department official who works on Russia issues. "Moscow might claim that it is just adjusting to focus more on Donbas, but even that campaign is finished." Back home, "in both men and materiel, the well has also gone dry."

A senior military official at the Pentagon agrees. Briefing reporters earlier this week, he said "we assess that Russian forces have largely ceded their gains to the Ukrainians and have withdrawn" from Kharkiv. But the official cautioned that Russia continues its offensive in Donetsk and western Kherson, including heavy use of artillery and airstrikes.

The government sources who spoke with Newsweek were granted anonymity in order to speak candidly about sensitive intelligence.

"Now comes the hard part," the State Department official says, referring to what happens with Ukraine's advances. "All eyes on Putin? Hell yes. Will he destroy Russia to stay in power? Or will Russia destroy him, finally holding him accountable for his Ukrainian blunder?"

A Ukrainian soldier inspects a captured Russian tank on the outskirts of Izyum, Kharkiv Region, eastern Ukraine on September 14, 2022. Getty Images

'Brilliant' misdirection

Last Tuesday night, Ukrainian ground forces surprised Russia by initiating a broad-based offensive around Kharkiv, the country's second largest city. To the north of the city, the 1st Guards Tank Army was quickly pushed back to the Russian border. Some 120 kilometers [74 miles] to the south of Kharkiv, the city of Izium was recaptured and Russian troops scrambled to find safety in their retreat. "The personnel of the units of the so-called 'DNR' [Donetsk People's Republic], which until recently were stationed in Izium, had to retreat 60 kilometers [37 miles] from the city due to the lack of ammunition replenishment and fuel," Ukrainian military intelligence reported over the weekend. "Russians and collaborators are fleeing ... towards Russia," says Luhansk military administrator-in-exile Serhiy Haidai. "The queues for exit are kilometer-long."

Earlier in the week, Haidai posted a picture of a Ukrainian flag hanging above a village on the eastern side of the Oskil River in northern Donbas. Social media is also reporting Ukrainian forces on the outskirts of Lysychansk, the city in Luhansk opposite Severodonetsk on the Donets River. The city was taken in July. With the Ukrainian advance back into the Luhansk region, there is a possibility that they will retake territory controlled by Russia since 2014.

Ukraine's offensive has been "expertly executed," a senior defense official said in a briefing to reporters. On the western end of the front in Kherson region, 450 kilometers (280 miles) to the south, Russian forces find themselves increasingly isolated as a result of Ukrainian artillery and missile strikes that have severed three key bridges over the Dnieper River.

"Brilliant" misdirection tricked the Russians into thinking that the counteroffensive would focus on this area, a senior Army intelligence officer working at the Pentagon tells Newsweek. Kyiv has been telegraphing for weeks its intention to launch a counteroffensive here, and as a result, the Russians hunkered down to defend against an onslaught. This not only "fixed" Russian forces in place, the Army officer says, but also took attention away from Kharkiv where the main attack was really planned. "It really is as significant as the April withdrawal from Kyiv and the north," the Army officer says. "Not even firepower is going to save Russia now."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday night that his country had recaptured more than 8,000 square kilometers (3,000 square miles) in the past two weeks and vowed to take back all Ukrainian territory. He switched to speaking Russian in his nightly video address to communicate with Putin's troops inside the country, calling the war "an obvious lost cause" for Russia and urging them to put down their arms. "History is written by the people and not the monster, never," he said. "What will be written about you in the history books?" The Ukrainian leader promised Russian troops that they "won't be treated like cannon fodder."

There have been consistent reports of Russian troops, individually and even whole units, surrendering in the face of Ukraine's lightning advance. British military intelligence says that some units "fled in apparent panic." Russia is deploying political commissars in "barrier units" behind its front lines to prevent fighters from fleeing, says Ukrainian military intelligence.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv—and the Russian withdrawal—pushed the unprepared Russian troops back and now denies Putin's forces a northern claw for a pincer movement to close on Donetsk, the southern part of Donbas. Meanwhile, British military intelligence says, the loss of Izium and nearby Kupiansk, another important Russian hub, threatens Russian supply lines to the Donbas front line further south. "The loss of Kharkiv essentially closes off the northern approach in Donetsk," says the Army officer. "If Ukraine can hold its newly captured territory, there is no real path for Russia to win in Donbas. Thus the so-called special military operation has failed and will fail. Conquering all of Donetsk and Luhansk can't be achieved."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is seen during his joint press conference with Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki and Latvian President Egils Levits on September 9, 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Today, Zelensky called a Russian missile attack on hydraulic structures in Kryvhi Rih part of a "war against civilians." Alexey Furman/Getty Images

'It's a rout, pure and simple'

President Zelensky was reluctant to crow too much. "The question is not how long this will be, but how much more is needed," he said in a CNN interview last weekend. But he vowed that Ukraine "will fight to the end," regardless of Russian moves or even negotiations.

"We're in the dark with regard to what it will take to convince Putin to seek negotiations," the State Department official tells Newsweek. "What we do know is that it just isn't military victory anymore. Putin has to be contemplating his own survival at this point."

This week, a group of municipal officials in Moscow risked fines and incarceration by publicly calling for Putin to be fired. One local council even urged the Duma, Russia's legislature, to bring charges of treason against Putin for orchestrating the invasion of Ukraine and for damaging the economy. Independent media outlets and social media influencers are starting to report news of Russian defeat in Ukraine. The tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets said this week that Russia "underestimated the enemy.

"We suffered a defeat and tried to minimize the loss by withdrawing our troops so they weren't surrounded," the tabloid said.

How Putin Botched the Ukraine War and Put Russia's Military Might at Risk

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How Putin Botched the Ukraine War and Put Russia's Military Might at Risk

The Russian Ministry of Defense insists that its troops are merely carrying out a "pre-planned regrouping" to focus more on fighting in Donbas—a claim that U.S. intelligence dismisses, saying there is no indication that Moscow was preparing to withdraw, or that it was changing its tactics in Donbas. "We're seeing massive traffic jams and abandoned weapons and encampments," the senior Army intelligence officer tells Newsweek. Ukrainian government sources have published images of crates of ammunition and military hardware scattered where Russian forces withdrew. Some "high-value equipment" was abandoned, British military intelligence says, highlighting "the disorganized retreat" of Russian units and "localized breakdowns in command and control."

"It's a rout, pure and simple," the Army intelligence officer says.

Even official Moscow felt compelled to acknowledge the setback. "On the frontlines of the special operation, this has been the toughest week so far," anchorman Dmitry Kiselev admitted on state television.

"Putin's options for the future are bleak, particularly as he increasingly feels the heat of domestic opposition," says the first intelligence official. The official cites the impact of 60,000-plus Russian casualties and as well as the bite of sanctions and the controls on travel as challenges to Putin.

"We're seeing more and more blaming of Western weapons," says the second official, "as if it is an excuse for why Russia is losing. It's ironic, given that Putin-and-company normally argues that it can defeat NATO. Now it's, 'we couldn't have won because of Western intervention' that is seeking to deflect responsibility from Moscow."

Kremlin loyalists may be working to deflect criticism of the war's mismanagement from Putin himself to the military. "More ominously, there are grumblings that it's all the Russian general staff's fault," says the senior intelligence official. "The Kremlin can hardly blame itself, so shifting blame to military incompetence and corruption might appeal to those who want a scapegoat. And it might strengthen Putin's weak hand."

Former World Champion chess player Garry Kasparov, a leading voice in the opposition, analyzed the Russian leader's position. "Putin has never dealt with situations like this one," he told the Kyiv Post this week. He's "been lucky that he

has always been able to escape.

Russian Hypersonic Missile Accidentally Strikes Russia

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Russian Hypersonic Missile Accidentally Strikes Russia

"Continuing the war is the only way for Putin to stay in power," Kasparov said in the interview. "He wants to create extra chaos in the free world hoping that a new window will open for him. It's really just a protracted agony. It is cynical and stupid, but Putin is willing to put thousands of civilians into graves in the months to come before the whole of Ukraine is liberated, if that will allow him to maintain power."

U.S. intelligence is not prepared to cite a timetable for Russia's military defeat, and President Biden cautioned this week as well that the Ukraine war "could be a long haul."

While a number of Ukrainian officials—including Zelensky himself—have said they will accept nothing short of complete Russian surrender, in at least one video address to the nation the Ukrainian president was more conciliatory. For negotiations to begin, he said, Putin must decide to withdraw to the borders that existed before the February invasion—not insisting that Russia pull back to pre-2014 borders.

Russia must "admit that this is a great tragedy, a historical mistake," Zelensky said. "If they are not ready, it means they have no political will and there will be no meaningful dialogue until then."

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov seemed to agree that a door has opened, stating publicly that Moscow is not opposed to negotiations. "The longer they postpone this process, the more difficult it will be for them to negotiate with us," he said. It was a sly admission that as time goes by and Ukrainian gains continue, the less leverage Russia will have in any deal.

"The Russian Foreign Ministry has practically broken with the Kremlin over negotiations," says the State Department official. Diplomats are increasingly urging Putin and his inner circle to join negotiations before there's nothing to negotiate. U.S. intelligence believes that the Russian military is weary and has begun to push back on Putin; the General Staff is particularly unhappy with the summary dismissal this week of the top Western Military District general fighting in Ukraine.

"It's a moment of truth for Putin," says the senior intelligence official. "There are few Russian options in Ukraine and little likelihood that the Russian president will back down. People are saying that the Russian president continues to reign supreme, but now, we're not so sure. Not only has he failed but he has few options."

Russian Howitzers Obliterated in Ukraine Counteroffensive Caught on Video

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Russian Howitzers Obliterated in Ukraine Counteroffensive Caught on Video

Though U.S. intelligence continues to closely watch the positioning of Russian nuclear forces and its chemical weapons stockpile, all officials who spoke to Newsweek rejected the notion that Putin would resort to nukes. The consensus is that Putin will likely follow the withdrawal from Kharkiv with another one, giving up the city of Kherson and moving Russia's forces east of the Dnieper River, where a more defensible front line could be held.

"I'm not so sure I agree with the 'long war' predictions," says the Army officer, adding that Putin has no real reserve and few options to turn the tide. "Everyone's talking about Putin's hold over Europe with his control of gas, that this is his ace in the hole. But if the heat intensifies back home, Putin may have to shift his attention to a winter disaster of his own making."

Newsweek · by William M. Arkin · September 16, 2022

6. Ukraine Wants the U.S. to Send More Powerful Weapons. Biden Is Not So Sure.

What takes priority: Successful defense of Ukraine and victory that results in a strengthened Ukraine and the international order or not provoking Putin? Does trying not to provoke Putin cede the initiative to him? Can we even be successful in not provoking him? Will Putin escalate regardless of our self-restraint? If we do not adequately arm and support Ukraine will it suffer when Putin escalates? We can control our actions but we cannot control Putin's? Should we exercise self-restraint based on our hope that Putin will not escalate or should we do what is necessary to achieve our objectives and anticipate that Putin will escalate? (as Sun Tzu said: "Do not assume the enemy will not attack, make yourself (or your ally) invincible." 

Ukraine Wants the U.S. to Send More Powerful Weapons. Biden Is Not So Sure.

President Biden wants to avoid provoking Russia at a moment when American officials fear Vladimir V. Putin could escalate the war to compensate for recent losses.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/17/us/politics/ukraine-biden-weapons.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share&utm_source=pocket_mylist

By David E. Sanger, Anton Troianovski, Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt

Sept. 17, 2022

WASHINGTON — Flush with success in northeast Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky is pressing President Biden for a new and more powerful weapon: a missile system with a range of 190 miles, which could reach far into Russian territory.

Mr. Zelensky insists to U.S. officials that he has no intention of striking Russian cities or aiming at civilian targets, even though President Vladimir V. Putin’s forces have hit apartment blocks, theaters and hospitals in Ukraine throughout the war. The weapon, Mr. Zelensky says, is critical to launching a wider counteroffensive, perhaps early next year.

Mr. Biden is resisting, in part because he is convinced that over the past seven months, he has successfully signaled to Mr. Putin that he does not want a broader war with the Russians — he just wants them to get out of Ukraine.

A shipment of long-range guided missiles, which could also give Ukraine new options for striking Crimea, the territory Russia annexed in 2014, would likely be seen by Moscow as a major provocation, Mr. Biden has concluded.

“We’re trying to avoid World War III,” Mr. Biden often reminds his aides, echoing a statement he has made publicly as well.

Senior aides to the president also say that when Mr. Biden asked the Pentagon in recent weeks how much the longer-range missile systems would help Ukrainian forces during the next stage of the war, he was told the benefits would be minimal. That led him to conclude, they said, that it was not worth the risk.

The argument over the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, comes at a critical moment, when officials in the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and American intelligence agencies appear more concerned than ever that Mr. Putin could escalate the war to compensate for his humiliating retreat.

They do not know what form that escalation might take. But many of the options they are preparing for are bleak: more indiscriminate bombardment of Ukrainian cities, a campaign to kill senior Ukrainian leaders, or an attack on supply hubs outside Ukraine — located in NATO countries like Poland and Romania — that are channeling extraordinary quantities of arms, ammunition and military equipment into the country.

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This account of the administration’s effort to control escalation in the war is based on conversations with more than a dozen senior American officials as they struggle to calibrate the next steps — hoping to build on Ukraine’s advances without triggering a wider conflict. It comes as the Ukrainians have gained momentum and the Russians, for now, are still in disarray.

American officials believe they have, so far, succeeded at “boiling the frog” — increasing their military, intelligence and economic assistance to Ukraine step by step, without provoking Moscow into large-scale retaliation with any major single move.

Image

A Ukrainian soldier carrying a U.S.-made Stinger missile. The United States has been steadily sending military, intelligence and economic assistance to Ukraine. Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

They say that Mr. Putin almost certainly would have pushed back hard if Washington had, at the outset of the war, provided Ukraine with the kind of support it is getting now, such as intelligence that has allowed Ukraine to kill Russian generals and target arms depots, tanks and Russian air defenses with precision-guided rocket attacks. Instead, the Americans believe their incremental strategy, and refusal to give Ukraine advanced weapons or aircraft that could reach deep into Russia, has put guardrails on the conflict.

But Mr. Putin has grown increasingly frustrated as his military struggles.

“We are, indeed, responding rather restrainedly, but that’s for the time being,” Mr. Putin said on Friday, after attending a regional summit in Uzbekistan. “If the situation continues to develop in this way, the answer will be more serious.”

The Biden Presidency

With midterm elections approaching, here’s where President Biden stands.

• Defending Democracy: President Biden’s drive to buttress democracy at home and abroad has taken on more urgency by the persistent power of China, Russia and former President Donald J. Trump.
• A Tricky Message: Even as he condemns Trumpism, Mr. Biden has taken pains to show that he understands that not all Republicans are what he calls extremist “MAGA Republicans.”
• On the Campaign Trail: Fresh off a series of legislative victories, Mr. Biden is back campaigning. But his low approval ratings could complicate his efforts to help Democrats in the midterm elections.
• Questions About 2024: Mr. Biden has said he plans to run for a second term, but at 79, his age has become an uncomfortable issue.

He claimed that Ukraine was trying to carry out “terrorist acts” in Russia, and described recent Russian cruise missile attacks against Ukrainian infrastructure as “warning strikes.”

The same day, speaking at an intelligence conference in Washington, the deputy director of the C.I.A., David S. Cohen, said Mr. Putin would be asking his military leaders “what has happened, why it is happening, what can we do to push back and to retain our position.”

“I don’t think we should underestimate Putin’s adherence to his original objective, which was to control Ukraine,” Mr. Cohen said. He added: “We should not underestimate his risk appetite.”

Colin H. Kahl, under secretary of defense for policy, said in a statement to The New York Times on Friday that “Ukraine’s success on the battlefield could cause Russia to feel backed into a corner, and that is something we must remain mindful of.”

But he said that while the United States is committed to providing Ukraine with the equipment it needs to counter Russian aggression, the Pentagon has assessed that Ukraine does not need the ATACMS for “targets that are directly relevant to the current fight.”

On Capitol Hill, Democrats and Republicans have expressed support for preventing the war in Ukraine from spilling into a wider conflict. But many lawmakers said the Biden administration was being overly cautious in denying Ukraine additional advanced weaponry.

Ukraine has called for much greater Western assistance, like fighter jets, tanks, and long-range missiles. Although Mr. Zelensky has asked for ATACMS, the Pentagon has instead provided thousands of satellite-guided rockets and 16 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System launchers, or HIMARS, to fire them. Those rockets have struck more than 400 Russian ammunition depots, command posts and radars.

The HIMARS can carry six guided rockets at a time, each of which can strike targets nearly 50 miles away — a range that Pentagon officials say covers the vast majority of Ukraine’s intended targets. By comparison, a HIMARS launcher can carry only one of the larger ATACMS missiles at a time before needing to reload.

Critics say the military aid that the West has provided until now has been enough for Ukraine to stay in the fight but not to win.

Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat who serves on both the House intelligence and armed services committees, said the United States should send ATACMS to Ukraine.

“Sure, escalation remains a concern, and we have to be mindful of that threat,” said Mr. Crow, a former Army Ranger. “But I don’t think providing ATACMS is substantively escalatory. We need to provide what Ukraine needs to win.”

An increased flow of arms and advice now, said some former officials, is vital to help the Ukrainians capitalize on the counter offensive and survive the coming winter.

“We have a window of opportunity,” said Evelyn Farkas, the executive director of the McCain Institute and a former senior defense official during the Obama administration, speaking at an intelligence and security summit in Washington. “I worry that if we don’t provide the Ukrainians with the weapons they need to push back further, get more territory, they will not be strong enough at the negotiating table and the Russians may regroup.”

Some American officials express concern that the most dangerous moments are yet to come, even as Mr. Putin has avoided escalating the war in ways that have, at times, baffled Western officials.

He has made only limited attempts to destroy critical infrastructure or to target Ukrainian government buildings. He has not attacked the supply hubs outside Ukraine. While he has directed low-level cyberattacks against Ukrainian targets every week, they have been relatively unsophisticated, especially when compared to capabilities that Russia has shown it has, including in the SolarWinds attack on American government and commercial systems that was discovered just before Mr. Biden took office.

Some officials have expressed concern Mr. Putin could detonate a tactical nuclear weapon — perhaps in a demonstration blast over the Black Sea or Arctic Ocean, or in Ukrainian territory. But there is no evidence that he is moving those weapons, officials say, or preparing such a strike.

One senior intelligence official said there was a debate underway inside American intelligence agencies over whether Mr. Putin believes such a step would risk Russia’s alienation from the countries it needs most — especially China — or whether he is holding the option in reserve.

Mr. Biden addressed the issue directly in an interview with CBS for “60 Minutes,” scheduled for broadcast on Sunday, when he warned that turning to nuclear or other unconventional weapons would “change the face of war unlike anything since World War II,’’ an apparent reference to the American use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

“They’ll become more of a pariah in the world than they ever have been,’’ Mr. Biden said, in an excerpt released by CBS. “And depending on the extent of what they do will determine what response would occur.”

That last statement appeared to refer to discussion inside the American defense community about how to respond to a demonstration blast — more akin to a nuclear test, though one conducted to warn of potential escalation — versus a strike on a populated part of Ukraine.

Mr. Putin, despite his early setbacks, appeared generally satisfied with how the war was going in recent months, content to give his army the time to make slow progress as it pummeled Ukrainian lines with a brutal artillery campaign.

Image

The tail of a Russian rocket protruding from the pavement in Lysychansk, Ukraine, in June. In the early months of the war, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia appeared generally satisfied in spite of his forces’ slow progress.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

But as he made clear on Friday, he is content no more. American officials say Moscow is even more ready to blame the United States for its troubles than it was earlier in the war.

“The disclosures that the U.S. intelligence is helping the Ukrainian side has shifted the Russian narrative even more to the message: We are fighting NATO now,” said Larissa Doroshenko, a researcher at Northeastern University.

There also are signs that Mr. Putin could be worried about his own political standing. Public criticism in Russia is on the rise in the aftermath of the counteroffensive. Commentators have, mostly, avoided any direct critique of Mr. Putin. But some academic experts see harsh assessments of the Russian military command as an implicit criticism of Mr. Putin.

The troubles facing Mr. Putin — from mounting criticism to the Ukrainian military strength — mean that his escalation calculus could change.

That has made the decision on longer-range weaponry particularly difficult.

The recent rhetoric out of Russia may well be designed to make the United States think twice about the ATACMS. The missiles would allow Ukraine to strike deeper into Russia or Crimea. Mr. Zelensky has vowed to take back the peninsula, and has carried out stunning attacks against Russian targets there in recent weeks.

Still, the missiles would not allow the Ukrainians to break the defensive lines that the Russians are trying now to rebuild. And some experts caution that they are unlikely to tip the balance in the war.

Throughout the war, U.S. intelligence has proved adept at learning Russian military plans, but its track record on Mr. Putin’s intentions is more mixed.

Intelligence officials have said publicly that Mr. Putin’s war aims remain the same from the beginning of the war — which include the removal of Mr. Zelensky.

In response to the recent setbacks, Mr. Putin could also consider some kind of additional military mobilization, according to U.S. officials. Mr. Putin has so far been unwilling to trigger a full mobilization. But military experts said he could call up more reservists, or men who have previously served in the military — which would be less politically fraught and could bring forces to the battlefield quicker.

What Mr. Putin decides to do could depend on his assessment of his own strength at home, how quickly he thinks Ukraine can regroup and attempt another counteroffensive — and what he can do to deter, rather than encourage, further American support.

Correction: Sept. 17, 2022

An earlier version of this article misstated which country annexed Crimea in 2014. It was Russia, not Ukraine.

David E. Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent. In a 38-year reporting career for The Times, he has been on three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting. His newest book is “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age.”  @SangerNYT • Facebook

Anton Troianovski is the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times. He was previously Moscow bureau chief of The Washington Post and spent nine years with The Wall Street Journal in Berlin and New York. @antontroian

Julian E. Barnes is a national security reporter based in Washington, covering the intelligence agencies. Before joining The Times in 2018, he wrote about security matters for The Wall Street Journal. @julianbarnes • Facebook

Eric Schmitt is a senior writer who has traveled the world covering terrorism and national security. He was also the Pentagon correspondent. A member of the Times staff since 1983, he has shared four Pulitzer Prizes. @EricSchmittNYT

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 18, 2022, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Is Reluctant As Ukraine Asks To Upgrade Arms. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

7. Pressure on Russian forces mounts after Ukraine's advances

Pressure on Russian forces mounts after Ukraine's advances

AP · by JON GAMBRELL · September 17, 2022

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Western defense officials and analysts on Saturday said they believed the Russian forces were setting up a new defensive line in Ukraine’s northeast after Kyiv’s troops broke through the previous one and tried to press their advances further into the east.

The British Defense Ministry said in a daily intelligence briefing that the line likely is between the Oskil River and Svatove, some 150 kilometers (90 miles) southeast of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.

The new line comes after a Ukrainian counteroffensive punched a hole through the previous front line in the war and recaptured large swaths of land in the northeastern Kharkiv region that borders Russia.

Moscow “likely sees maintaining control of this zone as important because it is transited by one of the few main resupply routes Russia still controls from the Belgorod region of Russia,” the British military said, adding that ”a stubborn defense of this area” was likely, but that it remained unclear whether the Russians would be able to withstand another concerted Ukrainian assault.

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Ukrainian forces, in the meantime, continue to cross the key Oskil River in the Kharkiv region as they try to press on in a counteroffensive targeting Russian-occupied territory, according to the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.

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The Institute said in its Saturday report that satellite imagery it examined suggest that Ukrainian forces have crossed over to the east bank of the Oskil in Kupiansk, placing artillery there. The river, which flows south from Russia into Ukraine, had been a natural break in the newly emerged front lines since Ukraine launched its push about a week ago.

“Russian forces are likely too weak to prevent further Ukrainian advances along the entire Oskil River if Ukrainian forces choose to resume offensive operations,” the institute said.

After the Russian troops retreated from the city of Izium, Ukrainian authorities discovered a mass grave site, one of the largest so far discovered. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Friday that more than 440 graves have been found at the site but that the number of victims is not yet known.

Zelenskyy said the graves contained the bodies of hundreds of civilian adults and children, as well as soldiers, and some had been tortured, shot or killed by artillery shelling. He cited evidence of atrocities, such as a body with a rope around its neck and broken arms.

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Videos circulating online on Saturday indicated that Ukrainian forces are also continuing to take land in the country’s embattled east.

One video showed a Ukrainian soldier walking past a building, its roof destroyed, then pointing up over his shoulder at a colleague hanging the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag over a mobile phone tower. The soldier in the video identified the seized village as Dibrova, just northeast of the city of Sloviansk and southeast of the embattled city of Lyman in Ukraine’s Donetsk region.

Another online video showed two Ukrainian soldiers in what appeared to be a bell tower. A Ukrainian flag hung as a soldier said they had taken the village of Shchurove, just northeast of Sloviansk.

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The Ukrainian military and the Russians did not immediately acknowledge the change of hands of the two villages.

Elsewhere in Ukraine, Russian forces continued to pound cities and villages with missile strikes and shelling.

A Russian missile attack early Saturday started a fire in Kharkiv’s industrial area, said Oleh Syniehubov, the regional governor. Firefighters extinguished the blaze.

Syniehubov said remnants of the missiles suggest the Russians fired S-300 surface-to-air missiles at the city. The S-300 is designed for striking missiles or aircraft in the sky, not targets on the ground. Analysts say Russia’s use of the missiles for ground attacks suggest they may be running out of some precision munitions as the monthslong war continues.

In the southern Zaporizhzhia region, a large part of which is occupied by the Russians, one person was wounded after the Russian forces shelled the city of Orikhiv, Zaporizhzhia’s Ukrainian governor Oleksandr Starukh reported on Telegram. Starukh said the Russian troops also shelled two villages in the region, destroying several civilian facilities there.

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The central Dnipropetrovsk region also came under fire overnight, according to its governor, Valentyn Reznichenko. “The enemy attacked six times and launched more than 90 deadly projectiles on peaceful cities and villages,” Reznichenko said.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s atomic energy operator, Energoatom, said a convoy of 25 trucks has brought diesel fuel and other critical supplies to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant — Europe’s largest, which was shut down a week ago amid fears that fighting in the area could result in a radiation disaster.

The trucks were allowed through Russian checkpoints on Friday to deliver spare parts for repairs of damaged power lines, chemicals for the operation of the plant and additional fuel for backup diesel generators, Energoatom said in a statement.

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The six-reactor plant was captured by Russian forces in March but is still operated by Ukrainian engineers. Its last reactor was switched off Sunday after repeated power failures due to shelling put crucial safety systems at risk.

___

Karl Ritter in Kyiv contributed to this report.

___

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

AP · by JON GAMBRELL · September 17, 2022

8. Six things to know as Xi Jinping moves to be China’s dictator for life

Which of his three titles will he give up (or have removed?)

​Topics/Excerpts:

Beijing’s Communist black box

He’s literally written his name into the history books.

A collision course with the U.S.

Total control over the state

Worrying signs in the economy, and abroad

What comes next?

“In his third term, he will have more of his proteges, meaning the people he promoted to the top leadership, so that will make him more powerful,” said Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution.

Senior CCP officials may require Xi to make a symbolic sacrifice of one of his titles or publicly anoint a successor as the price of another term.

But the absence of a clear successor waiting in the wings should ring alarm bells in foreign capitals. “If we don’t get any clues, and if there’s no one that looks like they’re going to have that function, that’s kind of weird,” said Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London.

“What happens if Xi is incapacitated or drops dead? For a risk averse entity, the Party is putting all his eggs in one basket and that’s pretty risky.”

Six things to know as Xi Jinping moves to be China’s dictator for life

Politico

Economic woes and growing perceptions of Beijing as a threat to international stability mean his third term won’t be easy.

Xi Jinping will likely emerge from the conclave with a third term, ensuring at least five more years in control. | Li Xueren/Xinhua via AP Photo

09/17/2022 07:00 AM EDT

In a few weeks, the Chinese Communist Party’s most senior officials will convene in the Great Hall of the People in central Beijing to put Xi Jinping on track to become leader for life — with power rivaling that of Mao Zedong.

Xi will likely emerge from the conclave with a third term, ensuring at least five more years in control.

But while Xi holds an unrivaled grip on the levers of state authority, the country he rules is paradoxically a lot more powerful — and more internally riven — than it was when he took office a decade ago.

Here are six things to know about Xi’s power grab at the mid-October 20th Party Congress — and the country’s complicated trajectory.

Beijing’s Communist black box

Party Congresses occur every five years and are exemplars of the CCP’s obsessive secrecy. The Chinese public’s awareness of the event is basically limited to its location and whatever hints the CCP opts to dole out via state media in the run-up to the event.

This year that includes the disclosure that the Party Congress will likely approve an unspecified amendment to the constitution. Note: it’s a constitution that Xi has already rewritten to allow for his unprecedented third term.

Beyond that, the specific agenda is a mystery. The proceedings aren’t open to the public and the results — including the approval of a work report that outlines the Party’s top priority policies for the next five years — often trickle out only weeks after the event.

Xi has limited his comments about the upcoming Congress to boilerplate propaganda points.

“The 20th CPC National Congress will offer a panoramic prospect of the two-stage strategic plan for China’s drive to build a great modern socialist country in all respects,” Xi told a study session of provincial and ministerial-level officials in Beijing in July.

But that pablum is a sign of confidence.

Xi’s trip to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Uzbekistan — his first foray out of the country since the pandemic — is a decisive confirmation that he feels no threat from potential Party rivals. “[I]t shows a very high level of confidence that he’s got the [Chinese leadership] situation under control and that he will get his third term,” said Yun Sun, China program director at the Stimson Center.

He’s literally written his name into the history books.

The CCP telegraphed Xi’s third term with a Central Committee resolution in November that enshrined him as a pivotal figure critical to China’s growing wealth and power.

The Sixth Plenum’s history resolution placed Xi on par with Mao and Deng Xiaoping, who masterminded China’s four decades of meteoric economic growth. The resolution lavished a good 20,000 words — out of a 27,000-word document — on Xi’s accomplishments since he took office in 2013.

But unlike Mao, whose authority was absolute while China was mired in poverty and roiled by hugely disruptive internal campaigns — including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution — Xi has presided over an increasingly aggressive and expansive authoritarian one-party state powered by China’s four-decade economic boom.

A collision course with the U.S.

Xi’s goal of economic, diplomatic and military dominance will point China in direct conflict with the Biden administration’s commitment to democracy, human rights and a rules-based international order. That’s antithetical to Xi’s hawkish vision of “national rejuvenation” of the Chinese nation.

“I would anticipate ‘more of the same’: more domestic repression, more external assertiveness and possibly aggression. Xi is not about to change course, and certainly not in a more liberal or cooperative direction,” said David Shambaugh, founding director of the China Policy Program in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.

“Xi and China may become even more brazen externally — further solidifying the de facto alliance with Russia, confronting the United States, probing and attempting to undermine Western resolve and U.S. alliances worldwide, leveraging China’s power against its Asian neighbors and Taiwan, and continuing to broaden China’s military footprint worldwide,” added Shambaugh.

The Biden administration hasn’t publicly commented on the implications of Xi’s third term in office.

The fractious state of U.S.-China relations — punctuated by trade tensions, Chinese military intimidation of Taiwan and the administration’s accusation of genocide in Xinjiang — makes it highly unlikely that Biden will congratulate Xi on his third term as then-President Donald Trump did when Xi got his second term in 2017.

Total control over the state

Xi’s growing power has allowed him to reach into corners of Chinese society once considered untouchable. One of those targets has been China’s new generation of affluent elites known as the “fuerdai,” or rich second generation.

His emphasis on reducing social inequities — part of his “common prosperity” initiative — has included moves to “adjust excessive incomes to promote social fairness and justice,” the CCP’s Central Committee for Financial and Economic Affairs said in a statement in August 2021.

Xi’s inequality campaign has put a target on China’s once freewheeling tech sector and the billionaires behind it, following his call in August 2021 that China’s most wealthy should “give back to society more.” Chinese tech mega-firms like Tencent and Alibaba have donated billions of dollars to common prosperity initiatives to demonstrate corporate submission to Xi’s economic agenda.

Worrying signs in the economy, and abroad

But when Xi emerges from the 20th Party Congress with CCP validation of a third term in office, the array of challenges facing China — many linked to Xi’s own policies — leave no time for a victory lap.

China’s youth joblessness rate rose to 19.9 percent in July, its highest rate since Chinese statisticians began calculating it in 2018. That’s sobering news for a one-party state that relies on delivering rising living standards as a key plank of its legitimacy.

Xi’s signature zero-Covid strategy may have saved many lives, but mass urban lockdowns have angered citizens and fueled unemployment. Meanwhile, one of the main drivers of economic growth, China’s property sector, is sputtering as real estate developers default on their debts prompting a sharp decrease in housing construction.

Xi also faces severe headwinds outside China’s borders. Beijing’s unfair trade practices and weaponization of state-backed espionage to power its military industrial complex have roiled China’s relationships with partners. And China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, the impacts of a draconian National Security Law imposed on Hong Kong in 2020 and worsening military intimidation of Taiwan has fueled a growing international China threat narrative.

China is “the most serious long-term challenge to the international order,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared in May.

Those suspicions are pushing the U.S. and China into “a new Cold War,” China’s ambassador in Washington, D.C., Qin Gang, warned in July.

On the continent, relations between China and the European Union have curdled over the past two years in response to Beijing’s efforts to economically throttle Lithuania in reprisal for deepening ties with Taiwan.

And concerns about China’s increasingly aggressive military posture in Asia and its willingness to use economic coercion against trading partners has sown a growing China threat narrative in the Indo-Pacific from Australia to South Korea.

Xi’s perceived management failures of these problems — and concern about his personality cult — has sparked rumors of internal CCP opposition to his third term.

“The next five years require a great deal of crisis management in China [and] the major priority for Xi will be economic growth, political [and] social stability, and external political and national security,” said Alfred Chan, professor of political science at Huron University College and author of Xi Jinping: Political Career, Governance, and Leadership, 1953-2018.

What comes next?

But Xi has other cards still to play. He will likely quell potential dissent within CCP’s ranks by replacing some or all of the 11 Politburo members above the unofficial retirement age of 68 — including China’s senior diplomat, Yang Jiechi, Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Vice Premier Liu He — with trusted acolytes.

“In his third term, he will have more of his proteges, meaning the people he promoted to the top leadership, so that will make him more powerful,” said Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution.

Senior CCP officials may require Xi to make a symbolic sacrifice of one of his titles or publicly anoint a successor as the price of another term.

But the absence of a clear successor waiting in the wings should ring alarm bells in foreign capitals. “If we don’t get any clues, and if there’s no one that looks like they’re going to have that function, that’s kind of weird,” said Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London.

“What happens if Xi is incapacitated or drops dead? For a risk averse entity, the Party is putting all his eggs in one basket and that’s pretty risky.”

POLITICO

Politico

9. Why do Russian executives keep dying in mysterious ways?

A rhetorical question I think most of us can answer.

Why do Russian executives keep dying in mysterious ways?

A string of deaths among wealthy Russians has this in common: The circumstances are always unusual.

Matt Stiles, Senior Data Visualization Reporter, Tom Nagorski, Global Editor, and Jason Paladino, Investigative ReporterSeptember 16, 2022

grid.news

It’s getting hard to keep track.

When Ivan Pechorin’s body was found washed onto shore near Vladivostok, Russia’s easternmost metropolis, it marked the 12th time this year that a wealthy Russian executive had died in strange circumstances.

“Strange circumstances” may be an understatement. Some of these men are said to have fallen out of windows. Some have died in reported murder-suicides. They have drowned or been drowned, hanged or been hanged — depending on who you believe. They have died in Russia, Western Europe and in Washington, D.C.

An oil executive magnate was found in his bathroom, his wrists slashed. The man who ran corporate security for the same company was found hanging in his garage. A shipping CEO was found in his swimming pool, a gunshot wound to his head.

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Perhaps the oddest of these stories is the case of former oil executive Alexander Subbotin, who died in May. Russian state media said he had been found at the house of a shaman in the Moscow region, dead of a heart attack. According to Newsweek, he was seeking a hangover cure.

Pechorin, the man found this week near Vladivostok, was an executive involved in the energy industry in the Russian far east. No fewer than eight wealthy Russians with ties to the country’s critical energy sector have died this year.

Pechorin was the aviation director for Russia’s Far East and Arctic Development Corporation (KRDV). He was said by local authorities to have “fallen overboard” from a boat that was sailing near Cape Ignatyev in the Sea of Japan.

“On September 12, 2022, it became known about the tragic death of our colleague, Ivan Pechorin,” a statement from the company said.

The KRDV is backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, part of his project for developing the rich energy and mining resources of the far east. Newsweek called Pechorin Putin’s “key man” in the region.

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He wasn’t the first KRDV executive to die this year. In February, the company announced the death of its 43-year-old general director, Igor Nosov. It gave the cause of death as a stroke.

Friends or foes of Putin?

Nearly all the accounts have come shrouded in mystery or hard-to-believe detail and — not surprisingly — they have given rise to a slew of conspiratorial-sounding theories and amateur sleuthing:

Surely someone is killing all these people? Surely Putin, who has been known to order attacks on his enemies, must be somehow tied to the deaths? Has falling out of favor with the Kremlin led to falling inexplicably from windows?

Complicating matters for investigators — amateur or professional — is the fact that some of these men were friends of the Kremlin; some were critics. Their companies profited from good relations with the Kremlin — or suffered from Putin’s war. In some cases, both may have been true.

Perhaps the most suspicious of all these stories was a pair of deaths of executives from Lukoil, Russia’s largest private oil company. That’s because Lukoil took an early public stand against the war in Ukraine. In March, the company issued a statement calling for the “immediate cessation of the armed conflict.”

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Earlier this month, Russian state media reported the death of Ravil Maganov, Lukoil chairman of the board. An initial company statement said Maganov had “passed away after a severe illness”; later accounts said his body had been found on the grounds of Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital and that Maganov had died in an accidental fall from a hospital window.

The second Lukoil official, Subbotin, was the man who had visited the shaman. Subbotin was found dead in the basement of a residence in a Moscow suburb belonging to Shaman Magua, who claimed to practice purification rites.

A pair of officials of the gas company Gazprom, which has not responded to a request for comment, are also among the dead; the suspicion here is that alleged corruption involving the company may have played a role.

While most have died in Russia, others have passed away abroad. Mikhail Watford, an oil and gas magnate, was found dead at his home in Surrey, England, four days after the war began. In April, the bodies of Russian oligarch Sergey Protosenya, 55, and two other family members were found dead in Lloret de Mar, in Spain. Protosenya was found hanging; his relatives had been stabbed. Family and friends told Catalan police he had been the victim of a “staged suicide.”

And on Aug. 14, Dan Rapoport, a Latvian American investment banker and outspoken Putin critic, was found dead in front of a luxury apartment building in Washington D.C. Police said they were not treating Rapoport’s death as suspicious, Politico reported, though the case remains under investigation.

What to make of it all? In some cases, suicide seems plausible, given that some of the individuals had lost enormous amounts of money due to the sanctions imposed after Putin’s invasion. Suspicion of foul play is of course understandable — given the nature of the deaths and the fact that Putin’s Kremlin has a history of ordering the killing of its enemies.

But beyond that, it is impossible to know where the truth lies. At least not yet. Perhaps the most one can say is that taking all the explanations at face value seems a stretch. And that will explain why so many people — the amateurs and professionals both — are doing no such thing.

Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.

grid.news

10. Command by Lawrence Freedman review – inside the war room

​I just received this book. I plan to read it on my flight to Korea today.

Conclusion:

Command is the history of our time, told through war. It’s a wonderful, idiosyncratic feat of storytelling as well as an essential account of how the modern world’s wars have been fought, written by someone whose grasp of complex detail is as strong and effective as the clarity of his style. I shall read it again and again.

Command by Lawrence Freedman review – inside the war room

From Korea to Ukraine, a brilliant study of the politics and personalities that drive modern conflicts

The Guardian · by John Simpson · September 17, 2022

There was a brief time, lasting from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, when even quite sensible people wondered whether major wars might become a thing of the past. This proved to be ludicrously wrong, of course. Since the late 1990s our age has been largely defined by war, beginning with Chechnya and the former Yugoslavia and intensifying with 9/11 and the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Now, after Vladimir Putin’s wholly unprovoked attack on Ukraine, we’re experiencing the scary feeling that nuclear war might be a real possibility, once again. And the Ukraine war is forcing us to ask the old, old question: whose finger is really on the trigger? Are the politicians or the generals in charge? The dictators or the duly elected representatives? The presidents and prime ministers or the people in uniform?

Prof Sir Lawrence Freedman is the dominant academic authority in Britain and the English-speaking world on the way modern wars have been fought. Rational, liberal-minded, clear-sighted, he has drawn on a lifetime of experience for his new book. It was, he accepts, a lockdown exercise. A purist might say some of the material could have been differently organised, with a clearer separation of the material by region, for example. But it is the quality of the narrative and the sheer intelligence of the judgment that count, given the subject’s vast sweep. Command takes in not simply the major wars – Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf and Afghanistan – but also France’s colonial wars in Indo-China and Algeria, the near-war created by the Cuban missile crisis, Pakistan’s hapless attempt to keep hold of Bangladesh, Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the Falklands, and Laurent Kabila’s vicious campaign in the Congo: an often shameful yet always illuminating parade of hardware, human inadequacy and death.

Democracies really do fight wars more effectively, and dictators really do make rotten strategists

It is, of course, too much to hope that any simple lessons can be drawn from all this. Some political leaders tell the generals what to do, sometimes it’s the other way round. Freedman summons up an extraordinary range of post-1945 commanders, from MacArthur to Giáp, Cogny and Challe, right through to Mike Jackson in Kosovo, Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf in Iraq and two of America’s most admirable but doomed generals, David Petraeus in Baghdad and Stan McChrystal in Kabul. Yet some basic principles apply: democracies really do fight wars more effectively, and dictators really do make rotten strategists, from Saddam Hussein to Vladimir Putin, who interferes even in the kind of decisions an army lieutenant ought to take.

Reporters – I’m thinking particularly of long-serving people such as Jeremy Bowen of the BBC, Richard Engel of NBC, or John Burns of the New York Times, but there are plenty more of us – have seen this succession of wars from a very different viewpoint: we stare up into the sky at the bombers and missiles targeting the enemy cities where we are cowering, knowing nothing of the strategy that has sent them there. Just occasionally our view can be clearer than that of the commanders in their headquarters; for instance during President Clinton’s and Tony Blair’s maladroit bombing of Belgrade in 1999, when the White House and Downing Street became increasingly panicky in their claims that Serbia’s resistance was collapsing when it was clear to us that it wasn’t. Freedman’s view is never simply that of the headquarters, though, and he takes a savage pleasure in untangling the infighting among the staff and the soldiers on the ground. His account of the wars against Hussein and the Taliban is masterly: perhaps the best I’ve read. Battlefield reporting is important, because people back home need to know what is being done in their name. But there’s no question that what really counts in the long run is Freedman’s perspective, examining the decision-making and the interplay between governments and military commanders.

Lawrence Freedman: ‘Autocracies tend to make catastrophic decisions. That’s the case with Putin’

Read more

Do certain basic threads link all the different wars since Korea? Just one or two: American short-termism, for instance. Every major enemy the US has come up against knows that Washington’s attention span is brief, and that the one hope of success lies in clinging on, despite the overwhelming firepower. Since Korea, the US has failed to emerge as the undisputed winner in any of the major wars it has fought, from Vietnam to Afghanistan. That this hasn’t damaged its standing as the world’s pre-eminent power is a tribute to America’s enormous economic and cultural strength. It’s also a sign that none of these conflicts has been as existentially important as Washington originally said they were.

In order to persuade public opinion to back a war, a US president must hype its significance grossly; think of Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam, a very middling local post-colonial conflict. (Blair did the same with Hussein’s WMDs and the supposed 45-minute strike time against British targets.) Soon the big US corporations muscle in, sniffing indecently large profits, and the Department of Defense proceeds to pour out immense and often unnecessary resources. Finally the cost incurred, plus the grotesque damage done to local civilian life, starts to tip the balance, and Americans themselves begin questioning the war’s purpose. After that, it’s just a question of how fast to get out.

Command is the history of our time, told through war. It’s a wonderful, idiosyncratic feat of storytelling as well as an essential account of how the modern world’s wars have been fought, written by someone whose grasp of complex detail is as strong and effective as the clarity of his style. I shall read it again and again.

John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor. He presents Unspun World on BBC Two. The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine by Lawrence Freedman is published by Penguin (£30). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

The Guardian · by John Simpson · September 17, 2022​

11. ‘A Crisis Coming’: The Twin Threats to American Democracy

This will not be received well by some of the tribes.

Please go to the link to view the proper formatting and the charts and data (to include interactive charts).

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/17/us/american-democracy-threats.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share&utm_source=pocket_mylist

DEMOCRACY CHALLENGED

‘A Crisis Coming’: The Twin Threats to American Democracy

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/17/us/american-democracy-threats.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share&utm_source=pocket_mylist

By David Leonhardt

David Leonhardt is a senior writer at The Times who won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Great Recession.

• Sept. 17, 2022

The United States has experienced deep political turmoil several times before over the past century. The Great Depression caused Americans to doubt the country’s economic system. World War II and the Cold War presented threats from global totalitarian movements. The 1960s and ’70s were marred by assassinations, riots, a losing war and a disgraced president.

These earlier periods were each more alarming in some ways than anything that has happened in the United States recently. Yet during each of those previous times of tumult, the basic dynamics of American democracy held firm. Candidates who won the most votes were able to take power and attempt to address the country’s problems.

The current period is different. As a result, the United States today finds itself in a situation with little historical precedent. American democracy is facing two distinct threats, which together represent the most serious challenge to the country’s governing ideals in decades.

The first threat is acute: a growing movement inside one of the country’s two major parties — the Republican Party — to refuse to accept defeat in an election.

The violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress, meant to prevent the certification of President Biden’s election, was the clearest manifestation of this movement, but it has continued since then. Hundreds of elected Republican officials around the country falsely claim that the 2020 election was rigged. Some of them are running for statewide offices that would oversee future elections, potentially putting them in position to overturn an election in 2024 or beyond.

“There is the possibility, for the first time in American history, that a legitimately elected president will not be able to take office,” said Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University who studies democracy.

The second threat to democracy is chronic but also growing: The power to set government policy is becoming increasingly disconnected from public opinion.

The run of recent Supreme Court decisions — both sweeping and, according to polls, unpopular — highlight this disconnect. Although the Democratic Party has won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections, a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees seems poised to shape American politics for years, if not decades. And the court is only one of the means through which policy outcomes are becoming less closely tied to the popular will.

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Two of the past four presidents have taken office despite losing the popular vote. Senators representing a majority of Americans are often unable to pass bills, partly because of the increasing use of the filibuster. Even the House, intended as the branch of the government that most reflects the popular will, does not always do so, because of the way districts are drawn.

“We are far and away the most countermajoritarian democracy in the world,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and a co-author of the book “How Democracies Die,” with Daniel Ziblatt.

The Times is examining challenges to democratic norms in the United States and around the world. This essay is part of the series. Read more here.

The causes of the twin threats to democracy are complex and debated among scholars.

The chronic threats to democracy generally spring from enduring features of American government, some written into the Constitution. But they did not conflict with majority opinion to the same degree in past decades. One reason is that more populous states, whose residents receive less power because of the Senate and the Electoral College, have grown so much larger than small states.

The acute threats to democracy — and the rise of authoritarian sentiment, or at least the acceptance of it, among many voters — have different causes. They partly reflect frustration over nearly a half-century of slow-growing living standards for the American working class and middle class. They also reflect cultural fears, especially among white people, that the United States is being transformed into a new country, more racially diverse and less religious, with rapidly changing attitudes toward gender, language and more.

Image

The attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was the clearest manifestation of the growing movement in the Republican Party to refuse to accept defeat in an election.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times

The economic frustrations and cultural fears have combined to create a chasm in American political life, between prosperous, diverse major metropolitan areas and more traditional, religious and economically struggling smaller cities and rural areas. The first category is increasingly liberal and Democratic, the second increasingly conservative and Republican.

The political contest between the two can feel existential to people in both camps, with disagreements over nearly every prominent issue. “When we’re voting, we’re not just voting for a set of policies but for what we think makes us Americans and who we are as a people,” Lilliana Mason, a political scientist and the author of “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity,” said. “If our party loses the election, then all of these parts of us feel like losers.”

These sharp disagreements have led many Americans to doubt the country’s system of government. In a recent poll by Quinnipiac University, 69 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of Republicans said that democracy was “in danger of collapse.” Of course, the two sides have very different opinions about the nature of the threat.

Many Democrats share the concerns of historians and scholars who study democracy, pointing to the possibility of overturned election results and the deterioration of majority rule. “Equality and democracy are under assault,” President Biden said in a speech this month in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. “We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise.”

Many Republicans have defended their increasingly aggressive tactics by saying they are trying to protect American values. In some cases, these claims rely on falsehoods — about election fraud, Mr. Biden’s supposed “socialism,” Barack Obama’s birthplace, and more.

In others, they are rooted in anxiety over real developments, including illegal immigration and “cancel culture.” Some on the left now consider widely held opinions among conservative and moderate Americans — on abortion, policing, affirmative action, Covid-19 and other subjects — to be so objectionable that they cannot be debated. In the view of many conservatives and some experts, this intolerance is stifling open debate at the heart of the American political system.

The divergent sense of crisis on left and right can itself weaken democracy, and it has been exacerbated by technology.

Conspiracy theories and outright lies have a long American history, dating to the personal attacks that were a staple of the partisan press during the 18th century. In the mid-20th century, tens of thousands of Americans joined the John Birch Society, a far-right group that claimed Dwight Eisenhower was a secret Communist.

Today, however, falsehoods can spread much more easily, through social media and a fractured news environment. In the 1950s, no major television network spread the lies about Eisenhower. In recent years, the country’s most watched cable channel, Fox News, regularly promoted falsehoods about election results, Mr. Obama’s birthplace and other subjects.

These same forces — digital media, cultural change and economic stagnation in affluent countries — help explain why democracy is also struggling in other parts of the world. Only two decades ago, at the turn of the 21st century, democracy was the triumphant form of government around the world, with autocracy in retreat in the former Soviet empire, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, South Korea and elsewhere. Today, the global trend is moving in the other direction.

In the late 1990s, 72 countries were democratizing, and only three were growing more authoritarian, according to data from V-Dem, a Swedish institute that monitors democracy. Last year, only 15 countries grew more democratic, while 33 slid toward authoritarianism.

Some experts remain hopeful that the growing attention in the United States to democracy’s problems can help avert a constitutional crisis here. Already, Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election failed, partly because of the refusal of many Republican officials to participate, and both federal and state prosecutors are investigating his actions. And while the chronic decline of majority rule will not change anytime soon, it is also part of a larger historical struggle to create a more inclusive American democracy.

Still, many experts point out that it is still not clear how the country will escape a larger crisis, such as an overturned election, at some point in the coming decade. “This is not politics as usual,” said Carol Anderson, a professor at Emory University and the author of the book, “One Person, No Vote,” about voter suppression. “Be afraid.”

The Will of the Majority

Image

Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election failed, partly because of the refusal of many Republican officials to participate.Credit...Saul Martinez for The New York Times

The founders did not design the United States to be a pure democracy.

They distrusted the classical notion of direct democracy, in which a community came together to vote on each important issue, and believed it would be impractical for a large country. They did not consider many residents of the new country to be citizens who deserved a voice in political affairs, including Natives, enslaved Africans and women. The founders also wanted to constrain the national government from being too powerful, as they believed was the case in Britain. And they had the practical problem of needing to persuade 13 states to forfeit some of their power to a new federal government.

Instead of a direct democracy, the founders created a republic, with elected representatives to make decisions, and a multilayered government, in which different branches checked each other. The Constitution also created the Senate, where every state had an equal say, regardless of population.

Pointing to this history, some Republican politicians and conservative activists have argued that the founders were comfortable with minority rule. “Of course we’re not a democracy,” Senator Mike Lee of Utah has written.

But the historical evidence suggests that the founders believed that majority will — defined as the prevailing view of enfranchised citizens — should generally dictate national policy, as George Thomas of Claremont McKenna College and other constitutional scholars have explained.

In the Federalist Papers, James Madison equated “a coalition of a majority of the whole society” with “justice and the general good.” Alexander Hamilton made similar points, describing “representative democracy” as “happy, regular and durable.” It was a radical idea at the time.

For most of American history, the idea has prevailed. Even with the existence of the Senate, the Electoral College and the Supreme Court, political power has reflected the views of people who had the right to vote. “To say we’re a republic not a democracy ignores the past 250 years of history,” Mr. Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard University, said.

Before 2000, only three candidates won the presidency while losing the popular vote (John Quincy Adams, Rutherford Hayes and Benjamin Harrison), and each served only a single term. During the same period, parties that won repeated elections were able to govern, including the Democratic-Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson’s time, the New Deal Democrats and the Reagan Republicans.

The situation has changed in the 21st century. The Democratic Party is in the midst of a historic winning streak. In seven of the past eight presidential elections, stretching back to Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, the Democratic nominee has won the popular vote. Over more than two centuries of American democracy, no party has previously fared so well over such an extended period.

Yet the current period is hardly a dominant Democratic age.

What changed? One crucial factor is that, in the past, the parts of the country granted outsize power by the Constitution — less populated states, which tend to be more rural — voted in broadly similar ways as large states and urban areas.

This similarity meant that the small-state bonus in the Senate and Electoral College had only a limited effect on national results. Both Democrats and Republicans benefited, and suffered, from the Constitution’s undemocratic features.

Democrats sometimes won small states like Idaho, Montana, Utah and Wyoming in the mid-20th century. And California was long a swing state: Between the Great Depression and 2000, Democratic and Republican presidential candidates won it an equal number of times. That the Constitution conferred advantages on residents of small states and disadvantages on Californians did not reliably boost either party.

Image

Joe Biden campaigning in Los Angeles in March 2020. He went on to win California in the general election by 29 percentage points.Credit...Josh Haner/The New York Times

In recent decades, Americans have increasingly sorted themselves along ideological lines. Liberals have flocked to large metropolitan areas, which are heavily concentrated in big states like California, while residents of smaller cities and more rural areas have become more conservative.

This combination — the Constitution’s structure and the country’s geographic sorting — has created a disconnect between public opinion and election outcomes. It has affected every branch of the federal government: the presidency, Congress and even the Supreme Court.

In the past, “the system was still antidemocratic, but it didn’t have a partisan effect,” Mr. Levitsky said. “Now it’s undemocratic and has a partisan effect. It tilts the playing field toward the Republican Party. That’s new in the 21st century.”

In presidential elections, the small-state bias is important, but it is not even the main issue. A more subtle factor — the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College in most states — is. Candidates have never received extra credit for winning state-level landslides. But this feature did not used to matter very much, because landslides were rare in larger states, meaning that relatively few votes were “wasted,” as political scientists say.

Today, Democrats dominate a handful of large states, wasting many votes. In 2020, Mr. Biden won California by 29 percentage points; New York by 23 points; and Illinois by 17 points. Four years earlier, Hillary Clinton’s margins were similar.

Vote Margins by State in Presidential Elections since 1988

198819921996200020042008201220162020

← More Democratic

More Republican →

Note: Circles are sized by each state’s share of the national population.Sources: Dave Liep's Atlas of U.S. Elections; Edison Research; U.S. Census BureauBy Keith Collins and Ashley Wu

This shift means that millions of voters in large metropolitan areas have moved away from the Republican Party without having any impact on presidential outcomes. That’s a central reason that both George W. Bush and Mr. Trump were able to win the presidency while losing the popular vote.

“We’re in a very different world today than when the system was designed,” said Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California. “The dynamic of being pushed aside is more obvious and I think more frustrating.”

Republicans sometimes point out that the system prevents a few highly populated states from dominating the country’s politics, which is true. But the flip is also true: The Constitution gives special privileges to the residents of small states. In presidential elections, many voters in large states have become irrelevant in a way that has no historical antecedent.

The Curse of Geographic Sorting

Image

Protesters outside the Supreme Court after Roe v. Wade was overturned in June. If elections reflected popular opinion, Democratic appointees would dominate the court, but it now has a conservative, six-member majority.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

The country’s changing population patterns may have had an even bigger effect on Congress — especially the Senate — and the Supreme Court than the presidency.

The sorting of liberals into large metropolitan areas and conservatives into more rural areas is only one reason. Another is that large states have grown much more quickly than small states. In 1790, the largest state (Virginia) had about 13 times as many residents as the smallest (Delaware). Today, California has 68 times as many residents as Wyoming; 53 times as many as Alaska; and at least 20 times as many as another 11 states.

Together, these trends mean that the Senate has a heavily pro-Republican bias that will last for the foreseeable future.

How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.

Learn more about our process.

The Senate today is split 50-50 between the two parties. But the 50 Democratic senators effectively represent 186 million Americans, while the 50 Republican senators effectively represent 145 million. To win Senate control, Democrats need to win substantially more than half of the nationwide votes in Senate elections.

This situation has led to racial inequality in political representation. The residents of small states, granted extra influence by the Constitution, are disproportionately white, while large states are home to many more Asian American, Black and Latino voters.

Senate and Electoral College Representation

Residents of less populated states like Wyoming and North Dakota, who are disproportionately white, have outsize influence.

1 voter in Wyoming

1 voter in North Dakota

has similar

representation as

White

White

or

6 voters in Connecticut

White

Black

Asian

or

7 voters in Alabama

White

Black

or

18 voters in Michigan

Hispanic

Black

Asian

White

Other

or

59 voters in California

Hispanic

Black

Asian

White

Other

Note: Examples are based on ethnic makeup of each state. Pacific Islanders included among Asian voters.Sources: U.S. Census Bureau; American Community SurveyBy Ashley Wu

In addition, two parts of the country that are disproportionately Black or Latino — Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico — have no Senate representation. Washington has more residents than Vermont or Wyoming, and Puerto Rico has more residents than 20 states. As a result, the Senate gives a political voice to white Americans that is greater than their numbers.

The House of Representatives has a more equitable system for allocating political power. It divides the country into 435 districts, each with a broadly similar number of people (currently about 760,000). Still, House districts have two features that can cause the chamber’s makeup not to reflect national opinion, and both of them have become more significant in recent years.

The first is well known: gerrymandering. State legislatures often draw district boundaries and in recent years have become more aggressive about drawing them in partisan ways. In Illinois, for example, the Democrats who control the state government have packed Republican voters into a small number of House districts, allowing most other districts to lean Democratic. In Wisconsin, Republicans have done the opposite.

Because Republicans have been more forceful about gerrymandering than Democrats, the current House map slightly favors Republicans, likely by a few seats. At the state level, Republicans have been even bolder. Gerrymandering has helped them dominate the state legislatures in Michigan, North Carolina and Ohio, even though the states are closely divided.

Still, gerrymandering is not the only reason that House membership has become less reflective of national opinion in recent years. It may not even be the biggest reason, according to Jonathan A. Rodden, a political scientist at Stanford University. Geographic sorting is.

“Without a doubt, gerrymandering makes things worse for the Democrats,” Mr. Rodden has written, “but their underlying problem can be summed up with the old real estate maxim: location, location, location.” The increasing concentration of Democratic voters into large metro areas means that even a neutral system would have a hard time distributing these tightly packed Democratic voters across districts in a way that would allow the party to win more elections.

Instead, Democrats now win many House elections in urban areas by landslides, wasting many votes. In 2020, only 21 Republican House candidates won their elections by at least 50 percentage points. Forty-seven Democrats did.

Landslides in 2020 House Elections

There were about twice as many districts where a Democratic House candidate won by at least 50 percentage points as there were districts where a Republican candidate won by as much.

Dem.

Rep.

Win

Landslide (one candidate won by at least 50 percentage points)

Maine

N.H.

Diana DeGette

Colo. District 1

Jesús García

Ill. District 4

Jerry Nadler

N.Y. District 10

Wash.

Mass.

Vt.

N.Y.

N.D.

Mont.

Mich.

Idaho

Minn.

Conn.

R.I.

Ore.

Wis.

Wyo.

S.D.

Barbara Lee

Calif. District 13

Calif.

Pa.

Neb.

Colo.

Ohio

Ill.

N.J.

Iowa

Ind.

Nev.

Utah

Kan.

Md.

Ariz.

N.M.

Mo.

W.Va.

Del.

Ky.

Va.

Okla.

N.C.

Ark.

Ga.

Tenn.

Texas

Donald Payne Jr.

N.J. District 10

Miss.

Ala.

S.C.

La.

Alaska

Fla.

Hawaii

Note: Landslides include uncontested elections.Source: Edison ResearchBy Ashley Wu

Looking at where many of these elections occurred helps make Mr. Rodden’s point. The landslide winners included Representative Diana DeGette in Denver; Representative Jerry Nadler in New York City; Representative Jesús García in Chicago; Representative Donald Payne Jr. in northern New Jersey; and Representative Barbara Lee in Oakland, Calif. None of those districts are in states where Republicans have controlled the legislative boundaries, which means that they were not the result of Republican gerrymandering.

Again and again, geographic sorting has helped cause a growing disconnect between public opinion and election results, and this disconnect has shaped the Supreme Court, as well. The court’s membership at any given time is dictated by the outcomes of presidential and Senate elections over the previous few decades. And if elections reflected popular opinion, Democratic appointees would dominate the court.

Every current justice has been appointed during one of the past nine presidential terms, and a Democrat has won the popular vote in seven of those nine and the presidency in five of the nine. Yet the court is now dominated by a conservative, six-member majority.

Presidential Appointments of Supreme Court Justices

Republican

Democratic

Supreme Court appointments

Presidential election winners

Popular vote

Electoral College

Party that nominated a justice

1988

Bush

Bush

David H. Souter (until 2009)

1990

Clarence Thomas

1991

1992

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (until 2020)

1993

Clinton

Clinton

Stephen G. Breyer (until 2022)

1994

1996

Clinton

Clinton

2000

Bush

Gore

2004

John G. Roberts Jr.

2005

Bush

Bush

Samuel A. Alito Jr.

2006

2008

Sonia Sotomayor

2009

Obama

Obama

Elena Kagan

2010

2012

Obama

Obama

2016

Neil M. Gorsuch

2017

Clinton

Trump

2018

Brett M. Kavanaugh

Amy Coney Barrett

2020

2020

Biden

Biden

Ketanji Brown Jackson

2022

Note: David Souter retired in 2009; Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020; and Stephen Breyer retired in 2022.Source: U.S. Supreme CourtBy Ashley Wu

There are multiple reasons (including Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to retire in 2014 when a Democratic president and Senate could have replaced her). But the increasingly undemocratic natures of both the Electoral College and Senate play crucial roles.

Mr. Trump was able to appoint three justices despite losing the popular vote. (Mr. Bush is a more complex case, having made his court appointments after he won re-election and the popular vote in 2004.) Similarly, if Senate seats were based on population, none of Mr. Trump’s nominees — Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — would likely have been confirmed, said Michael J. Klarman, a law professor at Harvard. Senate Republicans also would not have been able to block Mr. Obama from filling a court seat during his final year in office.

Even Justice Clarence Thomas’s 1991 confirmation relied on the Senate’s structure: The 52 senators who voted to confirm him represented a minority of Americans.

The current court’s approach has magnified the disconnect between public opinion and government policy, because Republican-appointed justices have overruled Congress on some major issues. The list includes bills on voting rights and campaign finance that earlier Congresses passed along bipartisan lines. This term, the court issued rulings on abortion, climate policy and gun laws that seemed to be inconsistent with majority opinion, based on polls.

“The Republican justices wouldn’t say this and may not believe it,” Mr. Klarman said, “but everything they’ve done translates into a direct advantage for the Republican Party.”

In response to the voting rights decision in 2013, Republican legislators in several states have passed laws making it more difficult to vote, especially in heavily Democratic areas. They have done so citing the need to protect election security, even though there has been no widespread fraud in recent years.

For now, the electoral effect of these decisions remains uncertain. Some analysts point out that the restrictions have not yet been onerous enough to hold down turnout. In the 2020 presidential election, the percentage of eligible Americans who voted reached the highest level in at least a century.

Other experts remain concerned that the new laws could ultimately swing a close election in a swing state. “When you have one side gearing up to say, ‘How do we stop the enemy from voting?’ that is dangerous to a democracy,” Ms. Anderson, the Emory professor, said.

An upcoming Supreme Court case may also allow state legislatures to impose even more voting restrictions. The court has agreed to hear a case in which Republican legislators in North Carolina argue that the Constitution gives them, and not state courts, the authority to oversee federal elections.

In recent years, state courts played an important role in constraining both Republican and Democratic legislators who tried to draw gerrymandered districts that strongly benefited one party. If the Supreme Court sides with the North Carolina Legislature, gerrymandering might increase, as might laws establishing new barriers to voting.

Amplifying the Election Lies

Image

Nearly 70 percent of Republican voters say that Mr. Biden did not win the 2020 election legitimately, according to polls.Credit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

If the only challenges to democracy involved these chronic, long-developing forces, many experts would be less concerned than they are. American democracy has always been flawed, after all.

But the slow-building ways in which majority rule is being undermined are happening at the same time that the country faces an immediate threat that has little precedent. A growing number of Republican officials are questioning a basic premise of democracy: That the losers of an election are willing to accept defeat.

State Legislators and Election Lies

The share of Republican state legislators who have taken steps, as of May 2022, to discredit or overturn the 2020 presidential election results

Wisconsin

Arizona

Georgia

81%

23%

73%

Nevada

Pennsylvania

Michigan

78%

48%

4%

Source: A New York Times analysisBy The New York Times

The roots of the modern election-denier movement stretch back to 2008. When Mr. Obama was running for president and after he won, some of his critics falsely claimed that his victory was illegitimate because he was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii. This movement became known as birtherism, and Mr. Trump was among its proponents. By making the claims on Fox News and elsewhere, he helped transform himself from a reality television star into a political figure.

When he ran for president himself in 2016, Mr. Trump made false claims about election fraud central to his campaign. In the Republican primaries, he accused his closest competitor for the nomination, Senator Ted Cruz, of cheating. In the general election against Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump said he would accept the outcome only if he won. In 2020, after Mr. Biden won, the election lies became Mr. Trump’s dominant political message.

His embrace of these lies was starkly different from the approach of past leaders from both parties. In the 1960s, Reagan and Barry Goldwater ultimately isolated the conspiracists of the John Birch Society. In 2000, Al Gore urged his supporters to accept George W. Bush’s razor-thin victory, much as Richard Nixon had encouraged his supporters to do so after he narrowly lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960. In 2008, when a Republican voter at a rally described Mr. Obama as an Arab, Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee and Mr. Obama’s opponent, corrected her.

Mr. Trump’s promotion of the falsehoods, by contrast, turned them into a central part of the Republican Party’s message. About two-thirds of Republican voters say that Mr. Biden did not win the 2020 election legitimately, according to polls. Among Republican candidates running for statewide office this year, 47 percent have refused to accept the 2020 result, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis.

Most Republican politicians who have confronted Mr. Trump, on the other hand, have since lost their jobs or soon will. Of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him for his role in the Jan. 6 attack, for example, eight have since decided to retire or lost Republican primaries, including Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming.

“By any indication, the Republican Party — upper level, midlevel and grass roots — is a party that can only be described as not committed to democracy,” Mr. Levitsky said. He added that he was significantly more concerned about American democracy than when his and Mr. Ziblatt’s book, “How Democracies Die,” came out in 2018.

Juan José Linz, a political scientist who died in 2013, coined the term “semi-loyal actors” to describe political officials who typically do not initiate attacks on democratic rules or institutions but who also do not attempt to stop these attacks. Through their complicity, these semi-loyal actors can cause a party, and a country, to slide toward authoritarianism.

That’s what happened in Europe in the 1930s and in Latin America in the 1960s and ’70s. More recently, it has happened in Hungary. Now there are similar signs in the United States.

Often, even Republicans who cast themselves as different from Mr. Trump include winking references to his conspiracy theories in their campaigns, saying that they, too, believe “election integrity” is a major problem. Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, for example, have both recently campaigned on behalf of election deniers.

In Congress, Republican leaders have largely stopped criticizing the violent attack on the Capitol. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House leader, has gone so far as to signal his support for colleagues — like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia — who have used violent imagery in public comments. Ms. Greene, before being elected to Congress, said that she supported the idea of executing prominent Democrats.

Image

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, at a Bikers for Trump rally in May.Credit...Nicole Craine for The New York Times

“When mainstream parties tolerate these guys, make excuses for them, protect them, that’s when democracy gets in trouble,” Mr. Levitsky said. “There have always been Marjorie Taylor Greenes. What I pay closer attention to is the behavior of the Kevin McCarthys.”

The party’s growing acceptance of election lies raises the question of what would happen if Mr. Trump or another future presidential nominee tried to replay his 2020 attempt to overturn the result.

In 11 states this year, the Republican nominee for secretary of state, a position that typically oversees election administration, qualifies as an “election denier,” according to States United Action, a research group. In 15 states, the nominee for governor is a denier, and in 10 states, the attorney general nominee is.

The growth of the election-denier movement has created a possibility that would have seemed unthinkable not so long ago. It remains unclear whether the loser of the next presidential election will concede or will instead try to overturn the outcome.

‘There Is a Crisis Coming’

Image

If Democrats did control both the White House and Congress, they have signaled that they would attempt to pass legislation to address both the chronic and acute threats to democracy.Credit...Oliver Contreras for The New York Times

There are still many scenarios in which the United States will avoid a democratic crisis.

In 2024, Mr. Biden could win re-election by a wide margin — or a Republican other than Mr. Trump could win by a wide margin. Mr. Trump might then fade from the political scene, and his successors might choose not to embrace election falsehoods. The era of Republican election denial could prove to be brief.

It is also possible that Mr. Trump or another Republican nominee will try to reverse a close defeat in 2024 but will fail, as happened in 2020. Then, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, rebuffed Mr. Trump after he directed him to “find 11,780 votes,” and the Supreme Court refused to intervene, as well. More broadly, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, recently said that the United States had “very little voter fraud.”

If a Republican were again to try to overturn the election and to fail, the movement might also begin to fade.

But many democracy experts worry that these scenarios may be wishful thinking. Mr. Trump’s most likely successors as party leader also make or tolerate false claims about election fraud. The movement is bigger than one person — and arguably always has been: Some of the efforts to make voting more onerous, which are generally justified with false suggestions of widespread voter fraud, predated Mr. Trump’s 2016 candidacy.

To believe that Republicans will not overturn a close presidential loss in coming years seems to depend on ignoring the public positions of many Republican politicians. “The scenarios by which we don’t have a major democracy crisis by the end of the decade seem rather narrow,” Mr. Mounk of Johns Hopkins said.

And Mr. Levitsky said, “It’s not clear how the crisis is going to manifest itself, but there is a crisis coming.” He added, “We should be very worried.”

The most promising strategy for avoiding an overturned election, many scholars say, involves a broad ideological coalition that isolates election deniers. But it remains unclear how many Republican politicians would be willing to join such a coalition.

It is also unclear whether Democratic politicians and voters are interested in making the compromises that would help them attract more voters. Many Democrats have instead embraced a purer version of liberalism in recent years, especially on social issues. This shift to the left has not prevented the party from winning the popular vote in presidential elections. But it has hurt Democrats outside of major metropolitan areas and, by extension, in the Electoral College and congressional elections.

If Democrats did control both the White House and Congress — and by more than a single vote, as they now do in the Senate — they have signaled that they would attempt to pass legislation to address both the chronic and acute threats to democracy.

The House last year passed a bill to protect voting rights and restrict gerrymandering. It died in the Senate partly because it included measures that even some moderate Democrats believed went too far, such as restrictions on voter identification laws, which many other democracies around the world have.

The House also passed a bill to grant statehood to Washington, D.C., which would reduce the Senate’s current bias against metropolitan areas and Black Americans. The United States is currently in its longest stretch without having admitted a new state.

Democracy experts have also pointed to other possible solutions to the growing disconnect between public opinion and government policy. Among them is an expansion of the number of members in the House of Representatives, which the Constitution allows Congress to do — and which it regularly did until the early 20th century. A larger House would create smaller districts, which in turn could reduce the share of uncompetitive districts.

Other scholars favor proposals to limit the Supreme Court’s authority, which the Constitution also allows and which previous presidents and Congresses have done.

In the short term, these proposals would generally help the Democratic Party, because the current threats to majority rule have mostly benefited the Republican Party. In the long term, however, the partisan effects of such changes are less clear.

The history of new states makes this point: In the 1950s, Republicans initially supported making Hawaii a state, because it seemed to lean Republican, while Democrats said that Alaska had to be included, too, also for partisan reasons. Today, Hawaii is a strongly Democratic state, and Alaska is a strongly Republican one. Either way, the fact that both are states has made the country more democratic.

Over the sweep of history, the American government has tended to become more democratic, through women’s suffrage, civil rights laws, the direct election of senators and more. The exceptions, like the post-Reconstruction period, when Black Southerners lost rights, have been rare. The current period is so striking partly because it is one of those exceptions.

“The point is not that American democracy is worse than it was in the past,” Mr. Mounk said. “Throughout American history, the exclusion of minority groups, and African Americans in particular, was much worse than it is now.”

“But the nature of the threat is very different than in the past,” he said.

The makeup of the federal government reflects public opinion less closely than it once did. And the chance of a true constitutional crisis — in which the rightful winner of an election cannot take office — has risen substantially. That combination shows that American democracy has never faced a threat quite like the current one.

Nick Corasaniti, Max Fisher, Adam Liptak, Jennifer Medina, Jeremy W. Peters and Ian Prasad Philbrick contributed reporting.

David Leonhardt writes The Morning, The Times’s flagship daily newsletter. He has previously been an Op-Ed columnist, Washington bureau chief, co-host of “The Argument” podcast, founding editor of The Upshot section and a staff writer for The Times Magazine. In 2011, he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. @DLeonhardt • Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 18, 2022, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Democracy Challenged. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

12. Russian military failures will force Putin to change war goals, says US intelligence

​Will he or can he change his goals?

Russian military failures will force Putin to change war goals, says US intelligence

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17 September, 02:10 PM

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The head of the US military intelligence stated that Putin will no longer be able to achieve his goal regarding Ukraine (Photo:Sputnik/Sergey Bobylev/Pool/Reuters)

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The failures of the Russian military in Ukraine has demonstrated the inability of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to achieve his earlier goals of a full-scale invasion, reported the Associated Press on Sept. 16, citing Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, the head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.

“We’re coming to a point right now where I think Putin is going to have to revise what his objectives are for this operation,” Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier said.

He also emphasized that it is now quite clear that Putin "is not going to be able to do what he initially intended to do."

“He’s coming to a decision point,” Berrier said.

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“What that decision will be, we don't know. But that will largely drive how long this conflict lasts.”

Ukraine’s Armed Forces continue to liberate settlements in the east and south of Ukraine from Russian occupation.

On the evening of Sept. 13, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukrainian defenders had liberated about 8,000 square kilometers of territory, and stabilization measures are underway.

Later, the Ukrainian leader noted that it was too early to talk about the end of the full-scale war unleashed by Russia, despite the swift counteroffensive.

The Russian Ministry of Defense recognized the retreat of its army on the Kharkiv axis, calling it a "regrouping." The ministry claimed that in order to achieve its war goals, they had allegedly decided to regroup troops in the Balakliya and Izyum regions in order to increase efforts on the Donetsk axis. However, this claim is false, and multiple reports paint the Russian retreat from Kharkiv Oblast as a complete rout.

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13. Partisanship Over Policy at the Heritage Foundation

Partisanship Over Policy at the Heritage Foundation

thedispatch.com · by Audrey Fahlberg

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. (Screenshot via C-Span 2.)

In the weeks after Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border on February 24, Luke Coffey was busy crafting the Heritage Foundation’s proposed policy responses. As the think tank’s lead policy analyst on Ukraine, he saw the House’s $40 billion supplemental aid package to the country later that spring as the practical culmination of his research.

“Let’s not blow it,” Coffey, then-director of the Heritage Foundation’s Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy, tweeted on May 10.

Coffey claims that within a day, Heritage senior leadership ordered him to delete the post. Heritage Action, the think tank’s 501(c)4 sister organization, had taken a different view. Executive Director Jessica Anderson implored House Republicans to sink the legislation, writing: “This proposed Ukraine aid package takes money away from the priorities of the American people and recklessly sends our taxpayer dollars to a foreign nation without any accountability.” The bill passed—albeit over the opposition of 57 Republicans in the House and 11 in the Senate.

“I was not looped into the decision to put out that press release,” Coffey said in an interview. He ended his decade-long tenure at Heritage about a month after the statement’s circulation. Other former staffers say they saw trouble long before Heritage Action came out against the bill.

With the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary approaching, some former employees believe Dr. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation since December 2021, and other senior leaders have lost sight of the think tank’s original mission. Where it used to function as a haven for conservative intellectuals to shape the Republican Party’s agenda, many worry that the institution is attaching itself to a faction of the conservative movement that prioritizes partisanship over policy.

Interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees reveal restrictive workplace practices to keep scholars in line with positions favored by Heritage’s lobbying arm. With Heritage Action’s growing influence has come a wave of staff turnover from the rank-and-file to senior leadership. Fifty-one employees have departed the Heritage Foundation and 73 new employees have joined since January 1, a Heritage spokesperson confirmed. There are 275 staff members on the foundation’s payroll and 30 at Heritage Action as of Tuesday.

“There are a lot of open positions, I guess because of COVID, and we have more people applying to Heritage than we have any hope of being able to hire, open positions,” Roberts told The Dispatch. He said he remains enthusiastic about the organization’s future.

Asked by The Dispatch how many employees left the foundation in 2019, 2020, and 2021, a Heritage spokesperson declined to provide raw numbers.

Several former employees cited Heritage’s departure from its foundational commitments—without the knowledge or consent of the scholars hired to translate them into policy positions—as their reason for leaving. Others pointed to one-on-one confrontations with the members of the leadership team over the organization’s ideological trajectory.

Fights over who sets Heritage’s “one-voice policy”—which requires that all staff be publicly aligned on any given issue—have caused much of the friction.

“The one-voice policy at Heritage has always—for 49 years—been difficult to implement,” Roberts said. “The difficulty is making sure that there is a conversation internally that gets us to a good spot. The nature of the one-voice policy is that there are always competing goods.”

Some former employees said that scholars are increasingly being cut out of the deliberation process. When Heritage Action came out against the Ukraine aid bill, for example, it contradicted the recommendations of some leading subject matter experts without notifying them beforehand. In April, Coffey had written a Heritage policy paper pushing for the U.S. to “ensure the free and unrestricted transfer of weapons, munitions, and other supplies to the Ukrainians, including a continuous flow of intelligence.” In another, he urged that the U.S. “establish a persistent and continuing presence” on NATO’s eastern front.

The May legislation aimed to do that by replenishing available emergency funding to Ukraine for the 2022 fiscal year days before it was expected to run dry. In addition to the $19 billion in immediate security assistance—$9 billion of which was set aside to replenish the U.S. Defense Department’s own arsenal—the bill allocated $3.9 billion to support American forces stationed in Europe and $2 billion for NATO and Pentagon modernization initiatives. A further $16 billion went to economic support to Ukraine and global humanitarian aid programs.

“The opposition to the Ukraine supplemental was irreconcilable with not only my views on U.S. support in Ukraine, but everything I’ve written on this matter for years, so I couldn't be truthful and honest by remaining there,” Coffey, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said about his decision to leave Heritage.

Alexis Mrachek, a former policy analyst at Heritage who specialized in Russia and Eurasia, pointed to the institutional inconsistencies behind the decision to oppose the bill. “We had established a one-voice policy on Ukraine over the past several years,” she said. But Heritage Action “contradicted our one-voice policy on Ukraine and in the process created a new one-voice policy on Ukraine that I was not allowed to contradict.” Mrachek resigned from Heritage in July and joined the International Republican Institute.

“Our policy didn’t change,” Jim Carafano, who leads Heritage’s foreign policy and defense team, said. “We are for an independent Ukraine that can defend itself. We’re for government bills that are fiscally responsible, and we’re for plans that actually work.” Carafano pointed to the legislation’s investments in “so-called civil society programs,” arguing that they would “fuel fraud, waste, and corruption.”

But the policy shop has only released one alternative legislative strategy since the supplemental bill’s passage, advocating for a fiscally calculated approach to the conflict—a notable change from the tone and frequency of previous reports. A recent video on Heritage’s Instagram features the caption: “We can’t afford to give Ukraine more money.” And on September 7, Heritage Action released a statement opposing the additional Ukraine-related money Biden requested in his continuing resolution to fund the government.

The disputes extended beyond the debate over Ukraine and preceded Roberts’ leadership. Several former experts and researchers detailed limitations on their intellectual freedom beginning in the Trump era, such as being told to delete tweets and ignore areas of agreement with perceived political opponents. In almost every case, the restrictive measures served a partisan end.

“There were several instances where I was asked to scrub the phrase ‘President Trump’ from my pieces. I think it was to tamp down any suspected criticism,” said one former Heritage employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about internal dynamics. “We were definitely discouraged from mentioning the Biden administration by name as well, unless we were attacking them.”

Another former employee said staffers were also told to avoid referring to incoming President Joe Biden as the “president-elect” until electoral votes were certified on January 6, 2021, to avoid lending implicit legitimacy to the 2020 election.

One former employee recalled being instructed by management not to quote or cite Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley because of his strained relationship with former President Donald Trump. Another former employee said Heritage leaders declined a request to conduct a public panel with Republican Sen. Mitt Romney for similar reasons.

At the tail end of the Trump presidency, one former communications staffer said, the media team shut down requests to schedule economics scholars for television appearances about the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement to preemptively quash any public criticism of Trump’s support for the trade deal.

In one encounter, a member of senior management approached a scholar to challenge the scholar’s stance on a policy issue, referencing a conflicting position taken by Fox News host Tucker Carlson on the air. The scholar recalled saying, “I don’t watch Tucker’s monologue anymore.” The senior staffer allegedly replied, “Well, you ought to watch it, because the people who pay your salary watch it.” This ethos may have made its way into the policy shop’s output, which increasingly resembles public positions taken by Carlson on topics ranging from election integrity to big tech.

The storming of the Capitol was another sensitive topic for senior management. Coffey recalls being required by management to remove a Twitter post condemning the January 6 Capitol riots.

Some employees went from avoiding criticism of January 6 to actively amplifying conspiracy theories related to that day’s events. That includes on the Daily Signal Podcast, where Daily Signal executive editor Rob Bluey hosted Julie Kelly—author of January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right—in February 2022 for a conversation about the Capitol riot. During the conversation, Kelly accused Biden, former President George W. Bush, and the media of “colluding” to brand the day an insurrection: “It was like a Fusion GPS-type orchestrated campaign, PR campaign, but then a little more sinister behind the scenes.”

Many argue that the organization’s goal is now to appease, rather than to inform and persuade, the Republican base. “We couldn’t decide who our primary audience was anymore,” recalled one former employee. “We were focused more on reaching the grassroots and maybe even influencing outcomes in elections than we were on making sure that the right policy ideas—that the principal policy ideas—got into the hands of the principal policymakers.”

Roberts—who maintains that Heritage’s main audience is Congress, governors, state legislators, and the like—says that his public opinion-oriented approach is aimed at ensuring scholarly research isn’t conducted in a vacuum.

“We hear often from our broad base of supporters—who are not at all dictating what we’re doing—but because we’re close to them,” Roberts said of Heritage’s roughly half a million donors. “More than any other organization on the right in the United States today, we have a clear understanding of where everyday conservative Americans are.” According to Heritage’s website, only two percent of its support comes from corporate donors.

Carafano added, in relation to challenging the GOP’s “orthodoxy” on foreign policy issues: “If people are a little angry at us and upset or confused or whatever, I think that’s the price we’re paying, because I think we’re doing exactly what the American people want.”

Roberts, who previously served as CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation and president of Wyoming Catholic College, “made clear from his first day on the job that Heritage will always be on offense” to push the organization’s preferred policies, people, and strategies, said Rob Bluey, Heritage’s vice president of communications.

What those policies, people, and strategies are might also be up to Roberts. “It’s not a one-voice policy, it’s a one-person policy,” one former employee said.

Some say this is a departure from the organization’s founding mission. Heritage’s incorporation in 1973 as a 501(c)(3) research institution filled what many right-wing intellectuals understood at the time to be a void in the conservative think tank space.

Heritage swiftly rose to prominence in the early 1980s after its founders published its Mandate for Leadership, what became an 1,100-page policy manuscript to assist Republican President Ronald Reagan’s White House. The playbook included 2,000 policy proposals dedicated to advancing Heritage’s four main policy objectives: “free competitive enterprise, limited government, individual liberty and a strong national defense.”

More than four decades since Reagan was sworn into office, Roberts’ vision for the organization recalls the leadership style championed by former Heritage president and South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, who presided over the think tank from 2013 until 2017. “The feeling that many of us had is that when DeMint came to Heritage, he brought his Senate battles with him,” recalled one former employee.

Some scholars say that under DeMint, senior leaders discouraged them from criticizing Trump’s policies even before he took office. Bryan Riley, a trade policy analyst at Heritage from 2010 to 2017, recalled holding his tongue on trade issues during the 2016 election to avoid clashing with the then-candidate Trump’s views. As director of the Free Trade Initiative at the National Taxpayers Union, he says he no longer feels he needs to self-censor. “When I came here the idea was to just address the policies without regard to whether it's Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or Mitt Romney or Josh Hawley,” Riley said.

It was around the same period that Heritage’s reputation began to complicate efforts by scholars to connect with lawmakers on Capitol Hill: If they were part of Heritage, some recalled, they were also considered part of Heritage Action.

DeMint was fired in 2017 by a unanimous board vote that followed internal disputes over his leadership tactics. Heritage founder Edwin Feulner—who led the organization for three decades—took his place until Kay Coles James succeeded him in December 2017. But even with DeMint gone, the partisan grip on Heritage’s policy shop continued to tighten. While many employees take pride in referring to the organization as a “do tank” rather than a “think tank,” scholars who have left say that Heritage Action’s ascendance within the organization has continued to muddy the distinctions between its research side and its lobbying arm.

“I don’t mind the idea of a think tank that is focused on real world impact and not just kind of pie in the sky, academic navel-gazing,” said Klon Kitchen, the founder and former director of Heritage’s Center for Technology Policy. “But what I think it’s actually become is a political action group that now uses serious policy scholars as a veneer to policy wash what is actually inherently political activity.” (Kitchen, who resigned from Heritage in February 2021 and is now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute AEI, is the author of a national security newsletter for The Dispatch.)

Whereas scholars at right-leaning 501(c)(3) research institutions like Cato Institute, the Hudson Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) are permitted and often encouraged to disagree with each other about policy issues, Heritage prides itself in projecting the same voice on every policy issue. “The reason that we have to have a one voice policy is because unlike those organizations that don’t, we’re actually spending our resources on effecting change in our world,” Roberts said.

With the founding of Heritage Action in 2010 came the introduction of the Heritage Action scorecard, a legislative metric that rates members of Congress based on how often they vote in line with the organization’s lobbying entity. Some high-ranking congressional Republicans are candid about their skepticism of its role on the Hill.

“I’ve never understood Heritage Action,” Rep. Mike Rogers, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, told The Dispatch this summer. “I’ve just never understood their perspective on anything we do over here.” Rogers has a 93 percent session score from Heritage Action and a lifetime score of 69 percent.

“Most of us get the Ronald Reagan approach, that the best way to keep the world safe is to have alliances—that the last time somebody roamed around Europe trying to take over countries didn’t end well,” said GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, asked about his reaction to Heritage’s position on the Ukraine aid bill, which he and Rogers supported. Graham’s Heritage Action session scorecard is 69 percent and his lifetime score is 57 percent.

It’s unclear how the Republican Party’s foreign policy aims might change once voters pick the next presidential nominee in 2024. For now, polls suggest that Heritage’s recent messaging might not have the popular appeal its leadership believes: By and large, Americans still want to back Ukraine. Around two-thirds of Republican respondents supported military and economic assistance to Ukraine in a recent Chicago Council poll, and an August Reuters/Ipsos survey found that the majority of both parties favor U.S. support for Ukraine “until all Russian forces are withdrawn.”

Some tension has emerged between establishment conservatives and the national conservatives on Capitol Hill, though national conservatives are from the dominant force in the GOP today. That’s not necessarily the case at Heritage. Tori Smith—a former trade policy analyst at Heritage who resigned from the organization in April to serve as director of International Economic Policy at the American Action Forum—observed that a similar “tension is playing out at Heritage, and the nationalist conservatives are winning, it’s abundantly clear.”

In many ways, Heritage has transitioned from being the home of conservative intellectuals to an institution that forces its thinkers to take a backseat to the base.

Roberts and Heritage Action executive director Jessica Anderson were featured speakers at this week’s National Conservatism Conference in Miami. The gathering brings together right-leaning figures who are often hostile to traditional conservative positions in foreign and domestic affairs, such as Republican Sen. Josh Hawley and tech billionaire Peter Thiel. “I come not to invite National Conservatives to join our conservative movement,” Roberts reportedly said at the conference, “but to acknowledge the plain truth that Heritage is already part of yours.”

Correction, September 15, 2022: This article originally stated Dr. Kevin Roberts has served as president of the Heritage Foundation since October. He started in December.

Correction, September 16, 2022: This article originally stated Dr. Kevin Roberts served as CEO of the Texas Public Policy Center. He served as CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

thedispatch.com · by Audrey Fahlberg

14. Ukrainian strikes into Russia’s border towns compound Putin’s troubles

Ukrainian strikes into Russia’s border towns compound Putin’s troubles

The Washington Post · by Mary Ilyushina · September 17, 2022

After a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in the northeast of the country, the messy war that Russian President Vladimir Putin started is now being fought directly on his doorstep, with artillery strikes hitting military targets in Russia and Russian officials in cities and towns along the border ordering hasty evacuations.

On Saturday, a new round of strikes hit the Belgorod region in Western Russia, killing at least one person and wounding two.

On Friday, Ukraine reportedly struck the base of the Russian 3rd Motorized Rifle Division near Valuyki, just nine miles north of the Russia—Ukraine border. Russian officials did not acknowledge that a military target was hit but said one civilian died, and the local electrical grid experienced a temporary disruption.

Russia blamed the attacks on Ukraine, but Kyiv did not claim responsibility for striking targets in Russian territory.

Kyiv has assured U.S. officials that donated weapons would not be used to strike targets inside Russia proper. But Ukrainian forces are now so close to the border that they can hit targets using their own less-advanced weaponry.

That Russian citizens are starting to seriously feel the impact of the war directly is another new source of pressure on Putin, who returned home this weekend from a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Uzbekistan where he faced a remarkable public rebuke by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and questions about the war from Chinese President Xi Jinping.

In a stunning public rebuke, Modi told Putin that “today’s era is not an era of war, and I have spoken to you on the phone about this.” That followed an acknowledgment by Putin that he had heard “concerns and questions” about the war from the Chinese president.

Ukraine has made stunning advances in the Kharkiv region, in the northeast of the country, in the past two weeks. During its advances, it has also uncovered hundreds of mass graves and stories of Russian forces terrorizing residents in the liberated city of Izyum.

Ukrainian officials have cited the gains and the evidence of torture and killings to reiterate pleas for modern battle tanks and other heavily armored vehicles which NATO allies have been slow to send.

Valuyki and Krasny Khutor are among dozens of small settlements in Russia that the Russian military uses as a staging ground, putting them in the middle of Moscow’s faltering invasion and Kyiv’s mounting counteroffensive.

The local governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, has ordered the evacuation of hundreds of people and shut down schools in border towns over the past months. But now the authorities in Belgorod are under increasing pressure from unnerved residents who are experiencing what many Ukrainians have lived with for months: nighttime explosions, destroyed homes and sometimes casualties.

“I’m asking once again, where is our army, the one that must be protecting us?” Belgorod resident Tatyana Bogacheva wrote on Gladkov’s VKontakte social media page. “We are on the border; they are shooting at us, so we need an army and protection. Who will wake up the President?”

Russian forces have been depleted after battlefield blunders and are scrambling to find personnel and working equipment to hold their ground in northeastern Ukraine. A recent hasty retreat from Izyum and Balakliya as well as concerns among local Russians who fear the war is coming home appear to have prompted Moscow to reinforce the border with young conscripts.

Russian soldiers who had been conscripted to serve in the 1st Guards Motor Rifle Regiment of the Taman Division as part of this year’s spring draft are reportedly being transferred from the Moscow region to “protect the state border.”

The BBC Russian Service, citing the families of troops, reported that many conscripts in the Taman Division had died at the beginning of the invasion and those who survived were returned to the Russian territory. But instead of returning to headquarters in Naro-Fominsk near Moscow, they were stationed in Valuyki. The new group of conscripts is supposed to replace those who are due to be demobilized in October, the BBC said.

According to Russian laws, conscripts can’t be sent into battle unless they have at least four months of training. Putin has repeatedly denied that Russia is using conscripts in Ukraine. But the country’s defense ministry acknowledged as early as March that some had been mistakenly sent to fight.

Russia’s problems along the border are drawing criticism from staunch pro-Kremlin quarters inside Ukraine as well. “I am curious whether the Russian leadership is going to somehow react to the constant shelling of Russian territory?” Igor Girkin, a hard-line former commander of separatists in Ukraine, lamented in his Telegram blog. “Or do I understand correctly that the Kremlin no longer considers the Belgorod region to be the territory of Russia?”

The war also appears to be weakening Russia’s capacity to put out fires to the south, in the region the Kremlin has long considered its backyard.

This week, for example, Armenia sought Russia’s help amid a renewed Azerbaijani attack on its border towns, according to the country’s prime minister Nikol Pashinyan, who formally appealed to the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a regional security alliance of post-Soviet states, including Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

But the response so far has been slow and tepid, perhaps undermining Armenia’s trust in Moscow as an ally and in the CSTO as a reliable security broker.

Azerbaijan is not part of the CSTO but is backed by Turkey, an essential mediator in the Ukrainian war. Azerbaijan accused Armenia of “provocations” in the border area, something Yerevan denies.

More than 200 officers have been killed on both sides this week, in what turned into the deadliest confrontation since the six-week war over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020.

On Friday, in a face-to-face meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Uzbekistan, Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev said the border conflict had “stabilized,” and a cease fire had been in place for the last three days.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday she plans to make a weekend visit to Armenia.

The Washington Post · by Mary Ilyushina · September 17, 2022

15. Japan, US Discuss Longer Range Missiles to Counter China

Excerpts:

Japan’s post-war pacifist constitution outlaws “war as a means to settle international disputes involving the state.” This year, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has been stepping up its efforts toward constitutional revision and aims to push the issue for wider public discussion. A Mainichi Shimbun opinion poll conducted in May showed that two-thirds of the public are in favor of Japan acquiring “counter-strike” abilities.

On August 29, a month into his tenure as defense minister, Hamada stated that the “international community has entered a new crisis phase that presents the greatest challenge since World War II.” China’s threats to take over Taiwan by force also gives the ruling LDP more scope to persuade the public to consider Japan’s security realities rather than focusing on constitutional principles.

Japan, US Discuss Longer Range Missiles to Counter China

At a defense ministers’ meeting, Japan gets U.S. support to bolster its defenses with “counter strike capabilities.”

thediplomat.com · by Thisanka Siripala · September 16, 2022

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Japan’s Defense Minister Hamada Yasukazu met his U.S. counterpart Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon on September 14, where both sides said Japan and the United States are planning to integrate defense strategies in response to worsening regional tensions over Taiwan.

From Washington, D.C., Hamada stated that Japan is considering “counterattack capabilities” to strengthen its defense capabilities as a part of a revised National Security Strategy. The Japanese defense minister is advocating for a drastic overhaul of Japan’s defense posture in the wake of five Chinese missiles landing in Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) last month during Chinese military exercises around Taiwan.

During the 90-minute meeting, Austin expressed “strong” support for Japan’s plans. He stated that “China’s coercive behavior in the Taiwan Strait and the waters surrounding Japan is provocative, undermines stability and is unprecedented.”

Japan is surrounded by increasingly unfriendly nuclear-armed neighbors, namely North Korea, China, and Russia. Against that backdrop, there are concerns Japan can no longer defend itself by only intercepting incoming missiles. Hamada outlined Japan’s intention to procure long-range, standoff missiles, which are said to be capable of striking enemy forces beyond their radar systems.

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There is also debate whether the procurement of longer-range missiles, which have the capacity to strike enemy bases, especially missile launch sites, is a violation of the constitution. Japan is restricted by its pacifist constitution to an exclusively defensive stance. Constitutionally, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces are allowed to preemptively attack if an enemy is preparing to launch an attack on Japan. But the precise definition of an “anticipated armed attack situation” could leave Japan on the sidelines at the critical moment.

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Japan plans to double military spending to 2 percent of GDP over the next five years – on par with NATO member states. Japan’s Defense Ministry is requesting $40 billion next fiscal year, putting it on track to become the world’s third largest military spender after the U.S. and China. But China’s military spending has risen for 26 consecutive years and is almost 200 times higher than Japan, at $229 billion in fiscal year 2022.

China also possesses operational hypersonic missiles that fly at five times the speed of sound. Japan and the U.S. will need to play a game of catchup as China’s hypersonic missile technology is thought to be decades ahead. During the defense ministers’ meetings, Japan and the U.S. agreed to cooperate on intelligence gathering and joint technological research to intercept hypersonic missiles.

The Japan-U.S. alliance provides Japan with extended deterrence but Japan also hopes procuring longer-range missiles will also serve as a deterrent. Some experts in Japan have expressed concern at to whether the U.S. is a reliable ally. Austin reaffirmed the United States’ “unwavering commitment to the defense of Japan.” He added that Japan is also backed by a “full range” of U.S. nuclear and conventional defense capabilities.

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Japan’s post-war pacifist constitution outlaws “war as a means to settle international disputes involving the state.” This year, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has been stepping up its efforts toward constitutional revision and aims to push the issue for wider public discussion. A Mainichi Shimbun opinion poll conducted in May showed that two-thirds of the public are in favor of Japan acquiring “counter-strike” abilities.

On August 29, a month into his tenure as defense minister, Hamada stated that the “international community has entered a new crisis phase that presents the greatest challenge since World War II.” China’s threats to take over Taiwan by force also gives the ruling LDP more scope to persuade the public to consider Japan’s security realities rather than focusing on constitutional principles.

Thisanka Siripala is an Australian-Sri Lankan cross platform journalist living in Tokyo.

thediplomat.com · by Thisanka Siripala · September 16, 2022

16. Can the West Shake Its Dependence on China’s Rare Earths?

A strategic vlnerability.

Can the West Shake Its Dependence on China’s Rare Earths?

Reliance on China’s rare earth elements sector limits the ability of the United States to punish Beijing economically should it pursue a military action against Taiwan.

thediplomat.com · by Barbara Kelemen · September 17, 2022

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The Taiwan Strait crisis in early August once again highlighted the question of Western economic levers as possible punitive measures should China escalate its offensive pressure on Taiwan. Despite the recent provocations, it appears that, for now, both Beijing and Washington remain wary of engaging in military conflict over Taiwan. And after taking into account the surprising ferocity of Western sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, punitive economic measures appear as the most obvious answer should China escalate its military engagement further.

In fact, the focus of Washington seems to be increasingly on whether, and how, it can decrease its supply-chain dependency on China. Besides the ongoing trade war between the two, the United States has long targeted Chinese technology due to its worries over potential weaponization of 5G networks. In a sign this sentiment is now spreading into other sectors, the Biden administration has recently expanded its restrictive measures on Chinese businesses (such as adding new firms to the Entity List) and announced measures that suggest a growing push to decrease U.S. vulnerability to Chinese import disruptions – particularly on rare earth elements (REEs).

China’s REE Dominance

REEs, such as neodymium, yttrium and terbium, are crucial materials commonly present in smartphones, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. As of today, China controls around 80 percent of the production of rare earths.

Half a century ago, the U.S. Mountain Pass Mine was the leading producer of rare earths. But concerns around environmental costs associated with radioactive waste disposal related to REE production pushed a lot of production to China, where companies enjoyed lax environmental regulations. In addition, Beijing had focused on developing the rare earth industry since the 1950s with Baotou processing site for materials coming from the Obo mine being a flagship of Sino-Soviet cooperation.

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China’s rare earth mining quota output rose – for a fifth year in row – by a hefty 25 percent earlier in August. That should not be a surprise. The world is hungry for REEs, as global focus on EVs and other REE-reliant industries is rising. But the Western reliance on China’s REEs is increasingly at the center of U.S. discussion on supply chains decoupling. This has been shown not only by recent legislative efforts (the new CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act) but also drill testing plans by Dateline Resources at Colosseum Mine, near the Mountain Pass Mine (the only REE operating mine in the U.S.) and governmental plans to tackle the U.S. weakness in the midstream processing of REEs by opening a Lynas-operated facility in Texas by 2025.

Weaponization of the REE Sector

China’s continuing dominance of the REE sector seriously impacts the West’s ability to find autonomous solutions to support its own defense industry, let alone impose economic sanctions on Beijing. Although the Western industrial complex has been reliant on China for REE exports for years, the issue only began to prompt security concerns in 2010, after China halted exports of REE materials to Japan amid ongoing diplomatic tensions. Still, little has been done since then when it comes to China’s monopoly over REEs. Quite the opposite, Beijing has even further strengthened its grip over the sector by increasing its investment into crucial mining projects across Africa.

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That said, this seems to be changing following recent tensions around Taiwan. This is most likely due to the Western military industry’s reliance on China’s REEs, which probably keeps Pentagon staff up at night. REEs are needed to manufacture fighter jets, submarines, and cruise missiles, meaning that Western military supply chains are highly vulnerable to Chinese decisions to limit REEs exports. With no alternative to feed military apparatuses so far, North American producers of critical minerals estimate that should confrontation occur, China could cut short the supply of critical minerals to the U.S. in an event of war, and exhaust the U.S. stock of minerals necessary for its defense apparatus in less than 90 days.

With this in mind, China took aim at the sector earlier in the year when it said it will restrict access of two U.S. defense companies to its REE exports. Their reliance on the Chinese sector in this regard was directly quoted by the media and was weaponized as retaliation for U.S. arm sales to Taiwan. It is thus reasonable to assume that China fully realizes the potential impact such an embargo would have on Western military apparatus; NATO’s dependency on rare earths from China seems to be even bigger than its dependency on energy from Russia.

REE Decoupling: An Unrealistic Timeline?

Western military industries’ dependence on Chinese rare earths will not vanish overnight. The path toward (partial) autonomy involves a blend of three factors: lawmaking, international alliances, and streamlined permitting processes. Indeed, the U.S. Departments of Defense and Energy, along with mining majors, are currently forging programs to build a domestic supply chain of critical minerals in response to the bipartisan infrastructure law, the CHIPS+ Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act.

In addition, the DoD plans on financing a Lynas separation plan in Hondo, Texas, to tackle industry weaknesses in the midstream processing of REEs: the extraction, separation, and purification technologies. The facility could produce up to 5,000 t/a of the rare metals.

However there still appears to be a lack of pragmatism in the Biden administration’s understanding of the issue. There is a gap between legal initiatives to favor REE production and the time it takes to get a mine in production in the United States. The average time for the Bureau of Land Management to issue a permit for a hard rock project is around two years, before the development and construction stages that can take up to a decade. In addition, there also seems to be a disparity between the U.S. government and the private sector, which still continues to make new major deals with Chinese producers. Ford only recently announced a major deal with Chinese CATL to supply lithium iron phosphate batteries starting in 2023.

Lengthy permitting processes, among other things, will likely hinder Washington’s – and the West’s – agility when responding to the next Taiwan crisis, giving Beijing the upper hand. For years to come China will be able to retaliate to any intervention in a Taiwan contingency by sanctioning U.S. military contractors dependent on REEs, a card Beijing has shown it does not hesitate to play when tensions are high. All this suggests that the clock is ticking in Beijing’s favor.

thediplomat.com · by Barbara Kelemen · September 17, 2022

17. Why Xi really traveled to Central Asia

Excerpts:

US policy should consider the meaning of Xi’s first foreign visit in years and adjust accordingly. China is showing its inability to pose an imminent and immense threat to the US and its allies’ interests in the Indo-Pacific region.

Beijing is constrained by domestic stability concerns, border issues, and insufficient energy and food supplies. Instead of pushing for de facto containment and risking a united authoritarian axis against America, Washington should use restraint and take the extra time it has to develop a real China strategy with an end goal and realistic means.

Why Xi really traveled to Central Asia

Internal stability – not power projection – is the underlying theme of Xi’s Central Asian tour

asiatimes.com · by Quinn Marschik · September 17, 2022

For the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic began, Chinese President Xi Jinping has left China to visit Kazakhstan and then Uzbekistan for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit.

This is in contrast to previous reports of Xi’s potential travel to Saudi Arabia or speculation that Xi’s first foreign travel would be to Indonesia for the G20 summit. Besides China, the SCO includes Russia and India as full members and Iran as an observer seeking full membership – along with multiple Central and South Asian members.

Xi’s choice to visit Uzbekistan and participate in the SCO summit in person indicates Beijing is primarily focused on bolstering stability at home instead of power projection in East and Southeast Asia.

However, the Biden administration’s democracies versus autocracies rhetoric could help transform the SCO from a primarily counterterrorism and internal stability organization into a more cohesive international grouping capable of challenging US interests abroad.

Xi’s first foreign visit in nearly three years to participate in the SCO summit demonstrates Beijing’s focus on internal security rather than power projection. Before the SCO’s founding declaration was issued, the original members created the Shanghai Convention on Combatting Terrorism, Separatism and Extremism.

Given this document’s status as a pillar of the SCO, Xi’s visit shows Beijing believes terrorism and separatism – particularly in Xinjiang and Tibet – remain a significant threat to China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Special operations soldiers assigned to a detachment of the 2nd Mobile Corps under the Chinese People’s Armed Police (PAP) Force break into the abandoned buildings during an anti-terrorism drill in late April 2021. Image: eng.chinamil.com.cn / Yang Xiaochen

Xi likely believes the threat will remain significant in light of increased Western criticism of China’s human rights abuses in these regions. By reinvigorating China’s relationships with its Central Asian partners, Xi may help reduce external support for any separatist and terrorist groups in Xinjiang and other minority areas.

In the same light, Xi’s SCO visit gives him the opportunity to meet with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and improve – even if marginally – Sino-Indian ties and border stability. A meeting between the leaders would build upon recent de-escalation of border tensions after years of troubles and put territorial dispute negotiations back on a more stable track.

It could also signal Beijing’s effort to pry New Delhi away from the Quad – although this will be a Herculean undertaking. Regardless, progress on border stability and China-India relations would allow Beijing to concentrate on other more pressing foreign policy priorities.

Equally important to boosting territorial integrity and border stability, Xi’s first pandemic foreign visit to the SCO summit indicates China is concerned about access to energy and food resources. Without secure access to energy, the Chinese economy will be hindered.

Over the past two years, supply shortages, heatwaves, and drought have cut into China’s domestic energy production. Likewise, this year’s drought may harm its agriculture sector and overall food security. Since 2021, Beijing has prioritized food security with Xi calling it essential for national security.

But it is much more than that. Similar to energy’s importance to the economy – and thus the CCP’s legitimacy – feeding the population has been a core factor for any Chinese government’s legitimacy. Xi’s direct participation in the SCO summit could help shore up China’s energy and agriculture imports from Central Asia, Russia, and Iran.

The BRI may also be reinvigorated and see new pledges – although China’s current economic situation will make these more rhetoric than reality. Regardless, Beijing will seek to continue the BRI’s successes.

China views continental Asia’s economic and infrastructure development as essential to national security. These areas will be critical pillars for trade and movement of resources should China be cut off from the Pacific Ocean.

China has a military presence in Tajikistan. Image: Twitter

For now, Xi’s efforts may work best during bilateral meetings at the summit, but the Biden administration’s democracies versus autocracies rhetoric risks transforming the SCO from a relatively benign organization into a more substantive body.

SCO members are no paragons of democracy. Even India has its challenges. A strong and active SCO united in fear of US regime change operations could pose a threat to US interests across the globe and represent a major foreign policy failure.

It would effectively control the Mackinderian Heartland and further unite China and Russia against the United States. This would weaken Washington’s ability to defend and advance its vital interests.

Additionally, should New Delhi develop a stronger affiliation with the organization, the SCO would have a strong position across the entire Asian continent with Beijing likely first among equals.

US policy should consider the meaning of Xi’s first foreign visit in years and adjust accordingly. China is showing its inability to pose an imminent and immense threat to the US and its allies’ interests in the Indo-Pacific region.

Beijing is constrained by domestic stability concerns, border issues, and insufficient energy and food supplies. Instead of pushing for de facto containment and risking a united authoritarian axis against America, Washington should use restraint and take the extra time it has to develop a real China strategy with an end goal and realistic means.

Quinn Marschik is a Contributing Fellow at Defense Priorities

asiatimes.com · by Quinn Marschik · September 17, 2022

18. Opinion: Anti-Americanism won't make Xi king of Asia

Opinion: Anti-Americanism won't make Xi king of Asia | DW | 16.09.2022

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is hoping to forge an anti-Western alliance through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. He will not succeed, DW's Konstantin Eggert writes.

DW · by Deutsche Welle (www.dw.com)

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is hoping to forge an anti-Western alliance through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. He will not succeed, DW's Konstantin Eggert writes.

It took just a few pronouncements by Russia's Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to turn the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in the Uzbek city of Samarkand from a predictably boring gathering of Asia's select authoritarian regimes (plus India, which is still a democracy) into a watershed event.

While Putin promised to supply fertilizers to poor nations and suggested that SCO countries stage a major sporting event together, Xi forcefully attempted to provide the summit with a political framework. He called on the SCO's leaders to fight back against "color revolutions," or the people-power movements that shattered corrupt regimes in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan earlier this century. The Chinese leader predictably said such movements were directed from abroad — read: by the West, especially the United States.

Although Putin will no doubt agree with the sentiment, Xi's solo in Samarkand reflects Russia's diminishing role even among the like-minded Asian regimes. It also shows the Chinese regime's forceful attempt to impose its political thinking on the bloc and shape it as an Asian political and security counterbalance to the United States. Iran is expected to officially join the SCO in 2023 — boosting its stature with its reputation as one of the US's most implacable and enduring foes.

Russia's so-far-unsuccessful aggression against Ukraine has weakened the Kremlin's influence even in those Central Asian states that used to be part of the Soviet Union. Two days before the summit in Uzbekistan, Xi paid a visit to Kazakhstan, Russia's traditional regional ally. There, he talked about China's desire to support and strengthen the sovereignty and security of countries in Central Asia. It sounded like a clear warning to Russia not to try annexing the traditionally Russian-speaking regions of northern Kazakhstan — something many in the country fear.

Beijing does not conceal its offer to the Central Asian governments to gradually decrease (if not completely replace) Russia as their main security guarantor. "As Ukraine continues to sap Putin's resources, Russia will continue losing its influence in the region," the Kazakh political analyst Dosym Satpayev told me. "This process is now irreversible."

Xi and Putin hold first meeting since Ukraine war

China is overreaching

China's obsession with US influence increasingly looks like Putin's fixation. And there is high concern that it will have the same disastrous result. Trying to fashion an anti-US, anti-Western block from the SCO will end in failure. Member countries may dislike the United States and the West, but differences, even conflicts, between SCO signatories are frequently much sharper than their common dislikes. India and Pakistan are the best-known example — but by no means the only one.

Secondly, even if some SCO governments are prepared to deal with and even be close to China, their citizens frequently have other opinions. India, again, is a special case her. But, in Kazakhstan, for example, popular backlash against China's influence is historically very strong and is something that the government must take into account. The support the West gives Ukraine against Putin makes it a great example of solidarity that is not going unnoticed in many SCO countries.

Finally, major Western alliances such as NATO and the European Union are firmly rooted in common values of democracy, rule of law and respect for citizens' rights. That is not to say they do not have problems — but solving them is much easier when the philosophy underpinning these organizations is a shared one. This may be the biggest obstacle to China's designs. There are no common values that underpin the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. The SCO may bring temporary security to some of the member regimes, but even this is not guaranteed. With Putin diminished by his failed invasion, Xi may think he will soon be running the show. He is wrong.

Edited by: Milan Gagnon

19. Ukrainian Success Will Not Be Catastrophic By Kori Schake

Ukrainian Success Will Not Be Catastrophic

We’re the strong ones in this conflict, and we deter more effectively when we act with confidence on that knowledge.

By Kori Schake

The Atlantic · by Kori Schake · September 17, 2022

“The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish … the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature,” Carl von Clausewitz wrote in his landmark treatise On War. “This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.” The leaders of Ukraine and Russia have set simple, and wholly incompatible, goals in their current war: Volodymyr Zelensky has made clear that Ukraine is fighting for its freedom, and Vladimir Putin has made clear that Russia is fighting to destroy Ukrainian independence.

Right now, the Ukrainians seem most likely to get what they want. And the United States shouldn’t fear the consequences of their victory.

Anne Applebaum: It’s time to prepare for a Ukrainian victory

Zelensky has been indefatigable in communicating his aims, both domestically and internationally. Domestically, the government has worked to connect the war to its human toll on Ukrainians. He grieves at the Bucha massacre, frets about the collapse of the Ukrainian economy, celebrates Ukrainian civil society, and somberly honors the military.

When lionized for Ukraine’s putting up an unexpectedly stiff resistance to Russian aggression, Zelensky implored the international community to understand that all Ukraine wants is peace. “I don’t want them destroyed—I want them all to remain.” More than 200 days after Russia invaded, he sounded equally focused on the survival of his people when he spoke to a group I was with in Kyiv this week: “The people are the only treasure we have.”

He has succeeded in bolstering Ukrainians’ hopes: 97 percent believe that Ukraine will definitely or likely win the war, and 40 percent favor no concessions of any kind to end the war. Ukrainians believe they are fighting for the fundamental values of a free society: human dignity, political liberty, national security. Those beliefs have electrified the society, which is engaged in impressive civic activism in support of the defense effort—something that will be studied by Western countries as mastery of 21st-century warfare.

Clausewitz also wrote that “the moral elements are among the most important in war. They constitute the spirit that permeates war as a whole.” Ukraine’s war has those moral elements, and they are generating societal resilience and garnering international support; Russia’s war does not, and that will doom it. Russia likely cannot recover from its strategic mistakes or generate the resources to achieve its war aims, especially because its leadership remains obdurate and its military forces are failing to adapt.

Ukrainian staying power is, naturally, changing the Russian approach. Putin initially believed Ukraine was so riddled with corruption and Russian supporters that a “special military operation” could parachute into the capitol and effect a regime change. He sent ground forces streaming in along three axes in the east and south to add insult to injury. Although the Russian military has targeted civilian populations from the start, it has shifted dramatically in that cruel direction as its invasion falters and is driven back. As Russia’s failures on the battlefield mount, it will lose its military effectiveness—which will further shift the Russian way of war from fighting an army to punishing civilians it could not conquer.

Could the Russians escalate more, and more wildly? Yes, absolutely. The possibility of Russia using a nuclear weapon on Kyiv as Russia’s military is forced to retreat is discussed frequently in policy circles in Kyiv. But I heard no variation on the conclusion by Ukrainians that it would change only the cost, not the outcome, of the war. Russia is already purposely inflicting civilian casualties indiscriminately and in large numbers.

Phillips Payson O’Brien: Ukraine pulled off a masterstroke

As Ukrainians defend their country, you can see what Abraham Lincoln called “the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.” You see it in graffiti reading more Europe, less war on the sides of destroyed apartment buildings. You hear it in mayors anxiously describing large-scale evacuations and the challenges of refugee resettlement. It emanates from the sober assessments of their military planners explaining what has been achieved but all that remains to be done. It rests in the mutual respect evident between the military and their civilian leadership, and Ukrainians affection for their military.

Some fear a “catastrophic victory” for Ukraine that humiliates Putin, thereby risking escalation against Ukraine or attacks on the U.S. and its NATO allies. But Russia isn’t winning a war against Ukraine, and it can’t win a war against us. We’re the strong ones in this conflict, and we deter more effectively when we act with confidence on that knowledge.

As we begin to think about a postwar Ukraine, we should not let the failures of prewar Ukraine shackle our thinking about who Ukrainians are and what they are capable of. They deserve our continued, increased help to win their war and reconstruct their country within the confines of the West.

The Atlantic · by Kori Schake · September 17, 2022

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com