Quotes of the Day:

"I shall ever repeat it, that mankind are governed not by extremes, buyt principles of moderation."

- Montesquieu

"The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress, and grows brave by reflection."

- Thomas Paine

"A teacher can never truly teach unless he is still learning himself. A lamp can never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its own flame.

The teacher who has come to the end of his subject, who has no living traffic with his knowledge but merely repeats his lesson to his students, can only load their minds, he cannot quicken them."

- Rabindranath Tagore

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JANUARY 16, 2023

2. Understanding Russia

3. Blinken to test limits of China’s diplomatic engagement on Feb. 5-6 Beijing trip

4. No stalemate in Ukraine, at least not yet

5. A Glimpse at What a China-Centric World Would Look Like

6. Why America will never give up on war

7. Expanded US training for Ukraine forces begins in Germany

8. China records 1st population fall in decades as births drop

9. Air Force’s new rescue helicopter notches first saves in Africa

10. #Reviewing The American Way of Irregular Warfare

11. This WWII OSS manual shows that being annoying at work is the best form of sabotage

12. Ukrainian civilians vanish and languish in Russian-run jails

13. Military considering back pay for troops kicked out over vax mandate

14. B-1B Bomber Flies to Pacific and Back, Integrates with Japan’s F-15s

15. China Undergoing ‘Build-Up in Every Warfare Area,’ Says ONI Commander

16. FBI raided Chinese ‘police station’ in NYC: Report

17. Taiwan’s Outlying Islands Are at Risk

18. What TikTok Has on You

19. Why Can't America Accept An Imperfect World?

20. Analysis | The worry in Davos: Globalization is under siege

21. Joe Biden's Ukraine Strategy Is A Success

22. Industrial espionage: How China sneaks out America's technology secrets

23. Russia’s Energy Clout Is Waning, Weakening Its Global Influence

24. Taliban start buying blue ticks on Twitter

25. New details link George Santos to cousin of sanctioned Russian oligarch

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JANUARY 16, 2023

Maps/graphics: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-january-16-2023

Key Takeaways

• The Kremlin continues to challenge Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s claims that only Wagner forces seized Soledar, Donetsk Oblast.
• Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov possibly indirectly accused Prigozhin of deliberately exposing the conflict between the Russian MoD and Wagner in the Russian information space.
• Prigozhin continued his efforts to undermine faith in the Russian MoD and Putin-aligned actors.
• NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg stated that the Russo-Ukrainian War is in a “decisive phase," which does not entail that the war is in its final phase or that Russian forces are planning to employ all resources in impending actions.
• A prominent milblogger revived pre-February 2022 discussions of Kremlin intent to return close Putin ally Viktor Medvedchuk to power in Ukraine.
• The appointment of Russian Chief of the General Staff, Army General Valery Gerasimov as theater commander of Russian forces in Ukraine notably did not spark a significant wave of criticism within the Russian nationalist milblogger discourse.
• Russian forces continued to launch localized assaults to regain lost positions around Svatove and in the Kupyansk direction as Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations around Kreminna.
• Russian forces made additional territorial gains north of Bakhmut and may be intensifying attacks south of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka.
• Russian forces continued ground attacks near Avdiivka and Donetsk City.
• Russian forces continued efforts accumulate manpower in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast and to develop new logistic routes between Russia and southern Ukraine.
• Low discipline among Russian forces continues to directly endanger Russian soldiers and limit force effectiveness.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JANUARY 16, 2023

Jan 16, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

understandingwar.org

Kateryna Stepanenko, Angela Howard, Grace Mappes, George Barros, and Mason Clark

January 16, 7:15 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.

The Kremlin continues to publicly challenge Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s claims that Wagner Group forces were solely responsible for capturing Soledar, Donetsk Oblast, on January 12. Russian President Vladimir Putin attributed the success on the frontlines to Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and General Staff plans when responding to a journalist’s question on January 15 regarding Russian advances in Soledar.[1] Putin’s statement was aired live on state-controlled TV and was likely a deliberate effort to undermine Prigozhin’s influence within the Russian information space, given that Putin has previously refrained from commenting on tactical advances in Ukraine. Putin may have also sought to demonstrate he retains control over traditional Russian mass media, while Prigozhin continues to grow an audience on Telegram and other social media networks. The Russian MoD, in turn, also continued to report that Russian Southern Military District (SMD) assault detachments and Russian airborne troops are attacking Ukrainian positions around Bakhmut and likely deliberately excluded mentioning Wagner forces in its January 15 daily briefing.[2]

Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov possibly indirectly accused Prigozhin of deliberately exposing the conflict between the Russian MoD and Wagner in the Russian information space. Peskov attempted to dispel reports of an ongoing conflict between Prigozhin and the Russian MoD, stating on January 16 that these reports are “products of information manipulations.”[3] Peskov, however, added that while most of such manipulations come from Russia’s ”enemies,” the Kremlin has ”friends” who also behave in a similar way. Peskov’s statement may have been tacitly aimed at Prigozhin, whose criticism of the Russian MoD is growing increasingly brazen. Peskov also continued Putin’s efforts to undermine Wagner’s effort to advance a narrative that only Wagner forces were responsible for capturing Soledar, noting that Russians will remember both Russian servicemembers and Wagner forces for their achievements.

Prigozhin is continuing his efforts to undermine faith in the Russian MoD and in Putin-aligned actors. Prigozhin directly responded to Peskov’s statement in an interview question about the MoD-Prigozhin conflict, stating that he has no reason to not trust Peskov.[4] Prigozhin could have easily disproved reports of the conflict by simply denying them, but continued his tactic of using deliberately vague messaging in order to generate more discussion within the Russian information space, ultimately aimed at undermining confidence in the MoD and Putin. Prigozhin also presented medals to Wagner forces for the capture of Soledar on January 15, including symbolically awarding a fighter who previously received a medal of courage from Putin.[5]

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg stated that the Russo-Ukrainian War is in a “decisive phase” on January 15.[6] Stoltenburg told German news outlet Handelsblatt on January 15 that NATO countries recognize the current situation and must “provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs to win.”[7] Stoltenberg’s statement supports ISW’s January 15 assessment that the Kremlin likely intends to take decisive strategic action in 2023.[8] Stoltenberg’s statement does not entail that the war is in its final phase or that Russian forces are planning to employ all available resources in impending actions. Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications representative Andriy Yusov remarked on January 15 that Russian President Vladimir Putin has recognized that Russian forces cannot take Ukraine quickly and is considering waging a drawn-out war of attrition.[9] ISW noted on January 15 that the Kremlin retains its long-term maximalist goals to seize Ukraine and is likely considering multiple courses of action to achieve those goals.[10]

Stoltenburg dismissed German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s repeated concerns that the Western provision of weapons to Ukraine could cause a nuclear escalation. Stoltenburg stated that “this risk of using nuclear weapons is low” and that countries including China conveyed to the Kremlin that “nuclear weapons must not be used.”[11] Stoltenburg’s statements align with continuous ISW assessments that the Kremlin is extremely unlikely to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.[12]

A prominent milblogger revived pre-February 2022 discussions of Kremlin intent to return close Putin ally Viktor Medvedchuk to power in Ukraine. Igor Girkin, a former Russian officer and prominent nationalist voice, claimed on January 16 that the Kremlin hopes to place Medvedchuk at the head of an alternative Ukrainian government.[13] Girkin and Kremlin-linked milblogger Sasha Kots critiqued Medvedchuk’s suitability and the feasibility of him ever taking such a position.[14] This conversation resembles prior media speculation of a potential Kremlin plan to install disgraced former Ukrainian dictator Viktor Yanukovych as the leader of Ukraine in early 2022.[15]

The appointment of the Russian Chief of the General Staff, Army General Valery Gerasimov, as theater commander of Russian forces in Ukraine notably did not spark a significant wave of criticism within the Russian nationalist milblogger discourse. Milbloggers largely claimed that Gerasimov’s appointment signifies that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is retaking responsibility for the war.[16] The milbloggers connected Gerasimov’s appointment to several ongoing issues including internal MoD tensions; conflict between the MoD and the Wagner Group; and the poor state of the war.[17] Milbloggers adopted a defeatist stance regarding Gerasimov’s appointment, noting that the fate of Gerasimov’s own military career rests on the long-term outcome of the war.[18] Some more critical nationalist voices stated that Gerasimov’s appointment is an example of the Kremlin’s inability to learn from its historic defeats, given that Gerasimov failed to keep occupied territories in northern Ukraine at the start of the war, but such discourse has been limited.[19] Milbloggers have largely expressed hope that Gerasimov will continue to cooperate with his predecessor (now his deputy commander), Commander of the Russian Aerospace Forces Army General Sergey Surovikin and continue missile strikes against Ukrainian energy infrastructure.[20] The mixed hopeful but apathetic milblogger response may indicate their hopes that the Russian MoD and the Kremlin are beginning to realistically envision the war in Ukraine by introducing a centralized command structure to take charge of the military campaign.

Key Takeaways

• The Kremlin continues to challenge Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s claims that only Wagner forces seized Soledar, Donetsk Oblast.
• Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov possibly indirectly accused Prigozhin of deliberately exposing the conflict between the Russian MoD and Wagner in the Russian information space.
• Prigozhin continued his efforts to undermine faith in the Russian MoD and Putin-aligned actors.
• NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg stated that the Russo-Ukrainian War is in a “decisive phase," which does not entail that the war is in its final phase or that Russian forces are planning to employ all resources in impending actions.
• A prominent milblogger revived pre-February 2022 discussions of Kremlin intent to return close Putin ally Viktor Medvedchuk to power in Ukraine.
• The appointment of Russian Chief of the General Staff, Army General Valery Gerasimov as theater commander of Russian forces in Ukraine notably did not spark a significant wave of criticism within the Russian nationalist milblogger discourse.
• Russian forces continued to launch localized assaults to regain lost positions around Svatove and in the Kupyansk direction as Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations around Kreminna.
• Russian forces made additional territorial gains north of Bakhmut and may be intensifying attacks south of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka.
• Russian forces continued ground attacks near Avdiivka and Donetsk City.
• Russian forces continued efforts accumulate manpower in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast and to develop new logistic routes between Russia and southern Ukraine.
• Low discipline among Russian forces continues to directly endanger Russian soldiers and limit force effectiveness.

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 forces continued to launch localized assaults to regain lost positions around Svatove and in the Kupyansk direction on January 15 and January 16. A prominent Russian milblogger reported that the frontline did not change significantly in the Kupyansk direction.[21] A Russian proxy source claimed on January 16 that Russian Special Forces elements gained control over Novoselivske (about 14km northwest of Svatove).[22] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces lack sufficient military equipment and personnel in the Kupyansk direction, stating that one tank battalion of the 26th Tank Regiment of the 47th Guards Tank Division has only 30 personnel and 10 operating T-80BV tanks remaining on the frontline (out of a regular complement of roughly 30 tanks).[23] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that a Russian S-300 missile failed to launch and damaged a residential building in Novopskov, Starobilsk Raion in Russian rear positions in Luhansk Oblast.[24]

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations near Kreminna on January 15 and January 16. The UK Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported that fighting in the Kreminna sector continued over the weekend, noting that Ukrainian forces are continuing to advance on the eastern edge of Kreminna.[25] The Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Administration reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian assault in the vicinity of Kreminna on January 16, and Ukrainian military officials stated that Russian forces launched unsuccessful assaults on Makiivka and Bilohorivka, approximately 23km northwest and 13km south of Kreminna, respectively.[26] A prominent Russian milblogger, in turn, reported that elements of the Russian 3rd Motorized Rifle Division of the 20th Combined Arms Army conducted an unspecified offensive operation on the Ploschanka-Makiivka line on January 15.[27] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces attacked Ukrainian positions in the Chervopopivka area (about 8km northwest of Kreminna) and conducted a successful assault on unspecified Ukrainian defensive positions west of Kreminna.[28] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian attack near Dibrova.[29] A Russian milblogger also amplified claimed drone footage of Russian artillery striking Ukrainian positions southeast of Dibrova and claimed that Russian forces continue to use drones despite challenges due to low temperatures and bad weather.[30]

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 made additional territorial gains north of Bakhmut on January 15-16. Wagner Group forces captured the Sil railway station northwest of Soledar on January 16.[31] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces captured the entirety of Sil on January 16, though ISW is unable to verify this claim at this time.[32] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces captured a Ukrainian stronghold west of Berestove (15 km northeast of Soledar) on January 15, but did not provide evidence.[33] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks against Soledar, Sil, and Krasnopolivka (just north of Sil) on January 15 and 16.[34]

Russian forces may be intensifying attacks near Klishchiivka (southwest of Bakhmut) after capturing Soledar (north of Bakhmut) in a new effort to encircle Bakhmut, after months of ineffective frontal assaults. A prominent Russian milblogger claimed on January 15 that Russian forces are attacking Klishchiivka and noted that Russian advances in southern Bakhmut will enable Russian forces to threaten Ukrainian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) on the T0504 highway from Chasiv Yar to Bakhmut.[35] Russian sources reported that heavy fighting continued in Klishchiivka on January 16.[36] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks against Bakhmut itself, Klishchiivka, and Mayorsk on January 15 and 16.[37] Geolocated combat footage published on January 15 indicates Russian forces have made marginal advances in southeastern Bakhmut near the Bakhmut garbage dump.[38] A Russian source claimed that Russian forces made additional territorial gains in southern Bakhmut on Maly Troitsky Lane, north of Opytne.[39]

Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area on January 15-16. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks against Krasnohorivka, Novobakhmutivka, Pobyeda, Vodyane, and Marinka on January 15 and 16.[40] Russian milbloggers reported that elements of the Russian 42nd Motor Rifle Division, 150th Motor Rifle Division, and the 5th Brigade of the Donetsk People’s Republic 1st Army Corps are fighting difficult battles to advance in Marinka but that Ukrainian forces are repelling Russian attacks as of January 16.[41]

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

Russian forces continued to accumulate manpower in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast on January 15 and 16. Ukrainian Kherson Oblast Military Administration Advisor Serhiy Khlan reported on January 15 that Russian forces increased their presence on the east bank of the Dnipro River and that Wagner Group elements arrived in Kherson Oblast.[42] ISW has not observed any other reports of Wagner Group forces in Kherson Oblast at this time. Russian forces continued routine artillery fire against areas in west (right) bank Kherson Oblast, including Kherson City and its environs.[43]

Russian occupation authorities claimed that Russian air defenses shot down 10 Ukrainian UAVs over the Black Sea near Sevastopol on January 15 and 16.[44] There is no indication that any of the UAVs hit their targets.

Russian forces continued efforts to develop new logistic routes between Russia and southern Ukraine, likely to disperse their lines of communication against Ukrainian strikes. The Russian occupation head of Kherson Oblast, Vladimir Saldo, claimed that Russian authorities finished restoring the Henichesk-Arabat Spit bridge, improving Russian transport logistics.[45] Saldo also claimed that occupation authorities are constructing a large road connecting rear areas in Kherson, Zaporizhia, and Donetsk oblasts to Crimea and Rostov-on-Don.[46]

Russian forces continued routine fire against areas in Zaporizhia, Mykolaiv, and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts on January 15 and 16.[47] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces struck industrial infrastructure in Zaporizhzhia City with S-300 missiles on January 16.[48] A Russian source claimed that Ukrainian forces struck Berdyansk on January 15.[49]

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

Low discipline among Russian forces continues to directly endanger Russian soldiers and reduce force effectiveness. Several Russian mainstream and opposition sources reported that a senior sergeant serving as a platoon commander stationed in Tonenkoye, Belgorod Oblast accidentally detonated an RGD-5 grenade on January 15 while holding it to show off his authority.[50] The blast set off a second explosion at a nearby ammunition storage site, killed three Russian soldiers, and injured 16 soldiers. The whereabouts of 8 soldiers remain unknown. [51]

A prominent Russian milblogger claimed on January 16 that Russian commanders are engaged in ongoing fruitless confrontations with servicemembers over defiance of orders to shave.[52] The milblogger claimed that soldiers in one assault aviation regiment swore at a superior officer who gave such an order and faced no disciplinary consequences, demonstrating lax discipline in Russian units.[53] Russian commanders‘ efforts to confront violations of shaving protocols demonstrates continued Russian difficulties implementing basic military protocol while Russian forces face dire logistical, organizational, and efficiency challenges. The milblogger called for systemic intervention at the highest levels of Russian command staffs and systems to eliminate Russian commanders’ efforts to show off insignificant accomplishments to senior leadership.[54]

The Ukrainian General Staff reported on January 16 that Russian authorities will launch new force generation efforts to replenish Wagner Group and BARS (Russian Combat Reserve of the Country) detachments who are suffering significant losses on the frontlines.[55] This force generation effort would represent a notable further step toward Russian recognition of and investment in non-traditional Russian military groups. Wagner and BARS units are predominantly engaged in the most combat-intensive positions around Bakhmut and along the Svatove-Kreminna line.

Increasing official concern over continued refusals to fight by Russian soldiers has likely motivated Russian authorities to publicize their punishment capabilities. Kremlin newswire TASS reported on January 16 that Russia’s Central Military District is organizing disciplinary guardhouses for mobilized soldiers who are arrested for or suspected of a crime.[56] Russian officials have previously maintained such detention centers covertly, as ISW has previously reported.[57]

Some Russian residents continue limited resistance to Russian mobilization and defense production. Video footage published to social media on January 14 shows Russian mobilized men from the Republic of Bashkortostan complaining that authorities sent them to the frontlines near Kreminna without training, radios, or fuel, resulting in their unit losing 50% of its personnel in 10 days.[58] Independent news outlet Meduza reported on January 16 that residents of Izhevsk, Udmurt Republic published a petition opposing authorities’ plans to convert a local shopping center into a military drone production site.[59] The residents claimed that announcing the location of military construction poses a safety risk to residents.[60] Russian news outlet Baza stated that unidentified actors committed an arson attack against relay cabinets installed on a railway in Buryatia on January 16 and near Ulan-Ude on January 13.[61] These attacks may have been attempts to limit the transit of military supplies.

Russian authorities may begin offering naturalization as a Russian citizen for “voluntary” enlistment in the Russian Armed Forces. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on January 16 that foreign citizens in line to receive Russian citizenship automatically receive citizenship if they enlist.[62]

Wagner Group deserter Andrey Medvedev escaped to Norway on January 12 and publicized reports criticizing Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin and group’s brutal disciplinary procedures.[63] Medvedev claimed that he commanded the detachment responsible for the highly-publicized murder of Wagner deserter Yevgeniy Nuzhin by sledgehammer.[64] Medvedev stated that he knows of 10 instances where Wagner forces killed their own members for refusing to fight, including one instance where Wagner soldiers were executed while attempting to flee from a hospital in occupied Donetsk Oblast. A Russian milblogger questioned whether Medvedev’s escape was a Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) mistake or an intentional effort to diminish Prigozhin’s reputation, though ISW cannot assess the conditions of Medvedev’s escape at this time.[65]

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)

Russian occupation authorities continue to nationalize assets in occupied Ukraine for Russian military needs. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on January 16 that Russian forces seized a civilian medical facility in Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast for military use.[66] Ukrainian Mariupol Mayoral Advisor Petro Andryushchenko stated on January 16 that “effectively the only hospital” in Mariupol, Mariupol City Hospital No. 2, restarted operations for the Russian military and is turning away civilians.[67] Andryushchenko stated that the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) authorities seized arable land from Ukrainian farmers to give to Russian veterans who fought in Ukraine.[68]

Russian occupation authorities continue to forcibly relocate and restrict the movements of Ukrainian civilians in occupied territories. The Ukrainian Resistance Center stated on January 15 that occupation authorities are intensifying their deportations and forced evacuations of Ukrainian civilians from occupied territories, and that Russian authorities allocated extra funds to Krasnodar Krai and Voronezh, Sverlovsk, Kursk, and Rostov oblasts to accommodate deported Ukrainians.[69] The Ukrainian Mayor of Vasylivka, Serhiy Kaliman, stated on January 15 that occupation authorities deported five civilians from Shelky, Vasylivka Raion in Zaporizhia Oblast to an unknown location.[70] A Russian milblogger published footage of Russian occupation authorities sentencing Ukrainian civilians to expulsion from occupied Zaporizhia Oblast to unspecified locations for “activities aimed at discrediting” the Russian state and occupation authorities.[71] The Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Administration stated that Russian occupation authorities closed entry and exit points to occupied Rubizhne and Lysychansk from the surrounding occupied territory, only allowing civilians with local registration to pass through the checkpoints.[72] A Ukrainian source published a picture of a supposed occupation Kherson Oblast Ministry of Health document purporting that occupation authorities plan to “evacuate” medical facilities in settlements along the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River to areas further in the Russian rear.[73]

Russian occupation authorities likely continue to struggle to care for displaced civilians within occupied territories. Russian occupation head of Kherson Oblast Vladimir Saldo stated on January 15 that over 30,000 Ukrainian civilians live in temporary accommodation centers along the Black Sea and Sea of Azov coastlines in Kherson Oblast.[74] Saldo stated that the civilians lack winter clothing as the civilians believed they would only be in these centers for a short time, and that Russian occupation authorities would provide them with necessary winter supplies.[75] Russian authorities previously gave housing vouchers to displaced civilians from southern Ukraine, as ISW has previously reported.[76]

Occupation authorities continue measures to integrate occupation institutions and infrastructure into their Russian counterparts. The Russian Ministry of Digital Development claimed on January 16 that all Russian mobile operators are now functional in occupied Ukraine.[77] Russian authorities will likely force Ukrainian civilians to switch to Russian operators, which the Russian government can better monitor and use to restrict the information space in occupied parts of Ukraine. Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) head Leonid Pasechnik announced on January 16 that LNR and Russian authorities met to discuss the LNR budget and financial integration with the Russian federal government.[78] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian authorities in Ukraine are blackmailing Ukrainian civilians into using Russian vehicle license plates.[79]

ISW will continue to report daily observed indicators consistent with the current assessed most dangerous course of action (MDCOA): a renewed invasion of northern Ukraine possibly aimed at Kyiv.

ISW’s December 15 MDCOA warning forecast about a potential Russian offensive against northern Ukraine in winter 2023 remains a worst-case scenario within the forecast cone. ISW currently assesses the risk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine from Belarus as low, but possible, and the risk of Belarusian direct involvement as very low. This new section in the daily update is not in itself a forecast or assessment. It lays out the daily observed indicators we are using to refine our assessments and forecasts, which we expect to update regularly. Our assessment that the MDCOA remains unlikely has not changed. We will update this header if the assessment changes.

Observed indicators for the MDCOA in the past 24 hours:

• Nothing significant to report.

Observed ambiguous indicators for MDCOA in the past 24 hours:

• The Ukrainian General Staff reported on January 16 that Russian forces strengthened their combat aviation group in Belarus under the guise of joint exercises and that the threat of Russian missile attacks and airstrikes from Belarusian airspace is increasing.[80]
• The Belarusian Ministry of Defense announced on January 16 that Russian and Belarusian military aviation began joint flight and tactical exercises in Belarus.[81] The exercise tasks include aerial reconnaissance, joint air patrols, air support mission for ground forces, tactical airborne landings, and supply delivery and medical evacuation tasks.[82]
• Belarusian forces continue conducting exercises in Belarus. The Belarusian Ministry of Defense announced on January 16 that elements of the Belarusian 120th Separate Guards Mechanized Brigade deployed to the Belarusian 227th Combined Arms Training Ground in Barysaw, Belarus, for unspecified combat exercises.[83]

Observed counter-indicators for the MDCOA in the past 24 hours:

• The Ukrainian General Staff reiterated that it has not observed Russian forces in Belarus forming a strike group as of January 16.[84]

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.

[3] https://www.militarynews dot ru/story.asp?rid=1&nid=587477&lang=RU; https://www.interfax-russia dot ru/specoperaciya-na-ukraine/kreml-soobshcheniya-o-konflikte-minoborony-i-chvk-vagner-produkt-informacionnyh-spekulyaciy

[6] https://www.handelsblatt dot com/politik/international/nato-chef-jens-stoltenberg-wir-leben-jetzt-in-einer-gefaehrlicheren-welt/28923730.html?utm_term=organisch&utm_campaign=standard&utm_content=ne&utm_medium=sm&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1673794052; https://www.axios.com/2023/01/16/ukrainian-forces-expanded-us-military-t...

[7] https://www.handelsblatt dot com/politik/international/nato-chef-jens-stoltenberg-wir-leben-jetzt-in-einer-gefaehrlicheren-welt/28923730.html?utm_term=organisch&utm_campaign=standard&utm_content=ne&utm_medium=sm&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1673794052; https://www.axios.com/2023/01/16/ukrainian-forces-expanded-us-military-t...

[9] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/kerivnytstvo-rosii-rozumiie-shcho-plan-shvydkoho-zakhoplennia-ukrainy-nezdiisnennyi.html

[11] https://www.handelsblatt dot com/politik/international/nato-chef-jens-stoltenberg-wir-leben-jetzt-in-einer-gefaehrlicheren-welt/28923730.html?utm_term=organisch&utm_campaign=standard&utm_content=ne&utm_medium=sm&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1673794052; https://www.axios.com/2023/01/16/ukrainian-forces-expanded-us-military-t...

[13] https://donrf.livejournal dot com/1301915.html?utm_source=vksharing&utm_medium=social; https://t.me/strelkovii/3743

[14] https://t.me/rybar/42746; https://t.me/sashakots/38095; https://donrf.livejournal dot com/1301915.html?utm_source=vksharing&utm_medium=social; https://t.me/strelkovii/3743

[15] https://fortune.com/2022/03/02/viktor-yanukovych-yanukovich-putin-put-ba...; https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/us-calls-alleged-russia-plot-install-...; https://www.tribuneindia dot com/news/world/kremlin-planning-to-declare-ex-president-yanukovych-as-new-head-of-ukraine-374471; https://worldcrunch dot com/world-affairs/putin-ukraine-yanukovych; https://belsat dot eu/en/news/24-01-2022-uk-exposes-kremlin-s-plan-to-install-pro-russian-leader-in-ukraine/; https://www.unian dot net/politics/rossiyskiy-publicist-raskryl-hitryy-plan-kremlya-i-obyasnil-pri-chem-tut-yanukovich-novosti-ukraina-11902320.html; https://www.ekhokavkaza dot com/a/31732082.html; https://www dot dsnews.ua/world/kreml-hoche-zrobiti-yanukovicha-prezidentom-zmi-02032022-453402; https://www.ukr dot net/news/details/politics/95059362.html

[50]https://t.me/tass_agency/176712; https://t.me/ENews112/12597; https://t.me/vchkogpu/35952; https://t.me/news_sirena/9783; https://t.me/bazabazon/15386; https://notes.citeam.org/mobilization-jan-13-15; https://meduza dot io/feature/2023/01/15/v-belgorodskoy-oblasti-serzhant-podorval-granatu-chtoby-povysit-svoy-avtoritet-sredi-drugih-mobilizovannyh-troe-chelovek-pogibli-esche-16-postradali

[51] https://t.me/tass_agency/176712; https://notes.citeam.org/mobilization-jan-13-15; https://t.me/news_sirena/9783 ; https://meduza dot io/feature/2023/01/15/v-belgorodskoy-oblasti-serzhant-podorval-granatu-chtoby-povysit-svoy-avtoritet-sredi-drugih-mobilizovannyh-troe-chelovek-pogibli-esche-16-postradali

[56] https://tass dot ru/obschestvo/16808577

[59] https://meduza dot io/news/2023/01/16/v-izhevske-zapustili-sbor-podpisey-protiv-proizvodstva-dronov-na-meste-torgovogo-kompleksa-sredi-zhiloy-zastroyki-v-tsentre-goroda

[60] https://meduza dot io/news/2023/01/16/v-izhevske-zapustili-sbor-podpisey-protiv-proizvodstva-dronov-na-meste-torgovogo-kompleksa-sredi-zhiloy-zastroyki-v-tsentre-goroda

[63] https://meduza dot io/feature/2023/01/16/gulagu-net-byvshiy-naemnik-chvk-vagnera-sbezhal-v-norvegiyu-i-poprosil-politicheskogo-ubezhischa

[64] https://meduza dot io/feature/2023/01/16/gulagu-net-byvshiy-naemnik-chvk-vagnera-sbezhal-v-norvegiyu-i-poprosil-politicheskogo-ubezhischa; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[66] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2023/01/16/rosiyany-prodovzhuyut-zakryvaty-czyvilni-likarni-na-tot/

[69] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2023/01/15/okupanty-zbilshyly-tempy-deportacziyi-ukrayincziv-do-rf/

[70] https://suspilne dot media/359328-rosiani-deportuvali-kilkoh-ludej-z-okupovanoi-teritorii-zaporizkoi-oblasti/

[77] https://ria dot ru/20230116/operatory-1845308698.html

[79] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2023/01/16/na-tot-ukrayincziv-vidmovlyayutsya-vid-rosijskyh-nomernyh-znakiv/

understandingwar.org

2. Understanding Russia

Understanding Russia | Small Wars Journal

Small Wars Journal

Understanding Russia

By Yurij Holowinsky

On Saturday, January 14, 2023, Russia destroyed an apartment building in Dnipro, Ukraine with a KH-22 missile launched from a strategic bomber.

The strike killed 36, injured 75, and hope of finding additional survivors among the wreckage is fading.

This latest atrocity, evil, insanity, war-crime, comes after nearly a year-long war initiated by Russia on February 24, 2022, with an unprovoked attack against Ukraine. Why? What did Russia intend to achieve? I would argue that the goal, as a first step, was total domination of Ukraine and her submission to the will of one man in Moscow. Then, the next move would have been a push into Europe to bring the former vassal states of the Warsaw Pact back under Russian control. After that, who knows.

This is not conjecture. Putin did not mince words when in 2005 he stated that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century. If one listened and analyzed and understood his message one may have deduced that he wanted to turn back the clock of history. Two years later, in his speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, he criticized US dominance in world affairs and called for the end of a unipolar world. He was telegraphing his intent to the world much as Hitler did in his Mein Kampf. But, just as the world ignored the not so subtle hints from the Austrian corporal Schicklgruber, AKA Hitler, so once again in the first decade of the twenty-first century, it paid no attention to what the old mid-level former KGB officer Putin was saying.

In early 2014 Putin made his move. Troops poured into the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine and “little green men” with no identifying military insignia occupied Crimea. Ukraine resisted in the east and achieved a military stalemate after Russia moved into the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. A weak Ukraine prevented further Russian incursion at the time but lost Crimea. In March of 2014 Russia boldly announced the annexation of the peninsula; an illegal act that has not been recognized by any normal country of the world other than Russia and a few rogue states.

Now, after eleven months of horrific suffering and unbelievable resistance by Ukraine and a people who just won’t quit, the world remains in awe of a nation that still stands when, in 2022, most pundits were advocating that Ukraine reach a compromise with Russia. What these well-meaning experts did not and still do not understand is that Russia is not like other countries and does not operate according to an internationally accepted code of conduct. Russia throughout history has always relied on deceit, outrageous lies, and military might in the implementation of a policy of constant expansion and control of adjacent areas through force when all else fails. Russia reached the peak of her expansion as an Empire in the early twentieth century. Modern day Poland and Finland were at that time under Russian control and Tsar Nicholas II had no qualms about forcing Poles and Finns into the Russian Army and shipping the soldiers all the way across Asia to the Pacific to fight and die in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.

So - what is Russia? An entity that has existed for centuries and has been a participant in numerous world events still raises confusion among those who want to define, in simple terms, an enormous landmass stretching from Europe to the Pacific, with a current population of approximately 146 million.

Mikhail Epstein, a scholar of Russian culture at Emory University, claims that Russia suffers from a “territorial curse” wherein the state is doomed to expand for the sake of expansion and conquest alone. Beginning as a minor outpost on the fringes of Eastern Europe, Russia’s history is indeed a pattern of ongoing wars of aggression against neighboring lands. On occasion there would be a pause for regrouping. Then the armies would move again, expanding Russian holdings by subjugation of contiguous indigenous non-Russian peoples. Currently, the Russian Federation stretches over 6,000 miles and covers eleven time zones.

You will note I have for the first time used the formal, official name of this large Eurasian landmass - the Russian Federation.

Most people erroneously refer to the Russian Federation by the singular term Russia. This suits Moscow just fine, creating the impression that the Kremlin rules over one homogeneous state when, in reality, ethnic Russians account for only approximately 75% of the total population of the Russian Federation. The remainder is comprised of well over 100 ethnic groups with distinct cultures and languages including Tatars, Buryats, Chechens, Bashkirs, Chuvash, a host of many others, and nearly two million Ukrainians. Yes, Ukrainians inside the Russian Federation mainly in the Far East in a region known as “Zeleny Klyn” an area between the Amur River and Pacific Ocean.

The various nationalities that comprise nearly a quarter of the total population of the Russian Federation did not willingly become members of the state. There was no honest plebiscite wherein a certain group of people that just happened to be located in an area “visited” by the Russian military freely voted to become a member of Russia. Lands would be occupied by Russian troops and once taken, said lands would henceforth and forever more belong to Russia. The population of a region would now be used, relocated, drafted, and moved at will by the whim of Moscow.

Back to the question - what is Russia?

You may be aware that Winston Churchill referred to Russia as - “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Ronald Reagan viewed Russia, or rather the whole Soviet Union, as an “Evil Empire.” Senator McCain quipped that Russia is a glorified gas station masquerading as a country.



Who is correct?



What is Russia? From history we know of a region called Muscovy that survived the thirteenth century Mongol invasion of Europe in large measure by serving the Khan as tax collectors during the period of Mongol rule. After 1480, with the Mongol Horde no longer in control of European lands, Muscovy embarked on a phase of never-ending wars of conquest against neighboring regions. A uniquely Russian memorial commemorating one such military victory is the world famous onion-domed St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square. Built in the mid-sixteenth century by order of Ivan the Terrible, St. Basil’s commemorates the capture of Kazan and Astrakhan.

Wars continued. No Congress or Parliament voted for Russia to embrace war. It was simply the whim of one ruler, a prince and then a Tsar, and from the eighteenth century onward an autocrat, an Emperor, who would decide upon a course of action and the fate of the people.

In the early years of Russia, there was a small class of noblemen, the boyars, who dared challenge and could occasionally restrain the man on the throne. But by the late seventeenth century, through violence, the boyars were effectively eliminated as a group capable of offering any challenge to the rule of the Russian Tsar.

With the advent of Peter the Great to the throne, all power in Russia completely and undeniably became vested in only one person. In 1721 Tsar Peter changed his title to that of Emperor. He became the supreme authority over all the lands of Russia, an unchallenged autocrat ruling and dictating as he wished. Russia defeated Sweden, gained control over Ukraine, and grew into a world power as the Romanov Empire lasted for three hundred years; until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Then, in July 1918, with Lenin’s approval, the last Emperor and his family were executed as a civil war raged in Russia. Poland also fought the Bolshevik Army. For a time it was uncertain whether Lenin’s government would survive. The Treaty of Riga in 1921 ended the conflict, and a new phase of Russian history commenced, the Soviet period.

Within two decades, as Hitler initiated his maniacal march across Europe, the Soviet Union signed the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact enabling the German dictator to have free reign in Europe. It was only after Hitler turned the Wehrmacht against Russia that out of necessity Stalin allied himself with the West. Once German armies were destroyed, however, the true Russian nature soon resurfaced as Soviet troops ensured that only Moscow would exercise control over Eastern Europe. Soviet troops built the Berlin Wall and installed puppet governments on lands they liberated from the Germans. When the people attempted to escape from Soviet rule, Moscow brutally crushed any attempt at freedom as they did in Hungary in 1956 and with the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. Moscow lost control over the lands it once ruled as Ukraine voted for independence. The model conceived for replacing the Soviet Union, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), turned out to be a stillborn idea.

Today, in 2023, Putin wants to succeed in recreating an Empire that once was. He knows no limits as evidenced by the horrors being inflicted on Ukraine. Having failed to conquer Ukraine when he first launched the invasion he is settling in for the long haul. Perhaps he views himself as a new Tsar, a new Emperor, an embodiment of Russia where he can do anything he wants.

And now to answer the question. What is Russia? In my opinion, what the world calls Russia is best expressed by a short poem penned in the mid-nineteenth century by Fyodor Tyuchev, a Russian diplomat of the Foreign Service. He wrote:

Умом - Россию не понять,

Аршином общим не измерить;

У ней особенная стать -

В Россию можно только верить.

My translation:

Incomprehensible

Unfathomable

Unique -

One can only believe in Russia

Simply stated, Russia is an idea. It is a force. It cannot be understood, it cannot be measured or contained, and it is certainly unique. As a force Russia can be a force of good or a force of evil. Putin has chosen the latter. Those launching missiles at civilian apartment buildings have also chosen to believe in the force of evil. Putin and evil must not become the embodiment of Russia and a Russian legacy. It is up to the people of Russia to reject the force of evil and choose to believe in Russia as an idea that can be an embodiment of civility, a force of good, and act accordingly.

 Yurij Holowinsky

1976 - B.A. Rutgers University, Phi Beta Kappa

1984 - Officer Training School, Commissioned Officer, US Air Force. Career in HUMINT, retiring with the rank of Major from the Reserves in 2006.

Mid-1990s - Contract Interpreter, Ukrainian language, US Department of State.

1997 - PhD in History, University of Virginia.

2001 - 2014, Intelligence Officer, Defense Intelligence Service. Retired as GS-15.

Numerous operational tours and deployments around the world throughout the course of a thirty-year government career including Russia, Ukraine, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Bosnia, Macedonia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Numerous military awards and decorations including Bronze Star with Valor for direct combat action in Afghanistan in November, 2001.

Small Wars Journal

3. Blinken to test limits of China’s diplomatic engagement on Feb. 5-6 Beijing trip

Blinken to test limits of China’s diplomatic engagement on Feb. 5-6 Beijing trip

By PHELIM KINE

01/16/2023 04:03 PM EST

Politico

The secretary of State’s agenda is likely to include the war in Ukraine, Beijing’s growing nuclear arsenal, stalled counternarcotics cooperation and U.S. citizens held in China.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s much-anticipated China trip is a follow-up to President Joe Biden’s meeting with China’s paramount leader, Xi Jinping, in Indonesia in November. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo

01/16/2023 04:03 PM EST

Secretary of State Antony Blinken will meet in Beijing with his counterpart, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang, on Feb. 5-6, Washington-based diplomats familiar with Blinken’s travel plans told POLITICO.

Blinken’s much-anticipated China trip is a follow-up to President Joe Biden’s meeting with China’s paramount leader, Xi Jinping, in Indonesia in November at which Biden pledged to “maintain open lines of communication” with Beijing at a time of worsening bilateral tensions.

The visit is a test of whether the Biden-Xi meeting has paved the way for more productive U.S.-China ties at a time when the relationship has become increasingly rancorous over issues ranging from Taiwan and trade policy to U.S. concerns about Beijing’s human rights record.

“Sometimes U.S.-China relations have to get dangerously bad before the two governments can invest more effort in improving relations,” said Susan Shirk, former deputy assistant secretary of State and chair of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy.

Shirk said Blinken’s Beijing trip would reflect whether the ruling Chinese Communist Party, “having just made a sudden pragmatic reversal of its Covid policies, … is willing to moderate other foreign and domestic policies to reduce the costs they have caused China.”

Neither the State Department nor the Chinese government has released details of Blinken’s upcoming Beijing visit. The Chinese Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to a request for comment. But State Department spokesperson Ned Price said last month that “Russia’s war against Ukraine will be on the agenda.”

Blinken will also likely push for a lifting of the suspensions on high-level bilateral contacts — including for counternarcotics cooperation and military dialogues — that Beijing imposed in August in reprisal for then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan. Blinken is also under pressure to seek the release of U.S. citizens wrongfully detained in China and to raise administration concerns about what the State Department last week referred to as “China’s ongoing and accelerating expansion of its nuclear arsenal.”

Qin — who assumed the foreign minister job in January after a mostly frosty 17 months as China’s ambassador to the U.S. — has signaled that he’s open to making Blinken’s visit a success. In a farewell tweet earlier this month, Qin praised past “candid, in-depth and constructive meetings” with Blinken and said he anticipated “continuing close working relations with him for a better China-US relationship.” That suggests that Beijing wants to stem the slide in bilateral ties that has prompted the U.S. to restrict exports of microchips used in advanced computing and military applications and to deepen its military alliance with China’s archrival Japan.

But former Foreign Minister Wang Yi, whose appointment earlier this month to lead the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission makes him China’s top diplomat, might make that an uphill battle.

“The United States has stubbornly continued to see China as its primary competitor and engage in blatant blockade, suppression and provocation against China,” Wang said in a speech last month.

POLITICO

Politico

4. No stalemate in Ukraine, at least not yet

Excerpts:

The strategic fight also rages unabated. Russian missile and drone attacks continue to cause the death of civilians and impact on power supplies, as they did again over the past weekend. The Russians probably have sufficient drones and precision missiles and rockets for several large-scale attacks on Ukraine each month. At the same time, both Ukraine and Russia continue to be energetic in the conduct of information operations in their own nations and beyond, seeking to retain the support of their partners and allies.

So, while we may not be witnessing the rapid advances of late 2022, there is still much activity going on in Ukraine. More importantly, both sides retain the military, economic and intellectual potential to innovate and act in creative ways to win battles and drain the resources of their adversary.

By no means are the main belligerents or their supporters yet in a position where “neither side in an argument or contest can win or in which no progress is possible”.

We may be in a lower tempo phase in this war, but this is a long way from a stalemate.

No stalemate in Ukraine, at least not yet

The Sydney Morning Herald · by Mick Ryan · January 16, 2023

January 16, 2023 — 3.30pm

At the beginning of 1915, the war on the Western Front had reached a stalemate. There were technical, strategic and doctrinal reasons for this. The machine gun changed tactics and killed soldiers by the hundreds, as did more accurate and concentrated artillery. Poor communications hampered the co-ordination of the different elements of the massive armies. A lack of protected mobility meant that even when a breach was made in enemy lines, the enemy could more quickly fill the gap than the attacker could exploit it.

Recently, this has become the analogy of choice for some writing about the war in Ukraine. Articles in publications from in the United States, Britain and beyond have all touted theories of the current “stalemate in Ukraine”. It makes for good headlines, but there is one problem: it just isn’t true.

Emergency workers search the remains of a residential building that was struck by a Russian missile in Dnipro, Ukraine on Sunday.Credit:Spencer Platt/Getty

The Collins dictionary defines stalemate as a “deadlock, draw, impasse … a situation in which neither side in an argument or contest can win or in which no progress is possible”. War is a complex tableau of military, diplomatic, technological, economic and societal endeavours. Therefore, a stalemate in war implies a situation of geographic, economic, military and intellectual stasis. This is not the case in Ukraine. Both sides in the conflict, and their supporters, have an enormous range of tactical and strategic options available to them in 2023.

What we are seeing instead is the normal ebb and flow of a long war being fought by well-resourced countries with external sources of support. After the initial burst of activity where each side seeks large, hard blows against the adversary to hopefully compel them to concede quickly, most wars settle into a cycle of pulses and pauses.

The most recent pulse, with the Ukrainian offensives in Kharkiv and Kherson, saw huge amounts of territory returned to Ukraine through the courage and innovation of its military forces, and the military, intelligence and technical support of the West. These offensives provided a boost to the morale of the Ukrainian people. They also reinforced that the Ukrainians are quite capable of defeating the Russians.

Importantly, the offensives also resulted in a lower tempo of operations. Humans, even well motivated ones, need a break from operations to reflect, reinforce and relax before the fighting begins again. This is the low ebb of the cycle of war that we are seeing right now.

People from the town of Soledar wait to be transported to temporary accommodation near Shakhtarsk, in Russian-controlled Donetsk region.Credit:AP

It is a very long way from a stalemate. There is a huge amount of activity being conducted even in this low tempo phase. Most of it remains invisible to the layman because it is not as exciting to report or because it is hidden by operational security and the normal fog of war.

The Battle of Bakhmut is draining away Russian and Ukrainian lives. Over the past several months, the Russian Army and the mercenary Wagner Group have competed to hurl tens of thousands of Russian soldiers against Ukrainian defensive lines which have been developed and improved since 2014. The town of Bakhmut has no strategic importance beyond its propaganda value for a Russian Army that has had no battlefield victories since the early days of this war. Yet, the fighting there is as bitter as any in this war and is resulting in mass casualties that few armies can sustain.

To the north, the Ukrainian Army presses on with its methodical advance towards the Kreminna-Svatove-Starobilsk triangle. Unlike the battle to the south, this offensive will have important strategic outcomes if the Ukrainians succeed. Within these towns are key transport and logistic support hubs for the Russian Army in Luhansk Oblast. If Ukraine secures this critical triangle of cities, the Russian position in Luhansk is probably untenable, and its forces in Donetsk will be forced into a dilemma about how to orientate their troops.

There is much more occurring that we don’t see directly. Tactical reconnaissance on the ground, in cyberspace and in the air is occurring across the entire front, seeking weaknesses to exploit in the offensives to come. Training and equipping of new troops and formations is occurring – quickly - for these future offensives. Once trained, these formations are being deployed behind the lines and being readied to join the more experienced forces who are defending, scouting and preparing to advance. And changes in command are being made in preparation for attacks in the northern spring, such as the appointment of the Russian general Valery Gerasimov last week.

A destroyed Russian tank covered by snow stands in a forest in the Kharkiv region on Saturday.Credit:AP

The strategic fight also rages unabated. Russian missile and drone attacks continue to cause the death of civilians and impact on power supplies, as they did again over the past weekend. The Russians probably have sufficient drones and precision missiles and rockets for several large-scale attacks on Ukraine each month. At the same time, both Ukraine and Russia continue to be energetic in the conduct of information operations in their own nations and beyond, seeking to retain the support of their partners and allies.

So, while we may not be witnessing the rapid advances of late 2022, there is still much activity going on in Ukraine. More importantly, both sides retain the military, economic and intellectual potential to innovate and act in creative ways to win battles and drain the resources of their adversary.

By no means are the main belligerents or their supporters yet in a position where “neither side in an argument or contest can win or in which no progress is possible”.

We may be in a lower tempo phase in this war, but this is a long way from a stalemate.

Mick Ryan is a retired major general who served in the ADF for more than 35 years.

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• Russia-Ukraine war
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Mick Ryan is a retired major general who served in the ADF for more than 35 years and was commander of the Australia Defence College. He is the author of War Transformed: The Future of 21st Century Great Power Competition and Conflict.

The Sydney Morning Herald · by Mick Ryan · January 16, 2023

5. A Glimpse at What a China-Centric World Would Look Like

Excerpts:

In their recent exploration of China’s surveillance state, Wall Street Journal reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin describe the CCP regime as a “dystopian state” that has harnessed the latest surveillance technology, including biometric data collection, facial-recognition software, internet-filtering firewalls, algorithmic controls, and artificial intelligence, to control and repress those who live in China. Chin told the Diplomat that the CCP’s “ultimate goal is a perfectly engineered society that automatically neutralizes dissidents while rewarding those who comply with lives of convenience, safety and predictability.”

In China, George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World have arrived.

A Glimpse at What a China-Centric World Would Look Like

This story will sound familiar to readers of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago.”

by FRANCIS P. SEMPA

January 15, 2023, 10:35 PM

https://spectator.org/a-glimpse-at-what-a-china-centric-world-would-look-like/

A

few days ago, a story in the Diplomat provided the United States and the West with another glimpse at what a China-centric world would look like. Zhanargul Zhumatai is a 47-year-old Kazakh artist and former radio and television editor who was arrested by Chinese police in September 2017 and spent two years in an internment camp in Xinjiang. She was “beaten and tortured” in the camp and was denied access to medical treatment in an effort to get her to confess to her “crimes.” She was finally released in October 2019 and currently resides in an apartment in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang province. She told the Diplomat that she lives “in utter fear.”

Zhumatai’s “crime” consisted of having Facebook and Instagram on her phone and traveling to Kazakhstan. Chinese police arrested her after inviting her back to Ürümqi to do an “artistic musical project.” She told the Diplomat that she couldn’t understand why she was arrested and why the Chinese authorities tried to force her to plead guilty. “They told me,” Zhumatai said, “that the CCP was trying to correct the ideologies that I had.” This story will sound familiar to readers of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which describes his own arrest as “a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality.” Solzhenitsyn’s first reaction was: “Me? What for?” And then the comforting thought: “It’s a mistake! They’ll set things right!” But, of course, they never did. Solzhenitsyn had the temerity to make a joke about Stalin — and, for that, he got eight years in the gulag camps.

Zhumatai refused to plead guilty despite threats to place her in a mental hospital — another tactic that the CCP borrowed from the Soviets. So, they sent her home instead, but she said that she is under “constant surveillance” by police, her mother and siblings have been threatened, she cannot access her own money, authorities have disconnected her phone, and she is unable to get a job due to her arrest. “For the three years since her release,” reports the Diplomat, “she has been hounded by Chinese police. Zhumatai cannot visit any public place without an alarm being set off due to facial recognition technology, which prompts hours [of] further police interrogation.” She has been denied medical care. She is essentially a prisoner in her own home. She is not permitted to travel abroad.

When Zhumatai managed to communicate her plight to a Kazakh friend, who went public about it on a Kazakh website, Chinese police accused her of “publish[ing] government secrets.” She says she lives in fear “every second” and hopes that CCP central authorities will right the wrongs that are being done to her. She told journalist Ruth Ingram that her message to the CCP is this: “Either kill me or let me go to Kazakhstan. I don’t want to continue in this hell.” The CCP authorities are urging her to surrender to a mental hospital. Her response: “I will never surrender to a mental hospital…. I am not mentally ill. I am not a bad person. I am innocent of their crimes.”

In their recent exploration of China’s surveillance state, Wall Street Journal reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin describe the CCP regime as a “dystopian state” that has harnessed the latest surveillance technology, including biometric data collection, facial-recognition software, internet-filtering firewalls, algorithmic controls, and artificial intelligence, to control and repress those who live in China. Chin told the Diplomat that the CCP’s “ultimate goal is a perfectly engineered society that automatically neutralizes dissidents while rewarding those who comply with lives of convenience, safety and predictability.”

In China, George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World have arrived.

6. Why America will never give up on war

Excerpts:

American power is righteous, because it is on the right side of History; as clearly demonstrated by the fact that America is so powerful. And if that power is righteous and good, it deserves to be exercised. To use righteous power to remake the world in our own image would by definition be to make the world better. Thus extending American power is both the most pragmatic and the most idealistic possible course.

This story, which has dominated Washington since at least the end of the Cold War, is what we might label The Consensus. Maybe all or some elements of The Consensus are true. Or maybe it’s all nonsense. It doesn’t really matter; that’s not the point. Those who submit themselves to The Consensus can by doing so automatically consider themselves better people, engaged in more meaningful lives. And their peers will consider them to be as well.

A term that one is liable to hear used in Washington is “Serious Person”. On being asked to meet with someone he doesn’t know (maybe a journalist, or a potential new hire), for example, a Very Important Washingtonian may first inquire of his staff: “Well, is he a Serious Person?” But what makes a person Serious? A Serious Person is, naturally, an orthodox follower of The Consensus. Asking if someone is a Serious Person is a bit like a secular version of how one might have asked, back in the day, whether some new fellow was in fact a “God-fearing Christian?” “Yes,” would come the reply, “and he went to Yale.” “Good enough, let’s put him in charge of the OSS,” you could then say with confidence.

Rumour that some new acquaintance is in fact a Serious Person is greatly reassuring, as it means he is not a “Wingnut”. A Wingnut is an unsociable crank, living outside of The Consensus. Wingnuts demonstrate this by suggesting unserious ideas, such as cutting the defence budget, curtailing the surveillance state, or questioning the demands of the public health bureaucracy. Glenn Greenwald is a Wingnut par excellence. Nobody wants to be associated with a Wingnut, as that can taint your reputation as a Serious Person. And then you’ll never be invited to a swanky conference in Aspen again. Which is probably why for every mile closer to Capitol Hill a foreign policy think tank is, the more measurably it advocates in favour of militant internationalism. These are the Serious Institutions, able to court the serious money necessary to afford prime real estate.

Here then is the point: why is it so likely that any given person in the Washington “Blob” will automatically support raising the defence budget, or intervening militarily in some country abroad, or otherwise expanding the security state? In the vast majority of cases, it’s not because they’re taking bribes from some defence contractor. It’s because they simply want more than anything to be counted among the Serious People. And to do that they first have to accept the word and practice of The Consensus.

Why America will never give up on war

Power, not money, corrupts politicians

https://unherd.com/2023/01/why-america-will-never-give-up-on-war/

BY N.S. LYONS

Last month, the US Congress approved an $858 billion national defence bill, increasing the Pentagon’s budget by 8% and allocating an additional $44 billion in military aid for Ukraine. One popular explanation for America’s relentlessly expanding military budget, and foreign policy hawkishness in general, is that this reflects the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower gravely warned America to guard against in his famous farewell address some 62 years ago.

In this view — as strongly argued recently by the journalist Glenn Greenwald, for instance — the US arms manufacturing industry, the military, and our politicians are all essentially engaged in a circle of corruption and collusion to make each other rich. This common understanding of the military-industrial complex — and of how politics in Washington works in general — is essentially conspiratorial. The theory goes something like this: big defence contractors bribe the politicians with large donations, and the generals and other government officials with board seats and other lucrative positions, and they in turn come up with reasons to justify shovelling ever-increasing piles of taxpayer money into buying new weapons from the arms makers.

Washington has thus become a “multi-tentacle war machine”, Greenwald says, because “no matter what is going on in the world, they always find — or concoct — reasons why the military budget must grow no matter how inflated it already is”. (Emphasis mine.)

Let’s call this the Corrupt Conspiracy Model of how Washington functions (or dysfunctions). It is a model that can be powerfully convincing, because it taps into the truth that people really are naturally flawed and self-interested creatures, demonstrably prone to corruption. From this viewpoint, Washington politics is all basically a con game led by a pack of greedy psychopaths. As Greenwald notes with some frustration and confusion, this used to be a characteristically Left-wing critique of government and corporate power, but following the Great Political Realignment it’s now become more common to the disaffected Right.

Reading his argument made me recall how, back when I was younger and Left-leaning, I too believed in this model, at least implicitly. As noted, it can be quite persuasive, even satisfying, in its simplicity. It’s also a subtly idealistic and optimistic theory: the American system would work great, just as it was designed to, if not for all the selfish bad actors taking advantage of the system. The only problem was that, after enough time in Washington, I had no choice but to re-evaluate. Because what I found is that the swamp is populated almost wholly not by cynics, but by true believers.

True believers in what? Answering that will require trying to nail down a second, more complex model to explain how people in the Imperial City make decisions.

First, let me qualify by acknowledging that yes, Washington is indeed awash with lobbyists, corrupt politicians, psychopathic executives, cynical operators, and backstabbing climbers. It is a veritable hive of scum and villainy. They just aren’t what really makes the place tick. In fact, all these people conform themselves parasitically to that which does.

The real issue to contend with is that almost no one in Washington actually thinks in the terms of the Corrupt Conspiracy Model; i.e. they don’t think: “I will advocate for a hawkish, interventionist foreign policy so that the resulting wars will benefit the arms industry and make me and my friends rich…” The reality is more disturbing than that, honestly.

MORE FROM THIS AUTHORHow we appeased China's Zero-Covid regime

BY N.S. LYONS

What runs Washington is a Spirit. Or, alternatively, a Story.

No one wants to live a meaningless life. Humans are meaning-seeking creatures and they desperately want, need, what they do to have meaningful value. If they cannot find inherent meaning in life, they are liable to come up with a narrative framework — that is, a story — that imbues what they do with some sense of higher meaning. Since everyone wants to be the hero of their story, the story becomes central to their personal identity. And no one wants their identity to be dull (even if they’re a government bureaucrat).

But while a few very special people can create and maintain their own personal stories indefinitely, living life entirely in their own self-sustained dramatic reality, for most people the much easier and more reassuring route is to simply adopt a collective story that already exists. The more popular or high-status this story is, the more attractive and self-reinforcing it will be — and the harder it will, therefore, be to disbelieve, dissent, and defect from.

Now, when one talks to members of the Washington establishment, the collective story they hold to tends to quickly become apparent.

None are, in their own minds, either corrupt cynics or ideological zealots. Instead they are moderate, prudent, wise “public servants”; the trained and chosen elite guardians of American interests and values. Sensible centrists, they do what must be done to ensure America’s security and prosperity, steering the ship of state along a pragmatic course, eschewing both the goodhearted but naïve idealism of the too-far-Left and the crude jingoistic nationalism of the populist-Right.

This pragmatism does not, of course, preclude their simultaneously being moral exemplars. They embody America’s highest ideals, given that they are the ones extending the light of whatever truly makes America great, whether that be liberal democracy, equality and human rights, pluralism and diversity, scientific progress, or economic liberty. In protecting the global world order of Pax Americana, they make the world safe for American ideals. In fact, these guardians are basically the bulwark of Enlightened Civilisation writ large, taming barbarian savagery wherever it rears its ugly head, whether in Afghanistan or Alabama. Even a moment’s slackness and “the jungle grows back”.

American power is righteous, because it is on the right side of History; as clearly demonstrated by the fact that America is so powerful. And if that power is righteous and good, it deserves to be exercised. To use righteous power to remake the world in our own image would by definition be to make the world better. Thus extending American power is both the most pragmatic and the most idealistic possible course.

SUGGESTED READINGShould America be more like Ukraine?

BY MARK LILLA

This story, which has dominated Washington since at least the end of the Cold War, is what we might label The Consensus. Maybe all or some elements of The Consensus are true. Or maybe it’s all nonsense. It doesn’t really matter; that’s not the point. Those who submit themselves to The Consensus can by doing so automatically consider themselves better people, engaged in more meaningful lives. And their peers will consider them to be as well.

A term that one is liable to hear used in Washington is “Serious Person”. On being asked to meet with someone he doesn’t know (maybe a journalist, or a potential new hire), for example, a Very Important Washingtonian may first inquire of his staff: “Well, is he a Serious Person?” But what makes a person Serious? A Serious Person is, naturally, an orthodox follower of The Consensus. Asking if someone is a Serious Person is a bit like a secular version of how one might have asked, back in the day, whether some new fellow was in fact a “God-fearing Christian?” “Yes,” would come the reply, “and he went to Yale.” “Good enough, let’s put him in charge of the OSS,” you could then say with confidence.

Rumour that some new acquaintance is in fact a Serious Person is greatly reassuring, as it means he is not a “Wingnut”. A Wingnut is an unsociable crank, living outside of The Consensus. Wingnuts demonstrate this by suggesting unserious ideas, such as cutting the defence budget, curtailing the surveillance state, or questioning the demands of the public health bureaucracy. Glenn Greenwald is a Wingnut par excellence. Nobody wants to be associated with a Wingnut, as that can taint your reputation as a Serious Person. And then you’ll never be invited to a swanky conference in Aspen again. Which is probably why for every mile closer to Capitol Hill a foreign policy think tank is, the more measurably it advocates in favour of militant internationalism. These are the Serious Institutions, able to court the serious money necessary to afford prime real estate.

Here then is the point: why is it so likely that any given person in the Washington “Blob” will automatically support raising the defence budget, or intervening militarily in some country abroad, or otherwise expanding the security state? In the vast majority of cases, it’s not because they’re taking bribes from some defence contractor. It’s because they simply want more than anything to be counted among the Serious People. And to do that they first have to accept the word and practice of The Consensus.

Sometimes they may not fully buy it, but conform merely because it’s the path of least resistance. Often, they do buy it completely. I once had a former General and Director of the CIA tell me, with complete earnestness, that the United States had to occupy every single “ungoverned space” on earth — every conflict zone, every “rogue state”, every barren patch of sand large enough for an Isis terrorist to do doughnuts in a Toyota pickup. No one was paying him to say this (yet); it was pure idealistic conviction. And there are a lot of people in Washington far less distinguished than he who labour daily to help shore up The Consensus: legions of non-profit workers, lowly staffers, and ambitious interns who happily pump out endless Consensus-reiterating briefing papers, reports, op-eds, and legislative bills (all of which are written by people under 35 who have no idea what they’re doing, by the way). The military-industrial complex doesn’t have to bribe any of them. They are working to cultivate the illustrious aura of a Serious Person.

SUGGESTED READINGThe American experiment has just begun

BY ANTON JÄGER

Any financial rewards are secondary to the power, prestige, and psychological assurance of being counted among the ruling class and holding the right opinions. This does not of course mean there aren’t significant financial rewards that flow to senior figures, but to the “public servant” they genuinely bear no conceivable trace of wrongful quid pro quo. As far as they are concerned, they are merely doing the right thing in service to the public and the nation, and being fairly compensated for it. Being paid to sit on Raytheon’s board and lobby for a strong national defence is public service, as is being paid by CNN to go on TV and call dissenters a dangerous threat to our democracy. Advancing The Consensus is, after all, the essence of public service. This complex is utterly impervious to any charges of corruption or hypocrisy, because from the inside such charges literally sound like the mad rantings of an immoral and maliciously anti-American Wingnut.

It would be tempting to call this ideological capture, but I don’t think that quite describes it. The Consensus is not an ideology with clear or coherent doctrines. And it is extremely adaptable and flexible, seamlessly incorporating new threats and opportunities (which is why “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is now regularly cited as a top foreign policy priority). Instead, it works more loosely, subconsciously, to shape what individuals and institutions value and what they believe is right and normal and just. It really is more like a deep story about the world and how it works; or a spirit that moves subjects without their understanding how or why, or even that it exists.

Which is why I think I need to introduce one more element in order to fully explain what really runs Washington.

Everyone and everything needs a hierarchy of values to operate, otherwise they risk having no telos — no purpose, motivation, or orientation for action. And at the top of this pyramid of values or principles must necessarily be some highest value or principle, from which all others descend.

Bureaucracies, which are themselves pyramidal, subsume an individual’s values and objectives into themselves; the individual’s value hierarchy and telos is then effectively restructured or replaced by the telos superimposed from above by the bureaucracy. Which is why the bureaucracy so often seems to co-opt its individuals and take on a life of its own. But many singular bureaucracies, such as the Defence and State Departments, exist side-by-side in Washington and operate simultaneously. And, at least theoretically, they are all part of the same government and on the same side. What unites them in direction and orientation, if anything? Some pyramid of higher values, naturally. This is the role of The Consensus.

SUGGESTED READINGThe West needs to grow up

BY PAUL KINGSNORTH

Does The Consensus itself also exist as part of an even higher story? Maybe. The author Paul Kingsnorth has I think wisely described there being, at the pinnacle of our collective Western civilisational subconscious, an “empty throne,” where once sat God:

“[E]very culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. It does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu or Daoist. It could be based around the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.”

“The modern experiment,” however, “has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representative of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions — ‘the people’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘progress.’” But one sacred value must necessarily rule above all others, and “when a culture kills its sovereign, the throne will not remain empty for long”.

What now occupies this empty throne today, if anything? Kingsnorth has suggested it is “money”. As I’ve written before, I don’t think that’s it. I think it is something more fundamental: I think it’s what could be called the spirit in Man that hungers for infinite “control” — meaning power itself. The power to have all good things, from material comfort to equality, without any limits or contradictions; power over all evils and all suffering and all dangers; power over human nature. It’s the desire for the power to eliminate all friction between the will and the world; to have the power to overcome all resistance and achieve heaven on earth, as fast as possible, by any means necessary.

The efforts of those few poor souls who spend their days trying to reason with Washington and convince it to follow some policy of “realism and restraint” are doomed. The place is busily fighting a holy war against the terms of existence.

When a Wingnut reveals himself as a Wingnut, it is because he has resisted the unrestrained exercise of power in some way. Such an act is grounds not for admiration of virtue, but for shock and suspicion: by doing so he has challenged the whole story of the new sacred order. In a real sense the Wingnut is not just unsociable but impious.

It may be that at some point in the past, when the empty throne was occupied by its rightful ruler, America’s governing institutions and the people who make their gears turn participated in a greater shared story, which subsumed their lower interests and appetites and rightly ordered them with a telos oriented toward a genuine highest good. Maybe this was God. Maybe it was the American Idea, or the Republican Ideal. Whatever it was, perhaps its very existence moderated and disciplined them. But if the baser value of power has now been elevated to this highest place, then they no longer have any internalised limits, and their quest has no stopping point. There are no longer any moral brakes on the run-away train of the state.

If so, then even all the money of the military-industrial complex definitely doesn’t run Washington. Indeed, if the military-industrial complex didn’t exist we’d have to invent it immediately just so that we could hand it all of our money.

A version of this essay originally appeared on The Upheaval on Substack.

7. Expanded US training for Ukraine forces begins in Germany

Expanded US training for Ukraine forces begins in Germany

AP · by LOLITA C. BALDOR · January 16, 2023

BRUSSELS (AP) — The U.S. military’s new, expanded combat training of Ukrainian forces began in Germany on Sunday, with a goal of getting a battalion of about 500 troops back on the battlefield to fight the Russians in the next five to eight weeks, said Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Milley, who plans to visit the Grafenwoehr training area on Monday to get a first-hand look at the program, said the troops being trained left Ukraine a few days ago. In Germany is a full set of weapons and equipment for them to use.

Until now the Pentagon had declined to say exactly when the training would start.

The so-called combined arms training is aimed at honing the skills of the Ukrainian forces so they will be better prepared to launch an offensive or counter any surge in Russian attacks. They will learn how to better move and coordinate their company- and battalion-size units in battle, using combined artillery, armor and ground forces.

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Speaking to two reporters traveling with him to Europe on Sunday, Milley said the complex training — combined with an array of new weapons, artillery, tanks and other vehicles heading to Ukraine — will be key to helping the country’s forces take back territory that has been captured by Russia in the nearly 11-month-old war.

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“This support is really important for Ukraine to be able to defend itself,” Milley said. “And we’re hoping to be able to pull this together here in short order.”

The goal, he said, is for all the incoming weapons and equipment to be delivered to Ukraine so that the newly trained forces will be able to use it “sometime before the spring rains show up. That would be ideal.”

The new instruction comes as Ukrainian forces face fierce fighting in the eastern Donetsk province, where the Russian military has claimed it has control of the small salt-mining town of Soledar. Ukraine asserts that its troops are still fighting, but if Moscow’s troops take control of Soledar it would allow them to inch closer to the bigger city of Bakhmut, where fighting has raged for months.

Russia also launched a widespread barrage of missile strikes, including in Kyiv, the northeastern city of Kharkiv and the southeastern city of Dnipro, where the death toll in one apartment building rose to 30.

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Milley said he wants to make sure the training is on track and whether anything else is needed, and also ensure that it will line up well with the equipment deliveries.

The program will include classroom instruction and field work that will begin with small squads and gradually grow to involve larger units. It would culminate with a more complex combat exercise bringing an entire battalion and a headquarters unit together.

Until now, the U.S. focus has been on providing Ukrainian forces with more immediate battlefield needs, particularly on how to use the wide array of Western weapons systems pouring into the country.

The U.S. has already trained more than 3,100 Ukrainian troops on how to use and maintain certain weapons and other equipment, including howitzers, armored vehicles and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, known as HIMARS. Other nations are also conducting training on the weapons they provide.

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In announcing the new program last month, Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary, said the idea “is to be able to give them this advanced level of collective training that enables them to conduct effective combined arms operations and maneuver on the battlefield.”

Milley said the U.S. was doing this type of training prior to the Russian invasion last February. But once the war began, U.S. National Guard and special operations forces that were doing training inside Ukraine all left the country. This new effort, which is being done by U.S. Army Europe Africa’s 7th Army Training Command, will be a continuation of what they had been doing prior to the invasion. Other European allies are also providing training.

AP · by LOLITA C. BALDOR · January 16, 2023

8. China records 1st population fall in decades as births drop

So I guess the "objective" of the One Child Policy has finally been reached - no population growth? Be careful what you ask for. (Note my attempt at sarcasm).

But this is an Asian problem (and for advanced nations around the world).

Excerpt:

China has sought to bolster its population since officially ending its one-child policy in 2016. Since abandoning the policy, China has sought to encourage families to have second or even third children, with little success, reflecting attitudes in much of east Asia where birth rates have fallen precipitously. In China, the expense of raising children in cities is often cited as a cause.

China records 1st population fall in decades as births drop

AP · by KEN MORITSUGU · January 17, 2023

BEIJING (AP) — For the first time in decades, China has fewer people than it did at the start of last year, according to official figures released Tuesday.

The world’s most populous country has worried for years about an aging citizenry’s effect on its economy and society, but its population was not expected to go into decline for almost a decade.

The National Bureau of Statistics reported that the country had 850,000 fewer people at the end of 2022 than the previous year. The tally includes only the population of mainland China, excluding Hong Kong and Macao as well as foreign residents.

Over one million fewer babies were born than the previous year amid a slowing economy and widespread pandemic lockdowns, according to official figures. The bureau reported 9.56 million births in 2022, compared to 10.62 million in 2021. Deaths rose from 10.14 million to 10.41 million.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the population figures were affected by the COVID-19 outbreak that was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan before spreading around the world. China has been accused by some specialists of underreporting deaths from the virus by blaming them on underlying conditions, but no estimates of the actual number have been published.

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China’s population has begun to decline 9-10 years earlier than Chinese officials predicted and the United Nation projected, said Yi Fuxian, a demographer and expert on Chinese population trends at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“China has become older before it has become rich,” Yi said.

China has sought to bolster its population since officially ending its one-child policy in 2016. Since abandoning the policy, China has sought to encourage families to have second or even third children, with little success, reflecting attitudes in much of east Asia where birth rates have fallen precipitously. In China, the expense of raising children in cities is often cited as a cause.

Men outnumbered women by 722.06 million to 689.69 million, the bureau reported, a result of the one-child policy and a traditional preference for male offspring to carry on the family name.

China has long been the world’s most populous nation, but is expected to soon be overtaken by India, if it has not already. Estimates put India’s population at more than 1.4 billion and continuing to grow.

The last time China is believed to have experienced a population decline was during the Great Leap Forward, a disastrous drive for collective farming and industrialization launched by by then-leader Mao Zedong at the end of the 1950s that produced a massive famine that killed tens of millions of people.

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Yi said that, based on his own research, China’s population has actually been declining since 2018, showing the population crisis is “much more severe” than previously thought. China now has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, comparable only to Taiwan and South Korea, he said.

That means China’s “real demographic crisis is beyond imagination and that all of China’s past economic, social, defense and foreign policies were based on faulty demographic data,” Yi told The Associated Press.

China’s looming economic crisis will be worse than Japan’s, where years of low growth have been blamed in part on a shrinking population, Yi said.

China’s statistics bureau said the working-age population between 16 and 59 years old totaled 875.56 million, accounting for 62.0% of the national population, while those aged 65 and older totaled 209.78 million, accounting for 14.9% of the total.

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If handled correctly, a declining population does not necessarily predict a weaker economy, said Stuart Gietel-Basten, professor of social science at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi.

“It’s a big psychological issue. Probably the biggest,” Gietel-Basten said.

The statistics also showed increasing urbanization in a country that traditionally had been largely rural. Over 2022, the permanent urban population increased by 6.46 million to reach 920.71 million, or 65.22%, while the rural population fell by 7.31 million.

The United Nations estimated last year that the world’s population reached 8 billion on Nov. 15 and that India will replace China as the world’s most populous nation in 2023. India’s last census was scheduled for 2022 but was postponed amid the pandemic.

In a report released on World Population Day, the U.N. also said global population growth fell below 1% in 2020 for the first time since 1950.

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Also Tuesday, the statistics bureau released data showing China’s economic growth fell to its second-lowest level in at least four decades last year under pressure from anti-virus controls and a real estate slump.

The world’s No. 2 economy grew by 3% in 2022, less than half of the previous year’s 8.1%, the data showed.

That was the second-lowest annual rate since at least the 1970s, after the drop to 2.4% in 2020 at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, although activity is reviving after the lifting of restrictions that kept millions of people at home and sparked protests.

Gietel-Basten said China has been adapting to demographic change for years by devising policies to move its economic activities up the value chain of innovation, pointing to the development of semiconductor manufacturing and the financial services industry.

“The population of India is much younger and is growing. But there are many reasons why you wouldn’t necessarily automatically bet your entire fortune on India surpassing China economically in the very near future,” he said.

Among India’s many challenges is a level of female participation in the work force that is much lower than China’s, Gietel-Basten said.

“Whatever the population you have, it’s not what you’ve got but it’s what you do with it … to a degree,” he said.

___

Associated Press writers Huizhong Wu in Taipei, Taiwan, and Kanis Leung in Hong Kong contributed to this report.

AP · by KEN MORITSUGU · January 17, 2023

9. Air Force’s new rescue helicopter notches first saves in Africa

HH-60W Jolly Green II

Air Force’s new rescue helicopter notches first saves in Africa

militarytimes.com · by Rachel Cohen · January 13, 2023

The Air Force’s new search-and-rescue helicopter is proving its worth on its first combat deployment to Africa.

HH-60W Jolly Green II crews saved the lives of two foreign troops on a December rescue mission in the Horn of Africa, on the continent’s eastern shore, the service said Thursday.

It’s the first publicized instance of a real-world overseas save for the HH-60 “Whiskey” since it was declared combat-ready in October.

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Air Force’s new search-and-rescue helicopter heads to first deployment

The Air Force can now launch a 30-day deployment of four HH-60Ws anywhere in the world.

According to a press release from the 435th Air Expeditionary Wing, rescue crews were on alert before dawn. They quickly picked up injured service members and left the area without incident.

“Pararescuemen performed their own stabilizing emergency medical care in the aircraft’s cabin,” the Air Force said.

Airmen headed for the nearest medical facility so that one of the wounded could undergo trauma surgery. HC-130J Combat King II planes, used to recover troops from the field, ferried the more seriously wounded person to another location for further treatment.

The Air Force did not provide details of the incident that caused the injuries.

“While personnel may be behind enemy lines, or far from needed support, this team is equipped to travel great distances and fight their way in and out if necessary to make the mission happen,” Personnel Recovery Task Force commander Lt. Col. Thaddeus Ronnau said in the release.

“Even in the vast expanses of Africa, this combined team was able to pull a critical patient from the battlefield with the Air Force’s newest rescue vehicle and place them in the hands of skilled trauma surgeons, ultimately saving two lives,” he said.

The HH-60Ws belong to the 449th Air Expeditionary Group at Camp Lemonnier. The group handles personnel recovery, regional airlift, base support, intelligence collection and airfield operations in support of U.S. Africa Command, U.S. Central Command and foreign militaries in East Africa.

U.S. troops have long been stationed in Djibouti to help stabilize countries in the region and support local militaries in the fight against terror groups like Al-Shabaab. Around 4,500 Americans currently live at Camp Lemonnier.

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Post-Afghanistan, US Air Force changes Jolly Green II helicopter purchase plans

“The acts of aggression like we’re seeing in Europe, or we might see in the Pacific by [China], put us in a very different scenario from a combat rescue point of view,” says Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.

HH-60W airmen deployed overseas for the first time on Sept. 24, though the Air Force did not say where the unit from Moody Air Force Base, Georgia, went or how long it would be gone. The Jolly Green II has been in eastern Africa since at least Dec. 8, 2022, when it conducted a casualty evacuation training exercise in Djibouti.

The Air Force is nearing the end of Jolly Green II production at manufacturer Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin subsidiary. Procurement is projected to cost $4.1 billion.

The service asked Congress to cap the buy at 75 HH-60Ws — instead of 113 as initially planned — in its latest budget request as its post-Afghanistan priorities evolve. Lawmakers instead provided funding to buy an additional 10 helos, for an 85-piece fleet.

The Jolly Green II fleet, named for the HH-3 helicopters flown during the Vietnam War, can fly faster and farther than its predecessor and better withstand threats. Moody was the first Air Force ops base to receive the new airframes in November 2020.

They are expected to replace an earlier Sikorsky airframe, the HH-60G Pave Hawk, at several active duty and Air National Guard installations around the world. Airmen have flown Pave Hawks since the early 1980s in conflicts and emergencies from Panama to Afghanistan to Japan.

About Rachel S. Cohen

Rachel Cohen joined Air Force Times as senior reporter in March 2021. Her work has appeared in Air Force Magazine, Inside Defense, Inside Health Policy, the Frederick News-Post (Md.), the Washington Post, and others.

10. #Reviewing The American Way of Irregular Warfare

Excerpts:

Cleveland concludes with a structured call to action. He recommends starting with a bipartisan congressional investigation into the employment of U.S. irregular warfare capability with a focus on policies, strategies, and campaigns in irregular conflict. Beyond a broad reassessment, he offers a range of proposals for institutionalizing the investigation’s conclusions.

Cleveland makes a number of recommendations. First, he recommends a restructuring of the Department of Defense to create a hybrid combined department with expertise from the military, State Department, intelligence, and private enterprise to focus on irregular warfare campaigns. He also suggests establishing a second four-star Special Operations headquarters dedicated to irregular warfare, separate and different from current special operations commands. He suggests the new command could be component under one of the military service departments similar to that of the Department of the Navy’s relationship with the US Marine Corps.

To support the restructuring initiatives he proposes, Cleveland suggests creating civilian educational institutions independent of professional military education to continue the academic study of irregular warfare. These outside educational institutions would critique military capability, policies, and strategies while capturing and analyzing irregular warfare actions for American public scrutiny. Lastly, he suggests creating professional military education outside the conventionally minded service-specific professional military education system. He points to the Naval Postgraduate School’s master’s degree focused on irregular warfare as a positive example worth emulation.

...

Cleveland rightly observes decisive victories are unlikely in the nuclear and information age. Anyone seeking to understand irregular warfare as integral to the entire continuum of warfare should read this book.

#Reviewing The American Way of Irregular Warfare

thestrategybridge.org · January 17, 2023

The American Way of Irregular Warfare: An Analytical Memoir. Charles T. Cleveland and Daniel Egal. Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2020.

The American Way of Irregular Warfare is a memoir co-authored by retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Charles T. Cleveland with Daniel Egal that explores how the United States military has employed the concept of irregular warfare.[1] The authors draw on Cleveland’s observations from his 37-year military career to argue the U.S. should restructure its military with doctrine, authorities, and education conducive to proper understanding and the proper employment of irregular warfare. Cleveland commanded the United States Army Special Operations Command and served in special operations through the unique historical period spanning the 1980s and the U.S. Global War on Terror. He asserts that operational and strategic level leadership must learn to better employ tactical irregular warfare units to solve people-centric campaigns.

He defines irregular warfare as conflict below the threshold of conventional warfare waged in the minds and wills of the population with limited support.[2] His theme throughout is that warfare is a human endeavor and the U.S. military must retool its understanding of how it affects human behavior through psychological, relational, economic, and military means. Humans are the key to successfully influencing local politics and culture, in Cleveland’s mind. Thus, leaving a competent partner force in place is the only way the US can avoid future indefinite commitments of Americans to stay and fight.

While satisfied with the U.S. military’s tactical performance in irregular warfare, Cleveland rejects the argument that special operations can raid their way to victory or capture enough terrain. Cleveland uses the strategic failures of the U.S. in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to argue the U.S. military must focus on its failure to structurally, doctrinally, and militarily invest in irregular warfare to succeed.

In practice, Cleveland sees leveraging of a partner force interspersed with American Special Operations Forces advisors as the ideal model. Advisors serve as a connecting sinew between fighters and external assets as a partner nation gains military competence and political legitimacy. He wants the U.S. to eliminate the grey-zone gaps that nation-states and non-state actors exploit in competing against a nuclear and conventionally dominant U.S. military. He argues the United States military is designed to dominate in the land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace domains but has failed to understand or appreciate the necessity of influencing populations.

Cleveland asserts locals must be empowered to retain legitimacy, or operations and U.S. personnel will foster resentment and insurgency against an occupying force. He offers a vignette from his experience removing Manuel Noriega from power in Panama. Panamanians approached U.S. soldiers with a report of a homicide. In response, the American leaders armed and empowered the local police detective. Cleveland observes that the Panamanian detective solved the case better than any platoon of U.S. soldiers could have.[3]

He contrasts U.S. relative success in Panama to the dissolving of the Iraq Ba’ath Party and the costly insurgency that followed. Cleveland warns that the U.S. military cannot afford to ignore its operational and strategic inadequacies in irregular warfare operations to focus on conventional warfare.

Cleveland concludes with a structured call to action. He recommends starting with a bipartisan congressional investigation into the employment of U.S. irregular warfare capability with a focus on policies, strategies, and campaigns in irregular conflict. Beyond a broad reassessment, he offers a range of proposals for institutionalizing the investigation’s conclusions.

Cleveland makes a number of recommendations. First, he recommends a restructuring of the Department of Defense to create a hybrid combined department with expertise from the military, State Department, intelligence, and private enterprise to focus on irregular warfare campaigns. He also suggests establishing a second four-star Special Operations headquarters dedicated to irregular warfare, separate and different from current special operations commands. He suggests the new command could be component under one of the military service departments similar to that of the Department of the Navy’s relationship with the US Marine Corps.

To support the restructuring initiatives he proposes, Cleveland suggests creating civilian educational institutions independent of professional military education to continue the academic study of irregular warfare. These outside educational institutions would critique military capability, policies, and strategies while capturing and analyzing irregular warfare actions for American public scrutiny. Lastly, he suggests creating professional military education outside the conventionally minded service-specific professional military education system. He points to the Naval Postgraduate School’s master’s degree focused on irregular warfare as a positive example worth emulation.

While thoughtful, Cleveland’s proposals are ripe for critique. He applies irregular warfare to every scenario as the golden key while ignoring factors that seem to preclude any reasonable likelihood of fostering local legitimacy in places such as Afghanistan.

Cleveland and his co-author also use exhaustive half-page footnotes that merely amplify the message in the original paragraph. They discuss the concept of an American way of irregular warfare, but Cleveland fails to provide a succinct definition that works across the instruments of national power. However, he does reference several different current military definitions in his footnotes.

Cleveland rightly observes decisive victories are unlikely in the nuclear and information age. Anyone seeking to understand irregular warfare as integral to the entire continuum of warfare should read this book.

M.T. Mitchell is a Marine Corps Officer studying at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. He holds a bachelors of political science and a graduate certificate from Texas A&M University and a Masters of Art and Science from the U.S. Air Force University. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the U.S. Marine Corps, Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

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

Thank you for being a part of the The Strategy Bridge community. Together, we can #BuildTheBridge.

Header Image: U.S. personnel in Iraq in 2009 (DVIDS)

Notes:

[1] Charles T. Cleveland and Daniel Egel, The American Way of Irregular War: An Analytical Memoir (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020), https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA301-1.html.

[2] Cleveland and Egel, The American Way of Irregular War, 4–9, 102–3, 133,150-51, 165–68, 217.

[3] Cleveland and Egel, The American Way of Irregular War, 72.

thestrategybridge.org · January 17, 2023

​11. This WWII OSS manual shows that being annoying at work is the best form of sabotage

Last March the OSS Society had the manual translated into Ukrainian and sent to Ukraine.

See this article: https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/glorious-ukrainian-resistance

This WWII OSS manual shows that being annoying at work is the best form of sabotage

taskandpurpose.com · by Max Hauptman · January 13, 2023

During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was manned with thousands of soldiers and spies, operating behind enemy lines to organize local resistance, gather intelligence and generally cause chaos for the enemy in occupied Europe. But as one OSS manual shows, sabotage isn’t always about blowing up railways or severing communication lines. Sometimes it’s as simple as being the absolute worst employee possible for your Nazi occupiers.

The “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” published in 1944, notes that “simple sabotage does not require specially prepared tools or equipment; it is executed by an ordinary citizen who may or may not act individually and without the necessity for active connection with an organized group; and it is carried out in such a way as to involve a minimum danger of injury, detection, and reprisal.”

The manual is a wealth of knowledge in how to be a nuisance when it comes to just about every job. If you’re a janitor in a building, make sure to carelessly gather oily rags and other greasy waste in a pile and then, perhaps, carelessly drop your cigarette.

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As “Simple Sabotage” says, “you can be the first to report the fire, but don’t report it too soon.”

If you work in an industrial manufacturing job, take horrible care of your tools and be sure to use them incorrectly. Put too much pressure on drill bits to break them, and keep adding hard, gritty substances to lubricants, like dirt, sand, ground glass, metal filings.

“Twisted combings of human hair, pieces of string, dead insects, and many other common objects will be effective in stopping or hindering the flow of oil through feed lines and filters,” reads the manual.

If you’re working around gasoline or oil tanks, “water, urine, wine, or any other simple liquid you can get in reasonably large quantities will dilute gasoline fuel to a point where no combustion will occur in the cylinder and the engine will not move. One pint to 20 gallons of gasoline is sufficient. If salt water is used, it will cause corrosion and permanent motor damage.”

When it comes to transportation, covertly turn road signs so that they point in the wrong direction. If you’re a taxi driver, waste a German officer’s time and money by taking the most circuitous route possible to wherever it is he’s trying to get to. If you work at a telephone switchboard, “delay putting enemy calls through, give them wrong numbers, cut them off ‘accidentally,’ or forget to disconnect them so that the line cannot be used again.”

The manual notes that any would-be saboteurs should take caution in carrying any of these acts out, and not be too brazen. The goal, after all, is not to cripple the Nazi war effort with one single act, but to merely be the kind of employee that causes a minor problem every day.

“Frequently you can ‘get away’ with such acts under the cover of pretending stupidity, ignorance, over-caution, fear of being suspected or sabotage, or weakness and dullness due to undernourishment,” says the manual.

When the simple saboteur isn’t slashing tires or forgetting to stock the bathroom with toilet paper — yes, that is a suggestion — there is always what the manual refers to as “general interference with organizations and production,” which is a very official way to describe someone being extremely annoying at work.

If you’re in a meeting, “talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate patriotic comments,” reads the manual, adding that it’s important to constantly bring up irrelevant issues and haggle over language.

“When possible, refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration.’ Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.”

For employees, work slowly and inefficiently. And if your boss has a problem with it, “pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once.”

At 32 pages long, the simple sabotage manual provided tips to would-be saboteurs on just about every conceivable way they could be the most terrible, annoying worker possible, and in so doing, play a small part in winning the war by pissing in the occasional Nazi official’s gas tank.

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taskandpurpose.com · by Max Hauptman · January 13, 2023

12. Ukrainian civilians vanish and languish in Russian-run jails

Putin must be held accountable for the atrocities in Putin's War.

Ukrainian civilians vanish and languish in Russian-run jails

AP · by HANNA ARHIROVA and DASHA LITVINOVA · January 17, 2023

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Alina Kapatsyna often dreams about getting a phone call from her mother. In those visions, her mother tells her that she’s coming home.

Men in military uniforms took 45-year-old Vita Hannych away from her house in eastern Ukraine in April. She never returned.

Her family later learned that Hannych, who has long suffered from seizures because of a brain cyst, is in custody in the Russian-occupied part of the Donetsk region.

Kapatsyna told The Associated Press that it remains unclear why her mother — ”a peaceful, civilian and sick person” who has never held a weapon — was detained.

Hannych is one of hundreds — and perhaps thousands — of Ukrainian noncombatants believed to be held by Russian forces for months following their invasion. Some are deemed to be prisoners of war, even though they never took part in the fighting. Others are in a sort of legal limbo — not facing any criminal charges or considered to be POWs.

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Hannych was wearing only a sweatsuit and slippers when she was seized by Russian forces occupying her village of Volodymyrivka several weeks into the Feb. 24 invasion. It is still under Moscow’s control.

Her family initially thought she would come home shortly. Russian forces were known to detain people for two or three days for “filtration” and then release them, Kapatsyna said, and Hannych had no military or law enforcement connections.

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When she wasn’t released, Kapatsyna and her 70-year-old grandmother started a search. At first, letters and visits to various Russian-installed officials and government bodies in the Donetsk region yielded no results.

“The answers from everywhere were the same: ‘We did not take her away.’ Who took her then, if no one took her?” said Kapatsyna, who left the village in March for the Ukrainian-controlled city of Dnipro.

Then, they finally got some clarity: Hannych was jailed in Olenivka, another Russian-controlled city, according to a letter from the Moscow-installed prosecutor’s office in the Donetsk region.

The jail staff told Kapatsyna’s grandmother that Hannych was a sniper, allegations her family deems absurd, given her condition. Medical records seen by the AP confirmed that she had a brain cyst, as well as “residual encephalopathy” and “general convulsive attacks.”

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Anna Vorosheva, who spent 100 days in the same facility as Hannych, recounted squalid, inhumane conditions: putrid drinking water, no heat or showers, having to sleep in shifts and hearing new prisoners screaming from being beaten.

Vorosheva, 46, said she wasn’t told why she was detained, aside from “smirks and jokes about Nazis” — a reference to Russia’s false claims that what it calls its “special military operation” was a campaign to “denazify” Ukraine. She also said the staff told her: “Be happy we’re not beating you.”

Donetsk authorities labeled Hannych a POW and recently told the family she is imprisoned in the occupied city of Mariupol. It remains unclear when, if at all, she could be released.

Ukraine’s top human rights organization, Center for Civil Liberties, has requests concerning around 900 civilians captured by Russia since the war began, with more than half still in custody.

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Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s human rights envoy, put the number even higher and said Friday that his office received inquiries concerning more than 20,000 “civilian hostages” detained by Russia.

Russian lawyer Leonid Solovyov told the AP he has amassed more than 100 requests concerning Ukrainian civilians. He said he was able to help 30-40 confirm the person they looked for was in Russian custody without any legal status — just like his client, Mykyta Shkriabin.

The student from northeastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region was detained by Russia’s military in March and has been held ever since without charges or any legal proceedings.

Shkriabin, then 19, was sheltering from the fighting in a basement with his family, according to his mother, Tetiana. During a break, he went out for supplies — and never returned.

Tetiana Shkriabina told the AP that she learned from witnesses that Russian soldiers seized him.

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Months later, Solovyov got confirmation from Russia’s Defense Ministry that Shkriabin was detained for “resisting the special military operation.” There is no such offense on the books in Russia, Solovyov said, and even if there was, Shkriabin would have been formally charged and investigated, but that hasn’t happened. The ministry refused to disclose his whereabouts.

Moreover, when Solovyov filed a complaint to Russia’s Investigative Committee contesting the detention, it confirmed that there are no criminal probes opened against Shkriabin, that he is neither a suspect, nor an accused.

Shkriabin, who turned 20 in captivity, hasn’t been labeled a POW, the lawyer said, adding: “His legal status is simply a hostage.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry and the Interior Ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Other cases are eerily similar to those of Shkriabin and Hannych.

In May, Russian forces detained information technology specialist Iryna Horobtsova in the southern city of Kherson when it was occupied by Moscow. They raided her apartment, seizing a laptop, two cellphones and several flash drives, and then took her away, according to her sister, Elena Kornii. They promised her parents that she would be home that evening — but it didn’t happen.

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Horobtsova remained in the city and spoke out against the war on social media before she was detained, Kornii said. She had attended anti-Russia protests and also helped residents by driving them to work or finding scarce medications.

“She hasn’t violated any Ukrainian laws,” Kornii said, noting that her sister had nothing to do with the military.

Horobtsova’s lawyer, Emil Kurbedinov, said he believed that Russian security forces were carrying out “purges of the disloyal” in Kherson.

He learned from Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, that she was still in custody. The Interior Ministry in Moscow-annexed Crimea told him that Horobtsova was in a detention center there. When Kurbedinov tried to visit her, officials refused to acknowledge having any such prisoner.

As for why she was held, the lawyer said authorities told him that “she resisted the special military operation, and a decision regarding her will be made when the special military operation is over.”

He described her as “unlawfully imprisoned.”

Dmytro Orlov, mayor of the occupied city of Enerhodar in the Zaporizhzhia region, describes the fate of his deputy the same way — “an absolutely arbitrary detention.”

Ivan Samoydyuk was picked up by Russian soldiers shortly after they seized the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in March, and no charges have been filed against him, Orlov said.

“We’re not even sure if he’s alive!” the mayor said. “If we can’t get clarity from the Russians about the fate of a deputy mayor, imagine the fate of ordinary Ukrainian civilians.”

Mykhailo Savva of the Expert Council of the Center for Civil Liberties said the Geneva Conventions allow a state to detain civilians temporarily in occupied areas, but “as soon as the reason that caused the detention of this civilian disappears, then this person must be released.”

“No special conditions, no trades, just release,” Savva said, noting that civilians can’t be declared POWs under international law.

International law prohibits a warring party from forcibly moving a civilian to its own territory or territory it occupies, and doing so could be deemed a war crime, said Yulia Gorbunova, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch.

POWs can be exchanged, but there is no legal mechanism for swapping noncombatants, Gorbunova said, complicating efforts to free civilians from captivity.

Since the war began, however, Kyiv has been able to bring some home. Andriy Yermak, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, said on Jan. 8 that 132 civilians were brought back from Russian captivity in 2022.

Lubinets, the Ukrainian human rights ombudsman, met this month with his Russian counterpart, Tatyana Moskalkova.

He said he gave Moskalkova lists of some of the 20,000 Ukrainian civilians he said were held by Russia, and “the Russian side agreed to find out where they are, in what condition and why they are being held.”

After getting such information, the question “of the procedure for their return” will be raised, Lubinets said.

___

This story has been updated to correct the age of Kapatsyna’s grandmother to 70, not 64, as stated in an official document.

___

Litvinova reported from Tallinn, Estonia. Yuras Karmanau contributed to this report from Tallinn.

___

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

AP · by HANNA ARHIROVA and DASHA LITVINOVA · January 17, 2023

​13. Military considering back pay for troops kicked out over vax mandate

A paid vacation for not getting the vaccination.

Military considering back pay for troops kicked out over vax mandate

americanmilitarynews.com · by Justin Cooper · January 16, 2023

The Pentagon is looking into the possibility of back pay for former service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, which was formally canceled last week.

Opponents of the military’s vaccine mandate have long called for the more than 8,400 troops discharged for non-compliance to be reinstated with back pay. The door to reinstatement for these troops had already been opened in Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s memo ending the mandate.

And a Pentagon spokesperson confirmed to POLITICO on Friday that back pay hasn’t been ruled out.

“Regarding back pay, the Department is still exploring this and will provide its views on legislation of this nature at the appropriate time and through the appropriate process,” said Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Charlie Dietz in a Friday email to POLITICO.

Austin’s memo ending the vaccine mandate had allowed for troops to request a correction to their discharge records, paving the way for them to reenlist. It also provided for letters of reprimand and other punishments to be reversed for troops who applied for exemptions that were denied.

The memo said that no troops are to be discharged “solely on the basis” of COVID-19 vaccine refusal “if they sought an accommodation on religious, administrative, or medical grounds.” All ongoing reviews of exemption requests were to end.

However, it still allows for commanders to take individual soldiers’ immunization status into account when “making deployment, assignment, or other operational decisions.”

Austin was legally required to end the vaccine mandate by a provision of the 2023 military budget bill. Republicans were long vocally opposed to the mandate, and even Democratic support for it was relatively muted, Military Times reported, with Democrats in some cases calling for its repeal.

Some military officers cited the mandate as a contributor to recruitment shortfalls. In his memo, Austin said the military’s “vaccination efforts will leave a lasting legacy in the many lives we saved … and the high level of readiness we have maintained, amidst difficult public health conditions.”

This was a breaking news story. The details were periodically updated as more information became available.

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americanmilitarynews.com · by Justin Cooper · January 16, 2023

14. B-1B Bomber Flies to Pacific and Back, Integrates with Japan’s F-15s

We can project power anywhere in the world on our timeline.

B-1B Bomber Flies to Pacific and Back, Integrates with Japan’s F-15s

https://www.airandspaceforces.com/b-1b-bomber-flies-to-pacific-and-back-integrates-with-japans-f-15s/?mc_cid=f536a44975&mc_eid=70bf478f36

Jan. 16, 2023 | By Greg Hadley

A B-1B Lancer from Ellsworth Air Force Base flew from South Dakota to the Pacific and back earlier this week, integrating with Japanese F-15s and linking up with a KC-135 tanker along the way. 

The long-duration, CONUS-to-CONUS mission, used a single B-1 bomber from the 37th Bomb Squadron to showcase the Air Force’s ability “to operate anywhere in the world at any time in support of the National Defense Strategy,” the squadron stated in a release. 

The release did not detail exactly where the B-1 flew, and the 28th Bomb Wing did not immediately respond to queries. However, in a Facebook post, U.S. Strategic Command referred to the flight as a Bomber Task Force mission, noting that the bomber flew alongside F-15s from the Japan Air Self-Defense Force. Images released by the 18th Wing at Kadena Air Base, Japan, showed a KC-135 Stratotanker from the 909th Air Refueling Squadron refueling the BONE “over the Pacific Ocean.” 

B-1s lately have become a regular presence in the Indo-Pacific. The 34th Bomb Squadron, also from Ellsworth, deployed Lancers to Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, in June 2022, training with the Japanese and landing in Australia for a hot-pit refueling exercise. Shortly after that, the 37th Bomb Squadron sent some of its B-1s to Guam for about six weeks, during which the jets carried naval mines, practiced Agile Combat Employment, and flew over the Korean Peninsula in a show of force in response to North Korean missile tests—the first such flight in five years. 

B-1s have conducted other CONUS-to-CONUS missions recently, as well. Two of the bombers from Dyess Air Force Base, Texas, flew to the U.S. Southern Command area of responsibility in September, integrating with partner nations Ecuador and Panama, and countering “illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing operations off the coast of Ecuador in the vicinity of the Galapagos Islands,” according to a 7th Bomb Wing press release. 

15. China Undergoing ‘Build-Up in Every Warfare Area,’ Says ONI Commander

Video the link: https://news.usni.org/2023/01/16/china-undergoing-build-up-in-every-warfare-area-says-oni-commander?mc_cid=f536a44975&mc_eid=70bf478f36

But I guess there is nothing to worry about since only China, Russia, and Iran are mentioned.

China Undergoing ‘Build-Up in Every Warfare Area,’ Says ONI Commander - USNI News

news.usni.org · by John Grady · January 17, 2023

Chinese amphibious landing craft on Nov. 25, 2022. PLA Navy Photo

The danger to Taiwan from China is “something we need to take very seriously” as the island is taking steps to mobilize its entire society to deter a mainland takeover, the commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence said last week.

The Taiwanese are asking themselves “what can we do to make China think twice” before it would attempt a cross-straits invasion, Rear Adm. Michael Studeman said last week. He said Beijing has increased its probes of Taiwan’s air defenses and sent more warships by the island since this summer to also warn off the United States and potential allies.

“The stakes have gone up,” he said.

He noted Taiwan’s stepped-up security spending, extending the training time required of draftees and exercising in how to fight and operate against an invading force, he said speaking at an online event sponsored by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.

Studeman said he has shared with Taiwanese officials lessons the United States has learned from the fighting in Ukraine

“China is the number one challenge to America,” noting the pressure it is putting on the Philippines and Japan over territorial claims.

What has been the most surprising thing to him across his more than 30 years of service has been Beijing’s ability to take basic technology from systems like anti-ship ballistic missiles and transform it rapidly into a hypersonic weapons system.

“We have to be really tuned into what they do.” He said that means harnessing “kinetic and non-kinetic ways of dealing” with these technological advances based on a variety of intelligence.

Rear Adm. Michael Studeman

In his opening remarks, Studeman said China is engaged in a “build-up in every warfare area” from space and cyber to a blue water navy. “We’ll see more of the Chinese navy” in the future as it operates more across the globe. Beijing is expanding its logistics networks via port access agreements, formal basing arrangements and takeovers of ports in nations that defaulted on infrastructure loans with China.

In addition to its expanding navy, China’s 15,000-vessel fishing fleet often pays little attention to exclusive economic zone restrictions. The fleets travel the world hauling in catches that deplete fish stocks critical to the world food supply. These vessels use the oceans’ size in locations as far apart as the Philippines and the coast of South America to fish illegally.

The government-subsidized fishing fleet is sometimes backed by China Coast Guard vessels to press territorial claims as it is doing in the South China Sea.

Last month, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro termed China’s illegal and unreported fishing as happening on an “industrial scale.”

The rise of China “is not a regional dominance issue but a global issue,” Studeman said.

On Russian Navy’s performance since the Feb. 24 invasion, Studeman noted that it “continues to fire missiles” from submarines and surface ships into Ukraine, but the ships are staying close to the coast of the Crimean Peninsula for their own safety.

“The Ukrainians have come up with very innovative techniques” to strike back. The Ukrainians sank RTS Moskva (121), the flagship of the Kremlin’s Black Sea fleet, with Neptune missiles in April. In the wake of that strike, the Russians reportedly moved Kilo-class attack submarines from its large base in Sevastopol. This fall, Kyiv used drones to attack several Russian surface ships in the Black Sea.

Despite Russia’s failings on the ground, Moscow is “playing a game of throttling” grain exports from Kyiv through snap inspections despite an agreement between Russia, Ukraine and Turkey to guarantee the safe passage of these vessels through the Black Sea.

“There is great concern” globally about a food crisis brought on by the war.

Studeman said this gives Russia “an opportunity to sell their own wheat” while keeping Ukrainian harvests in port. Moscow has claimed that it has not received all it was guaranteed to export fertilizer in the U.N.-brokered arrangement.

Looking at Iran, which has exported drones to support the Russian military in Ukraine, he said Tehran “is continuing to support its proxies with lots of weaponry” like the Houthis in Yemen to include a variety of unmanned systems. At the same time, Iran, as reported by USNI News, is converting a container cargo ship to a “drone carrier” to increase its long-range strike capabilities beyond the Persian Gulf.

Related

news.usni.org · by John Grady · January 17, 2023

16. FBI raided Chinese ‘police station’ in NYC: Report

FBI raided Chinese ‘police station’ in NYC: Report

americanmilitarynews.com · by Justin Cooper · January 16, 2023

The FBI raided a suspected outpost of Chinese police tucked away in New York City’s Chinatown last fall, seizing materials from one of the secretive operations for the first time known to the public, anonymous sources revealed to the New York Times.

The office was one node in a network of Chinese police outposts around the world that officials are increasingly worried about as a way for China to spy on foreign countries and keep tabs on its people abroad.

The Chinatown outpost was on the third floor of a six-story office building on a busy street, the Times reported. It was raided by FBI counterintelligence agents working on a criminal investigation with the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

In an email to American Military News, FBI spokesperson Martin Feely said the agency has “no comment or guidance to provide” on the reported raid.

At least 102 such outposts have been documented in 53 countries in recent months by the human rights group Safeguard Defenders. FBI Director Christopher Wray said in November that he’s “very concerned” about the outposts, which he called “police stations.”

“It’s a long-arm power to show their own citizens inside China that their government is so strong,” said Safeguard Defenders researcher Chen Yen-ting. “We have the power to reach globally, and even if you go out, you’re still under our control.”

The Chinese Embassy said “there is no need to make people nervous” about the so-called outposts, which it said are staffed by volunteers helping Chinese nationals with routine tasks like renewing their Chinese driver’s licenses, the Times reported.

But in Chinese state media, the Times found them referred to as “overseas police service centers” that are “collecting intelligence” and solving crimes for Chinese nationals without the help of local authorities.

A list of police outposts showed the addresses of Chinese restaurants and associations, the Times reported. Police outposts have been set up in Japan, Italy, France, Britain, Germany, Hungary and the Czech Republic, among other countries, by at least four regions of China, according to the Times.

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americanmilitarynews.com · by Justin Cooper · January 16, 2023

17. Taiwan’s Outlying Islands Are at Risk

Taiwan’s Outlying Islands Are at Risk

Chinese domestic instability could encourage the CCP to attack the Taiwanese archipelagos of Kinmen and Matsu.

By Frederik Kelter, a Danish freelance journalist based in Taiwan.

Foreign Policy · by Frederik Kelter · January 16, 2023

On the Taiwanese island of Kinmen, as waves break against the rows of anti-landing spikes that protrude from the sand, Wang Ne-Xie—a local and former military man—gazes out across the water.

Through the light haze shrouding the horizon he spots the vague silhouettes of skyscrapers rising like ghostly columns toward the sky. They constitute the outline of the Chinese city of Xiamen, which stands only a few miles from Kinmen on the Chinese mainland.

The skyscrapers fade from view in the gentle light of dusk, but around the Taiwanese island things are far from peaceful these days. Out in the Taiwan Strait, near-daily incursions of Chinese military aircraft into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone have continued unabated since former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in early August. Meanwhile, large-scale protests against harsh COVID lockdowns erupted in November throughout major Chinese cities in the biggest act of defiance to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule in more than 30 years. Developments on the Chinese domestic front and the Chinese conduct across the Taiwan Strait have convinced Wang that the Chinese will attempt an invasion of Kinmen.

On the Taiwanese island of Kinmen, as waves break against the rows of anti-landing spikes that protrude from the sand, Wang Ne-Xie—a local and former military man—gazes out across the water.

Through the light haze shrouding the horizon he spots the vague silhouettes of skyscrapers rising like ghostly columns toward the sky. They constitute the outline of the Chinese city of Xiamen, which stands only a few miles from Kinmen on the Chinese mainland.

The skyscrapers fade from view in the gentle light of dusk, but around the Taiwanese island things are far from peaceful these days. Out in the Taiwan Strait, near-daily incursions of Chinese military aircraft into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone have continued unabated since former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in early August. Meanwhile, large-scale protests against harsh COVID lockdowns erupted in November throughout major Chinese cities in the biggest act of defiance to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule in more than 30 years. Developments on the Chinese domestic front and the Chinese conduct across the Taiwan Strait have convinced Wang that the Chinese will attempt an invasion of Kinmen.

“We will be here to oppose them,” he said, gesturing toward Xiamen’s darkening skyline across the water. “But we won’t be able to stop them.”

Yet Kinmen’s defenders did exactly that in 1949 and 1950 when mainland forces tried to capture the island but were repulsed. Back then, the outlying islands of Kinmen and Matsu had to be conquered by the communists to clear the way for a final push toward Taiwan and a total victory in the Chinese Civil War that awaited once the nationalists were dislodged from their last holdouts in the Taiwan Strait. To prevent that from happening, the nationalists transformed Kinmen and Matsu into island fortresses and stationed tens of thousands of troops on them.

Today the situation is very different on the outlying Taiwanese islands. Since the 1990s, Kinmen and Matsu have been largely demilitarized. Most of the military installations and equipment are no longer manned by soldiers; instead, they draw flocks of tourists. The remaining bases and outposts house just a fraction of the numbers that were present in previous decades.

The demilitarization of the outlying islands was initiated during a period of calm and de-escalation in the Taiwan Strait. On the Chinese side, there was a cessation of the decadeslong artillery bombardment of the outlying islands that had continued since the failed invasion attempts. On the Taiwanese side, there was a marked troop reduction as part of a larger overhaul of the national defense policy as funds were diverted away from defense spending toward public welfare projects.

The de-escalation was preceded by groundbreaking shifts on either side, with China opening its economy to the world and Taiwan transitioning from a one-party state under strict martial law to a liberal democracy. These developments increased exchanges between China and Taiwan. Kinmen and Matsu were opened to Chinese tourists, and for a while steps toward a peaceful reunification seemed more likely than a Chinese takeover of the outlying islands.

While de-escalation resulted in demilitarization on the Taiwanese side, across the water from Kinmen, that was not the case. Quite the contrary. Chinese military spending has risen 72 percent since 2012 as China continues to expand and modernize its military capabilities. As tensions once again run high in the Taiwan Strait, the results of this expansion and modernization are repeatedly showcased around Taiwan as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) carries out constant airborne and seaborne activities near the island.

The outlying islands have not been ignored as the Chinese circle Taiwan. During the massive exercises carried out following Pelosi’s visit, Chinese drones were spotted on several occasions flying over Kinmen near the island’s military installations, resulting in one of them down being shot down.

If Beijing chose to undertake an outright invasion of Kinmen and Matsu, there would be very little standing in the immediate way of the Chinese forces’ advance on the largely demilitarized islands. Even if the Taiwanese were to attempt to reinforce the islands, such reinforcements would have to cover about 120 miles, whereas the Chinese attackers would only have to cover three to 12 miles to reach their targets.

Given the lightly defended state of the islands, Chinese military preparations could also be conducted more covertly than preparations for an all-out attack on the Taiwanese main island could. Additionally, the Taiwan Relations Act, the Three Communiqués, and the Six Assurances that on the U.S. side together constitute the guiding parameters of the U.S.-Taiwanese defense relationship offer pledges to Taiwan proper and the Taiwanese islands of Penghu, but they do not include the Taiwanese outlying islands of Kinmen and Matsu.

“There is a lack of American security guarantees for Kinmen and Matsu because the islands hold very little strategic value to the American strategy in the Western Pacific,” said Yao-Yuan Yeh, a professor of East Asian politics at the University of St. Thomas in Houston.

The first island chain running from Japan in the north to Malaysia in the south is the principal American strategic line in the military containment of China. Were Taiwan’s outlying islands to fall to the Chinese, this line would still be intact.

“So why risk a war with China over them?” Yeh asked.

Until recently, the Taiwanese have estimated that the risks against the islands are low since a takeover would not fulfill the overall Chinese goal of unifying Taiwan with the mainland.

For the Chinese, the outlying islands used to constitute a strategic obstacle that had to be overcome for any amphibious invasion of Taiwan to be conceivable. However, as China has demonstrated in countless military drills in recent years, the modernized PLA would be quite capable of striking Taiwan and swarming the island without the outlying islands as a launching pad.

If the Chinese launch an attack against the outlying islands, it would not be because of a U.S. omission, Chinese armament, or Taiwanese demilitarization, according to Yeh.

“The threat of invasion against the outlying islands really depends on the domestic pressure on the CCP and [Chinese President] Xi Jinping and how they handle such domestic pressure moving forward,” Yeh said.

And the domestic pressure has been rising on the Chinese leadership in several arenas in the last couple of years. Economic growth is at its lowest level in decades, youth unemployment is hovering around 20 percent, and tens of thousands of homebuyers are refusing to pay mortgages on incomplete apartments in a distorted housing market connected to a decadeslong building frenzy that at the same time has left upward of 50 million homes unoccupied.

Many of these issues have only been made worse by the three years of COVID-19 restrictions that in November sparked the biggest protests in urban China seen in a generation.

Although the zero-COVID policy was dismantled following the protests, that itself has led to a new crisis as millions of Chinese are catching the virus, while the recent strain on funeral homes and crematoriums is suggesting that people are dying in unusually high numbers.

“Meanwhile, the socioeconomic issues plaguing China remain just underneath the surface,” said Christina Chen at the Taiwanese security think tank Institute for National Defense and Security Research.

These issues will become increasingly difficult to resolve, according to Chen, as China moves from an authoritarian style of leadership toward a totalitarian one with an ever-more powerful Xi at the helm.

The reconstituted Chinese leadership initially did not recognize the existence of any protests and later indicated that any unrest was due to foreign forces seeking to destroy China.

It is a common trait among leaders of authoritarian and totalitarian systems to blame internal trouble and unrest on foreign interference and external forces seeking to undermine and eventually destroy the nation. The Russian leadership has used the notion of “foreign agents” to shut down NGOs and lock up opposition figures in the country since 2012. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has blamed Turkey’s sky-high inflation on “foreign financial tools,” while Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has blamed “the foreign hand” for instigating the protests that have rocked Iran since mid-September.

In the face of internal instability, such accusations of foreign meddling can lead to military interference in neighboring countries as a way of bolstering domestic support. President Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings rose markedly following the Russian takeover of Crimea in 2014, as did Erdogan’s approval ratings after the Turkish incursion into northeastern Syria in 2019.

Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu twice in December expressed concern that the Chinese leadership will take China down a similar road.

“We are concerned that the Chinese government will aim at Taiwan, will accuse Taiwan of being the cause for the unrest in China,” he said, suggesting later that the Taiwanese government believes that China is looking for a pretext and that the military situation is looking more serious than ever.

Were the Taiwanese government’s fears to come true, the vulnerability of the outlying islands would make them an obvious target of a military endeavor meant to divert attention away from a potentially deteriorating domestic socioeconomic situation in China.

While Kinmen and Matsu might very well have lost much of their strategic military significance, they have lost none of their symbolic significance, Chen said.

“A takeover of the outlying islands could offer a particularly solid boost to Xi Jinping since the PLA tried twice and failed twice to capture the islands in the past,” Chen added. “So, a conquest would be a feat not attained by any previous CCP leader.”

However, for Yeh it is not necessarily a predetermined outcome that the PLA will roll carefree onto Kinmen and Matsu if an attack is launched.

“As Russia has found out in Ukraine, military operations can be messy, unpredictable, and go completely sideways,” Yeh said.

But with Xi more uncontested than ever and surrounded by a new CCP leadership whose main qualification is loyalty to him, Yeh is concerned that there are fewer people left to ask the necessary questions and make sure Xi has the complete picture if the leadership starts to plan an invasion.

“Are they factoring in all the risks that would come with launching a military engagement in one of the most hotly contested regions in the world? Can they be sure that Taiwan and the U.S. will just stand by as China takes over Taiwanese territory? If they miscalculate, it can lead to war.”

According to Yeh, the answers to these questions depend on several factors—one of which is the U.S. and Taiwanese perception of the Chinese endgame.

“If a swift takeover of Kinmen and Matsu comes across as the absolute end goal, reactions could be more subdued from the American and Taiwanese camps. If it is seen as just the initial step in an extended conquest, then we are getting closer to war.”

Back on the western beach of Kinmen, Wang is aware that it is by bigger forces that Kinmen’s fate will be decided, not by the island’s 140,000 inhabitants.

“There is a great game being played in the region,” he said, “and on Kinmen, we just hope that we don’t fall victim to it.”

Foreign Policy · by Frederik Kelter · January 16, 2023

18. What TikTok Has on You

What TikTok Has on You

The social media app’s data collection practices are not unlike its competitors’, but its links to China add a sinister layer to the debate.

By Rishi Iyengar, a reporter at Foreign Policy.

Foreign Policy · by Rishi Iyengar · January 12, 2023

TikTok wants to convince the West that it’s just another social media platform, even as the immensely popular short-form video app has been banned from U.S. federal government devices and by several state governments, too. Several lawmakers and officials want to go even further and ban TikTok completely.

The primary concern, they say, is the likelihood of data collected by the app ending up in the hands of the Chinese government because of TikTok’s ownership by Chinese tech firm ByteDance.

And TikTok collects a lot: It can access users’ names, ages, phone numbers, email addresses, details about the devices and mobile networks they’re using, keystrokes, messages on the app, and even biometric information such as “faceprints and voiceprints,” according to the app’s privacy policy. TikTok’s algorithm also tracks what users watch and how much time they spend on each video so it can better tailor the content it serves them, giving the app key insights into behavior patterns, likes, and dislikes.

TikTok wants to convince the West that it’s just another social media platform, even as the immensely popular short-form video app has been banned from U.S. federal government devices and by several state governments, too. Several lawmakers and officials want to go even further and ban TikTok completely.

The primary concern, they say, is the likelihood of data collected by the app ending up in the hands of the Chinese government because of TikTok’s ownership by Chinese tech firm ByteDance.

And TikTok collects a lot: It can access users’ names, ages, phone numbers, email addresses, details about the devices and mobile networks they’re using, keystrokes, messages on the app, and even biometric information such as “faceprints and voiceprints,” according to the app’s privacy policy. TikTok’s algorithm also tracks what users watch and how much time they spend on each video so it can better tailor the content it serves them, giving the app key insights into behavior patterns, likes, and dislikes.

“There’s an extensive profile that can be created from this app in terms of privacy violations and things being easily linked back to you as a unique individual,” said Alexis Hancock, a director of engineering at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit.

Ultimately, however, Hancock and other cybersecurity experts say TikTok’s data collection practices are little different from those employed by its Silicon Valley competitors such as Google and Facebook, which have previously faced controversies of their own on that front.

“We’re already used to tech companies having this enormous amount of access to our personal life,” said Bruce Schneier, a lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government who specializes in privacy issues. “By extension, the U.S. government has that access, and so how do we feel about another country having that access?”

For government and intelligence officials, lawmakers, or other individuals working on sensitive issues that could be exploited by the Chinese government, the risk is clear. TikTok has admitted that its data, even if stored outside Chinese borders, can be accessed by employees in China, and recent revelations that the company tracked journalists who were writing about it has further heightened the alarm at its possibility. (ByteDance said it fired the employees involved in tracking journalists.) And while TikTok has repeatedly said it does not share data with Beijing and would not do so if asked, its parent company, ByteDance, could be compelled to do so by Chinese law.

For everyone else, including the tens of millions of young Americans who are avid TikTok users, it comes down to more personal notions of privacy and security.

“It depends on who you are—are you concerned, are you worried, that the Chinese government knows what kind of porn you like, the Chinese government knows if you are clinically depressed, the Chinese government knows if you are having an affair?” Schneier said. “You just have to decide who you trust. None of these companies are working in your best interest.”

Banning TikTok would also not necessarily prevent China from accessing data on Americans. Chinese hackers have been linked to some of the biggest data breaches in U.S. history, including at the Office of Personnel Management under the Obama administration and a massive 2018 cyberattack on Marriott Hotels that compromised the private information of more than 500 million customers. Moreover, large amounts of the same information TikTok collects are already hoovered up by so-called data brokers, companies that collect and sell that information for targeted advertising.

In the absence of effective U.S. privacy laws that curb data collection across the board, banning TikTok would “kind of be putting a Band-Aid on a bigger problem,” Hancock said. “If you were truly concerned about everyday Americans, you would target a federal privacy law that targets all of these malicious, insidious companies that repeat our data throughout advertising ecosystems without our knowledge,” she added. “You would need to target that ecosystem, not just one app.”

TikTok may face a bigger challenge in Europe, with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Digital Services Act laying out stricter guidelines for user privacy and content moderation. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew met with EU officials earlier this week to reassure them that the company will comply with the laws. But European officials have not sought to single out TikTok’s links to China in the way some American counterparts have.

“We don’t look, legally, at where companies are headquartered,” Gerard de Graaf, Europe’s senior digital envoy to Silicon Valley, told Foreign Policy in a recent interview. “They will all be treated equally. They will have to comply fully with the rules.” TikTok is under an ongoing investigation by European regulators, however, to ensure its data collection practices comply with the GDPR.

Back in Washington, it’s a somewhat different conversation.

“Without any meaningful online privacy laws on the books—and none in sight for the next Congress—forcing TikTok to store its data in the U.S. will not stop Beijing from acquiring data on Americans,” Dakota Cary, a consultant for cybersecurity firm Krebs Stamos Group who focuses on China’s cybercapabilities, wrote in a recent op-ed for tech news outlet CyberScoop.

But Cary argues that Chinese ownership of TikTok is a big enough threat to warrant a U.S. ban, not because of its data collection but because of the enormous influence it is capable of wielding. China can compel TikTok to censor sensitive topics, push certain types of content, or sway political discourse in other countries. (The same could be said for other social media platforms that have recently acquired new owners.)

TikTok has previously faced controversy on that front, with an executive admitting to U.K. lawmakers in 2020 that it censored some videos about China’s Xinjiang region and the region’s Uyghur population. The company said those policies have since been abandoned, but there are continued fears that the Chinese government could easily force TikTok to censor other topics it doesn’t want discussed, such as Taiwan.

“Overall, TikTok’s greatest issue is that discretion regarding content censorship, demotion, or promotion are at the discretion of a company whose staff can be coerced by the [Chinese] government,” Cary said in an email to Foreign Policy. The risk, he said, is heightened for members of the Chinese diaspora globally, who could be targeted by Beijing through the app.

“China chose to export its repression and surveillance abroad; TikTok is unfortunately paying for that policy choice,” he said.

Foreign Policy · by Rishi Iyengar · January 12, 2023

19. Why Can't America Accept An Imperfect World?

I guess the answer is to leave Ukraine to hang out to dry.

Conclusion:

Those episodes should induce much greater caution on the part of U.S. policymakers, especially with respect to the conflict in Ukraine. The United States and its NATO allies already caused a needless tragedy because of their clumsy, tone-deaf policy toward Russia and Moscow’s strategic interests in Ukraine. Once again, U.S. leaders refused to accept an unfavorable situation and thereby created a worse one. If they don’t back off now, the ultimate result could make the ugly outcomes in the Balkans, Iraq, Libya, and Syria seem like minor missteps.

Why Can't America Accept An Imperfect World?

19fortyfive.com · by Ted Galen Carpenter · January 16, 2023

Since the twilight of the Cold War at the beginning of the 1990s, the United States has meddled militarily–or even waged outright wars–in numerous regions for a multitude of reasons. The roster is a lengthy one: Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and, most recently, Ukraine.

Moreover, that list does not include Washington’s ongoing “drone wars” in Pakistan and other countries.

Even if U.S. leaders sincerely believed that those military interventions were both strategically desirable and morally justified, the record proves otherwise. Again and again, Washington’s actions have destabilized countries and regions, empowered unsavory, extremely dangerous political elements, and created massive refugee crises. Most of those crusades have made already bad situations worse. U.S. leaders must learn that frequently it is wise to accept an imperfect, even unpleasant, situation to avoid creating a catastrophic one.

Unfortunately, most members of the foreign policy establishment show no signs of having internalized appropriate lessons from previous blunders. Acknowledging that Washington’s arrogant insistence on expanding NATO to Russia’s border trampled on core Russian security interests and helped trigger the tragic war in Ukraine would be a good first step. The logical follow up would be to facilitate negotiations for a peace accord that would guarantee Ukraine’s strict neutrality.

Such a settlement would leave Russia in control of both Crimea and the Donbas, and it would confirm that Ukraine will be in Moscow’s sphere of influence. Instead of accepting such an unpleasant, but still bearable, outcome, Washington is using Ukraine as a pawn in a NATO proxy war against Russia—a strategy that creates the nightmarish prospect of a bloody, multi-year conflict. Worse, the proxy war could escalate to a direct war between NATO and Russia, with possible nuclear implications.

Such an ill-advised policy typifies U.S. behavior over the past three decades. Instead of allowing the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s to proceed in a natural fashion, despite the accompanying violence, the United States led NATO military interventions to keep the inherently unstable new country of Bosnia intact and (conversely) to sever Serbia’s Kosovo province from Belgrade’s control. Both areas remain ethnic and political powder kegs a quarter century later.

Washington’s myopia was even more in evidence with respect to its policy toward Iraq. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, once a valued U.S. client, committed the unpardonable sin of seizing neighboring Kuwait without U.S. permission. The United States punished him by expelling his forces from Kuwait and inflicting major damage on Iraq’s own infrastructure. But U.S. leaders did not stop even when those actions created ripples of destabilization throughout the Muslim world. Instead, under President George W. Bush, the United States initiated a new war and ousted Saddam from power.

Saddam was certainly a nasty, brutal ruler. But he was also a pragmatic, effective secular ruler, who kept the forces of religious extremism at bay. Post-Saddam Iraq has been a mess, punctuated by a Sunni-Shia civil war in 2005-2007 and the subsequent rise of ISIS during Barack Obama’s administration. At one point, ISIS controlled nearly a third of Iraq’s territory, including the country’s second largest city, Mosul. Even today, the Potemkin democratic government in Baghdad retains a precarious grip on power, while Kurds in Northern Iraq exercise de facto independence at the same time as they must fend off repeated Turkish military incursions. With its Iraq policy, Washington undermined stability enforced by a secular tyrant, creating instead a dangerous, much more volatile, environment.

Obama’s foreign policy team managed to produce an even more horrible outcome in Libya. In 2011, the United States and several key NATO allies (principally, Britain and France) helped rebel forces overthrow Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton celebrated Qaddafi’s downfall (and sadistic execution) with the flippant quip “we came, we saw, he died.”

It was extremely difficult to feel any sorrow for Qaddafi’s demise; he was a typical corrupt and brutal Third World dictator, seemingly straight out of Hollywood casting. But as in the case of Saddam, Qaddafi was a secular tyrant who managed (barely) to hold a fragile, artificial country together. By helping to eliminate him, the United States plunged Libya into more than a decade of horrific chaos. The result of NATO’s meddling has been massive refugee flows, both internally and with desperate attempts to make the perilous Mediterranean crossing to Europe. There have even been reports of open-air slave markets selling black African migrants. Currently, a simmering struggle for power continues between the official government in Tripoli and the forces of rebel Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar. No rational person could argue that the U.S.-led military intervention made Libya a better place.

The outcome of U.S. policy in Syria is at least as bad. The Obama administration launched an effort to help Sunni powers (primarily Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey) oust Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad. As bad as Assad was, his domestic opponents were worse. Washington ended up backing some of the most odious Muslim extremist forces in the Middle East, while falsely portraying them as pro-democracy “freedom fighters.” As in the cases of Iraq and Libya, U.S. meddling has produced a massive humanitarian tragedy. More than 300,000 Syrians have perished in the fighting and some 6.8 million are refugees—creating a huge refugee flow that has created serious social and political tensions in Europe. By refusing to accept the continued rule of a pro-Iranian secular dictator, Washington has made Syria into yet another chaotic arena and a playground for radical Islamist elements.

Those episodes should induce much greater caution on the part of U.S. policymakers, especially with respect to the conflict in Ukraine. The United States and its NATO allies already caused a needless tragedy because of their clumsy, tone-deaf policy toward Russia and Moscow’s strategic interests in Ukraine. Once again, U.S. leaders refused to accept an unfavorable situation and thereby created a worse one. If they don’t back off now, the ultimate result could make the ugly outcomes in the Balkans, Iraq, Libya, and Syria seem like minor missteps.

Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at 19FortyFive, is the author of 13 books and more than 1,100 articles on international affairs. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).

19fortyfive.com · by Ted Galen Carpenter · January 16, 2023

20. Analysis | The worry in Davos: Globalization is under siege

Excerpts:

All of this, the classically liberal Economist argued, has “set off a dangerous spiral into protectionism worldwide” and frays the global order that the United States spent decades creating and securing in the aftermath of World War II. It may even imperil “the causes of liberal democracy and market capitalism.”

The hosts in Davos want to hold the line. The kickoff panel Tuesday morning, featuring economic historians Adam Tooze and Niall Ferguson, is set to ponder “de-globalization or re-globalization.” The latter concept reflects new trends of the moment, with governments and multinational companies reconfiguring supply chains away from conflict spots and adversarial states. It’s on view with the departure of a significant number of Western companies from Russia and China.

“I would say we are in a re-globalizing moment,” Tengku Zafrul Aziz, Malaysia’s minister for trade and industry, told me at his nation’s pavilion along the snow-lined central promenade of Davos. He said in the short term, Malaysia may benefit from companies and businesses pivoting away from China to markets in Southeast Asia — but the bigger picture is more worrying.

“People are becoming more siloed,” he said. “In the long run, we are concerned about the costs of trade going up.”

Analysis | The worry in Davos: Globalization is under siege

The Washington Post · by Ishaan Tharoor · January 17, 2023

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DAVOS, Switzerland — A decade ago, political power brokers and corporate bigwigs gathered here in the Swiss Alps under an upbeat theme. It was a time for “resilient dynamism,” declared the organizers of the 2013 meeting of the World Economic Forum. After the travails of the global financial crisis, they explained, the world was now in a “post-crisis” stage. It was incumbent on the elites convened at Davos to usher in further reforms in the service of economic “sustainability” and “competitiveness,” perennial WEF watchwords that tap into the liberal dogma that long underlay its proceedings, where the desire to do good need not interfere with profit margins.

Ten years on, there seems to be less optimism. Instead of a “post-crisis” moment, it’s more common to talk of a “permacrisis,” of a world buckling under a never-ending cascade of calamity — war, climate catastrophe, energy price chaos, inflation, epidemics of hunger and disease, political instability and widening economic inequity. This year’s WEF theme, a plaintive appeal to find “cooperation in a fragmented world,” seems more possessed by the ruptures that have already taken place. In a press call with reporters last week, WEF President Borge Brende said the meeting “will happen against the most complex geopolitical and geoeconomic backdrop in decades.”

Top on the agenda are concerns over a possible global recession. There’s also the vexing challenge of climate change and the ongoing war in Ukraine and its downstream effects, including the snarling of the world’s grain trade that contributed to the onset of famine conditions in swaths of sub-Saharan Africa. Beneath it all is a deeper Davos anxiety: Few institutions are so immediately connected to neoliberalism and the project of globalization as the forum. In an age of ascendant nationalism and great power rivalry, where the United States itself is waging trade wars, where does globalization go?

The latest cover story of the Economist, which every year puts out an issue that tries to define the Davos zeitgeist, bemoaned the “new logic that threatens globalization.” It decried the Biden administration’s “abandonment of free-market rules for an aggressive industrial policy,” pointing to subsidy-laden programs to power the United States’ green transition as well as new efforts to make the nation a hotbed of semiconductor manufacturing.

All of this, the classically liberal Economist argued, has “set off a dangerous spiral into protectionism worldwide” and frays the global order that the United States spent decades creating and securing in the aftermath of World War II. It may even imperil “the causes of liberal democracy and market capitalism.”

The hosts in Davos want to hold the line. The kickoff panel Tuesday morning, featuring economic historians Adam Tooze and Niall Ferguson, is set to ponder “de-globalization or re-globalization.” The latter concept reflects new trends of the moment, with governments and multinational companies reconfiguring supply chains away from conflict spots and adversarial states. It’s on view with the departure of a significant number of Western companies from Russia and China.

“I would say we are in a re-globalizing moment,” Tengku Zafrul Aziz, Malaysia’s minister for trade and industry, told me at his nation’s pavilion along the snow-lined central promenade of Davos. He said in the short term, Malaysia may benefit from companies and businesses pivoting away from China to markets in Southeast Asia — but the bigger picture is more worrying.

“People are becoming more siloed,” he said. “In the long run, we are concerned about the costs of trade going up.”

The forum estimates that this year’s attendance involves the highest numbers of political and business leaders ever to make the trip up the mountain, including more than 50 heads of state or government, 56 finance ministers, 19 governors of central banks, 30 trade ministers and 35 foreign ministers.

But conspicuous in their absence are the bulk of the leaders of the world’s major economies. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will be the only leader of a Group of Seven nation to make an appearance, with his European counterparts likely keen to avoid the optics of glad-handing with the global elite while their publics cope with cost-of-living crises at home. The top officials from the Biden administration are U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, who given the course of current events may find herself engaging in rather testy conversations through the week.

After a hiatus during the pandemic, China has sent its own top-level delegation, led by Vice Premier Liu He, who is slated to deliver one of the event’s major keynote addresses on Tuesday. It marks a return of Beijing’s engagement with the forum, though still not at the level that was on show in 2017, when Chinese President Xi Jinping himself keynoted proceedings with a speech defending globalization that cast China as an upholder of the liberal order. It was seen then as a statement of intent from a leader keen to seize the mantle of global leadership and a thinly veiled jab at a newly installed ultranationalist Trump administration bent on populist disruption.

That moment in Davos was arguably a high-water mark for Xi on the world stage. In the years since, his autocratic fist tightened at home, while many governments elsewhere see China under his leadership as a threat, if not necessarily an adversary. Whatever the WEF’s entreaties for dialogue and cooperation, there’s an increasing view in the West that Xi’s designs over Taiwan must be checked. There’s also an evolving consensus that China’s admission two decades ago into the World Trade Organization — perhaps the single most important event in the history of globalization — was a mistake.

In 2013, WEF organizers hailed the participation of Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev as a national leader who understood “global responsibilities.” Of course, Medvedev along with Russian President Vladimir Putin are now all persona non grata in Davos, as well as the coterie of Russian oligarchs and business elites who used to throw some of the most lavish parties on the sidelines of the forum. The war in Ukraine will shadow discussions, with a major delegation from Kyiv, including Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska, in attendance.

A huge part of the forum has little to do with politicians or the doom-mongering of pundits. There will be dozens of discussions and events spotlighting all sorts of examples of innovation and collaboration in the private sector, on issues ranging from food security to youth education to forestry (WEF has pledged restore and plant a trillion trees around the world). WEF organizers speak rosily in technocratic jargon of how the forum’s attendees enable “systems positive change” and are nudging the world toward a happier, more sustainable future.

“There’s a cynicism around Davos, they can say it’s a talk shop,” Penjani Mkambula, who works on fortifying grains with minerals and vitamins in the developing world at the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, told me. “But there are so many positives that emerge. A lot of partnerships get forged, a lot of work gets done and you sometimes only see the results years later.”

The Washington Post · by Ishaan Tharoor · January 17, 2023

21. Joe Biden's Ukraine Strategy Is A Success

Excerpts:

For a long time, a lack of U.S. leadership in the face of Russian imperialism signaled to the Free World that business with Russia should continue as usual. This was perceived by Russia as the Free World’s collective weakness. It emboldened Putin to take bigger and bigger risks until we got to where we are today. While the Free World pays the price of this appeasement in military equipment and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, Ukrainians pay the cost in lives destroyed.

Despite the failures of his predecessors, President Biden has demonstrated leadership in the face of Russian imperialism, ended the appeasement of Putin, and carved a new path for the Free World to follow.

History will be kind to President Joe Biden for this.

Joe Biden's Ukraine Strategy Is A Success

19fortyfive.com · by George Monastiriakos · January 16, 2023

The U.S. is the undisputed leader of the Free World. During World War I, U.S. involvement was crucial for ending the conflict on terms favorable to the Allies. In World War II, U.S. intervention was instrumental in defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. During the Cold War, the U.S. vision of liberal democracy triumphed over the Soviet Union’s communist experiment.

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Carrying on the tradition of U.S. leadership, President Biden has led the Free World from the front since Russia invaded Ukraine. To be clear: U.S. support for Ukraine is President Biden’s most important foreign policy and his most successful.

From a moral perspective, U.S. support to Ukraine is the right thing to do.

Sovereignty and territorial integrity are the fundamental principles of the rules-based international order.

A powerful state cannot invade its smaller neighbor to kill its citizens and annex its territory.

Period.

Russia’s destruction of Ukraine’s physical infrastructure is unimaginable. Cities like Mariupol, Volnovahka, Bakhmut, and Soledar have become objectively uninhabitable. The human suffering inflicted on Ukrainians by Russia is even worse.

The psychological trauma to Ukraine’s population will take generations to heal.

For those who don’t care about the moral necessity of helping Ukrainians defend themselves against Russian aggression, support to Ukraine also accomplishes U.S. national security objectives.

Russia has posed a consistent threat to the U.S. since the end of World War II. The U.S. has invested trillions of dollars in dealing with Russia over the last eight decades and continues to spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

Now, Ukraine is decimating Russia’s army for roughly 5% of the U.S.’ annual military budget. This weakens Russia’s ability to wage a conventional war against the U.S. at a bargain price without sacrificing a single American soldier.

Joe Biden, The Uniter

President Biden’s leadership has united the Free World against Russia’s aggression.

The European Union has imposed nine sanctions packages against Russia.

Germany has made the difficult albeit necessary decision to become a military power.

Finland (neutral since the end of World War II) and Sweden (neutral since the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th century) have applied to join NATO.

Japan has reinterpreted Article 9 of its constitution to develop its offensive capabilities and revamped its national security strategy to deal with the threats posed by China, North Korea, and Russia.

The Free World has awakened to the reality that a great power conflict is possible in the 21st century.

Autocrats, Beware

President Biden’s leadership also sends a powerful message to revisionists around the world: autocrats will not be the architects of international relations in the 21st century.

The Free World’s resolve complicates the People’s Liberation Army’s calculations and delays China’s forced reunification with Taiwan.

Unwavering support for non-allied Ukraine signals to Kim Jong-un that the U.S. will defend its allies in Korea and Japan.

It also prevents President Vucic’s threatened incursions into Kosovo from materializing, reduces the likelihood of President Dodik launching a civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and ensures that President Erdogan’s purported invasion of Greece remains rhetorical.

As Winston Churchill famously observed: “You could always count on America to do the right thing – after it has exhausted all the alternatives.” In 2008, President Bush failed to respond to Russia’s invasion of Georgia. The European Union followed by awarding Russia with Nord Stream 1. In 2014, President Obama failed to respond when Russia launched its proxy war against Ukraine and annexed Ukrainian Crimea. The European Union followed by awarding Russia with Nord Stream 2. The policy of appeasement reached its apex in 2018, when President Trump undermined U.S. intelligence agencies, downplayed Russian interference in the 2016 election and failed to hold Russia accountable at his meeting with Putin in Helsinki.

For a long time, a lack of U.S. leadership in the face of Russian imperialism signaled to the Free World that business with Russia should continue as usual. This was perceived by Russia as the Free World’s collective weakness. It emboldened Putin to take bigger and bigger risks until we got to where we are today. While the Free World pays the price of this appeasement in military equipment and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, Ukrainians pay the cost in lives destroyed.

Despite the failures of his predecessors, President Biden has demonstrated leadership in the face of Russian imperialism, ended the appeasement of Putin, and carved a new path for the Free World to follow.

History will be kind to President Joe Biden for this.

George Monastiriakos is a lawyer licensing candidate and political science and history graduate who writes about politics and global affairs.

19fortyfive.com · by George Monastiriakos · January 16, 2023

22. Industrial espionage: How China sneaks out America's technology secrets

As one of our War College students observed long ago: Chinese R&D strategy is "steal to leap ahead."

Industrial espionage: How China sneaks out America's technology secrets

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Image caption,

GE turbine blades in France

By Nicholas Yong

BBC News

It was an innocuous-looking photograph that turned out to be the downfall of Zheng Xiaoqing, a former employee with energy conglomerate General Electric Power.

According to a Department of Justice (DOJ) indictment, the US citizen hid confidential files stolen from his employers in the binary code of a digital photograph of a sunset, which Mr Zheng then mailed to himself.

It was a technique called steganography, a means of hiding a data file within the code of another data file. Mr Zheng utilised it on multiple occasions to take sensitive files from GE.

GE is a multinational conglomerate known for its work in the healthcare, energy and aerospace sectors, making everything from refrigerators to aircraft engines.

The information Zheng stole was related to the design and manufacture of gas and steam turbines, including turbine blades and turbine seals. Considered to be worth millions, it was sent to his accomplice in China. It would ultimately benefit the Chinese government, as well as China-based companies and universities.

Zheng was sentenced to two years in prison earlier this month. It is the latest in a series of similar cases prosecuted by US authorities. In November Chinese national Xu Yanjun, said to be a career spy, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for plotting to steal trade secrets from several US aviation and aerospace companies - including GE.

It is part of a broader struggle as China strives to gain technological knowhow to power its economy and its challenge to the geopolitical order, while the US does its best to prevent a serious competitor to American power from emerging.

The theft of trade secrets is attractive because it allows countries to "leapfrog up global value chains relatively quickly - and without the costs, both in terms of time and money, of relying completely on indigenous capabilities", Nick Marro of the Economist Intelligence Unit told the BBC.

Last July FBI director Christopher Wray told a gathering of business leaders and academics in London that China aimed to "ransack" the intellectual property of Western companies so it can speed up its own industrial development and eventually dominate key industries.

He warned that it was snooping on companies everywhere "from big cities to small towns - from Fortune 100s to start-ups, folks that focus on everything from aviation, to AI, to pharma".

At the time, China's then foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Mr Wray was "smearing China" and had a "Cold War mentality".

'China seeks to topple our status'

In the DOJ statement on Zheng, the FBI's Alan Kohler Jr said China was targeting "American ingenuity" and seeking to "topple our status" as global leader.

Zheng was an engineer specialising in turbine sealing technology and worked on various leakage containment technologies in steam turbine engineering. Such seals optimise turbine performance "whether by increasing power or efficiency or extending the usable life of the engine", the DOJ said.

Gas turbines that power aircraft are central to the development of China's aviation industry.

Aerospace and aviation equipment are among 10 sectors that the Chinese authorities are targeting for rapid development to reduce the country's dependence on foreign technology and eventually surpass it.

But Chinese industrial espionage is targeting a wide range of other sectors too.

According to Ray Wang, founder and CEO of Silicon Valley-based consultancy Constellation Research, they include pharmaceutical development and nanotechnology - engineering and technology conducted at the nanoscale for use in areas such as medicine, textiles and fabrics and automobiles. A nanometre is a billionth of a meter.

It also includes pharmaceuticals, bioengineering - mimicking biological processes for purposes such as the development of biocompatible prostheses and regenerative tissue growth.

Mr Wang cited an anecdote by a former head of research and development for a Fortune 100 company, who told him that "the person he entrusted the most" - someone so close that their children grew up together - was eventually found to be on the payroll of the Chinese Communist Party.

"He kindly explained to me that the spies are everywhere," he said.

Image source, Getty Images

Image caption,

China needs technological knowhow to power its economy and its challenge to the geopolitical order

In the past industrial espionage from countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore was a concern, Mr Marro said. However once indigenous firms emerge as innovative market leaders in their own right - and so start to want to protect their own intellectual property - then their governments start passing legislation to take the issue more seriously.

"As Chinese firms have become more innovative over the past decade, we've seen a marked strengthening of domestic intellectual property rights protection in tandem," Mr Marro said.

China has also gained expertise by making foreign companies hand over technology under joint venture agreements in exchange for access to the Chinese market. Despite complaints the Chinese government has always denied accusations of coercion.

Hacking deal a 'joke'

There have been attempts to rein in hacking specifically.

In 2015 the US and China struck a deal in which both sides pledged not to carry out "cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information for commercial advantage".

By the following year, the US National Security Agency had accused the Chinese of violating the agreement, although it did acknowledge that the quantity of attempts to hack government and corporate data had dropped "dramatically".

But observers say the deal's overall impact has been minimal. Mr Wang said it was a "joke" due to a lack of enforcement. Chinese cyber-espionage in the US has been "pervasive" and extends to academic labs. "It has been going on in every aspect of Western businesses," he told the BBC.

However Lim Tai Wei from the National University of Singapore noted that there were no "definitive uncontested studies" on the extent of the phenomenon.

"Some believe that there was a short dip in Chinese cyber espionage against the US, but resumed its former level thereafter. Others believe it failed due to the overall breakdown in US-China relations," he said.

Meanwhile the US is now directly trying to block China's progress in the key semiconductor industry - vital for everything from smartphones to weapons of war - saying China's use of the technology poses a national security threat.

In October, Washington announced some of the broadest export controls yet, requiring licences for companies exporting chips to China using US tools or software, no matter where they are made in the world. Washington's measures also prevent US citizens and green card holders from working for certain Chinese chip companies. Green card holders are US permanent residents who have the right to work in the country.

• The US is beating China in the battle for chips

Mr Marro says that while these measures will slow China's technological advance, they will also accelerate China's efforts to remove US and other foreign products from its tech supply chains.

"China has been trying to do this for years, with muted success, but these policy goals now command greater urgency as a result of the recent US controls," he said.

With China also invoking its own national security, the scramble for a technological edge between the world's two biggest economies is only likely to intensify further.

But Mr Wang reckons that the US still holds the advantage.

"My cyber-security friends tell me when they hack Chinese sites, the only worthwhile tech [they can find there] is US intellectual property," he said.

Related Topics

• Spying
• China
• United States
• China-US relations

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23. Russia’s Energy Clout Is Waning, Weakening Its Global Influence

Russia’s Energy Clout Is Waning, Weakening Its Global Influence

The rebalancing is stoking Moscow’s fear of becoming a junior partner to Beijing

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-energy-clout-is-waning-weakening-its-global-influence-11673863787?mod=flipboard

By Georgi KantchevFollow

 and Joe WallaceFollow

Jan. 16, 2023 6:00 am ET

Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s use of energy as a weapon of financial war is increasingly backfiring, threatening the core of Russia’s beleaguered economy and curtailing its geopolitical influence.

Western sanctions, falling prices for Russian fossil fuels and strategic miscalculations are hurting the country’s oil-and-gas industry while the war in Ukraine is poised to stretch into a second year. Ultimately, the strain will erode Moscow’s status as an energy superpower, according to analysts and former energy officials and executives.

Russia hoped cutting off natural gas would cause Europe to freeze and weaken its support for Kyiv, officials on the continent say. Warm weather and ample supplies from other producers have derailed that effort so far. European gas prices tumbled 15% Monday to levels last experienced in September 2021.

The Russian oil industry, meanwhile, is having trouble adapting to a European Union embargo and a U.S.-led price cap on its crude. A Kremlin threat to cut supplies in response failed to boost prices and hasn’t materialized, showing Russia’s weakened hand.

Russia has diverted much of the oil that went to Europe, but in doing so it has replaced an array of buyers with two big importers: China and India. Refiners there command low prices, in part because delivering farther afield raises shipping rates.

With gas, Russia needs to build huge pipelines eastward to sell all the fuel that used to head to Europe. That would take years. And in the long run, lost access to technology and Western know-how will likely undermine production potential as Soviet-era oil-and-gas fields dwindle. 

All these issues will potentially be magnified when a fresh round of sanctions goes into effect next month.

“Because of sanctions, the Russian economy becomes ever more dependent on energy exports,” said Thane Gustafson, professor at Georgetown University and a historian of energy in Russia. “And when those themselves decline, the Russian economy’s ability to invest those…and its ability to modernize its legacy infrastructure [go] down.”

Russia’s earnings from fossil-fuel exports fell 17% in December to the lowest level since the start of the Ukraine invasion, according to the Finland-based research organization Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

Analysts and former Russian energy officials and executives say Russia will remain a major oil-and-gas producer with the ability to swing global prices. But they say Moscow will struggle to maintain output at prewar levels and sell it at international market prices, cutting into its biggest source of tax revenue and capacity to wield commodity exports as a tool of influence.

Fuel tankers stand at a Moscow refinery. An EU ban could force Russian refiners to slow their demand for crude.

PHOTO: MAXIM SHIPENKOV/SHUTTERSTOCK

The reshuffle is making Russia more reliant on China, threatening to realize longtime fears in Moscow that it would become a junior partner to Beijing. Lower output could also weaken Russia’s hand in its relationship with Saudi Arabia, the core of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries Plus oil cartel.

“Russia is still an energy power but its role has dramatically changed,” said Vladimir Milov, former Russian deputy energy minister and now an opposition politician living abroad. “Russia will have a smaller market share in oil and gas, it will make less profit and it has lost some of its geopolitical leverage as well.”

Evgeny Gribov, who quit as an executive at Lukoil PJSC, Russia’s second-biggest oil producer, shortly after the invasion, said the ban on exports to Europe and loss of Western technology are “going to have a hugely negative impact on the oil-and-gas industry, and then consequently to the Russian budget.”

“Oil-industry taxes will go down substantially,” he said. “Oil companies will reduce investments, which has a huge negative multiplier to the Russian economy.” 

The immediate pain is concentrated in gas. State-owned Gazprom PJSC’s output fell to 413 billion cubic meters in 2022 from 515 billion in 2021 after the firm cut off most of its European customers, which used to subsidize barely profitable sales at home.

Production of crude oil and a related hydrocarbon called condensate has held up at about 10.7 million barrels a day, said Livia Gallarati of Energy Aspects, down by 400,000 barrels a day since the eve of the war. Ms. Gallarati expects output to slip starting Feb. 5, when an EU ban on Russian refined fuels could force refiners to slow their own crude consumption.

Analysts don’t expect Russia’s energy industry to buckle quickly as Venezuela’s once-mighty oil sector did under U.S. pressure. One reason: the Biden administration, eager to ward off high gasoline prices, designed the price cap in such a way that Russia has a financial incentive to keep producing.

A steady deterioration of production and revenue is more likely, analysts say.

According to all future scenarios developed by the International Energy Agency, Russian fossil-fuel exports will never return to 2021 levels, “leaving Russia with a much-diminished position,” the IEA said last year. 

Europe’s energy links with Russia initially gave Moscow the upper hand in its economic war with the West. West Germany first traded steel pipes for gas with the Soviet Union in the 1960s, and those ties deepened down the decades. When they frayed last year, energy prices shot up, piling particular pressure on Europe while sending a gusher of revenue to Moscow.

The money helped Russia fund the war in Ukraine and placate its population at home with handouts. Oil and gas are the backbone of the Russian economy and provided 45% of the federal budget in 2021.

But prices have since fallen and the long-run outlook for production—and the Russian economy—has darkened. 

Russia’s main kind of crude, Urals, used to sail to Europe at roughly the same prices as global benchmark Brent. Most of the oil now heads on the weekslong voyage to India, and many mainstream shipping companies and traders are unwilling to handle it. Urals is trading at just over half the price of Brent, according to price-reporting agency Argus Media. At $45 a barrel, it doesn’t fetch much more than Russia’s estimated cost of production, when capital expenditure is included—though a weaker ruble should bolster local-currency tax revenue.

Last week, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, who oversees the energy industry, said the EU ban and price cap are the biggest risks it faces. In a meeting with President Putin, he said he hoped that the situation would be temporary and that the oil discount would narrow, according to an official transcript. 

“We need to look at this discount so that it does not create any problems with the budget,” Mr. Putin told Mr. Novak according to the transcript.

Mr. Novak said oil producers haven’t reported problems finding buyers for February, and that Russia will take all necessary steps to ensure supplies to new markets. Officials have said Asia is a big focus, alongside the expansion of domestic infrastructure. 

“Russia is in experimental mode these days,” said Mr. Milov, the former deputy energy minister. “They will try all the options to sell this…crude.”

A liquefied natural gas terminal was commissioned this year in Germany. LNG imports have helped Europe dodge an energy crisis.

PHOTO: NORBRT FELLECHNER/POOL/SHUTTERSTOCK

Russia’s bet to squeeze Europe by cutting off gas flows since last summer appears to have unraveled for now. Mild temperatures, brimming storage facilities and record imports of liquefied natural gas from the U.S. and elsewhere have helped Europe escape a serious energy shortage this winter. Executives say filling stores for the 2023-24 winter remains a challenge.

Russia, meanwhile, lost its biggest customer. “The German problem, or the central European problem, was that…half of [our eggs] were in the basket of Putin,” German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said this month. “He destroyed that.”

Over time, analysts and former executives say Moscow will struggle to maintain, let alone expand, production. Western oil companies have exited, external funding has dried up and sanctions are impeding technology imports. Russia has already faced delays on its flagship oil venture, Vostok Oil. Another oil project expected to experience difficulties is Sakhalin-1, which the Kremlin pushed Exxon Mobil Corp. out of last year.

With sanctions cutting off Russia from most of the Western financial world, analysts at Rystad Energy estimate that investments in exploration and drilling fell to $35 billion in 2022, down from $45 billion in 2021 and below the Covid-induced lows of $40 billion in 2020.

“The lack of foreign…investment, technology and money and experience of more difficult geographies and regions is just going to over time whittle away at the ability of the Russian oil sector to maintain production,” said James Henderson, a researcher at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Moscow’s big hope is to peddle its energy to China.

But while Beijing has increased its oil-and-gas purchases from Russia since before the war, its oil imports have recently stagnated, and Russia’s pipeline gas exports to China are less than a 10th of what it used to export to Europe before the war. Beijing has yet to agree to a second pipeline carrying Russian gas.

Write to Georgi Kantchev at georgi.kantchev@wsj.com and Joe Wallace at joe.wallace@wsj.com

24. Taliban start buying blue ticks on Twitter

Hmmm... I wonder how the Taliban thinks this will benefit them.

Taliban start buying blue ticks on Twitter

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Taliban officials and supporters are prolific users of Twitter, using the platform to disseminate key messages

By Abdirahim Saeed

BBC Monitoring

The Taliban have started using Twitter's paid-for verification feature, meaning some now have blue ticks on their accounts.

Previously, the blue tick indicated "active, notable, and authentic accounts of public interest" verified by Twitter, and could not be purchased.

But now, users can buy them through the new Twitter Blue service.

At least two Taliban officials and four prominent supporters in Afghanistan are currently using the checkmarks.

Hedayatullah Hedayat, the head of the Taliban's department for "access to information", now has the tick.

His account has 187,000 followers and he regularly posts information related to the Taliban administration. He had his paid-for blue tick removed last month, according to local media, but it has now returned.

Abdul Haq Hammad, head of the media watchdog at the Afghan Ministry of Information and Culture, also has a blue tick on his account that has 170,000 followers.

Prominent Taliban supporters have also acquired the blue tick, including Muhammad Jalal, who previously identified as a Taliban official. He praised the new owner of Twitter on Monday, declaring that Elon Musk was "making Twitter great again".

The presence of the hard-line Islamists on Twitter has been a topic of controversy for some time.

In October 2021, former US President Donald Trump - who was suspended from the platform after his supporters stormed the US Capitol - said: "We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced.

"This is unacceptable."

The Twitter Blue service was introduced in December.

It costs $8 per month, and an increased fee of $11 is paid by those using the Twitter app on Apple devices.

Subscribers to Twitter Blue benefit from "priority ranking in search, mentions, and replies" to help fight spam and bots, according to the platform.

Before the introduction of Twitter Blue, none of the observed accounts for Taliban officials carried the blue tick mark - that was then used to indicate the identities of users verified by Twitter.

After their return to power in Kabul in August 2021, the group took over verified accounts run by the previous administration, including the Afghanistan Cricket Board. The sporting body's account now carries a gold tick.

Under Twitter's new policies, gold checkmarks indicate businesses, while grey ones are for other users, such as governing authorities.

Taliban officials and supporters are prolific users of Twitter, using the platform to disseminate key messages.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

More on this story

• Wanting clout, the Taliban embrace social media
• 6 September 2021
• Facebook moves to protect Afghan users' accounts
• 20 August 2021
• Facebook continues ban of Taliban-related content
• 17 August 2021

Related Topics

• Social media
• Afghanistan
• Taliban
• Twitter

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25. New details link George Santos to cousin of sanctioned Russian oligarch

I guess when you are going to lie you should tell big lies. What a piece of work this guy is.

New details link George Santos to cousin of sanctioned Russian oligarch

The Washington Post · by Isaac Stanley-Becker · January 16, 2023

George Santos, the freshman Republican congressman from New York who lied about his biography, has deeper ties than previously known to a businessman who cultivated close links with a onetime Trump confidant and who is the cousin of a sanctioned Russian oligarch, according to video footage and court documents.

Andrew Intrater and his wife each gave the maximum $5,800 to Santos’ main campaign committee and tens of thousands more since 2020 to committees linked to him, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. Intrater’s cousin is Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, who has been sanctioned by the U.S. government for his role in the Russian energy industry.

The relationship between Santos and Intrater goes beyond campaign contributions, according to a statement made privately by Santos in 2020 and a court filing the following year in a lawsuit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission against a Florida-based investment firm, Harbor City Capital, where Santos worked for more than a year.

Taken together, the evidence suggests Santos may have had a business relationship with Intrater as Santos was first entering politics in 2020. It also shows, according to the SEC filing, that Intrater put hundreds of thousands of dollars into Santos’ onetime employer, Harbor City, which was accused by regulators of running a Ponzi scheme. Neither Santos nor Intrater responded to requests for comment. Attorneys who have represented Intrater also did not respond.

The congressman, whose election from Long Island last year helped the GOP secure its narrow House majority, has apologized for what he called “résumé embellishment” while rebuffing calls for his resignation. He is under scrutiny by prosecutors in New York and Rio de Janeiro.

Ties between Santos, 34, and Intrater, 60, reflect the ways Santos found personal and political support on his path to public office.

While Intrater is a U.S. citizen, his company, the investment firm Columbus Nova, has historically had extensive ties to the business interests of his Russian cousin. As recently as 2018, when Vekselberg was sanctioned by the Treasury Department, his conglomerate was Columbus Nova’s largest client, the company confirmed to The Post that year.

Intrater’s interactions in 2016 and 2017 with Michael Cohen, who at the time was working as a lawyer for Donald Trump, were probed during special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible links between Trump and the Kremlin.

Intrater’s company paid the lawyer and self-described Trump fixer to identify deals for his business, and court records show they exchanged hundreds of texts and phone calls. Neither Intrater nor Vekselberg was accused of wrongdoing in Mueller’s investigation.

In 2020, when Santos was tasked by Harbor City with locating investors in New York, he claimed in a Harbor City meeting held over Zoom that Intrater’s investment firm, Columbus Nova, was a “client” of his, according to footage obtained by The Washington Post.

He made the comment during a discussion of the difficulties of residential real estate investing, in particular for investors who put money into the 1,400-foot tall tower at 432 Park Avenue in Manhattan, which for a time was the tallest residential building in the world. Intrater did not respond to a question about whether he or Columbus Nova was involved in the project.

“You might know who they are,” Santos added in the company meeting, referring to Columbus Nova. “They’ve made the news on several occasions. They were heavily involved with the Russia probe. Unjustified.”

“But they’re a real estate company,” Santos added. “They’re legitimate.”

Santos did not respond to a text message seeking comment. Intrater did not respond to an emailed question about whether his firm was Santos’s client as claimed or about the deposit with Harbor City.

The congressman has falsified substantial aspects of his work experience. And, in the Harbor City Zoom meetings reviewed by The Post, he recounted dealings with other prominent investors or moneyed organizations that those entities denied took place.

But Harbor City was able to land a $625,000 deposit from a company registered in Mississippi that identifies Intrater as its lone officer, according to an exhibit included in the SEC’s complaint against Harbor City. The alleged deposit, which is undated, is included in a chart that lists several entities that the SEC says made payments to Harbor City.

The Mississippi company, FEA Innovations, is registered to Intrater, according to secretary of state records. Registration documents include no other officers or directors and identify Intrater’s address as the same one used by Columbus Nova on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. Columbus Nova is now known as Sparrow Capital.

In the SEC action, initiated in April 2021, regulators accused Harbor City and its founder of running a “classic Ponzi scheme” — promising investors reliable profit and instead bilking them out of millions.

The SEC complaint did not name Santos, who has denied knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing, although he had been told by a prospective investor that the firm was using a fraudulent bank document, as The Post previously reported.

Harbor City’s founder, J.P. Maroney, has denied the SEC allegations, which were brought in federal court in Florida. The company itself has not responded in court. Maroney did not respond to a text message about the alleged deposit from Intrater’s firm. The exhibit that identifies the alleged deposit from Intrater’s company does not elaborate on its purpose or suggest that Intrater had knowledge of purported wrongdoing at Harbor City.

After Harbor City’s assets were frozen, and with assistance from a fellow former Harbor City employee, Santos in 2021 formed a company, the Devolder Organization, that paid him at least $3.5 million over the next two years, according to Florida business records and financial disclosure forms he filed as a candidate. Santos loaned his campaign more than $700,000 but did not report any income from Harbor City despite having been paid by the company as recently as April 2021.

Details of Santos’s tenure at Harbor City were confirmed by a court-appointed lawyer overseeing liquidation of the company’s assets.

Columbus Nova became a subject of interest for the Mueller investigation as prosecutors probed the ties forged by Intrater and his company with Cohen, a confidant of Trump’s at the time.

Intrater donated $250,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee, according to campaign finance records, and attended the 2017 inaugural, along with Vekselberg. The Washington Post has reported that the two men encountered Cohen at the inauguration. Not long after, Columbus Nova began paying Cohen as part of a contract to recruit new investors for the company, The Post reported. Court records show the payments totaled $583,000.

Court records also show that Cohen and Intrater exchanged more than 1,000 calls and text messages between November 2016 and November 2017. Intrater donated $35,000 to attend a 2017 fundraiser for Trump’s reelection, attending at Cohen’s invitation, The Post has reported.

Federal officials questioned both Intrater and Vekselberg during the probe, interviewing the latter after his private airplane made a stop in the United States in 2018, people familiar with the investigation said.

Cohen ultimately pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations, tax and bank fraud and lying to Congress — matters unrelated to his interactions with Columbus Nova. Intrater told the New York Times in 2019 that his omission from Mueller’s final report “confirms what I knew all along — that I’ve done nothing wrong.”

Cohen later turned on Trump, criticizing him in a 2019 congressional hearing and cooperating with investigations into his former boss’ business practices.

Vekselberg and his company, Renova, were sanctioned by the Treasury Department in April 2018, cited for benefiting from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “malign activity around the globe.” In April 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Vekselberg’s $90 million yacht was seized by Spanish authorities at the request of the United States.

Columbus Nova has long been described as closely associated with the Renova Group, a Russian conglomerate run by Vekselberg. As recently as 2017, a website for Renova Group listed Columbus Nova as one of its companies, and Columbus Nova confirmed to The Post in 2018 that Vekselberg’s conglomerate was at that time its largest client. However, the firm said at the time that it was owned by Americans and had never been controlled by Renova Group or Vekselberg.

Devlin Barrett, Emma Brown and Jonathan O’Connell contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Isaac Stanley-Becker · January 16, 2023

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