Quotes of the Day:

"Self education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. The only function of a school is to make self-education easier; failing that it does nothing." 

- Isaac Asimov

"I begin to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy ... censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, this you may not read, this you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything–you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him." 

- Robert A. Heinlein - "If This Goes On–"

"The arch enemies of society are those who know better but by indirection, misstatement, and slander, seek to accomplish their concealed purposes or to gain profit of some sort by misleading the public. The antidote for these poisons must be found in the sincere and courageous efforts of those who would preserve their cherished freedom by a wise and responsible use of it.."  

- Charles Evans Hughes

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 14

2. IntelBrief: Russians Resort to Asymmetric Tactics and Ukrainians Fiercely Fight Back

3. EXPLAINER: What can the Patriot missile do for Ukraine?

4. An Alternate Reality: How Russia’s State TV Spins the Ukraine War

5. U.S. to Expand Training for Ukrainian Forces

6. Iran removed from UN women’s rights body after US push

7. Senate passes bill to ban TikTok on government devices

8. Crisis propaganda – Riddle Russia

9. Ukrainian forces are bracing for the possibility of another Russian invasion via Belarus: 'We have to be ready'

10. Belarus unlikely to provide Russia a force capable of new assault: U.K.

11. Taiwanese train for war after year of crises

12. World Leaders Expected to Push for Ukraine War Crimes Trials at Munich Security Conference

13. Why Crimea is Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s greatest bargaining chip

14. Russia’s New Theory of Victory

15. How to Stop Chinese Coercion

16. UN Votes to Remove Iran From Women’s Rights Commission

17. Breaking Precedent, Israel Provides Details of Syria Air Strike

18. Statecraft in the Age of Connectivity

19. Commissioners — AFGHANISTAN WAR COMMISSION

20. This Young Woman Was the First CIA Agent Killed in Vietnam

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 14

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-14

Key Takeaways

• Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly postponed his annual address to the Russian Federal Assembly, indicating that the Kremlin is not confident that it can continue to shape the Russian information space.
• Ukrainian officials are forecasting that Russian forces may attempt to launch a large-scale offensive at the beginning of 2023.
• Ukrainian air defenses shot down all drones that Russian forces launched in attacks on December 14.
• Ukrainian sources reported that 64 POWs returned to Ukrainian-held territory.
• The Kremlin will likely intensify information operations aimed at presenting the Ukrainian government as oppressing religious liberties and freedom of the press.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations and Russian forces conducted counterattacks in the Svatove and Kreminna areas.
• Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut and Avdiivka areas.
• Russian forces continued defensive operations south of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast.
• Kremlin officials admitted to receiving complaints about mobilization despite mobilization’s "de facto end."
• Ukrainian partisans continue to aid Ukrainian forces in identifying valuable Russian targets.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 14

Dec 14, 2022 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

understandingwar.org

Kateryna Stepanenko, Karolina Hird, George Barros, Riley Bailey, Madison Williams, and Frederick W. Kagan

December 14, 7:30 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 President Vladimir Putin’s alluded decision to postpone his annual address to the Russian Federation Assembly indicates he remains uncertain of his ability to shape the Russian information space amidst increasing criticism of his conduct of the invasion of Ukraine. The Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly to the Russian State Duma and Federation Council is an annual speech introduced to the Russian constitution in February 1994, roughly equivalent to the US President’s annual State of the Union address. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated that Putin may deliver his address to the Federation Assembly in 2023 and called on Russians to stop "fortune-telling with coffee grounds" regarding the timing of the next address.[1] An unnamed government source told the Russian state newswire TASS that the countdown for the new address starts from the date of the previous address, noting that the address is unlikely to take place in 2022.[2] Putin held his last address in late April 2021, discussing his initiatives for the year following the first crisis he caused with the Russian military buildup on the Ukrainian border in early 2021.[3]

The Russian withdrawal from Kyiv Oblast and northern Ukraine in April 2022 likely spoiled Putin’s plans to declare victory during the Federation Assembly address. Putin had previously seized the opportunity in March 2014 to deliver the "Crimean Speech," wherein he announced the illegal annexation of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol.[4] Putin likely anticipated a similar outcome in early spring only to indefinitely postpone the address, likely as a result of Russian military failures, his announced annexation of territories Russian forces did not control, and public dissatisfaction with mobilization. Putin may be still waiting and hoping to deliver a grandiose victory speech in 2023 or postponing the moment when he will have to admit that Russia cannot achieve his frequently restated maximalist aims in Ukraine.

Putin may not be confident in his ability to justify the cost of his war upon Russian domestic and global affairs when addressing the Russian public and elites. The unnamed TASS source noted that the address requires significant preparation by the president and his staff as it normally addresses plans for all aspects of Russian society—economy, education, military, global partnerships, etc. A victory in Ukraine could have allowed Putin to obfuscate Russian human and financial losses as it did in 2014, but Russia has not had any significant victories since the Russian occupation of Lysychansk in early July. Putin had previously attempted to sell the annexation of partially occupied Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk oblasts on September 30 as a major victory, only to reportedly generate further grumbling among Russian elites and undermine state propaganda narratives.[5] Putin’s most recent appearances on December 7 and December 9 offered vague responses to a few concerns over the length of the war, a second mobilization wave, and a claimed Ukrainian threat to Russian territory but also generated some criticism and confusion within the Russian pro-war community.[6] The Russian withdrawal from Kherson City had also angered prominent nationalist ideologists who had begun to question Putin’s commitment and ability to establish "Greater Russia."[7]

Putin has already canceled his annual press conference with the members of the Russian public, likely in an attempt to avoid answering questions about Russia’s military failures without resorting to excessively obvious manipulation of questioners and questions. Peskov announced on December 12 that Putin will not hold his live press conference with Russians, which he had been hosting for ten years.[8] Putin appears to be increasingly turning to scripted and pre-recorded appearances such as his meeting with 18 hand-picked, politically affluent women on November 25 who falsely introduced themselves as mothers of mobilized servicemen.[9] Putin is likely attempting to preempt the risks associated with having to respond to a complex question. The cancellation of the press conference, however, may undermine Putin’s populist appeal as a ruler in touch with his population.

Ukrainian officials are forecasting that Russia may attempt to launch a large-scale offensive in the early months of 2023. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba stated on December 13 that indicators such as Russian mobilization efforts, the announcement of conscription, and the movement of heavy weaponry suggest that Russia may be preparing for a large-scale offensive in January and February 2023.[10] Kuleba’s statement is consistent with ISW’s long-standing assessment that the winter months will increase the pace of operations on both sides and that conditions on the ground throughout Ukraine will likely be conducive to offensive operations.[11]

Russian forces could most readily relaunch offensive operations along two main axes of advance in the coming months—along the Kharkiv-Luhansk border in northeastern Ukraine, or in Donetsk Oblast. Russian troops appear to be moving heavy equipment from rear areas in Luhansk Oblast to areas near the current frontline along the Kharkiv-Luhansk Oblast border and have reshaped and reconsolidated their force grouping along this line, as ISW has recently reported.[12] Ukrainian and Russian sources have recently reported that Russian troops are conducting limited offensive operations along this line, particularly to regain lost positions west of Kreminna.[13] A recent drop in temperatures in this area to consistently below-freezing has allowed the ground to solidify, likely setting conditions for increasing the pace of offensive operations.

Russian combat power that was freed up following the withdrawal from the west (right) bank of Kherson Oblast has redeployed to various areas in Donbas, reinforced by mobilized reservists. Russian forces may additionally hope to launch an offensive in western Donetsk Oblast to build on marginal advances made in the Vuhledar-Pavlivka area in November.[14] ISW continues to assess that Russian forces seek to complete the capture of the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, and potential future offensives in western Donetsk Oblast may be intended to complement ongoing offensive drives on the western outskirts of Donetsk City and around Bakhmut to accomplish this wider territorial objective. However, despite the potential for new offensive operations, ISW continues to assess that Russian combat capability remains degraded and that Russian troops are highly unlikely to be able to take strategically-significant territory in the coming months.

Ukrainian air defense units shot down all the Shahed drones that Russian forces launched at Ukraine on December 14. Ukrainian military sources reported that Russian forces launched 13 Shahed-136 and Shahed-131 drones at critical infrastructure facilities in Ukraine, including areas of Kyiv Oblast, and that Ukrainian air defense forces shot down all the drones.[15]

Ukrainian sources reported that 64 Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs), including one American civilian, returned to Ukraine on December 14.[16] The Ukrainian Ministry of Reintegration announced the exchange but did not specify how many Russian soldiers were part of the deal.[17] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) notably has not commented on the exchange as of the time of this publication, which may draw criticism from prominent voices in the Russian milblogger information space who have called for increased transparency from the Russian MoD in its handling of prisoner exchanges.[18]

The Kremlin will likely intensify existing information operations accusing Ukraine’s government of oppressing religious liberty in Ukraine. Prominent Pro-Russian Telegram Channel Readovka made a post to its 1.5 million subscribers claiming that Ukraine’s State Security Service (SBU) raided Russian Orthodox churches in nine Ukrainian oblasts and accusing the SBU of conducting arbitrary "terror" searches to detain Russian Orthodox clergy on December 14.[19] This narrative contains elements of several observed Russian information operations designed to falsely portray Ukraine as oppressing Russian religious minorities.

Ukraine is not attacking religious liberty or Eastern Orthodoxy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree to impose personal sanctions against representatives of religious organizations associated with the Russian government on December 2.[20] This decree targets Kremlin-linked elements of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate (UOC MP). The UOC MP is not an independent religious organization. The UOC MP is the Kremlin-controlled Russian Orthodox Church’s subordinate branch in Ukraine.[21] The UOC MP materially supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Eastern Ukraine in 2014 and continues to support Russia’s current invasion.[22] Ukrainian authorities convicted a Moscow Patriarchate priest in Severodonetsk, Luhansk Oblast, for providing information about Ukrainian forces to Russian forces since April 2022, for example.[23]

The UOC MP is not the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, despite some inaccurate Western reporting characterizing it as "the Ukrainian Orthodox Church."[24] The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is a separate entity that gained autocephaly (official independence) from the Moscow Patriarchate in 2019.[25] The UOC MP is a small element within Ukraine’s religious demography. Multiple surveys conducted in 2022 found that only four percent of Ukrainians identify as members of the Moscow Patriarchate, whereas over 50 percent of Ukrainians identify as members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.[26] More than double of the UOC MP’s current adherents identified as Greek Catholics (8.8 percent) in 2021.[27]

The Kremlin will likely intensify information operations accusing Ukraine of attacking freedom of the press within the next three months. Ukraine’s parliament passed a media law on December 13 to satisfy a European Union membership prerequisite.[28] This law expands the powers of Ukrainian state censors over media organizations—including online media, forbids spreading Russian propaganda or information that disparages the Ukrainian language or defends the Soviet regime that ruled from 1917-1991, and establishes regulatory ratios for Ukrainian-language content versus Russian-language content on radio stations. These policies do not outlaw Russian-language media or the use of the Russian language in Ukraine but take steps to preserve the use of the Ukrainian language against the Kremlin’s campaign of cultural genocide that seeks to eradicate the notion of a unique Ukrainian cultural identity.[29] The Kremlin intensified information operations that Ukraine attacked freedom of the press in early 2021 after Ukraine banned three prominent pro-Russian television channels linked to key Putin ally Viktor Medvedchuk.[30] Ukraine’s new media law will enter into force three months after its ratification.[31]

Key Takeaways

• Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly postponed his annual address to the Russian Federal Assembly, indicating that the Kremlin is not confident that it can continue to shape the Russian information space.
• Ukrainian officials are forecasting that Russian forces may attempt to launch a large-scale offensive at the beginning of 2023.
• Ukrainian air defenses shot down all drones that Russian forces launched in attacks on December 14.
• Ukrainian sources reported that 64 POWs returned to Ukrainian-held territory.
• The Kremlin will likely intensify information operations aimed at presenting the Ukrainian government as oppressing religious liberties and freedom of the press.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations and Russian forces conducted counterattacks in the Svatove and Kreminna areas.
• Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut and Avdiivka areas.
• Russian forces continued defensive operations south of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast.
• Kremlin officials admitted to receiving complaints about mobilization despite mobilization’s "de facto end."
• Ukrainian partisans continue to aid Ukrainian forces in identifying valuable Russian targets.

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—Eastern Ukraine
• Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and one supporting effort);
• 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: (Eastern Kharkiv Oblast-Western Luhansk Oblast)

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in the direction of Svatove on December 14. Russian media outlet RIA Novosti claimed that Russian forces have routinely repelled Ukrainian assaults in the direction of Svatove in recent days.[32] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces are trying to break through to the R-66 (Svatove-Kreminna) highway near Svatove and maintained defenses in Novoselivkse, Luhansk Oblast (14km northwest of Svatove).[33] The Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian reserves from Kharkiv and Chuhuiv allow Ukrainian forces to continue to increase the pace of counteroffensive operations in the direction of Svatove.[34]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in the direction of Kreminna on December 14. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces thwarted Ukrainian assaults near Kreminna and Ploshchanka (16km north of Kreminna) and destroyed Ukrainian reconnaissance groups near Torske (14km west of Kreminna) and Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna).[35] A Russian milblogger claimed that current muddy weather conditions in the Kreminna area are preventing Ukrainian forces from using light vehicles.[36] The Russian milblogger also claimed that heavily fortified Russian frontlines reinforced with mobilized personnel are preventing Ukrainian mobile groups from breaking through Russian defensive positions in the Kreminna area.[37] A BARS-13 (Russian Combat Reserve) affiliated source warned that Ukrainian forces will be able to seize the initiative if they take Kreminna.[38] The Ukrainian General Staff reported on December 14 that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian force concentration area near Novoaidar, Luhansk Oblast (58km southeast of Kreminna ) on the night of December 12 to 13, killing more than 15 Russian military personnel.[39]

Russian forces continued to conduct counterattacks in the Svatove and Kreminna areas on December 14. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults northwest of Svatove near Hryanykivka in Kharkiv Oblast (51km northwest of Svatove) and Novoselivske.[40] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces have pushed Ukrainian forces to the outskirts of Novoselivkse.[41] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces also tried to advance toward Stelmakhivka in Luhansk Oblast (15km northwest of Svatove).[42] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces tried to advance in the direction of Makiivka (21km northwest of Kreminna) and continued to conduct counterattacks near Kreminna to constrain the actions of Ukrainian forces.[43] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults north of Kreminna near Chervonopopivka (6km north of Kreminna) and south of Kreminna near Serebrianka (11km south of Kreminna) and Bilohorivka (12km south of Kreminna).

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 to conduct offensive operations around Bakhmut on December 14. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Bakhmut, 14km south of Bakhmut near Kurdyumivka, and within 23km northeast of Bakhmut near Bilohorivka, Soledar, and Bakhmutske.[44] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces conducted assaults northeast of Bakhmut near Yakovlivka and Pidhorodne.[45] One Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces established control over positions on the outskirts of Soledar.[46] Russian milbloggers claimed that Wagner Group units and Ukrainian forces are fighting on the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut.[47] A Russian milblogger claimed that fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces has shifted from the industrial zone on the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut to residential areas.[48] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces conducted assaults south of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka and continued to clear Opytne, following previous Russian claims that Russian forces have almost entirely captured the settlement.[49] Wagner Group Financier Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed that fighting is ongoing in Opytne and that Ukrainian forces are putting up fierce resistance in the area.[50]

Russian forces continued to conduct offensive operations in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area on December 14. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults within 37km southwest of Avdiivka near Nevelske, Marinka, Pobieda, and Novomykhailivka.[51] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces captured the main part of Vodyane (8km southwest of Avdiivka).[52] Russian sources claimed that the capture of Vodyane would allow Russian forces to launch future offensive operations towards Tonenke (8km northwest of Avdiivka) and allows Russian forces to interdict Ukrainian supply routes from Orlivka to Avdiivka.[53] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces conducted assaults near Pervomaiske (12km southwest of Avdiivka) and that fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces is ongoing in the Marinka city center.[54] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces attempted to regain lost positions southwest of Avdiivka near Pisky and Vodyane.[55]

Russian forces reportedly conducted defensive operations in western Donetsk on December 14. The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces thwarted Ukrainian counterattacks within 75km southwest of Donetsk City in the direction of Pavlivka, Novomaiorske, and Neskuchne in western Donetsk Oblast.[56] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces switched to defensive operations following an unsuccessful attempt to storm Ukrainian positions in the direction of Velyka Novosilka (74km southwest of Donetsk City).[57] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued routine indirect fire along the line of contact in Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts.[58]

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

Russian forces continued defensive operations south of the Dnipro River and conducted artillery strikes on the west (right) bank of Kherson Oblast on December 14. Satellite imagery circulated by Russian and Ukrainian channels shows Russian fortifications comprised of three rows of "dragon’s teeth" in Kherson Oblast, but one Russian milblogger noted that there are shortcomings in the structure shown in the pictures of Russian trenches and questioned if they would be effective in protecting against substantial blast waves or mine and projectile fragments.[59] The Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) posted footage of its fighters reportedly engaging in small arms and grenade fire against Ukrainian positions on the line of contact along the Dnipro River.[60] Russian forces shelled settlements along the west bank coastline of the Dnipro River and significantly damaged the Kherson City Administration Building with multiple-launch-rocket-system (MLRS) fire.[61]

Ukrainian forces continued to strike Russian rear areas in Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts. Residents and Ukrainian sources reported that Ukrainian troops struck recreation centers where Russian soldiers lived in Skadovsk and Lazurne (both south of the Dnipro River) on the night of December 13 and morning of December 14.[62] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian strikes hit Russian concentration areas throughout Zaporizhia Oblast between December 12 and 14.[63]

Russian authorities are continuing efforts to consolidate administrative, bureaucratic, and informational control of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) and the surrounding city of Enerhodar. Zaporizhia Oblast occupation deputy Vladimir Rogov reported on December 14 that Eduard Senovoz, a Rosatom (Russian nuclear power company) employee and the former General Director of the Smolensk Nuclear Power Plant, is the new head of Enerhodar.[64] The Ukrainian Resistance Center also reported that Russian authorities are coercing Ukrainian employees of the ZNPP to sign employment contracts with Rosatom and threatening to fire and replace them with Russian operators if they fail to do so by January 1.[65] Russian sources continued to conduct information operations to accuse Ukraine of threatening the safety of the ZNPP.[66]

Russian forces continued routine shelling in western Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Mykolaiv Oblasts on December 14.[67] Ukrainian Mykolaiv Oblast Head Vitaly Kim reported that Russian strikes hit port infrastructure in Ochakiv, Mykolaiv Oblast.[68] Ukrainian air defense shot down Shahed-136 drones that Russian forces reportedly launched at Odesa Oblast.[69]

Note: ISW will report on activities in Kherson Oblast as part of the Southern Axis in this and subsequent updates. Ukraine’s counteroffensive in right-bank Kherson Oblast has accomplished its stated objectives, so ISW will not present a Southern Ukraine counteroffensive section until Ukrainian forces resume counteroffensives in southern Ukraine.

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

Kremlin officials admitted to receiving continued complaints about mobilization despite its de facto end. The Kremlin’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Tatyana Moskalkova, stated that she receives about 60-70 "terrible, agonizing, heavy" appeals regarding mobilization problems even though mobilization has "de-facto" concluded in Russia.[70] Moskalkova’s vague statement contradicts Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ongoing assertions that Russia has legally finalized its mobilization campaign and feeds into the ongoing Russian concern regarding the need for Putin to sign a decree formally ending mobilization.[71]

Select Russian federal subjects are continuing to deny the mobilized personnel's complaints regarding poor equipment and living conditions. Kemerovo Oblast officials distributed a video in which mobilization consultant Yuriy Yelgin attempts to disprove accusations by a group from the 247th Air Assault Regiment that complained about the lack of clothes and supplies.[72] Yelegin claimed that he personally distributed equipment to the regiment and that the commanders of the regiment denied these reports.[73] Kemerovo Oblast officials then distributed footage of a small group of men who claimed to be mobilized reservists from the 247th Air Assault Regiment and stated that they have not experienced any supply shortages and that they had no complaints about the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD).[74] The group did not feature the individuals from the original video and recorded the video at the same location as the original appeal.

Russian war efforts may further contribute to the brain drain and limit some professional specialties in Russia. Kremlin-sponsored business outlet Kommersant reported that Rossiya Airlines is planning to suspend a third of its pilots flying Airbus aircraft, with some Russian officials noting that this decision aims to conserve spare parts for Airbus planes amidst sanctions.[75] Kommersant reported that other Russian airlines are maintaining their staff and that some are even hiring new pilots. ISW also previously observed instances of the Kremlin attempting to mobilize commercial pilots, and such personnel cuts may be in preparation for the next mobilization wave or reflect the impact of Western sanctions on Russian air carriers.[76] Russian opposition outlets also reported that Russian officials are preparing a law that would ban IT, public services, and security personnel from working from home.[77] An unnamed Russian parliamentarian stated that the law aims to indirectly force Russian personnel who fled Russia as a result of mobilization to return to the country.[78]

The Kremlin continues to rely on financial incentives to lure men into participating in the war in Ukraine. Crimean Occupation Head Sergey Aksyonov announced on December 14 that the occupation State Council of Crimea adopted a law that provides a free plot of land in Crimea to participants of the "special military operation."[79] Aksyonov specified that the occupation administration will distribute land to individuals that had a Crimean permanent residency as of February 24, 2022.[80]

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of and annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Ukrainian partisans continue to undermine Russian occupation by aiding Ukrainian forces in identifying valuable Russian targets. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on December 14 that Ukrainian partisans in Donetsk Oblast provided information to Ukrainian forces that resulted in a Ukrainian precision strike on Russian manpower and equipment in Horlivka, Donetsk Oblast, resulting in the death of 100 Russian servicemembers.[81] The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that at least 20 Ukrainian partisans in Kherson City provided continual intelligence to Ukrainian forces during the Russian occupation of Kherson City.[82] WSJ stated that the intelligence provided by Ukrainian partisans played a key role in guiding Ukrainian precision strikes, which ultimately forced Russian troops to abandon the city in November.[83] ISW previously assessed on November 1 that Russian occupation forces have failed to neutralize Ukraine’s organized partisan movement and are unlikely to possess the capability to do so in the future.[84]

The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian occupation officials are increasing the pressure on Ukrainian citizens to apply for Russian passports in a failed attempt to validate the September 30 Russian Annexation Referendum.[85] The Ukrainian Resistance Center stated that occupied Russian territories have very low Russian passport issuance rates—in the tens of thousands rather than millions—which directly undermines the Russian claim that 99% of Ukrainians supported the annexation referendum.[86] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian occupation authorities have created unlivable conditions for Ukrainians who refuse to apply for Russian passports and introduced accelerated passport issuance in an attempt to rectify the disparity between their claims and the demonstrated lack of Ukrainian interest in obtaining Russian passports.[87]

Russian occupation officials continued to restrict the movement of Ukrainian residents out of occupied territories. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that since Russian occupation authorities introduced exit passes in October, the number of Ukrainians allowed to leave occupied territories has dramatically decreased from an average of 2,000 Ukrainians a day to 800 a week.[88] Zaporizhia Oblast State Administration Head Oleksandr Starukh also reported that Russian occupation authorities in Zaporizhia are preventing residents from leaving.[89]

A Russian media opposition source reported that Donetsk public utilities workers may be planning to strike soon due to intensified mobilization efforts and the overwork caused by labor shortages.[90] The source reported on December 13 that Donetsk public utilities sector employees are complaining about chronic overwork, no wage raises, and poor working conditions.[91] The source also stated that mobilization has caused economic devastation and greatly reduced the labor pool as many local men have been killed or badly wounded.[92]

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

[1] https://www dot interfax dot ru/russia/876856

[2] https://tass dot ru/politika/16586831

[3] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/65418

[4] http://en dot kremlindot ru/events/president/news/20603

[8] https://meduza(dot)io/news/2022/12/12/bolshaya-press-konferentsiya-putina-v-2022-godu-ne-sostoitsya; https://meduza(dot)io/news/2022/11/14/rbk-kreml-vpervye-za-10-let-mozhet-perenesti-bolshuyu-press-konferentsiyu-putina

[15] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02AbP5fLbw9FDL5MZBmv... https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/12/14/prezydent-ukrayiny-podyakuvav-sylam-ppo-zbyto-13-z-13-shahediv/; https://t.me/kpszsu/2210 ; https://t.me/kpszsu/2211

[16] https://minre dot gov dot ua/news/z-vorozhogo-polonu-povernuly-shche-65-osib; https://t.me/ermaka2022/1771; https://t.me/Koord_shtab/373 https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1602993889505411075?s=20&t=D2_v8pr...; https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1602995268433084418?s=20&t=D2_v8pr...

[17] https://minre.gov dot ua/news/z-vorozhogo-polonu-povernuly-shche-65-osib

[23] https://www.gp.gov dot ua/ua/posts/do-12-rokiv-za-gratami-zasudzeno-svyashhennika-upc-mp-v-luganskii-oblasti-za-informuvannya-voroga-pro-poziciyi-ukrayinskix-zaxisnikiv

[26] https://www.sapiens.com dot ua/publications/socpol-research/215/Release_IS_war_fin_6_04_church_language_ENG.pdf; https://www.kiis.com dot ua/?lang=ukr&cat=reports&id=1129&page=1

[28] https://bukinfo.com dot ua/mas-media/verhovna-rada-uhvalyla-zakon-pro-media; http://krivbass dot city/news/view/verhovna-rada-prijnyala-zakon-pro-media-yakij-neobhidnij-dlya-vstupu-v-es; https://hromadske dot ua/posts/v-ukrayini-uhvalili-zakonoproyekt-pro-media-yakij-neobhidnij-dlya-vstupu-v-yes-sho-vin-peredbachaye; https://www.rada.gov dot ua/news/news_kom/231238.html;

[30] https://rg dot ru/2021/02/03/zelenskij-zakryl-na-ukraine-tri-oppozicionnyh-telekanala.html; https://russian.rt dot com/ussr/article/829558-zelenskii-telekanaly-sankcii; https://www.rbc dot ru/rbcfreenews/620d86e09a794741df1537c8

[31] https://jurliga.ligazakon dot net/news/216066_ukhvaleno-zakon-pro-meda#:~:text=%D0%92%D1%96%D0%B4%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%96%D0%B4%D0%BD%D0%BE%20%D0%B4%D0%BE%20%D0%BF%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%85%D1%96%D0%B4%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%85%20%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%8C%20%D0%97%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD,%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%85%20%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%8C%20%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%87%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%96%20%D0%BE%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BC%D1%96%20%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%B8.&text=%D0%AE%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B9%20%D0%B1%D1%96%D0%B7%D0%BD%D0%B5%D1%81%20%2D%20%D1%86%D0%B5%20%D0%B1%D1%96%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%88%D0%B5%2C%20%D0%BD%D1%96%D0%B6,%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B0%D0%B2%D1%87%D1%83%2C%20%D0%BC%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%96%D0%B9%D0%BD%D1%83%20%D1%82%D0%B0%20%D1%84%D1%96%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%83%20%D1%96%D0%BD%D1%84%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%86%D1%96%D1%8E.

[35]

[62] https://t.me/hueviyherson/30916; https://t.me/hueviyherson/30917; ttps://t.me/Bratchuk_Sergey/24669

[65] https://sprotyv dot mod dot gov.ua/2022/12/14/bilshist-praczivnykiv-zaes-vidmovlyayutsya-ukladaty-dogovir-z-rosatomom/

[70] https://www dot interfax dot ru/russia/876926

[75] https://www dot kommersant dot ru/doc/5720805

[76] https://meduza dot io/en/news/2022/09/23/russian-airline-employees-summoned-less-than-a-day-after-mobilization-declared

[77] https://meduza dot io/news/2022/12/14/verstka-v-rossii-zapretyat-chinovnikam-i-rabotnikam-sfery-informatsionnyy-bezopasnosti-rabotat-udalenno-zapret-kosnetsya-rossiyan-uehavshih-iz-za-voyny

[78] https://meduza dot io/news/2022/12/14/verstka-v-rossii-zapretyat-chinovnikam-i-rabotnikam-sfery-informatsionnyy-bezopasnosti-rabotat-udalenno-zapret-kosnetsya-rossiyan-uehavshih-iz-za-voyny

[81] https://sprotyv dot mod dot gov.ua/2022/12/14/ukrayinske-pidpillya-dopomoglo-znyshhyty-voroga-v-gorlivczi/

[85]https://sprotyv dot mod.dot gov.ua/2022/12/14/okupanty-pospishayut-provesty-pasportyzacziyu-na-tymchasovo-okupovanyh-terytoriyah/

[86] https://sprotyv dot mod.dot gov.ua/2022/12/14/okupanty-pospishayut-provesty-pasportyzacziyu-na-tymchasovo-okupovanyh-terytoriyah/

[87] https://sprotyv dot mod.dot gov.ua/2022/12/14/okupanty-pospishayut-provesty-pasportyzacziyu-na-tymchasovo-okupovanyh-terytoriyah/

[88] https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2022/12/13/rosiyany-prodovzhuyut-blokuvaty-vyyizd-ukrayincziv-z-tymchasovo-okupovanyh-terytorij/

understandingwar.org

2. IntelBrief: Russians Resort to Asymmetric Tactics and Ukrainians Fiercely Fight Back

IntelBrief: Russians Resort to Asymmetric Tactics and Ukrainians Fiercely Fight Back - The Soufan Center

thesoufancenter.org · by Mohamed · December 15, 2022

December 15, 2022

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IntelBrief: Russians Resort to Asymmetric Tactics and Ukrainians Fiercely Fight Back

AP Photo/LIBKOS

Bottom Line Up Front

• As the Russian military continues to struggle on the battlefield in Ukraine, Moscow has broadened its approach by ramping up a range of asymmetric tactics, including an aggressive disinformation campaign and the use of proxies to foment instability throughout Europe.
• Russian forces have pounded Ukraine’s power grid to inflict pain and suffering on the civilian population, targeting critical infrastructure with relentless bombardments.
• On Telegram, Task Force Rusich, a neo-Nazi paramilitary unit linked to the private military contractor Wagner Group, has called on individuals who are “needed in Europe and in Ukraine to fight NATO forces.”
• The Ukrainians, as they have since the February invasion, have fought fiercely and proven to be innovative, adaptive, and agile against a much stronger adversary.

As the Russian military continues to struggle on the battlefield in Ukraine, Moscow has broadened its approach by ramping up a range of asymmetric tactics, including an aggressive disinformation campaign and the use of proxies to foment instability throughout Europe. The Russian approach to hybrid warfare is expansive, and includes economic, information, diplomatic, and subversive means, as well as the use of covert and clandestine operations across the so-called “gray zone.” The recent disinformation efforts have been focused on causing problems for Ukrainian refugees who relocated to Europe, with narratives suggesting that Ukrainians are gaining exclusive access to finite resources, including energy. Protests and demonstrations against the rising cost of living and utilities, many promulgating pro-Putin and Russia narratives, have sprouted up across Europe. Germany has seen an uptick in attacks, including arson, against refugee centers, with many far-right groups and politicians capitalizing on pre-existing tensions to further anti-migrant and refugee narratives. Poland has been targeted with similar disinformation efforts.

Russian forces have pounded Ukraine’s power grid to inflict pain and suffering on the civilian population, targeting critical infrastructure with relentless bombardments. The Kremlin is waging a war of brute force, with widespread accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Numerous credible reports of torture and rape have been published, while mass graves continue to be uncovered. Moscow’s conventional military operations have been faltering and the Pentagon believes the Russians are facing an ammunition shortage, which could force them to use decades-old, degraded rockets and artillery shells. Meanwhile, in Melitopol, a Ukrainian offensive augmented by long-range precision missile strikes, targeted assassinations, and sabotage missions has damaged Russian command centers, ammunition depots, and supply routes. In the eastern city of Bakhmut, Russian scorched earth tactics have led to heavy fighting and reports of high numbers of casualties on both sides, as civilians flee in large numbers.

On Telegram, Task Force Rusich, a neo-Nazi paramilitary unit linked to the private military contractor Wagner Group, has called on individuals who are “needed in Europe and in Ukraine to fight NATO forces.” One posting called for “partisans” who were able to both cover the location and block the transfer of NATO personnel and equipment; hold demonstrations and actions with local European populations against the war with the Russian Federation; and, in phrasing that could be interpreted quite broadly, “to solve other problems.” A more recent posting called for those willing to provide information and intelligence on border and military activity in Baltic nations. Some of these Telegram channels boast more than 60,000 subscribers, so the messages are reaching a wide audience. European countries already have a heightened sense of concern after a recent spate of letter bombings and suspicious packages targeting Ukrainian diplomatic missions across the continent. Ukrainian embassies in Denmark and Romania received “dangerous parcels” while numerous letter bombs were mailed to offices in Spain, including the Ukrainian embassy and the office of Spain’s prime minister. The U.S. embassy in Madrid also received a suspicious package that had to be detonated. There were also parcels that were soaked with an unspecified liquid and contained animals’ eyes, which were delivered to Ukrainian diplomatic missions in Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Croatia, Austria, Italy, and the Czech Republic.

The Ukrainians, as they have since the February invasion, have fought fiercely and proven to be innovative, adaptive, and agile against a much stronger adversary. The United States is now preparing to send PATRIOT missile defense systems to Ukraine, a move that would greatly aid the Ukrainians in defending their urban centers, power grid, and other critical infrastructure. While Ukraine has demonstrated a remarkable ability to repel waves of Iranian-made drones deployed by Russia, the PATRIOT systems would be a welcome upgrade for Kyiv. The Russians launched new strikes in Kyiv and Kherson yesterday, coming on the heels of drone strikes in the southern port city of Odesa last weekend, which according to officials left more than 1.5 million without power. Ukraine recently launched a drone strike of its own, targeting an airfield within Russia’s borders. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, careful not to escalate the conflict with Russia directly, distanced Washington from the attack, stating, “We have neither encouraged nor enabled the Ukrainians to strike inside of Russia.” Still, some within U.S. national security circles have called for a more aggressive posture vis-à-vis Russia, including sending Ukraine Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) with a range of nearly 200 miles.

thesoufancenter.org · by Mohamed · December 15, 2022

3. EXPLAINER: What can the Patriot missile do for Ukraine?

Conclusion:

But beyond the Patriot’s capabilities, its deployment is a big statement of support for Ukraine.

EXPLAINER: What can the Patriot missile do for Ukraine?

AP · by TARA COPP and LOLITA BALDOR · December 15, 2022

WASHINGTON (AP) — Patriot missile systems have long been a hot ticket item for the U.S. and allies in contested areas of the world as a coveted shield against incoming missiles. In Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific, they guard against potential strikes from Iran, Somalia and North Korea.

So it was a critical turning point when news broke this week that the U.S. has agreed to send a Patriot missile battery to Ukraine — something Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has sought for months to augment his country’s air defenses. U.S. officials have confirmed the agreement, and an official announcement is expected soon. But experts caution that the system’s effectiveness is limited, and it may not be a game changer in the war.

A look at what the system is and what it does:

WHAT IS THE PATRIOT?

The Patriot is a surface-to-air guided missile system that was first deployed in the 1980s and can target aircraft, cruise missiles and shorter-range ballistic missiles.

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Each Patriot battery consists of a truck-mounted launching system with eight launchers that can hold up to four missile interceptors each, a ground radar, a control station and a generator. The Army said it currently has 16 Patriot battalions. A 2018 International Institute for Strategic Studies report found those battalions operate 50 batteries, which have more than 1,200 missile interceptors.

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The U.S. batteries are regularly deployed around the world. In addition, Patriots also are operated or being purchased by the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Taiwan, Greece, Spain, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Romania, Sweden, Poland and Bahrain.

The Patriot system “is one of the most widely operated and reliable and proven air missile defense systems out there,” and the theater ballistic missile defense capability could help defend Ukraine against Iranian-supplied ballistic missiles, said Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

PATRIOT COST

Over the years the Patriot system and missiles have been continually modified. The current interceptor missile for the Patriot system costs approximately $4 million per round and the launchers cost about $10 million each, CSIS reported in its July missile defense report. At that price, it’s not cost effective or optimal to use the Patriot to shoot down the far smaller and dramatically cheaper Iranian drones that Russia has been buying and using in Ukraine.

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“Firing a million-dollar missile at a $50,000 drone is a losing proposition,” said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps reserves colonel and senior adviser at CSIS.

DEPLOYMENT CONCERNS

A Patriot battery can need as many as 90 troops to operate and maintain it, and for months the U.S. was reluctant to provide the complex system because sending forces into Ukraine to operate it is a non-starter for the Biden administration.

But there were also concerns that deployment of the system would provoke Russia, or risk that a missile fired could end up hitting inside Russia, which could further escalate the conflict. On Thursday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry warned that a U.S. plan to deliver sophisticated air defense missiles to Ukraine would be “another provocative move by the U.S.” that could prompt a response from Moscow.

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According to officials, the urgent pleadings of Ukrainian leaders and the devastating destruction of the country’s civilian infrastructure, including loss of electricity and heat as winter drags on, ultimately overcame U.S. reservations about supplying the Patriots.

A key hurdle will be training. U.S. troops will have to train Ukrainian forces on how to use and maintain the system. Army solders assigned to Patriot battalions get extensive training to be able to effectively locate a target, lock on with radar and fire.

The U.S. has trained Ukrainian troops on other complex weapons systems, including the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, known as HIMARS. In many cases they’ve been able to shorten the training, getting Ukrainian troops out to the battlefront in weeks. Officials have declined to provide details on how long the Patriots training would take and where exactly it will be done.

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PATRIOT CAPABILITIES

Ukraine faces a range of Russian threats, and the Patriot is good against some and not that useful against others.

One former senior military official with knowledge of the Patriot system said it will be effective against short-range ballistic missiles and it represents a strong message of U.S. support, but one battery isn’t going to change the course of the war.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the Ukraine deal has not yet been made public, noted that one Patriot battery has a long firing range, but can cover only a limited broad area. As an example, Patriots can effectively protect a small military base, but can’t fully protect a large city such as Kyiv. They could only provide coverage for a segment of a city.

Patriots are often deployed as a battalion, which includes four batteries. This won’t be the case with Ukraine, which officials said would be receiving one battery.

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The Patriot has a more powerful radar that is better at discriminating targets than the Soviet-era S-300 system the Ukrainians have been using, but it has limitations, both Karako and Cancian said.

Still the Patriot’s ability to target some ballistic missiles and aircraft could potentially protect Kyiv if Russian President Vladimir Putin carried through on his persistent threat to deploy a tactical nuclear device. But that would depend on how the weapon was delivered, Karako said. If it was a gravity bomb delivered by a warplane, the system could target the aircraft; if it was a cruise or short-to-medium-range ballistic missile, it could also possibly intercept the missile, Karako said.

Raytheon, which manufactures the Patriot, says it has been involved in 150 intercepts of ballistic missiles since 2015. The success rate of the Patriot, however, has been repeatedly questioned. A 1992 Government Accountability Office report said it could not find evidence to support reports that the system had achieved a 70% success rate against Scud missiles in the Gulf War. In 2018, Saudi Arabia’s success in using Patriots against missiles fired by Houthi rebels in Yemen was questioned when videos surfaced of systems failing.

But beyond the Patriot’s capabilities, its deployment is a big statement of support for Ukraine.

“There’s a lot of symbolism here,” Cancian said.

___

Associated Press writers Zeina Karam in London and Vanessa Gera in Warsaw, Poland, contributed to this story.

AP · by TARA COPP and LOLITA BALDOR · December 15, 2022

4. An Alternate Reality: How Russia’s State TV Spins the Ukraine War

An Alternate Reality: How Russia’s State TV Spins the Ukraine War

Leaked emails detail how Russia’s biggest state broadcaster, working with the nation’s security services, mined right-wing American news and Chinese media to craft a narrative that Moscow was winning.

By Paul Mozur, Adam Satariano and Aaron Krolik

The reporters spent the past year writing a series of stories about Russian censorship, surveillance and propaganda.

Dec. 15, 2022, 

3:00 a.m. ET

nytimes.com · by Aaron Krolik · December 15, 2022

As Russian tanks were stuck in the mud outside Kyiv earlier this year and the economic fallout of war with Ukraine took hold, one part of Russia’s government hummed with precision: television propaganda.

Spinning together a counternarrative for tens of millions of viewers, Russian propagandists plucked clips from American cable news, right-wing social media and Chinese officials. They latched onto claims that Western embargoes of Russian oil would be self-defeating, that the United States was hiding secret bioweapon research labs in Ukraine and that China was a loyal ally against a fragmenting West.

Day by day, state media journalists sharpened those themes in emails. They sometimes broadcast battlefield videos and other information sent to them by the successor agency to the K.G.B. And they excerpted and translated footage from favorite pundits, like the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose remarks about the war were shown to millions of Russians.

“Be sure to take Tucker,” one Russian news producer wrote to a colleague. The email referred to a clip in which Mr. Carlson described the power of the Chinese-Russian partnership that had emerged under Mr. Biden — and how American economic policies targeting Russia could undermine the dollar’s status as a world-reserve currency.

The correspondence was one of thousands of email exchanges stored within a leaked database from Russia’s largest state-owned media company, the All-Russia State Television and Radio Company, known as V.G.T.R.K. The data was made publicly available online by DDoSecrets, a group that publishes hacked documents.

The New York Times created a search tool to identify material from the 750 gigabytes of files related to the buildup to the war and its earliest stages from January to March 2022, when the available documents ended. The Times verified the documents by confirming email addresses and people’s identities. In many instances, matters discussed in the emails led to content broadcast on the air.

The emails provide a rare glimpse into a propaganda machine that is perhaps Russia’s greatest wartime success. Even as the country faces battlefield losses, mounting casualties, economic isolation and international condemnation, state-run television channels have spun a version of the war in which Russia is winning, Ukraine is in shambles and Western alliances are fraying. Along with a fierce crackdown on dissent, the propaganda apparatus has helped President Vladimir V. Putin maintain domestic support for a war that many in the West had hoped would weaken his hold on power the longer it dragged on.

To create this narrative, producers at the state media company cherry-picked from conservative Western media outlets like Fox News and the Daily Caller, as well as obscure social media accounts on Telegram and YouTube, according to the records. Russian security agencies like the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the successor to the K.G.B., fed other information, creating an alternative version of events such as the bombing of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

In other instances, V.G.T.R.K. workers shared clips, sometimes from little-known American media, that appeared to show opposition to the war rising in the West or how sanctions were backfiring against the United States.

The clip showed how some in the area were pasting stickers on the pump with a photo of President Biden saying, “I did that.” It quoted a local gas station manager, who worried the stickers could cause trouble during corporate inspections.

redacted email written in Russian

Other material showed an organization grappling with Russia’s growing isolation. V.G.T.R.K. employees tracked how their broadcasts were received overseas and talked about how to react when their channels were being blocked in neighboring European countries. They even discussed a response to Russia being dropped from the popular Eurovision singing competition, a major television event.

China was used to bolster Russian story lines, according to the records, with producers pulling from Chinese media for potential story ideas. In another instance, they discussed currying favor with a top Chinese propaganda official.

V.G.T.R.K. did not respond to requests for comment. A Fox News spokeswoman didn’t provide a comment.

V.G.T.R.K. has roughly 3,500 employees and operates some of the country’s most-watched channels, including Russia 1 and Russia 24, as well as a robust online operation. With national and regional networks, it reaches nearly the entire Russian population, from urban hubs to rural areas, and its dominance has grown as the government has restricted access to social media and independent news. The company receives about $500 million a year from the Russian government, analysts estimated.

“Besides the political machine of what the Kremlin operates directly, V.G.T.R.K. is the second-most important part of propaganda in Russia,” said Vasily Gatov, a Russian media researcher at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy.

The company, created in 1990 and now run by the Kremlin ally Oleg Dobrodeyev, sets the news agenda and shapes public opinion, Mr. Gatov said. About two-thirds of Russians count television as their main source of news, according to a recent survey. And V.G.T.R.K.’s influence extends to other media outlets, with its former Kremlin correspondent, Margarita Simonyan, now the top editor of RT, Russia’s English-language news channel.

Collaboration between the Kremlin and state broadcasters dates back more than two decades, said Mr. Gatov, a former Russian journalist and an expert on state propaganda. Each day, the Kremlin provides a list of talking points for broadcasters. The closely guarded document, known as the “temnik,” is delivered to senior officials at V.G.T.R.K. and other organizations, outlining issues the Kremlin wants covered, positively or negatively, along with views to endorse and people to criticize, said Mr. Gatov, who has seen copies.

The Kremlin’s tight control of the media has increased since the invasion of Ukraine, but people’s trust in what they are watching is falling the longer the war goes on and its violent realities become harder to hide, said Vera Tolz, a professor at the University of Manchester who has studied Russian media for the British Parliament and European Union. “There are cracks,” she said.

In the early days of the war, what was not explicitly outlined in Kremlin orders was left to television producers to fill in.

The United States was a frequent target, according to the documents. Each day, emails circulated with long lists of news clips and viral posts that served as a palette to paint a darkening picture of the United States.

In early February, weeks before the invasion of Ukraine, producers flagged a clip of President Biden declining to answer questions about sending troops to Poland, bolstering the idea that America was eager for a fight. A New York Times story about Ukraine’s aggressive information war against Russia was also recast as evidence of the country’s dishonesty. Another, pulled from Britain’s Daily Mail, showed Mr. Biden picking his teeth.

As the war dragged on, producers sought clips about the fallout in the United States. One came from a local news program in northern Alabama about stickers being placed on gas pumps that showed Mr. Biden saying, “I did that.” Another video, showing a U.S. grocery store emptied of food, came from a viral Telegram post. It seemed to inspire a broadcast soon after titled, “Oil shock and empty shelves: Trump’s grim prophecy is coming true.”

In March, Denis Davydov, a V.G.T.R.K. reporter in Washington, flagged a seven-year-old YouTube post, gaining newfound popularity, that claimed that the United States and NATO had fueled Russia’s hostility toward Ukraine.

“The Western viewer is looking for alternative information,” Mr. Davydov wrote in an email. (He did not respond to a request for comment.)

As Russia became isolated, China’s importance grew. V.G.T.R.K. reporters reworked reports from Chinese state media, conveying the image of a powerful country at Russia’s side whose people backed a just war in Ukraine. One email that led to a broadcast identified a refrain said to be circulating on the Chinese internet: “By buying a Russian candy, you can turn it into a bullet against Nazism.”

When the birthday of Shen Haixiong, a top Chinese propagandist, was coming up, V.G.T.R.K. leaders planned to ensure that a gift — an album containing reproductions of masterpieces by Russian artists — would get through China’s lengthy Covid quarantine in time, according to one email.

V.G.T.R.K. used Chinese officials and state media to build support for a conspiracy theory that the United States maintained secret labs to build biological weapons in Ukraine. In March, producers broke down footage from Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, saying the U.S. research was “aimed at creating a mechanism for the covert spread of deadly pathogens.”

To add an American voice to the biolab claims, producers discussed and then aired remarks by Roger Stone, a former Trump adviser, from the far-right television channel Real America’s Voice.

Fox News and other conservative outlets were fixtures of internal news roundups, scripts and broadcasts. Producers circulated a clip of a Fox News commentator discussing Russia’s “sanction-proof” economy and a Breitbart article about the effect on oil prices.

Mr. Carlson’s broadcasts were passed around V.G.T.R.K., according to emails.

V.G.T.R.K. watched how it was perceived abroad.

Reports tracked the foreign media coverage of a leading V.G.T.R.K. presenter, Dmitri Kiselyov, noting pickups by global newspapers and categorizing them as positive, negative or neutral. Mr. Kiselyov is a firebrand known for inflammatory statements — in May, he threatened Britain with nuclear annihilation — and his negative press mentions jumped in 2022, according to the reports. Outlets in Germany, Nigeria and Canada all had critical things to say. One quote, marked red for negative from the German magazine Stern, described the state of Russian television under “propagandists” like Mr. Kiselyov: “A poisonous mixture of lies, hatred and absurdity.”

Emails showed close ties between state media and Russia’s security apparatus, which provided information that was quickly put on the air that gave a rosy picture of a war that was in reality deteriorating.

On Feb. 24, the day of the invasion, the F.S.B. sent emails to state media calling them “colleagues” and claiming that Ukrainian soldiers were abandoning their posts. Another message noted a supposed attack by Ukraine on a civilian cargo ship.

In March, the F.S.B. sent dossiers about two Ukrainian officers killed in combat, making unverifiable claims that they had killed civilians and were terrorists. In the email, the security service said not to attribute the information to the F.S.B., orders that were followed in the ensuing broadcast.

State media took cues from the F.S.B. and the Ministry of Defense about how to cover events that drew international outrage, according to the documents. After the March bombing of a theater in Mariupol, where civilians were believed to be seeking cover, the military sent an email to V.G.T.R.K. and other state media with the subject “Important!” It provided a video of a woman who said members of a Ukrainian nationalist group had blown up the theater, not the Russian military.

“Please use in stories,” the note said.

Design and production by Aliza Aufrichtig and Axel Boada

nytimes.com · by Aaron Krolik · December 15, 2022

5. U.S. to Expand Training for Ukrainian Forces

Current time in:

Kyiv Dec. 15, 7:19 p.m.

Moscow Dec. 15, 8:19 p.m.

Washington Dec. 15, 12:19 p.m.

LIVEUpdated 

Dec. 15, 2022, 12:13 p.m. ET6 minutes ago

6 minutes ago

Russia-Ukraine War

U.S. to Expand Training for Ukrainian Forces

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/12/15/world/russia-ukraine-news

Here’s what we know:

The Pentagon aims to instruct one Ukrainian battalion each month in advanced battlefield tactics, beginning early next year, U.S. officials said.

• The U.S. plans to more than double the number of Ukrainian troops it trains in Germany.
• Zelensky says Russian and Belarusian athletes should not be allowed at the 2024 Olympics.
• Ukraine’s Parliament passes a bill to regulate the news media, drawing criticism from press freedom groups.
• Zelensky urges the E.U. to create a war tribunal as he accepts the Sakharov Prize.
• In ‘The Daily’ podcast, scenes from a Russian draft office.

The U.S. plans to more than double the number of Ukrainian troops it trains in Germany.

Image

Ukrainian soldiers training with U.S.-provided weapons used to damage bunkers near Yavoriv, Ukraine, just weeks before Russia invaded in February.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is expanding the training that the U.S. military provides to Ukrainian troops, with plans to more than double the number of forces it instructs at a base in Germany, according to two U.S. officials.

The expanded training, which officials said President Biden had approved this week, would enable American instructors to train a Ukrainian battalion — about 600 to 800 troops — each month, beginning early next year, the officials said.

That is a major increase in the overall number of Ukrainians the United States trains outside the country — now averaging about 300 troops a month — in addition to a revamping of the training that they will receive. Since the war started in February, the United States has trained 3,100 Ukrainian soldiers, mostly in small groups, on specific weapons like artillery systems, according to Defense Department statistics.

The Pentagon has trained 610 Ukrainian soldiers in the use of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, an advanced rocket launcher. Ukrainian troops have used the launchers to devastating effect, hitting targets far behind the lines, including ammunition depots, command posts and bridges.

Under the expanded program, American trainers will instruct larger groups of Ukrainian soldiers in more advanced battlefield tactics, including “collective training,” like coordinating ground infantry troop maneuvers with artillery support. CNN reported last month that the Biden administration was considering the expanded training.

The new training regimen is set to take place at a U.S. Army base in Grafenwoehr, Germany, where the Pentagon conducts its own combined arms training. The base is also home to the Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine.

Ukrainian officials have been wary of pulling too many troops off the front lines at any given time for specialized weapons training. But with winter slowing the tempo of fighting in many parts of the combat zone, officials said the coming months would provide a window.

Military officials said the expanded training would in many respects aim to resume the instruction that American Special Forces and National Guard trainers, along with instructors from other NATO countries, regularly provided Ukrainian troops before the war began.

From 2015 to early this year, American military instructors trained more than 27,000 Ukrainian soldiers at the Yavoriv Combat Training Center in western Ukraine, near the city of Lviv, Pentagon officials said. The United States withdrew 150 military instructors before the war began.

Months after the war began, the United States and other Western countries began training Ukrainian forces in Germany and Poland.

In addition, Britain started a program to provide military training in Britain to 10,000 Ukrainian Army recruits and staff members, an effort that aims to help bolster local resistance to the Russian invasion. The initiative, announced in June by Boris Johnson, the prime minister at the time, began with more than 1,000 British soldiers from the 11th Security Force Assistance Brigade, which specializes in foreign training.

Other nations, including Canada, Denmark, Finland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and Sweden, joined in after Britain requested help.

Adm. Sir Tony Radakin, Britain’s chief of defense, said on Wednesday that the initial goal of training 10,000 Ukrainian recruits had nearly been met. “This is significant,” he said in a speech in London.

— Eric Schmitt

6. Iran removed from UN women’s rights body after US push

Iran removed from UN women’s rights body after US push

al-monitor.com

Iran's removal from the 45-member Commission on the Status of Women comes as Tehran continues its brutal crackdown on its nationwide protests.

The UN voted to remove Iran from a women's rights body over Tehran's brutal crackdown of women-led protests. Twenty-nine members of the UN Economic and Social Council voted to expel the Islamic republic from the UN Commission on the Status of Women. (Photo by YUKI IWAMURA/AFP via Getty Images) -

Elizabeth Hagedorn

@ElizHagedorn

December 14, 2022

Iran was ousted on Wednesday from a women’s rights agency at the United Nations following a successful US push to reprimand Tehran over its brutal treatment of women.

The Islamic Republic's four-year term on the 45-member Commission on the Status of Women came to an end following a vote on a resolution introduced by the United States. The UN body is tasked with promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment, and Iran was elected as a member last spring.

The UN’s Economic and Social Council, a 54-member body that oversees and elects members of the commission, voted on Wednesday to remove Iran for the remainder of its term. Twenty-nine UN member states voted in favor of the resolution, with 16 abstaining. Eight members — Bolivia, China, Kazakhstan, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Oman, Russia and Zimbabwe — opposed it.

The United States had pushed heavily for Iran’s removal from the commission, with Vice President Kamala Harris saying in a Nov. 2 statement, “Iran has demonstrated through its denial of women’s rights and brutal crackdown on its own people that it is unfit to serve on this Commission.”

In a statement following the vote, White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan pledged the United States would “pursue all possible mechanisms of accountability against the Iranian regime.”

The vote comes as protests continue in Iran, sparked by the Sept. 16 death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, an Iranian woman detained for violating the country’s hijab rules. The demonstrations over Amini’s death quickly spread to dozens of cities across Iran, where women have risked arrest by burning their hijabs, which have been obligatory for Iranian women since 1983.

Iran’s security forces have cracked down violently on the months-long challenge to Iran’s clerical regime. More than 450 protesters have died since mid-September, according to Iran Human Rights, an Oslo-based nongovernmental organization.

Thousands more have been jailed in the unrest, including the niece of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was recently arrested after recording a video in which she criticized the regime.

The Iranian mission to the United Nations did not immediately return a request for comment on Wednesday’s vote. But in a Dec. 2 letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres obtained by Al-Monitor, Iran’s UN Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani slammed efforts to remove Iran from the commission as “yet another attempt by the United States to exploit the UN system to further its political agenda.”

Fatima Abo Alasrar, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute, told Al-Monitor that Iran used its position on the commission to “obtain legitimacy and enshrine its regressive policies.” The vote to expel it will “send a message to the protesters inside Iran that the world is watching the events in Iran and will not accept to deal with a regime that so flagrantly abuses women’s rights with impunity,” Abo Alasrar said.

Iran’s ouster is the latest UN effort to increase diplomatic pressure on Iran. Last month, the UN’s Human Rights Council voted to set up a fact-finding investigation into the Iranian government’s alleged rights violations.

On Friday, the Biden administration unveiled fresh sanctions on three Iranian officials involved in the repression of protesters. Among those targeted was Ebrahim Kouchakzaei, a Law Enforcement Forces commander whose alleged rape of a 15-year-old girl in Sistan-Baluchistan fueled major protests in the southeastern Iranian province.

7. Senate passes bill to ban TikTok on government devices

What is the US government's plan for dealing with the blowback which China will surely exploit?

Senate passes bill to ban TikTok on government devices

Axios · by Shawna Chen · December 15, 2022

The Senate voted unanimously Wednesday to pass a bill that would ban TikTok on government-issued devices.

Why it matters: A growing number of states have barred state employees and contractors from using the popular social media app on government devices in recent weeks amid FBI warnings about the possibility of surveillance and "influence operations" by the Chinese government.

• Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen last month said the app presents "legitimate national security concerns" to the U.S.

Meanwhile, one of the five commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission has called for a national TikTok ban entirely.

The big picture: TikTok is owned by the Chinese company Bytedance, which is largely subject to China's government, given the country's party-state system.

• TikTok itself doesn't operate inside China, however, and the company doesn't store U.S. user data in China.
• Oracle began vetting TikTok's algorithms and content moderation models earlier this year to ensure they aren't manipulated by Chinese authorities.

Worth noting: TikTok is working to reach an agreement with the Council on Foreign Investment in the U.S., an interagency committee that reviews certain transactions involving foreign investment to account for national security concerns, to determine whether the firm can be divested to an American company and remain operational in the U.S.

What's next: The legislation led by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) now heads to the House.

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to say that Sen. Josh Hawley is leading the legislation, not Sen. Marco Rubio.

Axios · by Shawna Chen · December 15, 2022

8. Crisis propaganda – Riddle Russia

Excerpts:

Ever since Vladimir Putin came to power, Russia’s history could be viewed through attempts at crisis management. Starting with the Kursk submarine tragedy, the Kremlin tried to control the crisis mainly through sanctions on journalists and increased media regulation. The current crisis happened in a situation where all media outlets within the country were under complete control and new laws had permitted all repressions against those who go against the Kremlin’s narrative.

On the one hand, this should have make it easier to manage and control information flows during the crisis. On the other, this total control was the reason why the pre-crisis information picture was completely subordinated to the logic of propaganda, which disrupted the feedback mechanisms, intensified the effect of the crisis that ensued and complicated the tasks faced by crisis communicators. In fact, increased control over the media increases the risks associated with the aftermath of a crisis.

In this case, crisis communication made a forced correction, but since it operates within the existing logic of war coverage, its main task is to create an information field for a new wave of propaganda. Thus, the propagandists turn into the mythical creature of Ouroboros, i.e. a serpent that eats itself. It is both the creator and the consumer of the new information reality, locking itself inside an isolated system. With each crisis, the serpent’s tail gets ever deeper into its mouth, approaching the point where self-absorption will lead to the annihilation of the one who absorbs.

Crisis propaganda – Riddle Russia

Gregory Asmolov looks at the new genre of authoritarian communication

By Gregory Asmolov

14 December 2022

ridl.io

Starting from February 2022, the Russian authorities initiated a large-scale information campaign with the aim of justifying the war against Ukraine and neutralising potential protest-oriented attitudes. In addition to maintaining the legitimacy of authorities in the context of worsening living conditions for Russians, propaganda has systematically downplayed the value of human life on both sides of the conflict. On the one hand, propaganda continues its efforts to justify civilian deaths on the ‘enemy’ side while, on the other, it explains the inevitability of fatalities on the propagandist’s side. The Russian information campaign has also conjured up a simplified picture of the world, which helps to find answers to potential difficult questions. According to researchers, the demand for such simplifications rises in crisis situations, and propaganda turns into a tool for mass therapy through news.

However, Russian propaganda has had an Achilles’ heel right from the outset of the aggression in February: the war coverage by the Russian media built an expectation of imminent victory. The further the hostilities dragged on, the more difficult it became to construct an ‘image of victory’, especially given that the Ukrainian successes were associated with strikes against targets with high symbolic value, be it the Moskva warship or the Crimean Bridge. The unattainability of victory presumably generated increased frustration and a wave of rising negative emotions. Once control over these emotions is lost, they could be directed not only at external targets, but also ones within the political system.

If there is no image of victory or a clear path to reach it, such a situation also potentially undermines the foundations of ontological security, essential for maintaining the aggressor’s internal political legitimacy. To explain why there has been no quick and easy victory, Russian propagandists had not only to revise the image of the enemy, but also to reshape the narratives of the conflict. After that change, it was no longer a war with Ukraine, but an existential struggle for survival with the ‘collective West’.

And yet even this adaptation of the narrative proved insufficient, especially in light of the strategic successes of the Ukrainian offensive in the Kharkiv region and then in Kherson. The dissonance between the real scale of the crisis and the picture painted by propaganda for the Russian audience reached a point where political tasks could no longer be solved by information methods known from the past. These events led to a crisis of propaganda as a genre of communication. For the first time since the beginning of the war, pro-Kremlin communicators had to move beyond propaganda methodology and enter the realm of crisis communication.

From propaganda to crisis communication

Propaganda and crisis communication are two fundamentally distinct genres whereby senders construct the symbolic reality through influencing audiences via information. Propaganda is an informational manipulation of public opinion to achieve a desired mode of behaviour among the target audience. In contrast, crisis communication is a response to an unexpected negative event that may lead to reputational damage for those who may be perceived as responsible for the crisis. The essence of crisis communication boils down to defending certain figures or groups from criticism by managing how the responsibility for the crisis is attributed. In an authoritarian environment, one of the main tasks of crisis communication is to build a distance between the leader and the crisis.

While propaganda can involve a wide range of tasks to build support for certain actions initiated by the propagandist, crisis communication forces the propagandists to defend themselves. Crisis communication often boils down to two interrelated questions: ‘Who is to blame?’ and ‘What should we do?’. The answer to the latter question often depends on the answer to the former. Therefore, identifying the range of those considered as guilty becomes the key task for crisis communication. However, the question ‘Who is to blame?’ can be avoided if the crisis communicator denies the presence of the crisis in the first place. Nevertheless, the strategy of denial is dangerous if the crisis cannot be concealed through effective management of news flows due to the magnitude of the crisis and the information environment where it occurs. In this case, the ‘deniers’ run the risk of being the first candidates for culprits.

Before a crisis, propaganda helps to achieve political objectives by influencing target audiences. In a crisis, the preceding propaganda campaign becomes an aggravating factor. The degree of surprise and negativity increases where propaganda previously created wrong expectations about the course of events. As a tool for targeting aggression at an external object, propaganda achieves its goals by driving emotional intensity. However, at a crisis moment, the propagandists may lose control over the management of emotions, unable to reduce the emotional intensity. As a result, a crisis may reverse an aggression flow from an external object to an internal one, which will be blamed for the situation. For this reason, between the retreat from the Kharkiv region and the withdrawal from Kherson, we saw a new genre emerging in pain in the Russian pro-government media, which sought to find a compromise between propaganda tasks and the need to minimise the crisis-driven political risks. Indeed, this is the very essence of crisis propaganda.

Crisis propaganda in action: from Izyum to Kherson

The first wake-up call for Russian propaganda was the «operation to draw down the Izyum-Balakliya troops and withdraw them to the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic». The so-called war correspondents («voenkory») were among the main sources of criticism, as well as a number of pro-Kremlin Telegram channels devoted to military topics. Both were previously loyal to the authorities and the army commanders. However, their tone changed in light of the military retreat. Harsh criticism emerged, including that targeted at the senior military officers and the country’s political leaders. Parts of the political elites decided to use the situation to their advantage. Accusations against some generals came from people such as Ramzan Kadyrov.

In fact, the symbolic resources of propaganda narratives were no longer sufficient to interpret the frontline news. Therefore, the simplest way to cover the crisis and to go beyond propaganda was to look for those responsible for the developments. The Kremlin apparently did not manage to prepare an effective communication strategy to explain what had happened, so the easiest solution to bring the situation under control was to resort to threats and reprisals. The prosecutor’s office announced its intention to investigate a number of military Telegram channels and war correspondents, making it clear that their critical coverage of the events in Kharkiv region could be interpreted as spreading fake news and discrediting the Russian army.

The effectiveness of an intimidation policy as a crisis management tool is limited, especially if the crisis drags on. The growing likelihood of a retreat from Kherson made it clear that repressive measures would not be enough to control criticism after a new military defeat. The few weeks between the two retreats were used to develop a new information strategy: switching from propaganda to crisis communication.

The scale of events surrounding the retreat from Kherson left no room for crisis denial. The new leitmotif on Russian media channels was the argument about «certain mistakes that were made.» A continued propaganda narrative would need to downplay the importance of the developments by focusing on successes in other areas where the fighting was going on. The logic of strategic communication suggested that the retreat would be explained by referring to rational factors, such as the need to preserve the lives of the military. In this light, the withdrawal from Kherson was positioned as «the only right choice under the circumstances.» However, the combination of these strategies still did not offset the demand for finding someone to blame.

Therefore, crisis communication came to the fore and began to set the tone for the media coverage of the retreat, also as part of the central propaganda shows on Russian TV. The reflections below are based on the content analysis of the TV show called ‘Evening with Vladimir Solovyov’ during the week following the withdrawal of Russian troops from Kherson.

The tasks of crisis communication around the Kherson operation can be divided into two parts. On the one hand, it was to identify the mistakes that led to the retreat. On the other, it was to identify those responsible for these mistakes. In the Russian case, the primary task of crisis communication was to protect the leaders from criticism by managing the identification of possible culprits. The formula which can be summarised as «the president is beyond any responsibility» has been a cornerstone of Russian political communication for many years.

In addition to protecting the country’s first person, crisis communication sought to protect the military leaders from criticism. General Surovikin, who was in charge of the withdrawal of Russian troops from Kherson, received a special place among those who needed protection. On the one hand, he fell into a special zone of reputational risk, as he was the person to publicly report the retreat. On the other hand, positioning the retreat as a forced yet correct choice meant that Surovikin’s authority had to be accentuated. Hence, for example, the participants on Vladimir Solovyov’s show said that Surovikin could not be blamed because he was not part of the problem, but part of the solution to problems created by others. He was even referred to as an ‘ambulance general’.

At the same time, three groups of culprits emerged from the content analysis of Russian talk shows. The first group are those who remain in the past and, as such, are easiest to blame. Speakers repeatedly brought the argument that «we should blame those who weakened the army in the 1990s.» In this context, the blame is related to the actions that dampened the military industry, focusing on the market economy instead. This applied not only to the Yeltsin era of the 1990s, but also to the first terms of Vladimir Putin as president, when the economy was still run by ‘liberals’. In this context, the solution to the crisis is to militarise the economy and redistribute resources in order to increase support for the defence industry and the military.

However, the search for the culprits who lived in the country’s past would hardly satisfy the demand for blame. The main candidate for blame attribution were the «cadres on the ground» who had been unreliable in carrying out the tasks assigned and, more importantly, misleading the superiors. According to this argument, lies told by officials lead to wrong decisions, which, among other things, «has lead to the loss of cities.» During Vladimir Solovyov’s show, the editor-in-chief of Russia Today Margarita Simonyan suggested that criminal liability should be introduced for officials who mislead the leaders during the special military operation:

«If your activities have anything to do with our victory (…), then your lies to your superiors should be punishable criminally. People who deliberately tell lies should go to prison.»

Such rhetoric clearly defines a spectrum of blame and guarantees that the central authorities remain outside this spectrum, following the formula that «the president is beyond responsibility.» In fact, the leaders in the Kremlin are shown as victims. This argument also promotes solidarity between the authorities and the target audiences. Both have been deceived by the very same ‘officials’.

The third group of culprits are ‘those who spread panic’ and who are overly critical, thus turning themselves into the enemy’s agents. Against this background, Vladimir Solovyov himself called for the need for military censorship to be introduced. Thus, the strategy of crisis communication does not only point to the culprits, but also clearly defines the boundaries of legitimate criticism within an acknowledgement of possible mistakes. Those who challenge the official version of the attributed blame are automatically classified into yet another category of culprits, deserving some repressive measures.

The use of historical parallels as an element of crisis communication should be analysed separately. For example, a number of participants in talk shows and Telegram channels pointed to parallels between the retreat from Kherson and the situation in the ranks of the Soviet army in 1942. The authors of the historical comparisons concluded that only «Stalin’s tough and brutal decisions in 1942 turned the course of the war in our favour.» This comparison, on the one hand, takes the country’s first person out of the range of culprits and, on the other hand, suggests that the leader’s ‘iron hand’ should become the solution to the crisis.

Moreover, crisis communication seeks to control the frustration triggered by the crisis and to channel protest-oriented aggression towards targets that are less risky politically. For example, the protests of the wives of the mobilised men were, in most cases, not about the fact of mobilisation as such, but about the lack of equipment for those mobilised. In this case, the protests were targeted at military enlistment offices or specific military units. Moreover, the protest-oriented energy was channelled into supporting the mobilised men, through fundraising and buying what they lacked.

Crisis communication related to the retreat from Kherson smoothly morphed into propaganda, reiterating the need for continued ‘special military operation’. The retreat from Kherson challenged the sense of this war for many Russians who had been the target audience of Russian propaganda. The sense had to be restored. In this light, the rhetoric started to emphasise the existential role of the conflict, pointing out that the West received a «historic chance to finish Russia off» and «there is no choice since we are obliged to win.» The crisis was also used as an indicator that «it is necessary to prepare for a long war,» i.e. to convince the target audience that they should be prepared to pay an even higher price in the future.

Thus, in the context of crisis communication, propaganda can only maintain its effectiveness by raising the stakes. This kind of integration of crisis communication and propaganda leads to the birth of a new genre, namely crisis propaganda, which aims not only to protect the country’s leaders from criticism, but also build a new legitimacy for the continued war.

The risks of crisis propaganda

Ever since Vladimir Putin came to power, Russia’s history could be viewed through attempts at crisis management. Starting with the Kursk submarine tragedy, the Kremlin tried to control the crisis mainly through sanctions on journalists and increased media regulation. The current crisis happened in a situation where all media outlets within the country were under complete control and new laws had permitted all repressions against those who go against the Kremlin’s narrative.

On the one hand, this should have make it easier to manage and control information flows during the crisis. On the other, this total control was the reason why the pre-crisis information picture was completely subordinated to the logic of propaganda, which disrupted the feedback mechanisms, intensified the effect of the crisis that ensued and complicated the tasks faced by crisis communicators. In fact, increased control over the media increases the risks associated with the aftermath of a crisis.

In this case, crisis communication made a forced correction, but since it operates within the existing logic of war coverage, its main task is to create an information field for a new wave of propaganda. Thus, the propagandists turn into the mythical creature of Ouroboros, i.e. a serpent that eats itself. It is both the creator and the consumer of the new information reality, locking itself inside an isolated system. With each crisis, the serpent’s tail gets ever deeper into its mouth, approaching the point where self-absorption will lead to the annihilation of the one who absorbs.

ridl.io

9. Ukrainian forces are bracing for the possibility of another Russian invasion via Belarus: 'We have to be ready'

Ukrainian forces are bracing for the possibility of another Russian invasion via Belarus: 'We have to be ready'

Business Insider · by John Haltiwanger

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, second left, inspects Russia-Belarus joint military exercises outside Minsk on February 17, 2022.

MAXIM GUCHEK/BELTA/AFP via Getty Images

• Ukraine is preparing for the possibility of another Russian invasion via Belarus amid military drills.
• "We have to be ready here," the country's defense minister told CNN.
• Analysts are skeptical that the exercises are cover for an attack or that Belarus would send its troops to join the war.

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Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov told CNN that his country's forces are preparing for the possibility of another Russian ground invasion via Belarus, which is closely allied with Moscow and has held military drills near Ukraine's northern border in recent days.

"We have to be concerned," Reznikov said, adding that Belarus is not a "friendly neighbor."

Belarus has already been used as a launching pad for Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and has faced sanctions from Western countries as a result. The country's authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, is widely viewed as Russian President Vladimir Putin's puppet.

Belarusian and Russian troops participated in joint military drills in the days leading up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February, and there are concerns that recent exercises could signal another assault is on the horizon.

"We have to be ready here," Reznikov told CNN.

—Will Ripley (@willripleyCNN) December 13, 2022

There's also been some speculation that Belarus might send its troops into Ukraine to bolster Russia's war effort, but analysts are skeptical the drills are more than exercises.

"Belarusian forces remain unlikely to attack Ukraine despite a snap Belarusian military readiness check on December 13," according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which has carefully tracked the conflict in Ukraine. "The exercise does not appear to be cover for concentrating Belarusian and/or Russian forces near jumping-off positions for an invasion of Ukraine," ISW added.

—ISW (@TheStudyofWar) December 14, 2022

A recent assessment from ISW underscored that Russian officials have consistently conducted information operations suggesting that Belarusian ground forces "might join Russia's invasion," while also emphasizing that this is likely part of an effort to pin Ukrainian forces at the Ukraine-Belarus border "to prevent them from reinforcing Ukrainian operations elsewhere in the theater."

The exercises force Ukraine to position troops along the border in preparation for the possibility of an attack, meaning that these troops are unavailable to support Ukraine's counteroffensives in the northeast and south, offensives which have seen Russia lose control of a substantial amount of territory in recent months.

Belarus Russia Ukraine

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Business Insider · by John Haltiwanger

10. Belarus unlikely to provide Russia a force capable of new assault: U.K.

Belarus unlikely to provide Russia a force capable of new assault: U.K.

Newsweek · by Brendan Cole · December 15, 2022

Belarus' announcement of an inspection of its troops' combat readiness does not signal that Minsk will form a force capable of launching an assault into Ukraine, British defense officials have said.

The assessment by the U.K. Ministry of Defense (MOD) follows the announcement on Tuesday by the Belarusian defense ministry that its soldiers would conduct exercises in the north-west of the country.

The drills would not directly approach the Belarusian border with Ukraine but would involve moving to locations to test equipment, organize security and defense and build bridges across the Neman and Berezina rivers.

The Neman River runs through Lithuania into the Baltic Sea, while the Berezina joins the Dnieper River around 40 miles north of the Ukrainian border.

This image from November 3, 2022 shows a Ukrainian border guard near the Ukrainian border with Russia and with Belarus. The U.K. Ministry of Defense said on Thursday that Belarus is unlikely to form a force capable of an assault into Ukraine. SERGEI SUPINSKY/Getty Images

However, the U.K. MOD said on Thursday that the Belarusian troops and Russian units "are currently unlikely to constitute a force capable of conducting a successful new assault into northern Ukraine."

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has relied on his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to stay in power, following elections in 2020 viewed internationally as fraudulent that were followed by protests and a brutal crackdown.

While Lukashenko has previously spoken of a joint-force comprising Russian and Belarusian soldiers, Belarus has not played a direct role in Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

However, Russian weapons and aircraft are stationed on Belarusian territory which did provide the staging post for Russia's assault towards Kyiv soon after Putin launched his attack on February 24.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said on December 11 that Belarus is "extraordinarily unlikely to invade Ukraine in the foreseeable future."

It added that such an intervention could only draw Ukrainian ground forces away from other areas temporarily given MInsk's "extremely limited effective combat power."

Rather, the rumors that Belarusian ground forces might join Russia are part of an information operation pushed by Russian officials that Lukashenko "sometimes plays along with," the ISW said. The aim is to divert Ukrainian forces to the Belarusian border.

As Newsweek has previously reported, the Belarusian opposition has said it is unlikely that Lukashenko would want to commit troops to Putin's war effort, in part because of the unpopularity of the war in Ukraine, but also because it could leave the autocrat vulnerable in Minsk.

However, British defense officials have previously said that Russia was moving MiG-31K jets and AS-24 Killjoy air-launched ballistic missiles to Machulishchy airfield in the Minsk region, raising the prospect of more attacks from Belarusian territory.

Newsweek has contacted the Belarusian and Russian defense ministries for comment.

Newsweek · by Brendan Cole · December 15, 2022

11. Taiwanese train for war after year of crises

Whole of society. Unconventional deterrence,. Resistance operating concept. Porcupine defense. Taiwan must show it will never be pacified.

Taiwanese train for war after year of crises

Al Jazeera English · by Frederik Kelter

Taichung, Taiwan – The noise from the jet engines reverberates across Taichung, drowning out the sounds from the congested traffic and continuing construction as a squadron of F-16 fighters roars past the rooftops of the city’s skyscrapers.

The planes quickly disappear behind the light cover of smog that often shrouds the horizon around Taiwan’s second-largest city. The fighter jets are heading towards the sea in the west where a group of Chinese military aircraft has penetrated the Taiwanese air defence identification zone (ADIZ) in the Taiwan Strait.

When US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan on August 2 tensions between the self-ruled island and China reached a boiling point, and Beijing, which claims Taiwan as its own, in the months since has sent its military jets deeper and deeper into Taiwan’s ADIZ.

Chef and former soldier Hsin Song, 27, has stopped on the street looking towards the hazy horizon for a glimpse of the F-16s. She is not bothered by the roaring of the jet engines above Taichung.

On the contrary.

“I feel more reassured seeing that our fighters are ready to stop the Chinese advances into our airspace,” she said.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Hsin Song has been convinced that China, which has not ruled out the use of force to take control of the island, will do the same with Taiwan.

Taiwan’s air force has often had to scramble jets to warn off mainland Chinese military aircraft in the self-ruled island’s air defence zone [File: Ann Wang/Reuters]

She believes that it is not just Taiwan’s air force that needs to be ready to counter China.

“All Taiwanese need to be ready.”

The threat of war

Hsin Song is far from the only one worried about China’s plans for Taiwan.

Polls show that both cross-strait experts and Taiwanese people share the same concern.

The US Department of Defense in its annual China Military Power Report released in November classified China as “the most consequential and systemic challenge to national security and to a free and open international system”.

Fang-Yu Chen is an assistant professor at Soochow University in Taipei researching the political relations between Taiwan, China and the United States. According to him, the growing unease surrounding China can be attributed to the increasingly heavy-handed Chinese approach directed at Taiwan.

“Chinese intimidation of Taiwan rose markedly following the Taiwanese presidential election in 2016 and has increased since to reach a culmination so far this year with the massive military exercises that took place around Taiwan following Nancy Pelosi’s visit in early August,” said Fang-Yu Chen.

“At the same time, the undermining of Hong Kong’s free system in 2019 and 2020 as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has shown the Taiwanese that certain events that previously were believed to be unthinkable can actually happen.”

Fearing the unthinkable, private Taiwanese organisations and actors have taken matters into their own hands in terms of preparing Taiwan for war.

One of these is the controversial business tycoon, Robert Tsao.

Tsao is an outspoken China hawk who often criticises the Chinese Communist Party’s conduct towards Taiwan in harsh terms and regularly accuses Taiwanese politicians of being too weak on China.

Leading up to the Taiwanese local elections last month, which resulted in a resounding defeat for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), he even went so far as to warn that victory for the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) party could impede efforts to obtain advanced weapons for Taiwan’s defence from the US.

But Tsao has not always been a China hawk.

Activist Ho Cheng-Hui founded the Kuma Academy with academic Puma Shen to train Taiwan residents in civil defence. Here he teaches participants about the equipment carried by a typical PLA soldier [Courtesy of Kuma Academy]

He actually renounced his Taiwanese citizenship in 2011 and moved to Singapore in protest when Taiwanese government legislation prevented his semiconductor company, United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), from investing in China. At that time, he was also an advocate for Taiwanese unification with China under the right circumstances.

Changing attitudes

The tycoon’s case reveals how much the mindset towards China has changed for many Taiwanese over the past 10 years – from an earlier focus on business and peaceful integration to a present one of decoupling and combatting coercion.

During a press conference in early September, Tsao announced that he had regained his Taiwanese citizenship. At the same time, he pledged to donate three billion Taiwanese dollars ($100.17 million) to bolster Taiwan’s defences as a response to the military drills the previous month which had effectively surrounded the island.

Part of the donation went to the civil defence training group, Kuma Academy, which was founded by academic Puma Shen and activist Ho Cheng-Hui – two other private individuals taking steps to prepare Taiwan for war.

Through Kuma Academy, Shen and Ho offer private classes with theoretical and practical lessons that teach participants basic skills such as how to combat online misinformation, how to identify a Chinese soldier, how to perform first aid and how to staunch bleeding.

“The military repeatedly carries out exercises to practise a defence of Taiwan should a Chinese attack occur, but most Taiwanese civilians don’t know how what to expect or what to do should such an attack materialise,” Ho explained to Al Jazeera.

“We started Kuma with the aim of giving interested Taiwanese civilians some tools that help them act before, during and after a potential military engagement in Taiwan.”

Taiwan has stepped up efforts to modernise and train its military because Beijing has not ruled out the use of force to take control of an island it considers its own [File: Ann Wang/Reuters]

Additionally, Ho hopes that the classes will instil a sense in Taiwanese people that countering China requires the full mobilisation of the island’s entire society.

“We do not teach or encourage violence, but we do teach people how to defend themselves and each other so that if war breaks out everyone knows that they have a part to play.”

‘Better to be ready’

According to Soochow University’s Chen, demand from civilians for classes on war preparation has been rising. But until recently there were few courses to choose from.

Kuma Academy held its first training session in early September.

“When we open for online booking to our classes these days only a couple of hours pass before we are fully booked,” Ho said.

As a result, they are planning to expand beyond their current base in Taipei to other major Taiwanese cities such as Kaohsiung, Tainan and Taichung.

University student Yuchi Pao, 29, from Taichung took part in Kuma Academy’s training at the beginning of November. She used to believe that war was something that would never happen in her lifetime. But the continuing war in Ukraine changed her perception.

“Since the Russian invasion (of Ukraine), I have felt that I should know more about what I can do for Taiwan’s defence if war breaks out.”

After participating in the Kuma class she says she felt more aware of the ways in which civilians can stand up to potential pro-Chinese online manipulation as well as how she can assist as a civilian in case of conflict.

She thinks that more Taiwanese people should consider their own readiness in the face of a potential Chinese attack.

Back in Taichung, former soldier Hsin Song believes that preparing civilians for war should not be left to private initiatives but should become a required civic duty for all Taiwanese.

Basic first aid, including how to treat minor injuries and deal with broken bones, is part of the training [Courtesy of Kuma Academy]

The roar from the fighter jets is fading away and traffic commotion and construction noise once again dominate Taichung’s soundscape.

But Hsin Song keeps her gaze fixed in the direction of the F-16s and the Taiwan Strait.

“It is better to be ready for a war that never comes than to be unprepared for one that does,” she said.

Al Jazeera English · by Frederik Kelter

12. World Leaders Expected to Push for Ukraine War Crimes Trials at Munich Security Conference

"Reopen" Nuremberg or establish a new location? (premature I know - the question is how to bring them to justice?)

World Leaders Expected to Push for Ukraine War Crimes Trials at Munich Security Conference

“How do we get them in front of courts?” says the German ambassador who leads the annual event.

defenseone.com · by Kevin Baron

World leaders are expected to make a collective push for international efforts to prosecute the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Ukraine war when they gather at the Munich Security Conference in February.

This will be “high on the agenda” and not just for the conflict in Ukraine, said Ambassador Christoph Heusgen, who chairs the annual event in Germany.

“We have seen [Russia’s Vladimir Putin] responsible for tens if not [one] hundred thousand deaths, 40 million people have had to flee; we see what has happened in Ethiopia during the last year, 600,000 deaths; we see the conflict in Yemen continues,” Heusgen said in an interview. “I think we need to focus more on accountability, that the people responsible for the atrocities, for committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, that we see—how do we get them, you know, in front of courts? And this theme of accountability, in the country of the Nuremberg trial is the right place to do that. So I want to put the subject ‘how to prevent impunity’ high on the agenda.”

Russia launched its invasion just four days after the last Munich conference, at which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made an unsuccessful last-ditch appeal to Moscow. It was Zelenskyy’s last appearance outside of Ukraine, and he has pledged to return to Munich if the war is over by the next gathering.

“I have my doubts, but we have to support him and this will be on the agenda,” as well, Heusgen said.

In recent weeks, Ukrainian leaders and activists in North America have called for war tribunals and legal consequences—more so, it seems, than their Western patrons. It’s a concern close to the hearts of the victims of Putin’s invasion force of professional troops, conscripts, and lawless mercenaries.

International trials historically have received a mixed reception in American politics. The United States is not among the 123 countries that are party to the two-decade-old International Criminal Court. But opposition appears to have faded over the past decade. And this year, the Biden administration and several dozen Republican lawmakers have expressed support for giving the ICC jurisdiction over war crimes in Ukraine.

In October at the Pentagon, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley said, “In the past few days, Russia has increased their strikes on civilian infrastructure, power generation, and dams. Russia has deliberately struck civilian infrastructure with the purpose of harming civilians. They have targeted the elderly, the women and the children of Ukraine. Indiscriminate and deliberate attacks on civilian targets is a war crime in the international rules of war.”

In November, the State Department’s war crimes envoy held an online press conference to make what sounded like a case against Russia’s top leadership.

“We have mounting evidence that this aggression has been accompanied by systemic war crimes committed in every region where Russia's forces have been deployed," said Beth Van Schaack, U.S. ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice. “There are legal doctrines that are available to hold Putin responsible.”

Asked whether the United States would support a role for the International Criminal Court, Schaack said, “The U.S. is fully committed to ensuring accountability for atrocities committed in Ukraine, and so we’re supporting a whole range of efforts to do that at the national and international level. This includes the investigation conducted by the International Criminal Court.”

The U.S. has no law to prosecute Russians for crimes against Ukrainians, but it could go after Russians for crimes against U.S. citizens in Ukraine. Much of the work, she expects, would occur through Ukrainian courts after the war.

“Ukraine, for example, has no crimes against humanity statute, and so if those charges are to be brought, they will have to be brought either in the International Criminal Court or in a foreign court that has jurisdiction over particular defendants.”

One expert called it a “remarkable shift” in U.S. views towards international law.

For Heusgen, the pursuit of war-crimes trials is an extension of the awakening to security issues that Germans, Europeans, and Americans are experiencing because of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“It was a wake-up call for everybody,” he said. “Of course you have a tendency in people that they somehow want to go back in their comfort zone, so I think it’s very important to continue to have…your eyes on the ball.”

The Munich Security Conference is hosting a tour of local and city town halls and media engagements, “just to make the point of how important it is that Germany has to step up to the plate.”

In their 120-point “Transatlantic To Do List,” the organization's leaders list “Track Russian war crimes and seek accountability, including through the establishment of a Special Tribunal for Ukraine.”

Heusgen called it a historic change for Germany.

“We were the aggressors in the second world war, we were guilty for the Holocaust, and there is in Germany for many generations the feeling now that never again should war emanate from Germany.”

In 2022, it became clear that perception put Germany, now the world’s fourth-largest economy, “too much in the back seat,” he said.

The change is the meat of what Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz has now famously called Zeitenwende.

“We have to step up to the plate, we have to assume more responsibility. We have to now implement, and we must not only give these speeches and write articles but we have to do it in practice,” Heusgen said.

defenseone.com · by Kevin Baron

13. Why Crimea is Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s greatest bargaining chip

Why Crimea is Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s greatest bargaining chip

As Boris Johnson makes an intervention on the status of the peninsula, will Ukraine really insist on Russia giving it back?

The Guardian · by Patrick Wintour · December 15, 2022

In a little noticed intervention the former British prime minister Boris Johnson – seen as a bosom ally of Volodymyr Zelenskiy – made the startling statement that if Russian troops were returned to lands they held inside Ukraine before the 24 February invasion that would represent a basis for reopening talks between Ukraine and Russia.

The statement implies Ukraine would have to accept that the removal of Russian troops from Crimea would not be a precondition for the start of talks.

In proposing this, in a piece last week in the Wall Street Journal, Johnson was making an admission made in private by many diplomats that a militarily enforced return of the Crimean peninsula – which was annexed by Russia in 2014 in a move rejected by the UN – to full Ukrainian control is fraught with risk.

Writing in the Spectator Henry Kissinger, the veteran diplomat, made a similar proposal, arguing Russia should only be required to disgorge territory gained since February this year. Land occupied nearly a decade ago, including Crimea, “could be the subject of a negotiation after a ceasefire”. If that negotiation failed to resolve particularly divisive territories, “internationally supervised referendums concerning self-determination could be applied”.

Historically and ethnically Crimea is different from the rest of Ukraine, the argument goes. There are also 30,000 Russian forces dug in with little available Ukrainian amphibious access. Crimea’s retention in some form is so precious to Vladimir Putin that if he felt it were slipping from his grasp some fear he may act on his threat to deploy tactical nuclear weapons, the escalation that terrifies, and holds back, Washington and Europe.

Map of Ukraine

In public Ukraine opposes a ceasefire with Putin retaining any land annexed since 2014. Zelenskiy has said countless times, for example at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore: “A simple ceasefire won’t do the trick. Unless we liberate our whole territory, we will not bring peace.”

Zelenskiy has also invested diplomatically in setting up the Crimea Platform, a coordination body to put pressure on the world to keep the illegal occupation of Crimea in its sights. At the August meeting of the Platform the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, said: “Crimea is and was as much a part of Ukraine as Gdańsk or Lublin are parts of Poland.” He added: “I think many of us need to do some examination of conscience for what has happened in the last year. Was the de facto consent to the occupation of Crimea a wrong signal from many countries to Russia?”

Polls in Ukraine show 85% support for the war ending with Ukraine having reoccupied its lands seized since 2014.

The Ukrainian military clearly has a plan to push south, isolating the peninsula, and cutting off Russian supply lines, ideally by coming down from the east side of the Dnipro River, and then reaching the dam that supplies 85% of Crimea’s fresh water.

But the military campaign to undermine Crimea’s impregnability is in its infancy. On 7 October Ukrainian special forces struck the heavily guarded 19km bridge over the Kerch strait, the symbol of Russia’s annexation and a near mystical reunification of Russia with a birthplace of the Russian Orthodox church.

The bridge linking Crimea to Russia had been a huge engineering feat that Putin personally opened after three years of construction. With its accompanying railway line and water pipes, it acts as the main supply route from Russia for troops fighting in Kherson and the surrounding region. The damage has slowed but not broken Russian supply routes.

Apart from that coup, there have been other softening-up exercises. On 9 August six explosions struck Saki airbase in Novofedorivka. Russia’s largest military base in Crimea, near Dzhankoi, was hit in November. People in Crimea are said to be nervous of what ammunition dump may explode next. Judging by the number of Crimeans recently arrested for collaborating with the enemy, Moscow has also become nervous about Atesh, the Crimean resistance movement.

The Kakhovka dam, which supplies about 85% of Crimea’s water supply, is a key Ukrainian target. Photograph: Olga Maltseva/AFP/Getty Images

One Ukrainian deputy defence minister, Volodymyr Havrylov, said Ukrainian forces would be on the peninsula by the end of December. In other pieces of bravado the senior presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak suggested a war crimes tribunal should be staged there on the basis “What started in Crimea must end there”. Petro Poroschenko, the former Ukrainian president, suggested a new Yalta conference could be held there next year, replicating the 1945 summit held to plan the post-second world war order.

But is Crimea’s capture practical – or even wise? British military officials point to Crimea’s vulnerabilities including its dependence on mainland Ukraine for water. At the start of the February 2022 invasion Russia recaptured the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam in southern Ukraine. The reservoir behind the Kakhovka dam allows water to flow down the 250-mile North Crimean canal, built in the Soviet era to supply fresh water from the Dnipro River to the arid areas of southern Ukraine and Crimea.

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For eight years before the Russian annexation the canal had been dry after Ukrainian authorities said Russia did not pay for supplies and built a concrete dam over it, causing big problems with irrigation, harvests and access to drinking water across Crimea. As much as 80% of agricultural land was lost in Crimea, and crops such as rice became impossible to grow. Once the Russian invasion started in February, Russian troops quickly reached Tavriisk, the town where the canal had been dammed, destroyed the dam and released 1.7m cubic metres of water from the Dnipro into Crimea.

British officials think the target of regaining Ukrainian control over the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant as well as the North Crimean canal is feasible and attractive.

But talk of an offensive kicking Russia’s 30,000 troops out of Crimea unnerves the US military. General Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said “the probability of that happening any time soon is not high, militarily”.

Privately, Ukrainian diplomats acknowledge that fear of escalation in Washington and European capitals is what holds back the supply of long-range artillery weapons needed to finish the job, including the capture of Crimea.

European diplomats acknowledge Crimea’s special status. The Soviet leadership only ceded Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, and most of its population is Russian; many residents are retirees from the Black Sea navy.

No reliable opinion polls have been carried out since the occupation. A leak of the true results on the initial annexation referendum in 2014 showed only a third of the population voted to join Russia. Since then Crimea’s economy has fared tolerably, and there has been an influx of about 300,000 Russians. Many pro-Ukrainian activists and Crimean Tatars have once again been forced out. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Olha Stefanishyna, said last month: “When we are talking about the people living in Crimea that’s absolutely different from what we had eight years ago.” Crimeans have been kept in a Russian media bubble for nearly a decade.

The prospect of a bloody prolongation of the war to free a population many of whom may not seek liberation would represent an inglorious end to the Ukrainian campaign.

Even some Ukrainian diplomats say the reality is that even if the southern offensive isolates the peninsula militarily it may be wise then to go slow. Instead of launching an invasion through the swampy Syvash or Rotten Sea, all with relatively narrow land approaches owing to the tides, it might be better to try to reopen talks with Russia.

By then it is argued Putin will be in deep domestic trouble and defending Crimea may be the least of his problems. Others say some kind of offer of special joint sovereignty status for the peninsula is possible. But trust is at a minimum. A previous joint lease agreement allowed Russia to retain its Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol until at least 2042. It was torn up by Putin in 2014.

The Guardian · by Patrick Wintour · December 15, 2022

14. Russia’s New Theory of Victory

Excerpts:

In executing these steps, Ukrainian leaders and planners can help prevent a more energetic, integrated, and imaginative Russian military from emerging. And if Ukraine can continue to win on the battlefield, Kyiv might try to isolate and possibly even seize all of the Donbass and Crimea. Retaking both areas is a stated goal of the Ukrainian government. But successfully moving into these territories will prove highly challenging. Taking Crimea would be particularly tricky, requiring that Ukraine carry out new kinds of naval operations to stop Russia’s powerful Black Sea Fleet from hitting Ukrainian troops as they cross into the peninsula. The Ukrainians would have to simultaneously coordinate amphibious, airborne, ground, and other operations. This task, although not insurmountable, is difficult. And some Western governments might view a campaign for Crimea as beyond the purview of what they promised to support—even though the peninsula legally remains part of Ukraine and Zelensky has continuously telegraphed his intention to take it back.

But there is a long way to go before Ukraine reaches the point where it can invade Crimea. Right now, it has more immediate crises and challenges. The country, for instance, needs to find ways to quickly reconstruct and harden its power and heating network in the face of ongoing Russian attacks, including by getting more Western assistance. (The U.S. State Department’s promise to send more than $53 million in energy equipment will help.) Kyiv will also need to carefully consider how it should sequence and prioritize its 2023 ground, air, and information operations, similar to how it orchestrated its counteroffensives over the last several months to force Russia into simultaneously fighting in the north, the east, and the south.

Thankfully, there are plenty of reasons to think that Kyiv can defeat even a revitalized Russian military. Ukraine’s international influence campaigns have been a model for other democracies to study and emulate. The Ukrainians have proven superior to the Russians at adapting and updating their tactics and military institutions. And they have far better morale. War holds no certainties, regardless of previous victories. But if Ukraine can maintain Western support, it can prove that Putin’s new theory of victory is just as misguided as was his last.

​

Russia’s New Theory of Victory

How Moscow Is Trying to Learn From Its Mistakes

By Mick Ryan

December 14, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Mick Ryan · December 14, 2022

Christmas Day will be a grim milestone for the Ukrainian people. It will mark almost exactly ten months since Russian forces crossed into their country, bringing devastation on a scale not seen in Europe since World War II. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed. Millions have fled their homes. Most of the state has lost power, leading Kyiv to worry that—as winter sets in—many of its citizens will freeze.

But Christmas will also be a grim marker for Russia. Moscow planned for a short, victorious campaign. Ukraine has instead dealt it a bitter lesson on modern warfighting and national resilience. The Ukrainians have steadily degraded Russia’s military capacity by damaging its forces on the battlefield and in support areas. They have undermined Russia’s reputation both around the globe and in the minds of Russia’s own soldiers, commanders, and citizens. The Ukrainians eschew methodical battles with high attrition where possible, but they engage in close combat when they have opportunities to gain ground. It has all been to great effect. Ukraine pushed Russia away from Kyiv, took back the northeast province of Kharkiv, and liberated parts of the Donbas. Most recently, it freed Kherson, the only provincial capital that Russia succeeded in capturing.

It is too soon, however, to count Russia out. Russian President Vladimir Putin has appointed a new military commander, General Sergei Surovikin, to lead the invasion, and Surovikin appears more brutal and capable than his predecessors. In one of his first acts, he launched the vigorous and horrific aerial campaign that has destroyed much of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure—a civilian-centered tactic he honed while leading Russian forces in Syria. Surovikin was responsible for Russia’s retreat from Kherson, but unlike when Russia withdrew from near Kyiv or Kharkiv, Surovikin saw to it that this retreat was well organized and well conducted.

Surovikin’s arrival heralds another adaptation of Russian strategy in Ukraine. Although Putin might realize he will not be able to take Kyiv, Russia’s president may still believe he can seize all of the four provinces he recently (and illegally) annexed—Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia. Surovikin is a critical implementor of these plans. Putin hopes that, as the war drags on and winter comes, Europe will stop providing Ukraine with large amounts of assistance so that the continent can try to restore imports of Russian gas. He believes that this potential diminishment of support will pave the way for a new, successful Russian offensive. To carry out such an offensive, he is counting on Surovikin to reorganize the military so that it operates in a smoother, more consistent, and more effective fashion.

It will be difficult for Surovikin to succeed, given the Russian military’s many problems, such as its deteriorating equipment and low morale. But Surovikin is working to unify the military under his command. He is almost certainly drawing up battle plans that are clearly focused, unlike past assaults that spread Russia’s troops thin. If Kyiv wants to keep the upper hand, it will need to anticipate Surovikin’s strategy while maintaining Western support—and that means continuing to innovate on the battlefield.

DOWN, NOT OUT

For people who have followed the war, much of what Russia has in store for 2023 will sound familiar. Moscow, for example, will continue to use propaganda about NATO aggression to try to keep China, India, and other currently neutral states from participating in Western sanctions. It will also use misinformation and disinformation to ensure that Russia’s own population continues to support the conflict. Keeping Russians in line will prove especially important when Moscow inevitably conducts additional military drafts. Even dictators must pay attention to domestic politics.

Similarly, Putin will sustain his energy warfare. He will keep depriving Europe of gas in hopes that the continent will force Kyiv to agree to a cease-fire as temperatures drop. He will also encourage more attacks on Ukraine’s energy supplies. In Putin’s calculus, Russian strikes on Ukrainian power stations will not only freeze the country’s people but also cost Ukraine external assistance; foreign investors, after all, are unlikely to return to the country when there is unreliable power. Even if the attacks do not keep out investors, they will still prove economically costly for Kyiv by stopping the Ukrainian power exports that began in July 2022.

Yet other elements of Russia’s strategy will be new—and Surovikin is playing a critical role in the changes. The general appears to be the first military leader that Putin clearly supports, and—according to a recent speech by U.S. National Intelligence Director Avril Haines—the Russian president is now better informed about the armed forces’ day-to-day operations. If Putin is confident that he is being better informed than he was before October, he is more likely to turn his attention to the many other challenges that Russia currently faces, giving Surovikin greater autonomy in using Russia’s broad array of forces within Ukraine. Surovikin could use this relative freedom of action to bring Russia’s fractured military and mercenary groups under a more unified control. He is certain to use it to better integrate Russia’s air and land operations and to ensure that there’s a better alignment between his country’s battlefield activities and information operations.

Consolidation will not, by itself, make Russia’s troops truly combat ready. Surovikin commands an army that suffers from low morale and keeps losing its people and best equipment. So far, evidence suggests that the troops Russia has mobilized to replace the dead and injured are not receiving the kind of demanding training they need to succeed. During the winter, at least, Surovikin will be on the defensive, doing whatever he can to preserve his force in the face of ongoing Ukrainian attacks.

Surovikin appears to be the first military leader that Putin clearly supports.

But he will begin to prepare Russia’s troops for new operations. Surovikin will, for example, work to reconstitute battered units by deploying tens of thousands of newly mobilized troops to Ukraine. If (and, almost certainly, when) these troops prove to be of poor quality, he may work to improve training back in Russia. He will try to take advantage of Russia’s ongoing industrial mobilization to acquire more and better weapons. He will also set up systems to safeguard key supply routes, build a more resilient logistics network, and stockpile munitions and supplies for future offensive operations.

Surovikin is likely to be more meticulous in planning and executing attacks. He will seek to ensure that Russia’s forces are aligned on the battlefield and to improve his country’s tactics, with the goal of avoiding the often piecemeal and uncoordinated approaches of his predecessors. And the general will keep working to make it harder for Ukraine to advance. Surovikin, for instance, will sustain his campaign against Ukrainian infrastructure, a tactic that diverts both Ukrainian and Western resources away from Kyiv’s offensive operations. (The strikes also provide propaganda for Russia’s domestic audience, ghoulish as that may seem.) Such strikes have little downside for Russia; they are an asymmetric advantage. As the historian Lawrence Freedman recently noted, Ukraine does not have the capacity to similarly destroy infrastructure within Russia—Ukrainian strikes on Russian airbases notwithstanding. “The Ukrainians are winning on the battlefield,” he wrote, “but they cannot hit back against the Russians on that strategic level.”

Surovikin will likely look to carry out more “economy of force” missions: military activities in which one party attempts to deceive its enemy in ways that force it to expend large numbers of soldiers on unproductive tasks. Russia, for example, has placed small contingents of soldiers in Belarus in order to force Ukraine to keep larger contingents around Kyiv, depriving the Ukrainian military of troops it could use elsewhere. Surovikin will likely conduct more such activities to give his military a better chance of success as he plans his next steps. Unless Russia is thoroughly routed, Surovikin will want to begin offensive ground operations that, if completed, would give Russia all or most of the provinces Putin has annexed.

The general, of course, knows that Ukraine could again try to retake lost territory. As a result, he is already ordering the military to construct more defensive positions across the territory Russia controls. Surovikin is also likely to conduct political activities to “Russify” the parts of Ukraine that Russia occupies. This process will resemble what Russia did in Kherson: moving the local economy off the Ukrainian hryvnia and onto the ruble, changing the school curriculum, and the repulsive practice of stealing Ukrainian children and sending them to Russia for adoption. Whether these will be more effective going forward than it was in Kherson remains to be seen.

MOVES AND COUNTERMOVES

Right now, the Ukrainian military still has the advantage. Unlike at the start of the war, Ukrainian leaders are the ones who decide where and when battles are fought. They get to determine how battlefield campaigns are executed. They have the momentum, and they do not want to relinquish it. But that does not mean Ukraine will have the initiative indefinitely. To stay on top, the Ukrainians need to understand and then undermine Putin and Surovikin’s plans.

First, that means Kyiv must continue to counter Russia’s information warfare. Moscow is working to convince Europeans that their rising heating bills are caused by their countries’ support for Ukraine, hoping that it can persuade these states that the cost is not worth it. It is also trying to undermine Washington’s support by fueling the United States’ partisan divisions. If the Kremlin succeeds in pushing NATO states away from backing Kyiv, it could prove devastating: for Ukraine, military and economic support from the United States and Europe has been essential to battlefield success.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his clever team are working on messages aimed at maintaining the international community’s sympathy. But they also need to keep the war on the front page of Western newspapers and at the forefront of the West’s thinking. And the best way to accomplish that is to do what Ukraine been doing for the past six months: winning. The more victories that Kyiv can point to, the more funding and weapons it is likely to receive from the West (rather than calls to negotiate).

Kyiv can defeat even a revitalized Russian military.

But to keep succeeding, Ukraine’s military strategy will need to evolve. It will have to anticipate and defeat Surovikin’s battlefield actions. To do so, the country is likely to intensify its surveillance of Russia’s front lines, logistics hubs, and command hubs, which can help identify weaknesses it can exploit. Ukraine must also broaden its program of sending soldiers and junior military leaders to Europe for more intensive training, making its already superior troops even better than Russia’s mobilized ones. And Ukraine will need to continue to finding ways to degrade Russian capacities that help enable the invasion, including Russian logistics, transport, and command hubs. Ukraine recently attacked two Russian airbases over 400 miles from Ukraine—strikes that it will likely want to replicate. Such deep attacks affect the Russians psychologically, impact Putin’s domestic political standing, and force Russia into a strategic dilemma about how to weigh its military effort in Ukraine against defending home bases.

In executing these steps, Ukrainian leaders and planners can help prevent a more energetic, integrated, and imaginative Russian military from emerging. And if Ukraine can continue to win on the battlefield, Kyiv might try to isolate and possibly even seize all of the Donbass and Crimea. Retaking both areas is a stated goal of the Ukrainian government. But successfully moving into these territories will prove highly challenging. Taking Crimea would be particularly tricky, requiring that Ukraine carry out new kinds of naval operations to stop Russia’s powerful Black Sea Fleet from hitting Ukrainian troops as they cross into the peninsula. The Ukrainians would have to simultaneously coordinate amphibious, airborne, ground, and other operations. This task, although not insurmountable, is difficult. And some Western governments might view a campaign for Crimea as beyond the purview of what they promised to support—even though the peninsula legally remains part of Ukraine and Zelensky has continuously telegraphed his intention to take it back.

But there is a long way to go before Ukraine reaches the point where it can invade Crimea. Right now, it has more immediate crises and challenges. The country, for instance, needs to find ways to quickly reconstruct and harden its power and heating network in the face of ongoing Russian attacks, including by getting more Western assistance. (The U.S. State Department’s promise to send more than $53 million in energy equipment will help.) Kyiv will also need to carefully consider how it should sequence and prioritize its 2023 ground, air, and information operations, similar to how it orchestrated its counteroffensives over the last several months to force Russia into simultaneously fighting in the north, the east, and the south.

Thankfully, there are plenty of reasons to think that Kyiv can defeat even a revitalized Russian military. Ukraine’s international influence campaigns have been a model for other democracies to study and emulate. The Ukrainians have proven superior to the Russians at adapting and updating their tactics and military institutions. And they have far better morale. War holds no certainties, regardless of previous victories. But if Ukraine can maintain Western support, it can prove that Putin’s new theory of victory is just as misguided as was his last.

• MICK RYAN is a military strategist and a retired Australian Army major general.

Foreign Affairs · by Mick Ryan · December 14, 2022

15. How to Stop Chinese Coercion

Excerpts:

The idea of collective resilience may trouble proponents of free trade and globalization. But collective resilience is not a trade war strategy; it is a peer competition strategy. It is defensive, resting first on the threat to weaponize trade, not on the actual use of sanctions. If China does not use its economic power to coerce, there is no need to make good the threat.

The strategy is also clearly and narrowly targeted. Its participants are not trying to punish China just for the sake of doing so; the goal is not to undermine the nation’s economy. The goal is to deter acts of economic coercion that do not conform to WTO rules and are aimed at meeting Chinese political goals unrelated to trade. According to an analysis published by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a nonprofit think tank, about a proposed European Union instrument to combat Chinese coercion, collective resilience could even comply with WTO regulations. China’s acts of economic hostility are beyond the remit of the organization’s laws, and nothing in the WTO rulebook prohibits states from engaging in self-defense.

That’s not to say that practicing economic resilience will never require sanctions on China. It may well do so, at least at first. But policymakers can rest easy knowing that any sanctions, if properly structured, would ultimately be in service of protecting economic interdependence. That notion may seem paradoxical, but sometimes conducting international relations requires living with contradictions. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time the United States has played dirty to keep a global system clean. During the Cold War, Washington routinely countenanced illiberal practices to protect the liberal order—for example, supporting anticommunist military regimes in South Korea and Taiwan as bulwarks against more brutal nearby powers. Today, the West may need to compromise on its free trade principles if it wants to prevent Beijing from corrupting globalization. It may need to be aggressive. A successful defense, after all, requires a good offense—including in great-power competition.

How to Stop Chinese Coercion

The Case for Collective Resilience

By Victor Cha

January/February 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Victor Cha · December 14, 2022

It took just seven words for the National Basketball Association to get canceled by Beijing. As pro-democracy protesters swarmed the streets of Hong Kong in October 2019, Daryl Morey, then the general manager of the Houston Rockets, one of the NBA’s 30 teams, posted a simple message to his Twitter account: “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.” Chinese broadcasters and streamers quickly announced that they would no longer show his team’s games. The league, which has more viewers in China than in the United States, immediately tried to distance itself from Morey’s tweet, writing that the general manager didn’t speak for the NBA and issuing a statement that implicitly rebuked him. That response fostered a backlash among fans outside China and did nothing to please Beijing. A bipartisan collection of U.S. senators blasted the league for not standing by Morey’s freedom of expression while all 11 of the NBA’s Chinese sponsors and partners suspended their cooperation. With a couple of exceptions, China’s broadcasters stopped airing NBA games until March 2022. The league’s commissioner, Adam Silver, estimated that the rupture cost his organization hundreds of millions of dollars.

At first glance, the row between China and the NBA may seem like small potatoes: a tiny example of how the U.S.-Chinese relationship is now more defined by contestation than by close economic partnership. But Beijing’s behavior toward the NBA is emblematic of a much bigger and extremely worrying pattern, and it is one that the Biden administration’s China strategy does not wholly address. Over the last dozen years, Beijing has slapped discriminatory sanctions on trading partners that interact with Taiwan or support democracy in Hong Kong. It has imposed embargoes on and fueled boycotts against countries and companies that speak out against genocide in Xinjiang or repression in Tibet. Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has gone after almost any entity that has crossed China in any way. And this strategy has worked. Because the Chinese economy is so integral to global markets, China’s coercive behavior has caused tens of billions of dollars in damage. The mere threat of Chinese cutoffs is now prompting states and businesses to stay quiet about Beijing’s abuses.

This silence is both deafening and dangerous. The CCP is carrying out a genocide of China’s Uyghur minority in Xinjiang, engaging in a wide variety of other human rights abuses, and menacing nearby countries—but states are too afraid to respond. Left unchecked, this paralysis could hollow out the postwar liberal order. Should they fear major penalties, few governments, for instance, will come to Taiwan’s defense if it is attacked by China. They will not help New Delhi if China attempts to take more Indian land in the Himalayas. They will hesitate to join the White House’s supply chain initiatives.

Concerned countries could appeal to the World Trade Organization, the usual arbiter of international economic disputes, to try to free them from the specter of Chinese sanctions. But the WTO is unlikely to be of any help. It can investigate an 80.5 percent Chinese tariff on Australian barley as discriminatory, but if China simply stops importing bananas from the Philippines or stops sending tour groups to Korea by citing the “will of the Chinese people,” there is little the organization can do in response.

The Biden administration is aware that Chinese economic predation is a major problem. It has responded by advocating resilient supply chains among like-minded partners in everything from personal protective equipment to memory chips, allowing these states to stop relying so much on Chinese-made goods. The administration has also imposed export controls on the transfer of advanced computing chips and chip-making equipment to China, and it may soon extend these controls to quantum information science, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and advanced algorithms.

But these efforts are at best a partial solution. Countries may be able to wean themselves from some Chinese goods in the supply chain, but Biden cannot reasonably expect most of them to decouple from one of the largest economies in the world. Export controls by the United States on the transfer of cutting-edge technologies to China won’t work unless other countries possessing such technology—including Denmark, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, and the United Kingdom—join in. And these states may choose not to participate in Washington’s supply-chain and technological coalitions because they fear Chinese economic retaliation.

To successfully compete with China, the United States needs to do more than insulate states from Chinese coercion. It needs to stop the coercion from happening in the first place. To do so, the United States will need to band together with its partners and draw up a new strategy, one of collective resilience. China assumes that it can boss other countries around because of its size and central role in the global economy. But China still imports enormous numbers of goods: for hundreds of products, the country’s economy is more than 70 percent dependent on imports from states that Beijing has coerced. Together, these goods are worth more than $31.2 billion to the Chinese economy. For nearly $9.1 billion worth of items, China is more than 90 percent dependent on suppliers in states it has targeted. Washington should organize these countries into a club that threatens to cut off China’s access to vital goods whenever Beijing acts against any single member. Through such an entity, states will finally be able to deter China’s predatory behavior.

Dealing with China’s weaponization of trade will be necessary if the Biden administration wants to successfully compete with Beijing. And although a U.S.-led collective-resilience bloc may strike proponents of globalization as mercantilist, they should understand that it is in fact essential to their project. China will continue to abuse its economic position and distort markets until it is forced to stop. Collective deterrence, then, may be the best way to keep the global economy free and open.

WILD ABANDON

China’s predatory actions are carefully designed to hit countries where it hurts most. Consider what Beijing did to Norway in 2010. After a Norwegian committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to a Chinese dissident, Beijing heavily restricted imports of Norwegian salmon. Over the next year, the product went from cornering almost 94 percent of China’s salmon market to just 37 percent, a collapse that deprived the Norwegian economy of $60 million in one year. After South Korea agreed to host a U.S. missile system in 2016, Beijing forced stores in China owned by the enormous Seoul-based Lotte Group to shut down, causing over $750 million in economic damage. China similarly banned and then heavily restricted the sale of group tours to South Korea, costing the country an estimated $15.6 billion.

Beijing also frequently targets individual businesses if they or their employees deviate from China’s official positions. In 2012, Chinese protesters—encouraged, according to a Los Angeles Times report, by Beijing—shut down Toyota’s manufacturing plants in China in response to tensions over the Senkaku Islands, which are administered by Tokyo but which Beijing claims (and refers to as the Diaoyu Islands). In 2018, Beijing took the website of Marriott Hotels offline for a week after the company sent an email to its rewards members in which it listed Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and Tibet as separate countries. The company apologized and issued a public statement against separatist movements in China. The same year, Beijing made more than 40 airlines—including American, Delta, and United—remove references to Taiwan as a separate country on their websites simply by sending them a menacing letter. And in 2021, the Chinese state media egged on a boycott of the Swedish fashion retailer H&M after it expressed concern about forced labor in Xinjiang. H&M sales in China quickly dropped by 23 percent.

To be fair, China is not the only country that engages in economic coercion. It is in some ways endemic to the international system. Writing in these pages in January 2020, the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman observed that globalization had enabled many countries to leverage financial power in pursuit of political ends, a phenomenon they have called “weaponized interdependence” in their earlier work. This isn’t always a negative. Indeed, in some situations, states have weaponized interdependence to target clearly bad international behavior. The widespread Western sanctioning of Russia for the war in Ukraine, for example, and the United States’ financial sanctions against North Korea and Iran for nuclear proliferation were designed to curtail illegal and dangerous acts.

Biden cannot expect most states to decouple from China.

But what China is doing is different, both in scale and kind. The United States may issue frequent sanctions, but these follow a clear set of processes: Washington does not weaponize economic interdependence through such a wide variety of means. One recent study identified 123 cases of coercion since 2010, carried out through popular boycotts against companies, restrictions on trade, limits on tourism to foreign countries, and other mechanisms. And aside from when the Trump administration levied a bizarre spate of tariffs against American allies, no other government has imposed sanctions or embargoes so casually, penalizing states for mild annoyances rather than broadly unacceptable international actions, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There is, for example, a direct correlation between countries whose leaders have met with the Dalai Lama and a decline in those states’ exports to China.

Beijing is unapologetic about the use of these sanctions and does not acknowledge that they violate global trading norms. It is not worried about domestic discontent arising from its behavior because the illiberal nature of China’s political system insulates the government from pushback. And because its trading partners are all more dependent on China than the other way around, Beijing usually has the advantage. As the Chinese ambassador to New Zealand warned in 2022, “An economic relationship in which China buys nearly a third of the country’s exports shouldn’t be taken for granted.”

HALF MEASURES

Beijing’s long-term objective is to force governments and companies to anticipate, respect, and defer to Chinese interests in all future actions. It seems to be working. Major democracies such as South Korea remained silent when China passed a national security law in Hong Kong suppressing democracy in 2020. In 2021, Brazil did not exclude the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from its 5G auction for fear of losing billions of dollars in business. In 2019, after the Gap clothing company released a T-shirt design with a map of China that did not include Taiwan and Tibet, it issued a public apology and removed the shirt from sale, even before Beijing said anything. After the salmon restrictions in 2010, Norwegian leaders refused to meet with the Dalai Lama when he visited in 2014. And according to reports and investigations by a variety of organizations, including The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and the human rights nonprofit PEN America, Hollywood companies won’t produce films that cast China in a negative light for fear of losing ticket sales.

Beijing’s apparent success doesn’t mean that countries have sat idly by while China has weaponized economic interdependence. The world’s heavy reliance on Chinese manufacturing—starkly illustrated by shortages of masks and other personal protective equipment in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic—has prompted almost every country to become more attuned to its own economic security. Japan, for instance, set up a new cabinet position for economic security in October 2021 and passed legislation to guard critical supply chains and technologies. During the spring of 2022, in the aftermath of both Beijing’s coercion and the pandemic, South Korea created an early warning system designed to detect threats to nearly 4,000 key industry materials. The South Korean government also established a new economic security position in the presidential office.

Fans watching an NBA game in Shenzhen, China, October 2019

Tyrone Siu / Reuters

States have also gotten better at redirecting trade, meaning that when China imposes tariffs or an import embargo on a target state’s goods, the target state finds alternative markets. This strategy has seen some success. Throughout 2020, China approved tariffs on Australian barley, coal, and wine in response to Canberra’s calls for an independent investigation into COVID-19’s origins, prompting Australia to redirect these goods to the rest of the world. When China restricted exports of rare-earth minerals to Japan over a territorial dispute in 2010, Japan diversified its sources of critical minerals and invested more in domestic seabed exploration. As a result, it has reduced its dependence on China for critical minerals from 90 percent to 58 percent in a decade.

Countries are now following Biden’s advice to “reshore” and “friend shore” supply chains, moving key elements of production from China (or places where China exercises inordinate influence) to manufacturers back home or to trusted partner economies. Through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, known as the Quad, Australia, India, Japan, and the United States are building resilient supply chains for COVID-19 vaccines, semiconductors, and emerging and critical technologies, including those related to clean energy. The countries participating in the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework are working on establishing an early warning system, mapping out critical supply chains, and diversifying their sources for important goods. In June, the United States announced the Minerals Security Partnership, an alliance with Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Japan, Norway, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the European Union to safeguard the supply of copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare-earth minerals. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States are contemplating the creation of an alliance called Chip 4 that would consolidate the supply chain for semiconductors.

These measures are all useful and necessary. But they do not constitute a comprehensive solution. Reshoring and friend shoring insulate states against China’s disruptions to the production chain while doing nothing to stop its economic coercion: securing the supply of one product does not prevent Beijing from cutting countries off from another product. Indeed, countries’ enthusiasm for participating in such measures is limited by fears that China will retaliate. South Korea, for example, has hesitated to join the Chip 4 alliance in part because it is concerned that Beijing would once again ban many of its consumer goods and block the flow of Chinese tourists. Supply chain resilience, trade diversion, and reshoring can work only if complemented by a strategy crafted to end China’s predatory economic behavior.

FLIPPING THE SCRIPT

Part of China’s hubris in practicing economic coercion against its trade partners comes from confidence that the targets will not dare counter sanctions with concrete action. Beijing is right to be confident: it is hard for any single country to go up against an economic behemoth. China, for instance, accounts for 31.4 percent of global trade in Australia, 22.9 percent in Japan, 23.9 percent in South Korea, and 14.8 percent in the United States—whereas those countries respectively account for 3.6 percent, 6.1 percent, 6.0 percent, and 12.5 percent of China’s trade.

But these states can fight back if they work together or, in other words, practice collective resilience. That strategy would flip the script. Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the United States may individually be at a disadvantage, but combined they account for nearly 30 percent of China’s imports, exceeding what China’s exports account for in most of theirs. Add Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Lithuania, Mongolia, New Zealand, Norway, Palau, the Philippines, Sweden, and the United Kingdom—all countries that Beijing has coerced in the past—and the collective share of China’s imports is 39 percent. These states all produce critical goods on which China is especially dependent. China gets nearly 60 percent of its iron ore, essential to its steel production, from Australia. It gets more than 80 percent of its bulldozers and Kentucky bluegrass seed, important for sowing fields, from the United States. More than 90 percent of China’s supplies of scores of other goods—cardboard, ballpoint pens, cultured pearls—are sourced from Japan. And 80 percent of China’s whiskey comes from the United Kingdom.

Source: United Nations COMTRADE database

To build a bloc that can stop Chinese coercion, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the United States must first come to an agreement among themselves. The first three governments are the United States’ key allies in the Pacific, and all four nations are prominent market democracies and the core stakeholders in the region’s liberal political and economic order. A commitment to join forces would not be without risk, but all have been prime targets of Chinese economic predation and have a powerful incentive to collaborate.

These four states must then take stock of which other countries are willing and able to join in, working through existing partnerships such as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework to promote the strategy. The best candidates for membership would be the 12 other states most profoundly affected by Chinese economic coercion. Many of these countries may be very weak compared with China. But if they joined forces with the four main members, they would enjoy formidable leverage: for 406 items, China imports more than 70 percent of what it uses from one of these 16 states; for 171 of those items, the import figure rises to 90 percent. (Lithuania and Palau do not produce any of these goods, but both are frontline states in need of protection, and so they should be welcomed into the coalition.) The four founding countries could also approach the European Union, which is currently considering milder measures to counter Beijing’s coercion, to see whether it is interested in joining their effort.

The impact of these imports is far from trivial. For example, China relies on Japan for more than 70 percent of its supplies of 114 items, amounting to over $6.2 billion in trade, and for more than 90 percent of its supplies of 47 items, worth over $1.7 billion. China is over 70 percent dependent on U.S. producers for 94 items, totaling over $6.0 billion, and 43 items for which China is over 90 percent dependent on U.S. producers, worth over $1.5 billion. Added up, all 406 of the “high dependence” goods produced by coerced states are worth more than $31.2 billion to China.

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS

But having the capability to fight back is only half the battle. The other half is political will: For collective resilience to be credible, countries must be willing to sign up for it in the face of fierce Chinese resistance. Beijing is likely to use a combination of carrots, such as offering discounted digital infrastructure, and sticks, such as more export restrictions, to deter countries from joining and to try to peel them off if they do. States will need to build enough domestic political support to withstand the external pressure and resist the temptation to free-ride by accepting coalition support without ever actually sanctioning China.

Given that most participants would be democracies, this will prove difficult. But the pact’s bigger countries can take several steps to help smaller or poorer states endure the discomfort. They can create a collective compensation fund for losses and offer alternative export or import markets to divert trade in response to Chinese sanctions. Bigger states can also provide clear reassurances to smaller powers that they would not be left high and dry if Beijing slapped them with sanctions. That means the larger countries, particularly the original four, would need to delineate clear actions they would take to restrict important exports to China if Beijing bullied any pact member, even if those steps were economically costly to them. The four organizing members would also have to agree on what types of bullying would elicit a response. Disputes over trade that could be adjudicated by the WTO, such as whether China can adjudicate Western technology patent protections in its courts, would not meet the threshold. The trigger would be coercive Chinese economic actions taken for political purposes.

During the Cold War, Washington routinely played dirty to protect the liberal order.

Yet despite the challenges, states would likely recognize that joining the pact and staying the course is worth the short-term costs. They would need to recognize and explain to their citizens that ultimately, ending Chinese economic coercion would be in their long-term interests. China could initially fight back against the new group by finding alternative suppliers for one, two, or even several high-dependence goods. But if tariffs, nontariff barriers, or embargoes were applied to a wide range of the 406 high-dependence items made by prospective coalition members, the costs of finding new suppliers might cause Beijing to think twice before taking coercive actions. Eventually, China would have to stop such behavior, which would result in a level playing field for all of the collective’s participants.

The participating states could feel confident that China would indeed stop. Despite its authoritarian system, China has proved quite sensitive to supply chain obstacles, evidenced by the fact that it rarely applies sanctions to imports of high-dependence goods. Beijing was happy to cut off South Korea from Chinese tourists, but it has not sanctioned Samsung; it needs the company’s memory chips. It has not touched Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, another critical supplier of computer chips, even as tensions with Taipei reach new heights. In all its sanctioning of Australia, Beijing never so much as threatened Australian iron ore even though it is one of the country’s most lucrative exports.

If Beijing was unwilling to locate alternative sources for Australian iron ore at dependency levels of 60 percent, it will certainly be sensitive to the many goods for which it is more than 70 percent dependent on outside countries—not to mention the ones where its dependence exceeds 90 percent. Then there are the 40 products made in the United States and Japan on which China is 99 or 100 percent reliant. Beijing does not want to lose access to any of them, especially when it is already struggling from a general economic slowdown.

FAIR AND SQUARE

The idea of collective resilience may trouble proponents of free trade and globalization. But collective resilience is not a trade war strategy; it is a peer competition strategy. It is defensive, resting first on the threat to weaponize trade, not on the actual use of sanctions. If China does not use its economic power to coerce, there is no need to make good the threat.

The strategy is also clearly and narrowly targeted. Its participants are not trying to punish China just for the sake of doing so; the goal is not to undermine the nation’s economy. The goal is to deter acts of economic coercion that do not conform to WTO rules and are aimed at meeting Chinese political goals unrelated to trade. According to an analysis published by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a nonprofit think tank, about a proposed European Union instrument to combat Chinese coercion, collective resilience could even comply with WTO regulations. China’s acts of economic hostility are beyond the remit of the organization’s laws, and nothing in the WTO rulebook prohibits states from engaging in self-defense.

That’s not to say that practicing economic resilience will never require sanctions on China. It may well do so, at least at first. But policymakers can rest easy knowing that any sanctions, if properly structured, would ultimately be in service of protecting economic interdependence. That notion may seem paradoxical, but sometimes conducting international relations requires living with contradictions. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time the United States has played dirty to keep a global system clean. During the Cold War, Washington routinely countenanced illiberal practices to protect the liberal order—for example, supporting anticommunist military regimes in South Korea and Taiwan as bulwarks against more brutal nearby powers. Today, the West may need to compromise on its free trade principles if it wants to prevent Beijing from corrupting globalization. It may need to be aggressive. A successful defense, after all, requires a good offense—including in great-power competition.

• VICTOR CHA is Vice Dean and D. S. Song–Korea Foundation Professor of Government at Georgetown University and Senior Vice President for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. From 2004 to 2007, he was Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.

Foreign Affairs · by Victor Cha · December 14, 2022

16. UN Votes to Remove Iran From Women’s Rights Commission

UN Votes to Remove Iran From Women’s Rights Commission

fdd.org · December 14, 2022

Latest Developments

The UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) decided today by a vote of 29-8, with 16 abstentions, to remove Iran from the UN Commission on the Status of Women. The decision reflects women’s second-class status across the Islamic Republic. The rights of women have taken center stage in the protests now consuming Iran: The regime’s killing of 23-year-old Mahsa Amini, whom security forces had arrested for allegedly violating Tehran’s hijab laws, triggered the demonstrations now nearing their fourth month with no end in sight.

Expert Analysis

“The vote at the United Nations today is a test not only of the commission but of the UN itself and of the countries that purport to uphold the very principles of women’s empowerment. What the women of Iran have shown with such courage and determination is that regardless of any vote, the regime does not represent them as women or as Iranian citizens. They have called for the ouster of their regime not merely because of its treatment of women but because the abhorrent conduct reflected in the Islamic Republic’s long rap sheet on human rights is not what they aspire to for their future.” – Toby Dershowitz, Senior Vice President for Government Relations and Strategy

The Hijab Law

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Tehran has required all women to wear a hijab in public. Violators of the law face lengthy jail sentences and even torture. This policy has elicited protests in Iran even prior to the current round of demonstrations. In late 2017 and early 2018, for example, an Iranian woman became the public face of protests after she removed her hijab in public and waved it on a stick.

Women’s Second-Class Status

Women in the Islamic Republic face a range of other discriminatory laws. For example, in court, a woman’s testimony has half the value of a man’s. The law consistently favors men in marriage, divorce, inheritance, and child custody. A married woman may not leave the country without her husband’s permission. Tehran routinely bars women from entering stadiums to watch soccer matches, Iran’s most popular sport. Tehran also restricts women from running for president and other higher offices.

Sexual Violence

Women face sexual violence in Iranian prisons. CNN has documented multiple cases of sexual assault against female dissidents since the current protests began. In one incident, CNN reported, 20-year-old dissident Armita Abbasi “was rushed to the Imam Ali hospital in Karaj, accompanied by plainclothes officers, according to leaks from that hospital. Her head had been shaved and she was shaking violently. In the accounts, the medical staff attending to her spoke of the horror they felt when they saw evidence of brutal rape.” One medical staffer recounted that the officers “said she was hemorrhaging from her rectum… due to repeated rape. The plainclothes men insisted that the doctor write it as rape prior to arrest.”

Related Analysis

“Iran Surpasses 500 Executions in 2022,” FDD Flash Brief

“Maximum Support for the Iranian People: A New Strategy,” by Saeed Ghasseminejad, Richard Goldberg, Tzvi Kahn, and Behnam Ben Taleblu

fdd.org · December 14, 2022

17. Breaking Precedent, Israel Provides Details of Syria Air Strike

Breaking Precedent, Israel Provides Details of Syria Air Strike

fdd.org · December 14, 2022

Latest Developments

Israel’s top general, Aviv Kohavi, revealed today that Israel had exceptionally detailed intelligence about a convoy hit by an airstrike last month while bringing Iranian weapons into Syria. Kohavi did not say explicitly that Israel launched the air strike, yet his description of events matched precisely with reports of an attack on November 8 in the vicinity of Bukamal, near the border between Iraq and Syria. Kohavi said the convoy had 25 trucks, and Israel knew “Truck number eight is the truck with the armaments.” He added, “And you have to send the pilots there, too.” While Israeli leaders have acknowledged the targeting of Iranian weapons shipments, they have rarely telegraphed the Israeli role in specific strikes.

Expert Analysis

“Iran is determined to arm Lebanese Hezbollah with advanced weapons that can target Israeli infrastructure and population centers with extraordinary precision. Geography necessitates most of these weapons move across Syria en route to Lebanon, making them vulnerable. The best estimates indicate Hezbollah already has hundreds of precision-guided munitions, which consistently hit within 20 meters of their target or less.

“Since its founding, Hezbollah has made clear that its purpose is to destroy the Jewish state. For Israel, it would be intolerable for such an enemy — perched on its northern border — to have weapons that could rapidly destroy the country’s power plants, airfields, and port facilities while scoring direct hits on schools and apartment buildings, too.” – David Adesnik, FDD Senior Fellow and Director of Research

Hezbollah’s Arsenal

Incapable of launching a conventional assault, Hezbollah has long relied on rocket fire as its principal means of threatening Israel, in particular by targeting civilians. Its main weapons include the Katyusha rocket, which the group has stockpiled in large numbers but whose accuracy is minimal. Israel estimates Hezbollah now has an arsenal of 150,000 rockets — few are accurate, but waves of unguided rockets could help overwhelm Israeli air defenses, such as Iron Dome, clearing the way for precision strikes.

The War Between Wars

Israel is waging what it calls a “War Between Wars” to prevent the Iranian regime and its proxies from building the capabilities they would need to launch a decisive war against the Jewish state. Initially, Israel refused to acknowledge the military component of its campaign, but it has begun to describe its efforts in general terms. In 2019, then Israeli Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot said, “We struck thousands of targets,” adding that the Israeli Air Force dropped 2,000 bombs in Syria in 2018 alone.

Related Analysis

“The Quiet War Between Israel and Iran,” by Jonathan Schanzer

“Israel Reveals Iranian Missile Production Sites in Syria,” FDD Flash Brief

“PGMs: Iran’s Precision-Guided Munitions Project in the Shadow of a Nuclear Deal,” by Jonathan Schanzer and Mark Dubowitz

fdd.org · December 14, 2022

18.  Statecraft in the Age of Connectivity

Connectivity Statecraft, or CS.  (or Competitive Statecraft)

Excerpts:

In the end, I decided that Israel would join the resolution. This decision-making process was complex, but the reason was simple: there are moments when one must not remain silent. China should know that the world is not ignoring what is happening in Xinjiang. The Chinese were very angry with us, and I had to conduct a careful and at times unpleasant dialogue with them. But after all of the angry exchanges, the innovation conference was held as planned and was very successful. In some ways, our joining the statement even contributed to our relationship. The Chinese understand power, and they value strength and clarity. They don’t have to share our values on human rights, but they certainly need to know that we take these values seriously. They know that those who cede ground on principles will most likely end up losing ground on their interests as well. Even those who see the world as an arena powered only by the forces of realpolitik do not ignore the fact that liberal democracies are willing to pay a price for what they believe in. This is not weakness; it is strength.

Perhaps it is also appropriate to sound a word of warning regarding the opposite phenomenon. For CS to work, puritanism should be avoided. Morality is a part of any liberal foreign policy, but preaching is ineffective (and annoying). Intervening in the domestic affairs of a foreign country, friendly or not, should be done with caution and only when absolutely necessary. In most cases, a problem that appears clear and straightforward in the media turns out to be much more complex when you learn the details. Until recently, Sweden used to be governed by a progressive left-wing government that regularly tried to explain to Israelis, in righteous tones, how shocked it was by our treatment of the Palestinians. These people, comfortably sitting in Stockholm, were preaching to me while Israelis were being killed in terrorist attacks and rockets were being fired at my house in Tel Aviv. It drove me crazy. Eventually, Ann Linde, the Swedish foreign minister, visited Tel Aviv, and we resolved some of our disagreements in a friendly and open conversation. Shortly thereafter, the Swedish government fell, and a right-wing government came to power, supported by the Sweden Democrats, a party that has neo-Nazi roots. I managed to restrain myself and didn’t call Stockholm to lecture the Swedes about their attitude toward minorities.

Henry Kissinger insisted that the great dilemma of leadership is that we have to make decisions about the future without knowing what the outcome will be. This dilemma has become very acute in recent years, because the modern nation-state is a static point within an ever-expanding network of other powerful actors. Counterintuitively, the best way to handle this new world is not to work in a less compartmentalized manner but rather a more compartmentalized one. Stop looking at countries as whole units, and instead work with them on the basis of shared challenges and shared interests. This is the essence of the CS approach, and this is the direction in which global foreign policy needs to move.

Statecraft in the Age of Connectivity

How Countries Can Work Together Even When They Disagree

By Yair Lapid

December 15, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Yair Lapid · December 15, 2022

For the past year and a half, I have had the privilege of leading the State of Israel’s foreign policy, first as minister of foreign affairs, and then as prime minister. Throughout this period, we have operated with the understanding that foreign relations in the era of globalization cannot be conducted as they were in the past. The global economy has changed, the range of security threats has widened, and social media is transforming ties between regimes and their citizens. It no longer makes any sense for the field of foreign relations to continue operating according to diplomatic conventions forged in the nineteenth century. The right way to look at another country in this new era is not as a unified whole, but rather as a complex network of interests and values. Governments can cooperate in some areas even when they disagree, compete, or clash in others. In this way, if we work correctly, we can build new kinds of ties and alliances, ones that we haven’t seen before. I call this path Connectivity Statecraft, or CS.

I was able to put this approach into practice. At the end of June 2021, an El Al plane landed at the airport in Abu Dhabi. Smiling sheikhs in their dazzling white djellabas stood on a red carpet awaiting my arrival. It was over 40 degrees Celsius, and the Israeli flags drooped on flagpoles as if they had passed out in the heavy heat. I had arrived for the first official visit by an Israeli minister to the United Arab Emirates in order to open our first embassy in the Gulf. Politicians and diplomats have a tendency to overuse the word “historic,” but this time we knew that this was a visit that would be engraved not only in our memories but also in the histories that would one day be written about us.

That evening, after a long series of meetings and ceremonies, I went to dinner with Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the foreign minister of the UAE. I like him: he has a wonderful sense of humor, and he is one of the savviest and most experienced leaders I have ever met. Somewhere between the sixth and seventh course (I lost count at a certain point), something jogged my memory.

“Tell me,” I asked him, “Aren’t England playing Germany today in the quarter-finals of the European soccer championship?” In response, he hit the table, causing the delicate plate of sashimi in front of him to bounce in the process.

“Damn it,” he replied. “We should have stayed at my house to watch the match.”

As frequently happens when soccer is involved, I struck a poetic tone. “You don’t understand what it means to the Jewish people when England plays Germany,” I told him. “It immediately reminds me of my father, who sat in the ghetto during the Holocaust and secretly listened to Churchill’s speeches on the BBC.” A spark lit in his eyes. “That’s very moving,” he said, “but my brother owns Manchester City. We may have fewer memories associated with the game, but we have a lot more assets on the pitch.”

The sheikh raised his hand, and a bald bodyguard with the squashed nose of a boxer hurried over. “Do you have a phone on you?” Zayed asked. The bodyguard nodded in bemusement. From that moment on, we spent most of the meal with the bodyguard standing over us while we watched the match on his battered cellphone. As with us, unexpected history was also made on the pitch: England won 2-0.

In the year and a half that has passed since, Israel and the UAE have forged one of the closest alliances in the Middle East. It is an economic, political, and even military alliance. But what is the basis for this friendship?

Countries are not monoliths; they are complex networks of interests and values.

Israel and the UAE are very different countries. Israel is a vibrant and at times unruly democracy; the UAE is a federal monarchy. Israel is a “startup nation,” home to many entrepreneurs and innovative companies; the UAE’s economy thrives off oil and trade. Most Israelis are Jews; most people who live in the UAE are not even Emirati, as around 88 percent of the country’s residents are expatriates. By the old standards of foreign relations, our two countries don’t share a single criterion that would make them “like-minded countries,” or LM, in diplomatic parlance.

No standard definition of LM exists, but until recently, such a detailed explanation wasn’t needed. In the two events that most pivotally shaped the twentieth century, World War II and the Cold War, the world organized itself along relatively clear lines: on one side stood the nationalist dictatorships, and on the other stood liberal democracies. (The only exception was the Soviet Union, which stood with the Allies in World War II and against them in the Cold War.) The differences between the two sides could be determined by looking at the countries’ attitudes towards free elections, a free press, independent courts, minority and individual rights, and in many cases the strength of the resentment and suspicion directed at the other side. Friendly relations developed between the countries that felt they had similar worldviews, and groupings such as the European Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the African Union, and the Arab League were formed. What began as an attempt to identify and address shared challenges developed very practically into economic, cultural, and security cooperation on a huge scale. Even without a precise definition or a formal overarching organization yoking them together, Canada and the Netherlands were clearly LM countries, just as Turkey and Azerbaijan were LM countries, and Spain and Portugal were LM countries.

The Canadians and the Dutch didn’t need to sign a treaty to indicate that they were part of the same group. All the components were already there: pluralistic societies, some form of moderate capitalism, and governments that changed every few years without the transfer of power leading to too much disruption. The two countries have many common interests, but more than that, they enjoy a comfortable friendship based on shared values. When Canadian officials vote at the United Nations on a resolution condemning Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian regions, they don’t ask themselves how the Dutch will vote. They already know.

BEYOND FRIENDS AND FOES

And yet what worked in the twentieth century doesn’t work in the twenty-first. The world has changed. The first two decades of the new millennium were profoundly impacted by four phenomena: economic globalization, the globalization of information (through the Internet and social media), the spread of international terrorism, and the climate crisis. All these trends are global, whereas the world’s political structure is still riven by nation-states. As recently clarified in the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy, the traditional division between foreign and domestic issues no longer holds. In many ways, the old methods of managing foreign relations have been left behind.

Fifty years ago, the world was divided into huge blocs. Thirty years ago, those divisions shrank to countries that were “like us” or “not like us.” Over the past 20 years, nation-states have had to deal with ever-increasing complexities. The challenge liberal democracies face is no longer a matter of getting more countries to move over “to our side” but rather to operate intelligently, given the intricacies in every country. A smart foreign policy does not treat other countries as monoliths. Instead, it must be able to examine each country in terms of what matters in a given political moment and in terms of the issues most important to one’s own country’s foreign policy.

In this model, alliances are organized according to subject, not regime type. The same country can be a partner in certain fields but compete or clash in others. In a polarized world in which the rivalry between China and the United States is intensifying, countries need to develop as many types of collaborative mechanisms as possible with as many different partners as possible. They cannot limit themselves only to the dichotomy of “partners’’ and “enemies.” Israel has incredibly close allies, such as the United States, and sworn enemies, such as Iran, but there is a range of countries in between with which relations are based on dialogue, cooperation, and ad-hoc agreements.

Israel and the UAE may not be LM countries when it comes to our methods of governance or our stances on the Palestinian issue, but we are undoubtedly CS partners thanks to our shared economic worldviews, our mutual concerns about Iran, and our ability to pool resources to advance global goals. Just recently, for example, Israel and the UAE launched a huge joint solar energy project with Jordan that will undoubtedly make a tremendous contribution to protecting the environment. In all of these areas, our two countries operate as CS countries, bolstering ties in the long term while buttressing our economic and security cooperation in a region that is prone to disruption and turmoil. Even in the areas where we are far from agreement, our deepening ties allow us to conduct a much closer and more open dialogue. When the Emiratis decided to reopen their embassy in Tehran, we were wary, but we had an honest and frank conversation with our UAE counterparts and got good answers on many of the issues that troubled us. This is another advantage of CS: it establishes better diplomatic dialogue.

THE TIES THAT BIND

In the coming years, even the greatest of rivals will have to find ways to build relations in some areas. The United States and China, for example, are not just two superpowers on an economic, security, and diplomatic collision course but also the two countries that emit the most carbon into the atmosphere. If the U.S. government wants to address the climate crisis with the appropriate seriousness, it will need to find a way to build a joint climate policy with China. In other words, the Americans and the Chinese can continue to clash over Taiwan and over the use of high technologies, but they will still have to deal with the climate crisis together, and even formulate a unified U.S.-China climate policy with respect to other countries.

Israel was able to disaggregate sources of tension and sources of agreement in the way we rebuilt our relations with Turkey. In 2021, we started receiving signals from the Turkish government that they wanted to renew diplomatic relations. Relations had been severed in May 2018, when the Israeli ambassador in Ankara was expelled after Israeli military activity in Gaza. In response to the renewed outreach, I sent a careful message to the Turks saying that we would examine the issue and get back to them. Turkey is an important regional power, but I wanted it to be clear that they could not sever and restore relations with us whenever they felt like it. A few days after I conveyed this message to the Turks, I tested positive for COVID-19. I was sitting at home, coughing quite a bit, when I was told that Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, wanted to speak with me about a nondiplomatic matter. When he got on the line, Cavusoglu said he had heard I was sick and wanted to wish me well—and that, once I recovered, we should meet so he could personally verify that my health had improved. Amid my coughing, I managed to tell him that I got the message.

When he arrived in Israel, we sat down for a private conversation in my office in Jerusalem. As happens in such conversations, he took the cards with talking points that his assistants had prepared for him out of his pocket. He looked at them for a minute, and then he did something that no one had done before or has done since: he gave me his cards. “Look,” he said, “and tell me which things on here you want to talk about.” Cavusoglu is not only one of the nicest people I have ever met; he is also an experienced diplomatic fox. He essentially told me: I understand that the only way to earn your trust is to trust you. I told him that we would be happy to restore diplomatic ties, but first we wanted to renew the aviation agreements between our two countries and reestablish the Israeli-Turkish economic commission.

Lapid and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, Jerusalem, May 2022

Asi Efrati

The Turks thought I was insisting on these preliminary steps to test their seriousness, but my goal was in fact the opposite: I proposed these measures to ensure that our relations were rooted not only in the decisions of statesmen but also in the clear interests of our states. The goal was to create within Israel and Turkey a dense network of ties that would strengthen our diplomatic relationship from the bottom up. The Turks understood, and the agreements were signed with record speed. In June 2022, I visited Ankara and met with the head of Turkish intelligence with the added goal of strengthening security ties between our countries (a visit that had an unexpected bonus—when I got back to the plane, a gift from Cavusoglu was waiting for me: warm pita bread with the most delicious doner kebab I’ve ever eaten). In September, I had a cordial meeting in New York with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and we agreed to exchange ambassadors. The way we shaped the renewal of our ties will also better protect the bilateral relationship from turbulence in the future. Not long after my visit to Ankara, Israel launched an operation in Gaza against the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad. It was a wider military operation than the one that had led to the severing of relations in 2018, but Turkey responded this time with moderate, measured criticism, as one would expect from a friendly Muslim country.

Azerbaijan, a country with a large Shiite majority, responded similarly. It is a country with which we conducted a similar CS process, based on our shared concern about the spread of Iranian influence and our ties in the fields of energy and agriculture. In November 2022, after a gradual expansion of security and economic cooperation with us, the parliament of Azerbaijan voted overwhelmingly in favor of opening an embassy in Israel.

The old way of “doing business” was to define the nature of relations between countries—friendly, hostile, or something in between—and only then let government bodies and the private sector develop relations. The CS approach reverses this order. It treats the nature of relations with another country not as the product or goal of diplomacy, but as the infrastructure on which diplomatic engagement is built. When you tell the other side in advance what interests and values are important to you, it creates a sense of security. A country whose behavior you can anticipate is one you can trust.

THE POWER OF GOING SMALL

The CS approach is most effective when it operates through the framework of small groups of states—what is referred to in diplomatic parlance as “geometric ties”—and eschews cumbersome, highly conflicted organizations, such as the UN and the World Trade Organization.

In October 2021, I had dinner at the luxurious home of the Emirati ambassador to Washington, Yousef Al Otaiba. Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, and Zayed of the UAE sat with us. The conversation turned to issues of food security and water technology. What occupied us were not the technical solutions but rather a diplomatic question: In whose hands are we willing to entrust the control of the food and water supply of entire populations? Whom do we believe will not carry out actions like those seen more recently, such as the cut in Saudi oil production in October 2022 that led to a spike in prices, or the disruption of supplies of wheat and gas resulting from Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine?

Alon Ushpiz, the director general of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had once served as Israel’s ambassador to New Delhi and was present at the meeting. He suggested that we talk with the Indians. Just five days later—astonishingly fast when it comes to international diplomacy—a first meeting was held, and the I2U2 Forum was born, bringing together India, Israel, the UAE, and the United States on matters relating to food, water infrastructure, and other pressing issues. A few months later, in July 2022, we convened an I2U2 meeting in Jerusalem with Joe Biden, the U.S. president; Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister; Mohammed bin Zayed, the UAE president; and myself as prime minister. There, we received an initial report on a new food corridor the I2U2 had established between India and the UAE that would help increase food production in India, an important strategic partner of Israel, and increase food security for the Middle East. There is no doubt in my mind that this corridor will survive even tense political periods between our countries. Working in small multilateral groups is a form of insurance. The number of conflicting interests is limited, and therefore so are the number of things that can go wrong.

Foreign ministers at the Negev Summit in Sde Boker, Israel, March 2022

Asi Efrati

We acted similarly in establishing the Negev Forum, in which Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, the UAE, and the United States are partners. Instead of fighting for the thousandth time over the Palestinian issue, we established working groups that deal with energy, regional security, the fight against terrorism, tourism, health, and more. The Abraham Accords, which preceded the establishment of the forum, were signed between the countries; the Forum’s working groups operate within each country. We saw the strength of this positive connection from the first night. We sat down in March 2022—the six foreign ministers, without our teams—for dinner in a remote hotel in the Israeli Negev desert, not far from the grave of Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion. I instructed my staff not to disturb us under any circumstances. But soon, the door suddenly opened and my communications director entered. “There was a terrorist attack near Tel Aviv,” she whispered to me. “Two Israelis were murdered.”

The foreign ministers must have understood from my expression that something had happened because the lively conversation died down at once. I told them what had happened. “If we don’t condemn this attack altogether,” I told them, “the summit is over, and terrorism will have defeated us.” They were silent for a long moment. I told myself that if even one of them asked to call home for instructions, it was all over. Then, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry raised his head. “Of course we will condemn this attack,” he said. “We are always against terrorism.” Ten minutes later, a joint statement condemning the attack was issued, signed by the Negev Forum ministers. From that moment on, the summit soared to new heights of collaboration.

One of the advantages of CS is the ability to forge ties even with hostile countries. There is constant tension between Israel and Lebanon. Our two countries are in a declared state of war. Lebanon was once the pearl of the Middle East, and only Tel Aviv’s nightlife could rival Beirut’s. Unfortunately, over the past 20 years, the terrorist group Hezbollah has become the dominant force in Lebanon. Hezbollah’s rise has helped transform Lebanon into a corrupt and failing country in which public bodies have stopped working and the supply of electricity is limited to several hours a day because of constant fuel scarcity. As usual, it became clear that every problem also holds an opportunity.

For more than a decade, Israel and Lebanon ponderously conducted ineffective negotiations to try and determine the maritime border line between the countries. Signs of gas deposits had been discovered along the disputed line, and a French-Italian consortium had expressed interest in building an oil rig to start drilling. When the war broke out in Ukraine and gas prices suddenly surged, we identified an opportunity. Together with the French and the Americans, we made sure that the Lebanese public knew that they could get electricity and secure a better economic future if their government signed an agreement on the maritime border with Israel. Public pressure began to build in Lebanon in favor of the agreement. Hezbollah objected at first, but then the group’s leaders realized that they looked as if they were blocking a source of hope for the Lebanese people. In October 2022, we signed a historic maritime boundary agreement. Lebanon was forced to recognize—in an official document deposited at the UN—that Israel is not only not an enemy but can also be a partner.

THE PARTS, NOT THE WHOLE

Building relations between countries is not a simple task. It brings us back to the old nineteenth century debate between the German statesman Otto von Bismarck and the Austrian diplomat Klemens von Metternich on the question of what governs states: interests or values. CS is an effective tool, but we must be careful that it does not turn us all into cynics who cooperate where it benefits us and turn a blind eye to everything else. Smart navigation between conflicting interests can very quickly degenerate into cold utilitarianism. Countries are not commercial enterprises and cannot operate only in terms of profit and loss. Liberal democracies have principles and values that obligate them to act and react. Torture, attacks on women and minorities, an unjustified attack on a friendly country: all of these are things that cannot be ignored. Our enemies must know which fundamental principles we will not compromise, but so, too, should our friends.

In the summer of 2021, a U.S.-Canadian request to join a statement of condemnation at the UN Human Rights Council against China’s violation of the human rights of Uyghurs in Xinjiang was put before me. I deliberated. At the time, we were busy preparing for our Joint Committee on Innovation Cooperation with the Chinese, which I was supposed to lead jointly with the vice president of China, Wang Qishan, an incredibly astute statesman. A series of events had also been planned with the Chinese to mark the 30th anniversary of the renewal of diplomatic relations between our countries. There were quite a few people in the Israeli Foreign Ministry who thought that our joining the UN council’s statement of condemnation would jeopardize these projects. “What for?” they said. “For a statement that won’t change anything for anyone at a meeting of an organization that constantly unfairly attacks Israel?”

In the end, I decided that Israel would join the resolution. This decision-making process was complex, but the reason was simple: there are moments when one must not remain silent. China should know that the world is not ignoring what is happening in Xinjiang. The Chinese were very angry with us, and I had to conduct a careful and at times unpleasant dialogue with them. But after all of the angry exchanges, the innovation conference was held as planned and was very successful. In some ways, our joining the statement even contributed to our relationship. The Chinese understand power, and they value strength and clarity. They don’t have to share our values on human rights, but they certainly need to know that we take these values seriously. They know that those who cede ground on principles will most likely end up losing ground on their interests as well. Even those who see the world as an arena powered only by the forces of realpolitik do not ignore the fact that liberal democracies are willing to pay a price for what they believe in. This is not weakness; it is strength.

Perhaps it is also appropriate to sound a word of warning regarding the opposite phenomenon. For CS to work, puritanism should be avoided. Morality is a part of any liberal foreign policy, but preaching is ineffective (and annoying). Intervening in the domestic affairs of a foreign country, friendly or not, should be done with caution and only when absolutely necessary. In most cases, a problem that appears clear and straightforward in the media turns out to be much more complex when you learn the details. Until recently, Sweden used to be governed by a progressive left-wing government that regularly tried to explain to Israelis, in righteous tones, how shocked it was by our treatment of the Palestinians. These people, comfortably sitting in Stockholm, were preaching to me while Israelis were being killed in terrorist attacks and rockets were being fired at my house in Tel Aviv. It drove me crazy. Eventually, Ann Linde, the Swedish foreign minister, visited Tel Aviv, and we resolved some of our disagreements in a friendly and open conversation. Shortly thereafter, the Swedish government fell, and a right-wing government came to power, supported by the Sweden Democrats, a party that has neo-Nazi roots. I managed to restrain myself and didn’t call Stockholm to lecture the Swedes about their attitude toward minorities.

Henry Kissinger insisted that the great dilemma of leadership is that we have to make decisions about the future without knowing what the outcome will be. This dilemma has become very acute in recent years, because the modern nation-state is a static point within an ever-expanding network of other powerful actors. Counterintuitively, the best way to handle this new world is not to work in a less compartmentalized manner but rather a more compartmentalized one. Stop looking at countries as whole units, and instead work with them on the basis of shared challenges and shared interests. This is the essence of the CS approach, and this is the direction in which global foreign policy needs to move.

• YAIR LAPID is the Prime Minister of Israel.

Foreign Affairs · by Yair Lapid · December 15, 2022

19. Commissioners — AFGHANISTAN WAR COMMISSION

Names, links to bios, and photos of the commissioners are at this link: https://www.afghanistanwarcommission.org/commissioners?utm

Commissioners — AFGHANISTAN WAR COMMISSION

Commissioners

The Afghanistan War Commission is composed of 16 commissioners, eight appointed by Democratic members of Congress and eight appointed by Republican members of Congress.

20. This Young Woman Was the First CIA Agent Killed in Vietnam

Another piece of history that is new to me.

This Young Woman Was the First CIA Agent Killed in Vietnam

Inspired by JFK, Barbara Robbins went to Vietnam to do her part to fight communism. At age 21, she became the youngest-ever CIA employee killed on duty.

By CATHRYN J. PRINCE12/13/2022

historynet.com · by Cathryn J. Prince · December 13, 2022

Barbara Annette Robbins checked her luggage at the United Airlines desk, passed through the doors and walked toward the airplane waiting on the tarmac at Denver’s Stapleton airport in August 1964. In film footage captured by her father, the young woman in a simple pastel suit turns and waves before boarding the silver aircraft. He kept filming as the plane took off.

Three layovers later, Robbins touched down at Tan Son Nhut Air Base on the outskirts of Saigon and was eager to begin her job fighting communism. There would be no film of her happy return home. Less than a year later Robbins became the first American woman and first CIA officer to die in Vietnam and remains the youngest CIA employee killed on duty.

Bright and Unconventional

Robbins was born on July 26, 1943, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to Buford and Ruth Robbins. At the time, her father was stationed in World War II’s Pacific theater loading ordnance onto Consolidated PBY-FA amphibious flying boat bombers. She grew up in Denver, with younger brother Warren, in a three-bedroom ranch house in the West Colfax neighborhood. Her father was a butcher at King Sooper’s grocery store, and her mother worked in the complaints department at a window factory.

Robbins’ parents, Ruth and World War II veteran Buford, get a family picture with baby Barbara.

At Thomas Jefferson High School in southeast Denver, Robbins demanded a lot from herself while also demanding she receive proper credit for her work. “I remember she got a B+ in one class and thought she deserved an A, and she went to her teacher and made her case,” Warren said. “Her grade was changed.”

Robbins was determined to do well in high school because she had college in her sights, unlike many of her peers. Less than 40 percent of women graduated from college in the 1960s.

Robbins was “a terribly bright little girl” and “unconventional,” recalls older cousin Dolores Schneider. Although the girl had a taste for Dairy Queen vanilla ice cream cones, “she didn’t always like to eat the ice cream, but she liked the cones.” Robbins was always a little independent, Schneider added. “She was like that as a girl, so naturally she grew up to be that way.”

Recruited By the CIA

After high school Robbins enrolled at Colorado State University in Fort Collins to study French and learn secretarial skills. While there, she was recruited by the CIA. The Robbins family wasn’t especially political, but it was patriotic. Fourth of July meant large extended family barbecues and parking alongside Interstate 25 to watch fireworks burst in the night sky over Denver’s newly built McNichols Arena.

This patriotism that had been imbued in Robbins inspired her to answer President John F. Kennedy’s call for Americans of all ages to ask themselves what they could do for their country.

A few semesters before completing her degree, Robbins told her family she was going to join the State Department and volunteered to serve in Vietnam. “I remember a conversation about how she wanted to fight communism,” Warren said. “That was her goal, and she was adamant about that.”

Addressing her father, Robbins even evoked the potential threat to the family’s home. “When they get to West Colfax, mister, you’ll wish you’d done something,” she said.

Robbins concealed the fact that the State Department job was just a cover for her work with the CIA. She left college in 1963, without a degree. Her parents “were nervous about her decision to volunteer,” Schneider said. “She wasn’t nervous at all.”

The family’s nervousness was understandable. In summer 1959, six Viet Cong guerrillas had attacked a compound that housed eight American advisers with Military Assistance Advisory Group-Vietnam, in Bien Hoa, a few miles northeast of Saigon.

MAAG-V was formed on Nov. 1, 1955, to oversee a U.S. military contingent that had been growing since President Harry S. Truman sent the first advisers to Vietnam in 1950 to support colonial ruler France, which had been trying since the end of World War II to quell a communist takeover of Vietnam.

The Saigon station had an opening. Robbins volunteered. If she was going to make a difference, she was going to do it where it most counted.

The Situation In Vietnam

In May 1954, communist-led Viet Minh independence fighters defeated French forces at Dien Bien Phu, a small village in northwestern Vietnam near the Laotian border, bringing nearly a century of French rule to an end.

In July 1954, the Geneva Accords sliced Vietnam in half at the 17th parallel. Communists led by Ho Chi Minh governed the North. The pro-Western government of the South was led by President Ngo Dinh Diem, buttressed by French and American support. Tensions between the two sides soon flared into violence.

The attack on the Bien Hoa MAAG-V compound occurred on July 8, 1959. Six of the American advisers were in the mess hall watching The Tattered Dress, a 1957 crime drama starring Jeff Chandler and Jeanne Crain. Just as someone flipped on the lights to change the reel, Viet Cong attackers thrust their weapons through the open windows and sprayed the room with automatic fire. The VC killed two South Vietnamese guards and two Americans—Maj. Dale R. Buis, 37, and Master Sgt. Chester M. Ovnand, 44, the first U.S. troops killed by enemy fire during the American war in Vietnam.

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The simmering conflict in Vietnam had not yet resonated with most Americans or even found its way into U.S. military classrooms. The attention of the nation’s leading military educators and strategists seemed to lay elsewhere—namely on how best to repel the hordes of Soviet soldiers seemingly poised to troll through West Germany if the ongoing Cold War ever turned “hot.”

“There was zero attention paid to Vietnam,” said retired Col. Alan Phillips, a Silver Star recipient who graduated from West Point in 1959 and did tours in 1963 and 1967. “We had half a million troops stationed in Germany then, and there was nothing like counterinsurgency plans being developed or taught.”

Keeping The Secret

During Robbins’ time at Colorado State, the situation in Vietnam remained on the periphery. The peace movement did not fully reach the campus until 1968 when students occupied the agricultural building. The Rocky Mountain Collegian, the student newspaper, focused on various club activities, guest speakers and sporting events. After leaving the school, Robbins returned to her parents’ house and packed for Washington while listening to Pat Boone on the record player she had bought with her saved allowance.

While her parents believed she was working in a State Department building, Robbins spent 12 months as a trainee in the CIA’s Directorate of Plans, the forerunner of today’s National Clandestine Service.

In late spring 1964, after the last of Washington’s famed cherry blossoms had fluttered to the ground, an unexpected opportunity arrived. The Saigon station had an opening. Robbins immediately volunteered. If she was going to make a difference, she was going to do it where it most counted.

Before she left for Vietnam that summer, Robbins, her parents and brother piled into the car and drove to the Four Corners Monument in Monument Valley, Utah. A home movie shows the four skipping, dancing and smiling their way around the metal marker at the point where Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico touch.

Last Goodbye

A week later the family returned to their home. Robbins stood in her bedroom considering her clothes. She laid out airy linen shifts and pastel suits, low-heeled pumps and a few pairs of gloves. She packed pencils, pens and lightweight stationary. She was ready for her trip to Vietnam.

On the drive to the airport with her parents and brother, bursts of quiet interrupted the chatter. Warren recalled it as “a nice day and just sort of exciting, too, to see Barbara off.” Buford parked, popped open the trunk and lifted out Robbins’ suitcases. She headed for the United Airlines desk.

The Brinks Hotel Bombing on Christmas Eve 1964, which killed two Americans, was noted in one of Robbins’ letters to her family.

After the arrival at Tan Son Nhut, Robbins, a leather purse in hand and sensible pumps on her feet, boarded a bus. Chicken wire covered the windows to protect against bomb blasts, and the seats reminded her of buses in elementary school. The bus took Robbins to the Astor Hotel in downtown Saigon. She stayed there for a week and then moved into a fully furnished apartment, complete with linens and maid service.

“There are many other Americans from the Embassy also living here so I feel very safe,” she wrote to her family. “Security-wise we do have to be careful–but you’d never feel that way right here in Saigon if it weren’t for the Vietnamese police all over the city.”

Over the next year Robbins sent 30 letters home. She never wrote about how she typed top-secret CIA reports during the day. Her letters described searching the black market for piasters (Vietnamese currency) and dollars, what women wore, training her new dog “Captain” and occasional weekends in Nha Trang, a coastal city about 200 miles north of Saigon with beaches and fine French dining.

Every now and then she nonchalantly mentioned Buddhist protests in the square near the Rex Hotel in Saigon, bombings at various cafes and fighting on the outskirts of the city.

“You probably see more of what’s happening on television than I’ll ever see here,” she wrote, adding that her family would read about curfews and Vietnamese students marching in protest as if the “country doesn’t have enough problems trying to win against the VC.”

Hoping to bolster South Vietnam’s prospects for victory, U.S. military personnel had jumped from 16,263 in 1963 to 23,310 in 1964, and by the end 1965 would reach 184,314.

The Christmas Bombing

Robbins took pains to contrast the war news presented in the States with reality on the ground, whether in the portrayal of Saigon politics or daily dangers American personnel faced.

“We in the embassy were in no danger whatsoever,” Robbins wrote after a bomb exploded Aug. 25, 1964, on the fifth floor of Saigon’s Caravelle Hotel. It didn’t kill anyone, but several were wounded. Reassuring her parents, she remarked that the hotel’s rooftop was still probably the safest place in the city for dinner. Robbins wrote about meeting military personnel who volunteered for service in Vietnam, the “very unusual group” of helicopter pilots “you’re always reading and hearing about,” and the close-knit American community that came together for dinners and dancing.

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

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“Well, I was here during a coup—or at least an attempted one—it’s pretty busy in the embassy at a time like that,” she noted. Robbins mentioned a military parade on the anniversary of the successful Nov. 2, 1963, coup that overthrew and assassinated Diem. During “the night of our party it was a 2 a.m. curfew instead of 12 midnight and so we were all outside and could hear the gunfire at Bien Hoa.”

In December 1964 Robbins marked her nine months in-country with a renewed sense of purpose. She meant to attend Christmas Eve Mass, but two men in a four-door sedan changed those plans. She explained: “I didn’t go to Xmas service because the Brink’s BOQ [bachelor officers’ quarters housed in the Brinks Hotel] was just bombed at 6 p.m. and it was all but impossible to get to church from where I live. I heard the explosion and at first thought it was thunder, but when the radio went off the air I knew it was an explosion and a large one. Not a very pleasant way to start the holiday.”

Two Viet Cong had driven a car with 200 pounds of explosives to the hotel, parked it and detonated the explosives. Two Americans—one military, one civilian—were killed, and dozens of Americans and South Vietnamese were injured.

Killed In the Embassy

With the arrival of the new year, Robbins pushed through a brief bout of homesickness and immersed herself in her work. She considered extending her stay in Vietnam.

All the while the situation in Saigon grew increasingly fraught. In February 1965, as conditions deteriorated, dependents of American diplomats and military personnel were evacuated. Robbins’ letters became more serious.

She wrote: “Many demonstrations are backed and infiltrated by the VC. It’s sort of like in the U.S. with the communists in some of the clubs, societies, etc. who are influencing and persuading in a sort of behind-the-scenes act. You don’t know who they all are, and so that makes it twice as difficult to fight them. Even then the American advisors are out in the field fighting with the Army of the Vietnam North—they don’t know who the enemy is. During the day he may be a simple farmer with his rice paddies and when the night comes he is the enemy.”

On the morning of March 30, 1965, Robbins sat at her metal desk on the second floor of the U.S. Embassy on Pasteur Street. Gunfire erupted outside. According to accounts of the incident, a car that sagged from being overloaded was parked too close to the embassy.

A policeman ordered the driver to leave, but the man refused. The officer fired at the vehicle. Suddenly a man on a scooter pulled up alongside the car and shot at the police officer.

President Lyndon B. Johnson sent a telegram to Robbin’s parents expressing his sympathy. Among the other condolences was a telegram from Secretary of State Dean Rusk, as the government maintained her cover.

Hearing the commotion outside their office, Robbins and other CIA secretaries scurried to the window. As Robbins got close, 300 pounds of explosives in the car exploded. In the blast, a piece of iron grating covering the windows broke free, sailed through the air like a javelin and impaled the 21-year-old CIA employee, killing her as she looked out the window.

Outside, firemen sprinted toward the building, ambulances screeched to a stop, and more shots rang through the air. A young American woman, blood streaming from her ear, stumbled around dazed. On the sidewalk, shattered glass sparkled in rivulets of blood. A man on a stretcher held a cigarette between nicotine-stained fingers.

It was the most brazen attack against American interests in South Vietnam to date. The bomb killed 21 people—Robbins, Petty Officer 2nd Class Manolito Castillo, a Filipino serving in the U.S. Navy, and 19 South Vietnamese. Additionally, 183 were wounded.

Viet Cong Arrested

The South Vietnamese police arrested one of the men involved in the bombing, Nguyen Van Hai, and took him to a local hospital. Hai admitted he was with the Viet Cong, and a military tribunal sentenced him to death. In retaliation, the North Vietnamese announced they would execute Gustav Hertz, a 46-year-old American aid mission officer they had taken hostage.

At the urging of the U.S. government, the South Vietnamese did not execute Hai. Nor was Hertz executed, although he died of malaria in 1967 while in captivity.

On May 25, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation appropriating $1 million to build a new embassy compound on a more secure site. Johnson would not yet support military leaders’ push for retaliatory raids on North Vietnam but vowed that “the Saigon bombing fires our will to fight on.”

Robbins’ parents turned on the evening news just as reports were being aired about a bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Buford phoned a contact at the State Department to learn more. An hour later, Warren came home and realized by the look on his parents’ faces that something serious had happened.

Around midnight Warren closed his bedroom door and tried to sleep. Two hours later, Buford called the family’s pastor and asked him to keep them company while they waited for news. At 4 a.m. there was a knock on the door. Opening it, Buford and Ruth saw a State Department official standing on the stoop. They crumpled. Their daughter was dead.

Robbins’ coffin is transported to Chapel Hill Cemetery outside Denver on Sunday, April 4, 1965. About 325 family members, friends and neighbors attended the services. On April 3, a service honoring Robbins and a sailor killed in the blast was held in Saigon.

In Saigon, on Thursday, April 1, a South Vietnamese and an American honor guard stood at attention during a short ceremony at the American chapel at Tan Son Nhut. Acting U.S. Ambassador U. Alexis Johnson, whose face had been cut in the blast, stared at the caskets holding Robbins and Castillo. Assistant Prime Minister of South Vietnam Tran Van Do pinned the Vietnamese medal of gallantry on the flag-draped coffins.

After the plane bearing Robbins’ body touched down at Stapleton, her parents and brother drove to the funeral home. A State Department official escorting the 21-year-old’s remains met the family there and gently explained that one of the handles on the coffin broke in transit. He asked Ruth if she wanted to see her daughter. She shook her head. Buford and Warren also declined.

Traveling To Washington

After finalizing the funeral arrangements, the three drove home to discover local and national press camped across the street. For the next three days Buford and Ruth remained cloistered inside their home, leaving Warren, now 18, to run the occasional errand and bring in the mail. Among the many condolences were telegrams from Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

Three days later on April 4, 1965, the funeral procession wended its way to Chapel Hill Cemetery on the outskirts of Denver. At the grave, Ruth, wearing sunglasses and a white hat, pressed her white-gloved hands to her mouth. Buford, in a black suit, bowed his head.

That Sunday, the University Hills Lutheran Church dedicated its service to Robbins. State Department co-workers, friends and family donated an illuminated cross that was affixed to the wall behind the altar.

Weeks later, Buford, Ruth and Warren traveled to Washington. The family had learned only recently that their daughter worked for the CIA, not the State Department. Since Robbins was stationed inside the U.S. Embassy, Rusk wanted to meet her family.

He presented the parents with an engraved plaque: “Barbara A. Robbins (Posthumous) Who gave her life for her country at the American Embassy, Saigon, Viet-Nam, On March 30, 1965.” Rusk and the family then moved to the dining room for a meal of lamb chops and apple pie with cheddar cheese on top. “It wasn’t a depressing thing,” Warren said. “It was nice for my parents.”

The CIA’s Memorial Wall

Thirty years later, on June 1, 1995, the Robbins family returned to the nation’s capital to attend a private service in honor of their daughter, who had a memorial star carved into the CIA’s Memorial Wall, which recognizes agency employees who died in service to their country. But Robbins’ name was not in the accompanying Book of Honor that lists fallen CIA officers.

Warren said a CIA official told the family that Robbins’ name was not listed for what the agency termed “cover considerations,” an indication that some related documents had not been declassified yet. Buford wished to see his daughter’s name inscribed, but he died in 1998. Robbins’ name wasn’t listed until 2011. By then, Warren’s mother had died. He was the only one alive for the ceremony, held in the agency’s hall on May 23, 2011.

CIA Director Leon Panetta said: “To this day, Barbara is the youngest officer memorialized on our Wall. She was the first American woman to die in Vietnam and the first woman in our Agency’s history to make the ultimate sacrifice. Nine women since then have fallen in service to our mission. Today we remember them all, with great love and admiration.”

In 1974, the CIA dedicated a Memorial Wall at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to honor fallen employees with a star carved into a marble wall. Originally proposed to recognize CIA officers killed in Vietnam and Laos, the concept was expanded to honor all who died in the line of duty. The initial stars represented 31 members killed since the agency’s founding in 1947. Today there are 139 stars.

Displayed with the wall is a “Book of Honor,” containing the names of those memorialized with a star. Some stars don’t have corresponding names in the book because they remain classified even in death to protect intelligence sources and methods.

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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