Quotes of the Day:
"Men stay silent in Russia, but the stones speak, in pitiful accents. No wonder the Russians fear and neglect their old buildings, for these bear witness to the history that they would prefer, more often than not, to forget."
- Marquis de Custine
"It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it."
- Eleanor Roosevelt
A dead soldier who has given his life because of the failure of his leader is a dreadful sight before God. Like all dead soldiers, he was tired before he died, and undoubtedly dirty, and possibly frightened to his soul and there is on top of all that . . . Never again to see his homeland. Don’t be the leader who failed to instruct him properly, who failed to lead him well. Burn the midnight oil, that you may not in later years look at your hands and find his blood still red upon them.
- James Warner Bellah, former Army officer and author of Western stories
1. Biden and Putin are live-blogging a pre-war
2. How ten false flag narratives were promoted by pro-Kremlin media
3. A new era of transparent warfare beckons
4. Does the U.S.-Russia Crisis Over Ukraine Prove That the Cold War Never Ended?
5. American Self-censorship (appeasing China)
6. Opinion | Biden has rebuilt the Western alliance
7. Who needs an invasion? Putin's offensive against Ukraine has been underway for a long time
8. Russian troops will remain indefinitely, says Belarus, as fears rise of Ukraine invasion
9. West plans to arm resistance if Russian forces occupy Ukraine
10. Mysterious ‘Z’ Painted on Russian Tanks Closing in on Ukraine Border
11. Russian State TV Is So Ridiculous Right Now It Looks Like a Farce
12. Perspective | Evacuating U.S. embassies in a crisis just leaves us uninformed
13. What Nato is doing to prevent a Russia-Ukraine war and what it could do if there is an invasion
14. Putin is forcing the West to confront a 'new normal.' He may not like it.
15. Former top Trump Russia adviser details the sharp contrast between the former President and Biden
16. Yuval Noah Harari argues that what’s at stake in Ukraine is the direction of human history
17. Mainers among them, ‘Ghost Army’ tricked Nazis to give Allies an edge
18. Who Is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints
19. Don't slip into the 'lazy analogy' of referring Quad as Asian NATO, says Jaishankar
20. Families of U.S. troops killed in Kabul airport bombing question whether Pentagon distorted investigation findings
21. Is NATO A Dead Man Walking? – OpEd
22. The Key to Blunting Russia’s Strategic Victory in Ukraine and Beyond? Irregular Warfare
1. Biden and Putin are live-blogging a pre-war
War in the modern age? Shaping the information environment.
Say what you will from a partisan perspective, it takes national leadership to shape the national security narrative. We can have the best PSYOP personnel and information operations specialists as well as diplomats and public affairs officers but if the national leader is not engaged the information environment cannot be effectively shaped.
Now we just have to see how this plays out to assess the plans and actions.
Biden and Putin are live-blogging a pre-war
Axios · by Dave Lawler · February 20, 2022
President Biden and Vladimir Putin are each trying to shape the narrative of what is happening in Ukraine and get inside the heads of a global audience — and each other — to gain the upper hand in an information war as a possible prelude to a real one.
Why it matters: U.S. officials say Putin is stoking disinformation in order to blame Ukraine if Russia invades. The White House is trying to announce Putin's plays before he runs them — a novel and risky strategy they hope might stave off an invasion, or at least help unify the international community against it.
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Biden said Friday: "We’re calling out Russia’s plans loudly and repeatedly, not because we want a conflict, but ... to remove any reason that Russia may give to justify invading Ukraine."
The backstory: U.S. officials have been releasing intelligence for weeks about alleged Russian plans to build a pretext for war. U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken took that to a new level on Wednesday by providing a step-by-step description of how the U.S. expects an invasion to unfold.
- That set the stage for Biden's remarkable address on Friday, in which he said he was "convinced" Putin had decided to launch a full-scale invasion to target the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.
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Moscow has alternated between mocking the dire predictions from Washington — particularly after an invasion target date floated by U.S. officials came and went — and condemning them as "aggression" and "information warfare" against Russia. Putin claims the U.S. is trying to bait him into invading.
Between the lines: Russia has appeared to follow the playbook Blinken laid out, as part of Moscow's own efforts to shape the narrative around the potential war.
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Putin's spokesman claimed Ukraine was planning a major military offensive (despite the fact that 150,000 Russian troops are massed on its borders). Russian officials and state media circulated purported evidence to back Putin's recent claim that a "genocide" is taking place in eastern Ukraine.
- Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas region began shelling Ukrainian-held territory while also announcing an evacuation of civilians due to the purported threat from Ukraine.
Data: Mapbox/OSCE as of Feb. 14, 2022; Map: Will Chase/Axios
Reports on Friday that a separatist police chief's car was bombed chimed with Blinken's warning that Russia would fabricate "terrorist attacks" and blame Ukraine.
- All of this came after a remarkable head fake from Putin earlier in the week. In televised meetings with top officials, he announced Russia would pull troops back from the border and focus on diplomacy. U.S. officials say that hasn't happened.
Inside the strategy: If Putin's media strategy is to sow confusion, Biden's is to speak with an almost jarring clarity about what he expects from Russia.
- The Biden administration has been flooding the airwaves. State Department officials did 16 interviews last Tuesday alone in U.S., Ukrainian and European media. Blinken has been on TV almost continually.
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Biden made two televised addresses in the span of four days, and used the first to prepare Americans for higher energy prices in the event of war. The administration appears to have taken a lesson from Afghanistan, where it failed to anticipate or prepare the public for a swift Taliban takeover.
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Putin, meanwhile, used a joint appearance with Belarusian President Aleksander Lukashenko on Friday to prepare Russians for sanctions, which he claimed would be applied whether there was a war in Ukraine or not. On Saturday, he personally oversaw massive nuclear drills.
The big picture: The world was caught by surprise when Putin moved into Crimea in 2014 and Georgia in 2008. No one will be surprised if he invades Ukraine again.
- Analysts have debated whether Washington's strategy would make Putin more likely to back off, or potentially make it harder for him to back down, since anything short of war could now be viewed as a victory for the West.
Axios · by Dave Lawler · February 20, 2022
2. How ten false flag narratives were promoted by pro-Kremlin media
How ten false flag narratives were promoted by pro-Kremlin media
By Givi Gigitashvili and Roman Osadchuk
Medium · by @DFRLab · February 18, 2022
Russian media actively portrays the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as victims of Ukrainian aggression
Residents of Donetsk line up at an ATM machine after receiving evacuation orders on February 18, 2022. (Source: REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko)
By Givi Gigitashvili and Roman Osadchuk
Amid Russia’s ongoing military buildup around Ukraine’s borders, Kremlin-controlled and pro-Kremlin media outlets in Russia relentlessly amplify false or misleading narratives about Ukrainian aggression against the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) in Eastern Ukraine. These ongoing efforts accusing Ukraine of threatening the lives of people in Ukraine’s breakaway regions could serve as pretext by Russia to invade the country.
The DFRLab analyzed ten false and misleading narratives, mainly coming from Russia-led separatist leaders in Eastern Ukraine, that were widely amplified by Russian media outlets. Each of these narratives accused Ukraine of being the aggressor in the conflict. Notably, Kremlin media outlets have intensified pushing false-flag narratives since early February 2022.
Russia previously used a false-flag operation as pretext to invade Ukraine in 2014, when Russian special forces sent unmarked soldiers to seize government buildings, leading to the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of Eastern Ukraine. These Russian soldiers pretended to be local self-defense forces; the Kremlin still denies its involvement in the conflict.
US officials have warned since early February 2022 that Russia could use false-flag operations as justification to invade Ukraine, but the Kremlin keeps issuing denials. The DFRLab’s analysis of recent false-flag narratives between December 1, 2021 and February 14, 2022 indicates that pro-Kremlin media actively promote these narratives, potentially laying the groundwork to justify Russian military action.
While these ten false-flag narratives are representative of the many rumors and conspiracy theories published by pro-Kremlin media to paint Ukraine as the aggressor, it should be noted that they are by no means exhaustive, as new false-flag narratives now appear on a nearly daily basis. On the day of publishing, for example, the leaders of the breakaway republics announced they were evacuating civilians into Russia after making unsupported claims that saboteurs had attempted to detonate chlorine tanks. This was then followed by a car bombing in Donetsk, which local authorities quickly claimed was an assassination attempt against a government official.
Narrative: Ukrainian border guards shoot migrants from Belarus (December 1, 2021)
A video appeared on several private Facebook pages showing thermal imaging of five armed individuals gunning down around 20 people. Commenters claimed that the footage depicted Ukrainian border forces shooting refugees fleeing from Belarus. One account even claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy issued the command himself because he had received an order from “abroad.” These reports also alleged the video had been leaked by Rinat Akhmetov, a Ukrainian oligarch that Zelenskyy and Western officials believe is a potential candidate to replace him in a puppet regime if Russia initiated a successful coup against the Ukrainian government.
Meanwhile, local media in the city of Zhytomyr reported there had been a shooting incident but later deleted the story, reporting that their website had been hacked. Meanwhile, a local NGO, Detector Media, also had a Web page edited illicitly claiming that the oligarch was behind the video. The webpage was deleted by the organization soon after being spotted. However, these reports were picked up by pro-Kremlin media and an anonymous Telegram channel.
The Ukrainian Centre for Strategic Communications analyzed the footage of the incident, ultimately debunking it.
Narrative: US mercenaries preparing biochemical weapons in Ukraine (December 21, 2021)
Russia Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu claimed that US private military firms were preparing biochemical components to provoke fighting in Eastern Ukraine. On Russian state TV, Eduard Basurin, deputy chief of the DNR Militia Directorate, went further and even identified the biochemical in question as Botulinum toxin. DNR leader Denis Pushilin stated that Donetsk’s water supply would be poisoned.
Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby denied the allegations during a press briefing that same day. “Those statements by Minister Shoygu are completely false,” he said. Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Oleg Nikolenko also denied the allegations and stated that such messages are simply the latest examples of Russian disinformation campaigns.
Narrative: Ukraine has prepared a plan for attacking Donbas (February 1, 2022)
DNR Militia Deputy Chief Eduard Basurin claimed that the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine had completed its plan to invade the Donbas. He asserted that the plan would be presented by the leadership of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, then sent for approval by the National Security and Defense Council. LNR separatist leaders claimed Ukraine was preparing to invade and noted that if Ukraine attacked the Donbas, Russia would immediately need to protect more than 700,000 Russian citizens living there.
Ukrainian officials have repeatedly underlined that Ukraine does not intend to undertake any military operation against the Donbas, and that Kyiv is committed to finding a diplomatic and political solution to the conflict. Nonetheless, the Kremlin continues to cite Ukraine’s “military aggression against the Donbas” as pretext for its military build-up near Ukraine.
Narrative: Ukrainian special services planted a bomb in a Donetsk administrative building (February 1, 2022)
The DNR Defense Ministry reported that security services prevented a terrorist act by Ukrainian special forces to bomb a Donetsk administrative building. An anonymous message about the setting of explosives was allegedly sent to city administrators by e-mail. Moskovskij Komsomolets wrote that a bomb found in the building consisted of TNT and four electronic detonators, while Regnum claimed that Ukrainian terrorists previously staged a series of explosions in the Donbas to kill local military and political leaders. Despite these allegations, the separatist regimes failed to provide any evidence that a bomb had been found, or that Ukraine was behind it.
Narrative: Ukraine prepares for a massive military mobilization (February 3, 2022)
Kremlin-owned media claimed that Ukraine would prevent men of conscription age from leaving the country. They also reported that enlistment offices would prepare lists of citizens subject to mobilization, implying that such a decision might soon occur. While a limitation of movement would violate Ukrainian law, this narrative likely emerged to create panic among the civilian population. The Ukrainian government’s Center for Strategic Communication debunked the claim, calling it a provocation. Ukraine’s defense minister stated in an interview that there would be no conscription mobilization, and that Ukraine would instead rely on existing territorial defense forces.
Narrative: Ukrainian armed forces initiated a massive artillery attack on Donetsk (February 5, 2022)
Pro-Kremlin media outlet Moskovskiy Komsomolets reported that Ukrainian forces had initiated a massive shelling of Donetsk, including artillery, mortars, and even grenade launchers. The source of the report came from a Telegram channel, Novorossiya Militia Reports (Сводки Oполчения Новороссии), which wrote on February 5 that Ukrainian armed forces opened artillery fire on the northern part of Donetsk. Novorossiya’s website also claimed that residents of Donetsk had woken up to the sound of Ukrainian artillery bombardment. The post included a photo of what appeared to be clouds of smoke on the horizon, but the source of the smoke was not depicted.
The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine recorded 38 explosions in the Donetsk region between the evenings of February 4–6, 2022, but these explosions were not attributed to either side of the conflict. A Polygraph.info fact-check argued that it was suspicious that either side could have conducted a “massive artillery” bombardment, as only 38 explosions were reported in Donetsk region over a 48-hour period.
Narrative: Polish mercenaries arrive in Donbas to organize terrorist acts (February 7, 2022)
Leaders of the Ukrainian breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk pushed claims about the arrival of Polish mercenaries in eastern Ukraine. On February 7, the DNR asserted that two groups of Polish mercenaries had appeared in Ukraine-controlled areas of the Donbas. They alleged the mercenaries were working with Ukrainian forces to conduct terrorist acts and sabotage the self-proclaimed republics. DNR leaders also claimed that Polish mercenaries would try to damage civilian infrastructure in the region to trigger a response from DNR military units, thus completing their objective of pushing the Donbas region into a war. The Telegram channel Donbas Decides alleged that Polish mercenaries were instructing Ukrainian forces how to kill Donbas civilians. Previously, LNR separatist leaders had claimed that mercenaries from the US private military company Academi (formerly Blackwater) were present in the Donbas.
The Ukrainian Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security promptly denied the presence of foreign mercenaries on Ukrainian territory. It stated that representatives of NATO countries are invited to Ukraine as instructors only, adding that only Ukrainian forces are “fighting for Ukraine.”
Narrative: Ukraine deployed S-300 anti-aircraft missiles near the Donbas (February 11, 2022)
The DNR’s Eduard Basurin claimed that Ukraine had deployed S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems to Kramatorsk, near the current front line. Multiple Russian media amplified the message, with some adding that such systems could be dangerous for Russian passenger aircraft near the border, rehashing the widely debunked claim that Ukraine shot down the MH-17 jetliner rather than Russia.
Similar to previous allegations, the DNR did not provide evidence to back up their claims. The DFRLab could not find evidence to disprove the allegations, as defensive military deployments of anti-aircraft systems might have occurred in light of a possible Russian invasion. Meanwhile, Russia was spotted moving its own S-300 air-defense systems to the Ukrainian border through Kursk.
Narrative: a phantom explosion in Donetsk (February 12, 2022)
RT cited unnamed local media sources to report a February 12 explosion in Donetsk. A few minutes after this message, Ukrainian pro-Russian media Strana UA published a screenshot of online commenters discussing an explosion near Donetsk airport. Citing DNR chief Denis Pushilin, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan then confirmed the explosion had taken place on the Ukraine side of the conflict line, but added that RT correspondents in Donetsk did not hear any explosions. RT also published a comment by the DNR’s Eduard Basurin, who claimed that he did not hear anything either. Some time later, Simonyan forwarded yet another message, now claiming the whole thing was “Ukrainian disinformation.” Meanwhile, Pushilin contended that the situation was under control and that the explosion in Ukraine-controlled territory might have been “the filming of a provocation” against the DNR, in line with previous claims by DNR and LNR leaders.
The Ukrainian Joint Forces published a statement that Ukrainian troops were following the ceasefire and did not conduct any shelling. RT had somehow simultaneously confirmed and debunked the incident.
Narrative: Ukrainian nationalists prepare saboteurs and militants to carry out terrorist attacks in Donbas (February 14, 2022)
The LNR claimed that Ukraine had created a secret network of saboteurs in order to carry out terrorist acts and sabotage at infrastructure facilities in the Donbas region, in cooperation with Ukrainian security services. LNR military spokesman Ivan Filiponenko claimed that Ukrainian militants arrived in the Donbas and expelled local residents from their houses, and that civilians had appealed to local authorities with complaints of atrocities committed by Ukrainian “radicals.” He also asserted that Ukrainian saboteurs were being trained by Polish and Canadian instructors. Filiponenko provided no evidence to support his claims.
How false-flag narratives were widely amplified by Russian media outlets
The DFRLab selected ten Kremlin-controlled and pro-Kremlin Russian media outlets and examined how many of them covered the above false-flag narratives. At least six of the narratives had been covered by all ten outlets.
Table shows mentions of each narrative by Russian Kremlin-controlled and pro-Kremlin media outlets. (Source: Ggigitashvili_/DFRLab)
The DFRLab also examined cumulative views of articles pushing these false-flag narratives on the ten outlets’ websites and Telegram channels. Articles about the so-called phantom explosion in Donetsk were viewed over 440,000 times, followed by articles about Polish mercenaries, which garnered over 345,000 views across the outlets’ websites and Telegram. When it comes to audience engagement, stories about US mercenaries deploying biochemical weapons garnered over 2,800 engagements across different platforms, followed by stories about the phantom explosion in Donetsk, which accumulated more than 520 engagements.
A chart shows articles and Telegram posts’ cumulative views, as well as engagements on articles across social media platforms (Source: GGigitashvili_/DFRLab via Flourish)
The DFRLab analysis demonstrates how Russian media outlets actively reinforce current tensions by posting false or misleading claims of Ukrainian aggression. Though the Kremlin denies having any intention of invading Ukraine, the situation on the ground and across the pro-Kremlin media landscape indicates that Russia continues to develop potential pretexts for doing just that.
Medium · by @DFRLab · February 18, 2022
3. A new era of transparent warfare beckons
A new phrase for my quote book. We have nuclear warfare, conventional warfare, irregular, unconventional, and political warfare. Now we have "transparent war."
Just as the internet has made every blogger a "journalist," it is making every citizen with a keyboard and a twitter account an "intelligence collector" and an "intelligence analyst." (and as we always have been - armchair quarterbacks for all decision making!)
A new era of transparent warfare beckons
Russia’s manoeuvres are a coming-out party for open-source intelligence
Feb 19th 2022
LOW EARTH ORBIT
ON FEBRUARY 4TH one of the four satellites operated by Maxar, a company based in Colorado which photographs more than 3m square kilometres of the Earth every day, took pictures of a Russian military camp in Rechitsa, Belarus. Rows of military vehicles were laid out neatly over a thick carpet of snow less than 50km from the border with Ukraine. On February 14th a sister satellite took another picture of Rechitsa. The snow had gone; so, too, had most of the vehicles (see above).
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Since the start of the cold war, America and its NATO allies have scrutinised Russian military deployments and movements using expensive and often exotic means of keeping tabs on other people’s territory such as spy satellites and surveillance flights as well as human agents—means that nobody else could muster.
But civilian observers increasingly have their own tools. Journalists, academics, think-tankers, activists and amateur enthusiasts have access to a range of open-source intelligence, or OSINT, capabilities that have expanded hugely over the past decade, and that let them reach their own conclusions about what the world’s armed forces are doing. Images and other data from commercial satellites, videos posted on social media, ship- and aircraft-tracking websites and other publicly available, if sometimes arcane, sources can reveal goings on in inaccessible places like Rechitsa in unprecedented detail, and sometimes nearly in real time. Russia’s military build-up on the borders of Ukraine is a coming-out party for the possibilities OSINT now offers.
As Stephen Wood of Maxar notes, this is partly because the satellites in the private sector have improved “dramatically”. His firm’s satellites can take photographs that are sharp enough to make out objects as small as 30cm. The number of providers has jumped sharply, too. (The Economist has relied on both Maxar and Planet, a company in California, to monitor the Russian build-up over recent weeks.) But what has been especially powerful in this crisis is the combination of timely, accurate satellite pictures with the social-media posts that are pouring out of Russia.
On the road from Mazyr to Naroulia. Source: TikTok
Consider the case of the missing equipment at Rechitsa. The satellite imagery does not show where the weapons and vehicles have gone, only that they are missing. But there are other clues. Russian drivers are avid users of dashboard-mounted cameras. In recent weeks, these have captured reams of footage of tanks and other equipment on the move by road and rail. Much of that is uploaded to TikTok, a Chinese app on which users can post short video clips (images of tanks being sped past the Russian borderlands are often set to thumping music).
One such video, uploaded on February 13th, shows a convoy of armoured vehicles, including a Shilka anti-aircraft system, on a road that runs south-east from the town of Mazyr to Naroulia. Two days later an open-source analyst who tweets under the name @danspiun, noticed that an emblem on the Shilka, though indistinct, suggested the vehicles belonged to Russia’s 5th Tank Brigade—one of the units previously seen arriving at Rechitsa. A glance at a map shows that Mazyr and Naroulia lie farther south, closer to the Ukrainian border. In other words, at least some of the units that left Rechitsa appear to have been moved not back to their bases, but into still more threatening positions. This fits with the statement by Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence secretary, that Russian forces are moving from “holding areas” to “front-footed deployed areas”.
Yelnya, a base 125km from Russia’s border with Belarus, is normally home to the 144th Guards Motorised Rifle Division. In November last year it began to fill up with equipment from the 41st Combined Arms Army, a grouping that typically includes several divisions and is based more than 3,000km away in Siberia. By late January Yelnya was not only crammed with armour, but occupied by troops: satellite pictures showed that heating had melted the snow on roofs, and booted feet had turned the surrounding ground to muddy slush.
Then some moved on. At first, this was difficult to see because Yelyna, like much of Europe at this time of year, is often covered in clouds. But neither clouds nor darkness are a problem for synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) satellites that illuminate what they are looking at with radio waves.
Troops left Yelnya under the cover of cloud, beyond the view of normal optical satellite imagery. Synthetic-aperture radar captured the change
The Sentinel-1 SAR satellites operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) take pictures of every spot on the continent every six days. The results are grainy and lower in resolution than pictures made using visible wavelengths by the likes of Maxar and Planet. But some man-made structures reflect radar waves particularly well. Images taken by Sentinel-1 from January 23rd to February 11th showed a hubbub of purple blobs—the colourised radar returns from equipment—fading away as Yelnya emptied out (see below left).
Where did the 41st Combined Arms Army’s stuff go? Again, probably towards the Ukrainian border. One clip on TikTok showed armoured vehicles at a station in Bryansk, around 35km from Ukraine. Cross-referencing an eight-figure number emblazoned on the train with a website that tracks railway movements showed that the train originated in—you guessed it—Yelnya.
In recent days, the Russian army has moved equipment around at a frenzied pace, possibly to give the appearance of a withdrawal—something which the defence ministry said was under way on February 14th. Michael Kofman of CNA, an American think-tank, calls it a “deployment shell game” in which units are shuffled around confusingly “without altering the overall picture”. Some troops are leaving Crimea, he says, but more are arriving in other places along the border.
Left: the 41st Combined Arms Army moving south from Yelnya, identified by the number on the train. Right: pontoon companies reportedly in Belarus. Source: TikTok
And they are doing the sort of thing that armies do before wars. On February 14th another analyst scanning low-resolution satellite data noticed a change on the banks of the Pripyat river in Belarus, less than 6km from the Ukrainian border. It was, he surmised, preparatory work for a bridge. Pictures released on February 15th showed that a crossing had appeared. (This was not a complete shock—an obscure press release on February 11th had announced that a bridge was going up over the Pripyat, though it did not say when or where.) Then on February 16th SAR images indicated the bridge had been taken down. Perhaps it was a drill.
Left: Activity on the banks of the Pripyat river, near the Belarus-Ukraine border. Right: the bridge that appeared the next day. It has since disappeared
Good OSINT requires constant searching for these sorts of hints—and knowing where to look. One answer is a practice known as “tipping and cueing”: clues gleaned from one sensor, often a lower-resolution one, are used to guide a sharper one that can see what’s what. The tipping is often done with low-resolution satellite pictures—cheaper and more plentiful than the high-resolution stuff—but there are more ingenious ways to do it, too.
In recent years, analysts have noticed that some sorts of powerful military radar discombobulate the Sentinel-1 satellites’ radar, producing a distinctive interference pattern in their returns. Ollie Ballinger, a lecturer at University College London, built a tool called the Radar Interference Tracker which allows anyone to search for such interference. In September the tool detected interference likely coming from Pogonovo, a key Russian base close to the Ukrainian border, a discovery which suggested the possibility of air-defence systems there (see below).
Military radar produces a distinctive interference pattern in Sentinel-1 satellites’ radar. Here at Pogonovo, in Russia. Source: Ollie Ballinger, UCL/Google
For all the insight that it yields, OSINT is not a panacea. Satellites may be providing unprecedented volumes of data, but they can only image so much in a day—and high-resolution data are still scarce. Intelligence analysts have long known that overhead pictures, while very useful, never show everything. They also know that the amount that they do show can be bewitching—beguilingly concrete in a way that can mislead the inexperienced.
Modern armed forces appreciate the role that open sources have begun to play in crises, and can use this to their advantage. An army might, for instance, deliberately show a convoy of tanks headed in the opposite direction to their intended destination, in the knowledge that the ensuing TikTok footage will be dissected by researchers. The location signals broadcast by ships can be spoofed, placing them miles from their true locations.
“People seem to think that OSINT will present them with the full scale of the build-up,” writes Konrad Muzyka of Rochan Consulting, whose research has formed the basis for The Economist’s maps of Russian deployments. “I am under no illusion. We are only seeing a fraction of what is really going on.” Even so, to see that fraction, and to see it by means which do not rely on the word and whim of governments, is a radical departure from the crises of the past. If war comes to Europe, it will be transparent as never before. ■
Editor’s note: This article draws on The Economist’s earlier, interactive analysis of Russia’s military build-up. It is available here.
All of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis can be found here.
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "Watching the border"
4. Does the U.S.-Russia Crisis Over Ukraine Prove That the Cold War Never Ended?
If we define the Cold War as a competition of ideologies, world views, within and against the rules based international order for influence and hegemony then, yes, the Cold War has never ended and is in fact perhaps a natural state of foreign affairs.
Then there are the two constant trinities: "Fear, honor, and interest" and "passion, reason, and chance" which seem to influence all aspects of foreign affairs and national security.
Does the U.S.-Russia Crisis Over Ukraine Prove That the Cold War Never Ended?
Putin’s aggression in Europe has triggered a new debate about whether American Presidents and policymakers have misunderstood decades of history.
In his final State of the Union address, in 1992, President George H. W. Bush sounded almost ecstatic. “The biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this: by the grace of God, America won the Cold War.” The ideological struggle between the U.S.-led West and the Soviet-dominated East—which played out in proxy wars around the world over four decades—had not simply ended, the President declared. The U.S. had triumphed. “A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and preëminent power, the United States of America,” he told a joint session of Congress. “And they regard this with no dread. For the world trusts us with power, and the world is right.” Bush really did believe in what he labelled “a new world order” marking the end of an era. “The quest for freedom is stronger than steel, more permanent than concrete,” he said, in November, 1989, as the Berlin Wall and Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were crumbling.
Both of Bush’s assertions seem dubious—even naïve—three decades later. In a stunning announcement on Friday, President Biden said that, based on “significant intelligence,” the U.S. believes President Vladimir Putin intends to invade Ukraine. The Russian leader “is focussed on trying to convince the world that he has the ability to change the dynamics in Europe in a way that he cannot,” Biden told reporters. On Saturday, during a stop in Lithuania, a former Soviet republic that is now a NATO ally, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that Russian forces “are uncoiling and are now poised to strike.”
Amid escalating tensions, a new debate has emerged among historians and experts on Russia about whether the Cold War ever really ended—at least as far as Moscow is concerned—and whether American arrogance blinded successive U.S. Presidents. Russia, with the largest army in Europe, is now resurgent. It is trying to reëstablish its traditional sphere of influence. In Europe over the past fourteen years, Russia has invaded and annexed part of Ukraine, and invaded Georgia and recognized two of its breakaway provinces as independent countries. For the first time, Russia has entrenched a military presence on the Mediterranean at naval and air-force bases in Syria, in the Middle East. In Africa, thousands of Russian contract mercenaries have been deployed on the Mediterranean coast of oil-rich Libya as well as in Sudan, Mali, the Central African Republic, Mozambique, and Madagascar. Now Russia appears intent on absorbing geostrategic Ukraine—a country slightly smaller than Texas that borders four members of NATO—either by military force or political coercion. Moscow counters that Washington’s criticism is hypocritical, given U.S. military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, much farther from its own shores, during the past two decades.
From the vantage point of history, some experts now view the current tensions as merely a new phase in a Cold War that never ended. “We can trace current strains back to the Cold War,” Robert Daly, the director of the Kissinger Institute, at the Wilson Center, told me. “There are important continuities.” He said the crisis today was not preordained or inevitable. If American, Russian, and Chinese leaders had made “a whole slew” of different choices along the way, history could have taken a different and less troubled course. “But it now looks like the period between the Cold War and today was an interregnum,” he said. “We thought issues were resolved, but it’s now clear that they weren’t.” The new prism on the past will be hard for Americans to accept, he said, because the crisis today reflects a “collective failure” over decades.
The brief period of hope—when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev crafted compromises on nuclear arms during the openings of glasnost, in the late nineteen-eighties, and when Bush hosted Boris Yeltsin at Camp David, in 1992—contrasts starkly with Putin decision, in 2022, to amass the largest military buildup in Europe since the Cold War. The combative language today echoes the political furies of the past. On Thursday, the Kremlin fired off an eleven-page response to Biden’s proposals to enhance security for both Europe and Russia. Putin balked—obstinately. Russia instead pledged never to abandon its two core demands—first, that Ukraine is barred from ever joining NATO, and second, that NATO, the world’s most powerful military alliance, roll back its deployment of troops and matériel to its 1997 borders. The response included a new threat, should NATO refuse. “In the absence of the readiness of the American side to agree on firm, legally binding guarantees to ensure our security from the United States and its allies,” it vowed, “Russia will be forced to respond, including by implementing measures of a military-technical nature.”
From today’s vantage point, the root causes of the tensions between Washington and Moscow have not changed much since the Cold War, Sergey Radchenko, an international-relations expert at the School of Advanced International Studies, at Johns Hopkins University, told me. The assumption in Washington that the Cold War was over in 1989 was “unduly American-centric” and ignored Moscow’s historic desire to be seen and respected by the U.S. and Europe as a major power, regardless of ideology. “It was never about this conflict between capitalism and communism,” he said. “It was much more about challenging the hierarchy of global politics and climbing up the hierarchy at the expense of the United States.” Gaining acceptance as an equal power, with its own sphere of influence, has been Moscow’s goal—whether under Communist or post-Communist rule—dating to the summit in Yalta, in 1945, of the three Allied leaders in the Second World War, Radchenko said.
Others still separate the historic eras. They contend that there are more differences than similarities between the Cold War of the twentieth century and the tensions of the early twenty-first. “I don’t think it would be accurate to say it was just an interregnum, a short little thing, and then we’re back to the way history always is,” Michael McFaul, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia now at Stanford University, told me. “The old Cold War did end.” It was followed, McFaul said, by a “moment of opportunity” when Russia could have consolidated democratic governance at home and integrated into the liberal international order. “Some of us worked on that project—and that project failed, in 2011,” he said, referring to the time just before Putin reclaimed the Presidency and consolidated power.. The Cold War, McFaul said, was replaced by a period of “hot peace.” And it may now be getting much hotter.
The one constant is Moscow’s ambition, Francis Fukuyama, the author of “The End of History and the Last Man,” told me. Putin has openly lamented the Soviet Union’s collapse as a “huge tragedy. His foreign policy has been really to try to reassemble as much of that entity as possible.” But otherwise, Fukuyama said, the stakes between 1947 and 1989 were higher, and the conflict “much more enveloping” globally. The Cold War was often considered a conflict between rival universalist ideologies. In 2022, Putin is instead seeking “to undermine the belief of Western democracies in their own systems, but he’s actually not trying to pretend that Russia has a superior system that would apply in other countries,” Fukuyama said. The ideological battles of the Cold War have been replaced by more traditional geopolitical competition. “Russia is simply trying to gain influence using the sort of limited military leverage that it has in different parts of the world. But that’s not the Cold War,” Fukuyama said. Russia today, he added, is far weaker than the Soviet empire was, especially as much of Eastern Europe is “pretty solidly aligned with the West.”
The Cold War lasted nearly a half century. Whether Russia actually invades Ukraine, the crisis has the potential to drag out and ripple across the other countries on Russia’s borders, as the Cold War did. “Moscow has made it clear that it is prepared to contest the fundamental principles that have underpinned our security for decades, and to do so by using force,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said, on Wednesday. “I regret to say that this is the new normal in Europe.”
Amid the tensions over Ukraine, little attention has been focussed on Putin’s intentions in neighboring Belarus, which is already Moscow’s closest ally among the Soviet empire’s former republics. Putin hosted the Belarusian President, Alexander Lukashenka, in Moscow on Friday. Lukashenka, who crushed pro-democracy street protests last year, with Putin’s aid, offered to allow Russia to deploy nuclear weapons in his country, which borders three NATO members—Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. From a command center in Moscow, on Saturday, Putin and Lukashenka together watched the joint military exercises in Belarus that included nuclear-capable cruise and ballistic missiles and involved thirty thousand Russian troops. “Once this big exercise is over, I think it’s entirely possible that Russia will leave a lot of its own forces there and effectively reincorporate Belarus,” Fukuyama, who has worked on projects in Ukraine for seven years, told me. Putin, he added, “was probably planning to do that anyhow. This gives him an excuse.”
President Bush got one thing right in his final address to Congress, three decades ago. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, “the world is still a dangerous place,” he said. “Only the dead have seen the end of conflict. And though yesterday’s challenges are behind us, tomorrow’s are being born.”
5. American Self-censorship (appeasing China)
A troubling conclusion. I would argue that the long term impact of businesses appeasing China is going to have a much more detrimental effect on America, American values, and the American way of life than the conflict over mask mandates and similar issues that are causing internal political divisions. The long term effects of self-censorship to appease China will turn the US into a nation of defanged sheep.
Conclusion:
Ultimately, American institutions may have to make their own choice: Reject censorship or maintain access to China. Right now, desire for access is winning.
American Self-censorship
Newsletter
The Morning
U.S. institutions are increasingly silencing themselves to win access to China.
The actor John Cena apologized for calling Taiwan a country while promoting the movie "F9: The Fast Saga."Credit...Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
By
Feb. 20, 2022, 7:44 a.m. ET
Before the Winter Olympics, Chinese officials cautioned athletes against speaking out about topics that cast them in a bad light. Then, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told American athletes not to anger the Chinese authorities.
It was the latest sign that China’s campaign to stifle dissent is succeeding in an important way: U.S. institutions and businesses are increasingly silencing themselves to avoid angering the Chinese government.
The professional wrestler and actor John Cena apologized, in Mandarin, last year for calling Taiwan a country. In 2019, a Houston Rockets executive apologized for tweeting support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong after Chinese officials complained, and a top video game publisher suspended an e-sports competitor who voiced support for the protests. The 2013 movie “World War Z” was rewritten to clarify that its zombie-spawning virus didn’t originate in China.
Erich Schwartzel, the author of “Red Carpet,” which is about China’s relationship with Hollywood, told me that one number drives these decisions: 1.4 billion, China’s population.
American businesses and institutions want access to this enormous market. Given China’s authoritarian leadership, that means playing by the Chinese Communist Party’s rules — and, in particular, avoiding criticism of its human rights abuses. So cultural institutions that are influential bastions of American values like free expression are now frequently absent from public conversations about China.
Compromising values
U.S. sports and media have often showcased American values, even if clumsily or unfairly. These cultural exports helped spread democratic ideas internationally during the Cold War. Movies like “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” or “Selma,” which celebrate democracy, justice and equality, can change how people view the world and how it works. Celebrities can push people to vote or get vaccinated, or put a spotlight on neglected problems.
Censorship prevents these institutions from shining a light on China as its leaders oppress dissidents, crack down on democracy in Hong Kong, round up and detain ethnic Uyghurs and threaten war with Taiwan.
Asked about business in China in an interview with the Times Opinion writer Kara Swisher, the former Disney C.E.O. Bob Iger acknowledged the reality facing Hollywood: “You try in the process not to compromise what I’ll call values. But there are compromises that companies have to make to be global.”
A recent example of censorship appears in “Top Gun: Maverick,” set to premiere in U.S. theaters this year. In the original 1986 movie, Tom Cruise’s character, the U.S. Navy aviator Pete Mitchell, wore a jacket with patches of the Taiwanese and Japanese flags. In the coming sequel, those flags are gone.
As Schwartzel reported, Chinese investors told movie executives that the Taiwanese flag was a problem because China doesn’t consider Taiwan independent. Playing it safe, the executives also removed the Japanese flag because of Japan’s own historical tensions with China.
"Wolf Warrior 2" features an American mercenary antagonist.Credit...Andy Wong/Associated Press
In the meantime, Chinese studios are getting better at making movies, and they’re not afraid to take an anti-American stance. In 2017’s popular “Wolf Warrior 2,” the Chinese hero Leng Feng saves African villagers from an American mercenary called Big Daddy, who proclaims his people’s supremacy moments before Leng triumphs and kills him.
The consequences are asymmetrical. Chinese movies proudly showcase their country’s values while American movies remain silent about China — skewing the messages people hear not just in the U.S. and China but across the globe.
American movies can even give the impression that China is better. In the 2014 movie “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” U.S. officials were portrayed “in unflattering tones,” according to PEN America. The Chinese characters in the film, which was made with the Chinese government’s support, were more often selfless and heroic. Variety called the movie “a splendidly patriotic film, if you happen to be Chinese.”
“Transformers” made more than $1 billion at the box office — $300 million of it from China. From a business perspective, it was a success.
A growing problem
The pull of censorship stands to grow as China’s economy, and therefore the potential market for U.S. businesses, also grows.
Some American lawmakers have tried to address the problem, but any change in U.S. policy would most likely have little effect. The same free-speech rights those politicians defend also make it hard for them to tell Hollywood, the N.B.A. or anyone else what to do.
Another issue: The most striking and obvious examples of censorship have involved blatant interventions by Chinese officials. But U.S. businesses are more frequently doing what Yaqiu Wang at Human Rights Watch calls anticipatory self-censorship: “Before the idea of a movie is even conceived, the first thing they need to think is, ‘How can I make sure that this movie can be shown in China?’”
That kind of self-censorship is harder to detect — or do anything about.
Ultimately, American institutions may have to make their own choice: Reject censorship or maintain access to China. Right now, desire for access is winning.
6. Opinion | Biden has rebuilt the Western alliance
All of our alliances are key to US national security.
Conclusion:
Mr. Biden might never be successful in getting the Build Back Better legislation that he wanted for this country. However, his presidential legacy might well be defined by his success in building back better a global order that believes in a real rule of law.
Opinion | Biden has rebuilt the Western alliance
In his Feb. 16 op-ed, “Putin and Xi might be unwittingly saving the West,” David Von Drehle gave a gently mocking tip of the hat to the Russian and Chinese dictators for their unforced errors in posting an army at the borders of Ukraine and in raising the curtain on the real China by hosting this year’s Olympics, respectively, but he made a material and obvious omission of the person who has wittingly done more than either of them to rebuild the Western alliance, restore global order and demonstrate that the values of democracy aren’t dead. That person is, of course, President Biden, who, almost alone, was willing to snub Beijing for its human rights abuses by withholding a U.S. diplomatic presence at the Winter Games. And it was Mr. Biden alone who had to stiffen the spine of NATO members in facing down Moscow’s tanks.
As Mr. Von Drehle cautioned, only time will tell if Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin have overplayed their hands. Likewise, Mr. Biden’s counter-initiatives might have to await the judgment of historians rather than that of U.S. voters in this fall’s congressional elections, which will almost certainly be fought over domestic issues exclusively, come what may in Europe.
Mr. Biden might never be successful in getting the Build Back Better legislation that he wanted for this country. However, his presidential legacy might well be defined by his success in building back better a global order that believes in a real rule of law.
James McKeown, Falls Church
7. Who needs an invasion? Putin's offensive against Ukraine has been underway for a long time
Hybrid, asymmetric, irregular, unconventional, political, information, cyber, new generation, non-linear warfare before our very eyes.
Everyone likes to quote Sun Tzu and "win without fighting." It is a nice sentiment and a worthy goal. But the question is how to achieve that goal? We forget that Sun Tzu gives us the answer, "what is of supreme importance is to attack the enemy's strategy." Recognize it, understand it, expose it, and attack it.
I would offer (in the face of much partisan criticism expected) what the President is doing with his public statements is to expose and attack Putin's strategy.
Counterintuitively, I think President Biden's recent statement that he knows Putin has made the decision to invade Ukraine may actually provide the off ramp. Putin now has the opportunity to halt preparations and actions and withdraw forces to "prove" Biden wrong and to shift all the blame for the strategic situation in Ukraine to the shoulders of Biden. He will embark on a new line of effort in his political warfare campaign and that will be to use his "backing down" (which he will not acknowledge and simply say he never had plans to invade Ukraine) to undermine the legitimacy of the US (as the boy who cried wolf) and try to split the US from our European allies. However, he will likely not succeed because of the work that has been done to shore up our alliances and aggressively consult with them throughout this entire situation. The president will have to be ready to receive political attacks not only from Russia and other revisionist and rogue powers, criticism at the UN from Russian aligned friends, and US partisans who will accuse him of a "wag the dog" campaign when the invasion does not happen. But it will be better to receive these political attacks than to have an invasion. I am in my foxhole waiting for incoming (information) fire.
Who needs an invasion? Putin's offensive against Ukraine has been underway for a long time
WASHINGTON —
Vladimir Putin and his aides have long insisted that they have no intention of starting a war with Ukraine. President Biden said Friday that U.S. intelligence has concluded that the Russian president has made the decision to invade.
In a larger sense, though, Putin’s current offensive against Ukraine has been underway for a while now — through proxy forces, cyberwar, economic pressure and truculent diplomacy.
It’s already had visible effects.
Putin’s deployment of more than 150,000 troops with tanks and artillery on the border has forced Ukraine’s military — smaller and weaker than Russia’s — to mobilize. His cyberattacks have caused chaos in Ukrainian government ministries.
The fear of war has blown a hole in Ukraine’s already sputtering economy. Most private investment has stopped, commercial flights have been canceled, interest rates have soared, and the currency has fallen to a yearlong low.
All that’s on top of Putin’s seizure of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and his military aid to rebels in the eastern part of the country.
“Putin’s intimidation tactics are a great way of keeping Ukraine locked in the economic doldrums and vulnerable to Kremlin pressure,” economist Anders Aslund wrote last week.
For a leader who wants to destabilize the anti-Moscow government in Kyiv, those measures count as achievements.
The threat of war has affected NATO’s behavior as well. It forced the United States and Britain to withdraw military trainers from Ukraine, fulfilling — at least temporarily — another of Putin’s aims.
It’s made the prospects for Ukrainian membership in the alliance, already modest, even more distant. And it’s compelled the Biden administration to acknowledge publicly that Russia has legitimate security interests that deserve a hearing.
It’s as if Putin had taken the advice of China’s legendary general of ancient times, Sun Tzu: The ultimate test of a strategist’s skill is to win without fighting.
Perhaps, as Biden suggested, Putin has decided to abandon that path and move to full-scale war. But if he continues to follow Sun Tzu’s advice, his next logical step might be to step up aid to the pro-Russian separatists who occupy part of eastern Ukraine.
Russian government spokesmen hinted at such a move last week when they claimed that Ukraine was carrying out “genocide” against the area’s ethnic Russian inhabitants.
There’s no evidence that such a campaign is underway, and Ukrainian officials heatedly deny it.
But the accusation could serve as a handy pretext for recognizing the independence of the rebel areas, or at least sending them more weapons in the guise of humanitarian aid.
Among other benefits, such a move would give Moscow a de facto veto over NATO membership for Kyiv, since the alliance won’t want a new member that’s already locked in low-grade conflict with Russia.
And that course would stop short of provoking the Western response Putin presumably fears most: the massive economic sanctions Biden and other NATO leaders have brandished.
But if Biden and the U.S. intelligence community are right, and the Russian leader has decided to invade, then he has made a different calculation: He’s gambling that the sanctions won’t be effective enough to hurt much.
Putin has worked for years to make his economy sanctions-proof, expanding his government’s foreign currency reserve to a staggering $631 billion and shifting much of Russia’s trade from Europe to China.
And if European countries apply sanctions, he can retaliate by reducing his exports of natural gas, which supply much of his neighbors’ heating fuel.
“Can you imagine German houses [going] cold in order to punish Russia?” asked Graham Allison, a Harvard scholar of international affairs. “I can’t.”
A battle over sanctions, he noted, could allow Putin to achieve another goal — using an energy crisis to drive a wedge through the NATO alliance.
The uncomfortable truth is that Putin, if only because of geography, has the advantage in this conflict.
He’s willing to put troops on the ground, which makes his threats credible. The United States and its NATO allies are not.
“Militarily, Putin has the high card,” Allison said. “He has a military that can fight and win.”
The Russian leader may invade in the next few days, as Biden warned, or he may wait for another round of diplomacy to see what he can gain without war. Either way, he has an interest in keeping the crisis going.
“We’re all looking for a solution. There’s not going to be one,” Fiona Hill, a White House advisor on Russia in the Trump administration, warned.
“The Russians know that if they keep the pressure up, by hook or by crook, in their view they’ll find a way of getting what they want in Ukraine.”
Which means Putin’s confrontation with Ukraine and the West is likely to continue for a long time — whether he launches a full-scale invasion or not.
8. Russian troops will remain indefinitely, says Belarus, as fears rise of Ukraine invasion
Russian troops will remain indefinitely, says Belarus, as fears rise of Ukraine invasion
Defence minister says soldiers will stay after end of joint exercises due to ‘escalation of situation’ in Donbas
Russian troops sent to Belarus for military exercises will remain in the country indefinitely, Belarus’s defence ministry has said, in a decision that will further fuel concerns Moscow is planning an imminent Ukraine invasion.
Belarus’s defence minister, Gen Viktor Khrenin, said Russian soldiers would stay after large-scale joint drills were completed on Sunday. He said the move was necessary because of the “escalation of the situation” in the Donbas, in the east of Ukraine.
The Kremlin had promised to remove its forces from Belarus once the 10-day exercise, which began on 10 February, ended. It has deployed what the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said was the largest concentration of soldiers and modern weapons in Belarus since the cold war.
They include 30,000 combat troops, elite Spetsnaz units, Su-35 fighter jets and S-400 missile defence systems. Russian forces are stationed close to the Belarus border and within striking distance of Kyiv, 160 miles (260km) away. The US and UK have warned Moscow is planning to attack the Ukrainian capital.
The Belarusian defence minister, Gen Viktor Khrenin. Photograph: Sergey Shelega/AP
“In connection with the increase in military activity near the external borders of the Union State and the escalation of the situation in the Donbas, the Presidents of the Republic of Belarus and the Russian Federation decided to continue the joint inspection of response forces,” the statement by Belarus’s ministry of defence said.
As recently as Wednesday, Belarus’s foreign minister, Vladimir Makei, said “not a single” Russian soldier would remain in the country after the massive joint drills – a promise echoed by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.
Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, repeated his claim on Sunday that Russia had no plans to launch a military offensive. “We urge you to ask yourself the question: what is the point of Russia attacking anyone?” Peskov told the state-run Russia-1 TV.
Peskov added that Russia had “never attacked anyone throughout its history”. But he warned that “any spark, unplanned incident or minor planned provocation” in the Donbas region might lead to what he called “irreparable consequences”.
The troop announcement follows what Ukraine’s government says is a coordinated spike in violence in the east of the country, where Ukrainian soldiers and pro-Russian separatists face off across a 260-mile (421km) frontline. Since Thursday, Ukrainian positions have come under intense bombardment.
Ukraine’s joint forces command said that by 1pm local time on Sunday 27 artillery strikes had been launched against 10 Ukrainian-controlled villages and towns. It blamed the “provocative shelling” on Russia’s armed forces. Two Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since Saturday and five wounded, it added.
Separatists from the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) have claimed they are under Ukrainian attack. On Sunday, they said two civilians had been killed near the village of Pionerskoye. “Unfortunately, as a result of the aggression of the Kiev militants, two civilians died and five residential buildings were destroyed,” the LPR said.
Ukraine’s operational command dismissed the report as “an absolute fake” and said troops had been given orders to refrain from any “active action”. “We realise that the Russians are now looking for any excuse to invade,” it said, adding that it was closing several crossing points with rebel territory because of hostile fire.
The Biden administration and Boris Johnson, among others, have said they believe Russia is behind a series of recent “false flag” events, designed to give Moscow a pretext to invade. They include a car bomb on Friday outside the separatist administration building in Donetsk, an “attack” on a water plant and a “shell” that landed across the border in Russia’s Rostov region.
The situation in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities remained calm on Sunday. Demonstrators took to the streets of the Black Sea port city of Odessa, waving blue and yellow Ukrainian flags. They shouted slogans including “Glory to Ukraine” and “Putin is a prick”.
— Michael Shtekel (@mishajedi) February 20, 2022
Meanwhile, the Dutch foreign ministry said it was moving its embassy from Kyiv to the western city of Lviv “due to security reasons”.
The US and UK have already moved their missions to Lviv, with other European countries following suit. The French ambassador in Kyiv said on Saturday he was staying put.
The political analyst Artyom Shraibman said the decision to keep Russian troops in Belarus was expected. He described Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, as “completely dependent” on what Putin wants. “Lukashenko is forced to dance to Putin’s tune,” he said.
He added: “Lukashenko won’t be happy that he is being used, but he will hope that Belarus might get something in return from Russia. Potentially a new credit or new weapons deal. The Belarusian leader doesn’t have any real allies left.
“This shows that Lukashenko is very vulnerable at the moment, he has to play along with Putin’s bigger games.”
9. West plans to arm resistance if Russian forces occupy Ukraine
I think we have already begun, at least the US, UK, Canada and other NATO allies.
The headline is illustrative of a lack of understanding of unconventional warfare and resistance. If you have the opportunity you must prepare and arm the resistance before the invasion occurs. It is much more difficult to do so afterward. The correct title might be the West will continue to advise and assist the resistance after the invasion occurs.
West plans to arm resistance if Russian forces occupy Ukraine
Invasion ‘must be seen to fail’, says Boris Johnson, as western allies hold secret talks about how to give military backing to Kyiv
Secret discussions are under way between western allies over how to arm what they expect to be fierce Ukrainian resistance in the event of a Russian invasion that topples the Kyiv government.
Boris Johnson laid bare the case for such a move in a dramatic speech to the Munich security conference where he stated it was in the collective self-interests of the west for any Russian invasion to “fail and be seen to fail”.
He said that any invasion would lead to “a generation of bloodshed and misery” as Ukrainians would fight a fierce campaign to resist Russian forces. The message was underscored in a meeting between Johnson and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, on the margins of the Munich conference where the two men predicted a fierce resistance to an invasion.
Similar discussions have been taking place in the US, where reports suggest the country’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has told senators that the US is willing to arm a resistance and is not going to accept a Russian military victory that erases the principles of national self-determination.
Boris Johnson: “A lightning war would be followed by a long and hideous period of reprisals and revenge and insurgency.” Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
At the crucial gathering in Munich, Johnson warned of a protracted battle after any invasion that Russia could not contain. He said: “A lightning war would be followed by a long and hideous period of reprisals and revenge and insurgency, and Russian parents would mourn the loss of young Russian soldiers, who in their way are every bit as innocent as the Ukrainians now bracing themselves for attack.
“If Ukraine is overrun by brute force, I fail to see how a country encompassing nearly a quarter of a million square miles – the biggest nation in Europe apart from Russia itself – could then be held down and subjugated for ever.”
It came as Zelenskiy demanded greater support from the west in the face of Russian aggression and the immediate imposition of tough sanctions on Russia, which leaders have vowed to impose should an invasion take place.
Ukraine’s military said two of its soldiers had been killed and four injured in enemy shelling on Saturday. It said there were 70 ceasefire violations as of 5pm local time. Civilians living close to the frontline with separatist-controlled territory experienced another day of intense shelling and bombardment. Ukraine’s foreign ministry said “armed Russian formations” had unleashed “provocative firing” all across the 155-mile (250km) frontline in the east of the country.
Meanwhile, there was growing suspicion that Russia was behind a series of seemingly coordinated “false flag” attacks, designed to give Vladimir Putin a pretext for a possible invasion. They included a car bomb on Friday evening outside the administration building in separatist-run Donetsk, an “attack” on a water station and a shell that landed just over the border in Russia’s Rostov region.
In Stanytsia Luhanska, a Ukrainian-controlled town on the outskirts of Luhansk, one of the Russia-backed separatist capitals, repeated thuds of incoming fire were audible on Saturday afternoon. Ukrainian officials in the town said there had been frequent bursts of incoming fire over the past few days.
The Ukrainian military took a group of journalists into Stanytsia Luhanska by helicopter and armoured vehicles on Saturday to help dispel what it said was a false Russian narrative that the Ukrainian army has been behind the recent rise in violence.
Ukraine’s military intelligence service said on Saturday the Kremlin was planning further destabilising operations, which could even see civilians killed, with an attack blamed on Kyiv.
The Ukrainian capital was also a possible target, it indicated. The service said that leaflets circulating in the Donetsk and Luhansk rebel republics, purporting to come from the Ukrainian army, were fakes. The flyers claimed Ukraine was preparing to attack.
Ukrainian National guard soldiers during a joint operation in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Thursday. Photograph: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
Ukraine’s pro-western government said it was committed to dialogue and had no intention of launching an attack, or carrying out acts of sabotage in the Donbas region. Meanwhile, Nato said it was moving its personnel from Kyiv to the western city of Lviv. The British embassy relocated to Lviv on Saturday.
Until now, public discussion has been limited to the massive economic sanctions the west will impose on the Russian economy – and Putin’s circle. Steps have also been taken to protect Nato’s eastern flank, principally in Poland, Romania and the Baltics.
However, in his speech to the Munich security conference, Johnson made it clear that the west must stand by Ukraine by ensuring Russia was ultimately repelled. “If dialogue fails and if Russia chooses to use violence against an innocent and peaceful population in Ukraine, and to disregard the norms of civilised behaviour between states, and to disregard the charter of the United Nations, then we at this conference should be in no doubt that it is in our collective interest that Russia should ultimately fail and be seen to fail,” he said.
He presaged the possibility of further military help when he added: “We have to steel ourselves for the possibility of a protracted crisis, with Russia maintaining the pressure and searching for weaknesses over an extended period, and we must together refuse to be worn down.”
The degree of military assistance and the extent to which it is overt is still under discussion. Its scope in part depends on events on the ground. In public, Johnson has so far only said it is possible arms would be supplied, adding he would not rule it out. The west would not wish to be seen to be fomenting a futile and bloody resistance that was risking a wider conflict between Nato and Russia.
In the US, the Biden administration has approved about $650m (£480m) of military equipment to Kyiv in the past year, and more recently, it authorised a $200m package to Ukraine that included Javelin anti-tank missiles, other anti-armour systems, grenade launchers and munitions. The US has also allowed the Baltic states to send weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles.
Last night, Johnson said that Russia’s plans were “in motion”, but that Putin could still pull back and call off his military operations. “In the course of the next few days if there is a violent kinetic phase of this in Ukraine, that is the moment when the west, when Nato, will be truly tested,” he said. “If there’s still a path for diplomacy, for negotiation, then let’s go down it.”
10. Mysterious ‘Z’ Painted on Russian Tanks Closing in on Ukraine Border
Zorro? (I could not resist). Ona serious note perhaps a Russian expert can assess the possible meaning.
Mysterious ‘Z’ Painted on Russian Tanks Closing in on Ukraine Border
A ‘Z’ written in the Roman, not Cyrillic, alphabet has been painted on a number of Russian military vehicles rolling towards Ukraine.
Updated Feb. 20, 2022 7:51AM ET / Published Feb. 20, 2022 5:35AM ET
Rob Lee Twitter
While the world continues to watch Russian troops mass and maneuver at Ukraine’s vast borders, an esoteric group of investigative journalists and military experts are focusing on an ominous “Z” that has started appearing on military hardware heading towards Ukraine.
Video posted on social media has shown hundreds more tanks, communications vehicles and rocket launchers bearing down on the border. Many of those captured on camera have been painted with a “Z” inside a large white square.
Bellingcat reporter Aric Toler, says his group has been monitoring Russian military symbols for the last eight years, but they have “no idea what they [the Zs] are” and haven’t seen them before. “So, assume the worst, I guess/fear,” he wrote on Twitter.
Some, like Russian defense policy guru Rob Lee, whose social media followers have grown exponentially thanks to his keen dissemination of what’s going on, believes the symbol may refer to contingents assigned to Ukraine regions. “It appears Russian forces near the border are painting markers, in this case “Z”, on vehicles to identify different task forces or echelons,” he tweeted this weekend.
Others have speculated Russia is borrowing a play used in World War II by allies who used symbols to avoid friendly fire accidents since most Ukraine tanks are Soviet era and easily confused with Russia’s fleet. There is also speculation that the “Z” could stand for Russian enemy no. 1: Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, who has vowed he won’t be drawn into action by the saber rattling around his country.
To further confuse matters, “Z” is not a letter in Russia’s Cyrillic alphabet.
While the phenomenon of what some have dubbed the “Zorro Squad” is relatively new, the threat of a Russian invasion of the sovereign nation of Ukraine is starting to grow old. Late Saturday, a massive explosion blew up a Luhansk gas pipeline in eastern Ukraine in an incident the head of the company called “sabotage.”
After attending the Munich Security Conference, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned on Sunday that Europe was about to face its “biggest war since 1945,” claiming that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s plan “has already in some senses begun.”
“You’re looking at not just an invasion through the east, but coming down from the north, down from Belarus and actually encircling Kyiv,” Johnson told the BBC. “People need to understand the sheer cost in human life that could entail.”
11. Russian State TV Is So Ridiculous Right Now It Looks Like a Farce
But we should be careful not to "misunderestimate" this (or assess it by mirror imaging).
Russian State TV Is So Ridiculous Right Now It Looks Like a Farce
COEN BROTHERS GO TO WAR
The TV propaganda has taken a farcical turn with Kremlin insiders begging President Biden not to start a vicious war in Ukraine. No mention of the Russian tanks.
Julia Davis
Published Feb. 20, 2022 6:10AM ET
MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV
Chairman of the International Committee of Russia’s State Duma, Leonid Slutsky alleged that the president of the United States is painting “an absolutely inverted picture of the situation around Ukraine” and accused Joe Biden of misrepresenting “the alleged readiness of the Russian Federation to invade Ukraine.” Slutsky added that “the American president, talking about the “villain-Russia,” the very Russia that today accepts and saves the civilian population of the LPR and DPR, seems like a real character from [Lewis Carroll’s topsy-turvy children’s book] ‘Through the Looking-Glass.’”
And yet, it is Russia who has turned white into black, and black into white. If there were not so many lives hanging in the balance, you would describe current Russian state TV as a darkly comic farce.
Events on the ground are unfolding just as the American president had warned, based on the information provided by U.S. intelligence agencies. U.S. Ambassador to the OSCE Michael Carpenter said that according to U.S. assessments, Russia has placed somewhere between 169,000 and 190,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders—up from 100,000 at the end of January.
Having massed its troops and armaments on the Ukrainian border, Russia stands ready to invade Ukraine. On Friday, Kremlin-controlled heads of the self-proclaimed “republics” in Eastern Ukraine (LPR and DPR) started unprovoked evacuations of civilians to Russia, followed by suspicious explosions in the region. Russia’s state media immediately—and baselessly—blamed the Ukrainian military. State TV channel Rossiya-24 reported: “Let’s address the emergency event that took place several minutes ago.” The correspondent present on the scene said, “Everyone is trying to figure out what happened here.” The headline read: “The Ukrainian army struck the gas pipeline in Luhansk.”
What makes this all the more bizarre is that the U.S. had publicly predicted these very tactics.
Just as the U.S. administration had warned, Russian authorities now appear to be readying themselves for the re-invasion of Ukraine under false pretexts. One of the main pretexts aggressively promoted by the Kremlin and Russia’s state media is the unfounded allegation of “genocide” of Russian speakers by the Ukrainian military. Back in December of 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed: “What is happening in Donbas right how we know and see very well, it’s very reminiscent of genocide.” By February, the state media and Russian officials went full bore with their accusations of “genocide” in Ukraine.
According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Russian officials circulated a document at the UN Security Council meeting on Thursday, accusing the Ukrainian government of the “genocide of the Russian-speaking population of Donbas.”
Speaking before that UN Security Council meeting, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that according to the information obtained by the U.S. intelligence agencies, Russia was planning to use a false flag attack in Eastern Ukraine, followed by baseless accusations of “genocide” in the region. Blinken pointed out: "Russia may describe this event as ethnic cleansing or a genocide, making a mockery of a concept that we in this chamber do not take lightly, nor do I take lightly, based on my family history."
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's dismissal of Moscow's assertion of “genocide” in the eastern Ukraine’s region of Donbas enraged Russian officials. On Saturday, Russian Foreign Ministry scolded Scholz and Germany as a whole: “It is not for German leaders to laugh at the issues of genocide. This is unacceptable, given the historical experience of Germany in matters of massacres against people and the spread of misanthropic ideology.” Russian state TV went even further, with the host of 60 Minutes Olga Skabeeva cynically asserting: “Germans have different ideas about genocide. They’ll have to start burning people in ovens, and maybe then they’ll concede: ‘Yes, it’s genocide.’”
Russia’s state media is spreading claims of Ukraine allegedly shelling the regions of Donbas and on Saturday alleged that the Ukrainians shelled Russia’s Rostov Region, located near the border with Ukraine. The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Lieutenant General Valery Zaluzhny, denied all of Russia’s accusations, stating in part: “It should be noted that the artillery units of the Joint Forces are located in areas of withdrawal at a distance of more than 21 km from the line of contact, which exceeds the maximum firing range of multiple rocket launchers "Hail" and 122-mm guns in service with the Armed Forces of Ukraine."
Anticipating false accusations from the Kremlin, Ukrainian authorities allowed access to a number of local and international journalists. NBC’s Richard Engel noted: “The separatists are claiming Ukrainians are attacking and besieging them. I’ve walked up and down those trenches for the last several months. Saw no signs of ongoing or impending Ukrainian offensive. None.” Meanwhile, streams of state media news reports claim that Ukraine is aggressively shelling Donbas, alleging “the most intensive bombardments by the Ukrainian military in recent months.”
In a bizarro world of Russia’s state media, America—which has been painstakingly attempting to prevent an escalation—is the true aggressor. Appearing on 60 Minutes on Friday, lawmaker Oleg Morozov lamented: “I’m hoping there are people next to Biden, next to Scholz, next to the British PM, who will look at the scenarios and say, ‘If the big war with Russia’s participation were to start, it will cost Europe dearly. Think about that!’ That is my last hope, that the fear of this unpredictable situation will stop these hotheads.”
Igor Korotchenko, a member of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Public Council and editor-in-chief of the National Defense magazine, exclaimed: “The United States want this war. Their main goal is to take over Europe’s energy market. Biden could care less about the victims and their suffering, about Europe’s losses. He is realizing the plans of the American establishment.” Summarizing the grotesque new theme in the Kremlin’s war on truth, Korotchenko theatrically pleaded with European leaders: “Stop Zelensky! Stop Biden!”
12. Perspective | Evacuating U.S. embassies in a crisis just leaves us uninformed
I think we forget that this is why ambassadors and country teams and the State department (and in the intelligence community) resist evacuation for as long as possible. Yes, they are concerned with messaging, signaling, credibility, and legitimacy, but the practical reason is to maintain communication and 9as best as possible) access to information.
The key point in this conclusion that I agree with.
I think we forget that there are committed foreign service officers and intelligence officers who willingly go in harm's way to serve our country. It is not just the military that is committed to serving in harm's way. Yes we must do everything we can to protect them but we must conduct the risk analysis and take calculated risks to achieve strategic effects for our nation.
Conclusion:
It is a mistake to view foreign embassies as a relic of the past or to use their closure to send signals to adversaries. On-the-ground reporting and personal relationships are the backbone of successful diplomacy, intelligence collection and military action. As recently reported in the New York Times, the lack of local knowledge and sustained presence led to the death of innocent civilians in Syria: A U.S. military unit killed “farmers trying to harvest, children in the street, families fleeing fighting, and villagers sheltering in buildings.”
The world is full of dangerous places, and we need to protect our professionals. But we also need to put people in those dangerous places, or we will be blind and deaf the next time we face a crisis.
Perspective | Evacuating U.S. embassies in a crisis just leaves us uninformed
Citing security concerns as a Russian invasion of Ukraine looks increasingly likely, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced earlier this week that the United States is closing its embassy in Kyiv and moving its diplomatic and consular operations to the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Although it is hard to fault the Biden administration for prioritizing the safety of its diplomats, closing U.S. embassies during crisis situations has a cost. To those of us who spent our careers overseas, shutting down an embassy is like closing hospitals during a pandemic because of the risk of illness. Although the Kyiv closure is probably temporary, many of America’s biggest blunders have happened in places where we had no Americans on the ground.
Embassies are the U.S. government’s eyes and ears overseas, and they serve multiple functions. Our diplomats represent administration initiatives abroad. They meet regularly with local officials to explain U.S. policy and seek feedback. They report on political, security, economic, military and cultural issues to keep Washington informed. Embassies also provide protection for classified reports, in addition to military, law enforcement and political activity, and they provide services to U.S. citizens in-country. There is a lot to lose when they close. Foreign crises are exactly why we have foreign missions in the first place.
The United States has maintained embassies in war zones and in hostile countries for years, allowing for on-the-scene reporting, crisis management and intelligence reporting. We had a functioning embassy in Moscow throughout the Cold War, missions in Kabul and Baghdad during fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a diplomatic representation in Cuba. Even in environments such as Russia and China, where our diplomats are followed, harassed and monitored closely, they provide crucial understanding of our adversaries. I know: When I served overseas in a hostile counterintelligence environment, I was followed everywhere, and my house was monitored with audio and video. But even in such circumstances, U.S. missions are able to develop insight into closed cultures and keep Washington well-informed.
It surprised me last summer when the administration so quickly shuttered the embassy in Kabul — and when it moved out of Kyiv this week. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul was an $800 million complex with state-of-the-art security that included hardened barriers and blast walls, and it maintained protection of classified materials through years of fighting. When it closed, it was one of the biggest U.S. missions in the world, housing approximately 1,500 American diplomats and staff and an even larger contingent of Afghans.
At the time, embassy staff was in direct negotiations with the Taliban and had secured agreements to discontinue targeting of Americans and maintain a diplomatic presence in a possible future Taliban-led government. While a Taliban takeover was anticipated to be devastating for Afghan citizens who had grown used to life under a more liberal elected government, few expected that all official Americans would depart for good — especially as so many other embassies remained.
For those professionals who know what we built and what we were losing in Afghanistan, the fallout from the retreat from Kabul was especially difficult. It was maddening to hear outsiders so casually declare that the United States could easily replace its intelligence collection and engage in counterterrorist operations in an “over-the-horizon” manner. It may appear that way from the outside — making the withdrawal seem like less of a mistake — but the dirty little secret for anyone who has worked in national security is that high-tech solutions rely heavily on low-tech enablers. There is no substitute for Americans on the ground in tough places. Trying to understand people, institutions, politics and a society from afar is difficult, and it easily leads to misunderstanding. Intelligence is far more than secret reports. It is being there to provide the necessary insight, context, nuance and ability to meet sensitive sources and take action with partners on the ground. To get critical information now, the United States relies on a handful of journalists who travel to Afghanistan and on updates from allies who maintained a presence. Anti-terrorism operations have dropped close to zero.
We’ll pay a price for moving our diplomats from Kyiv to Lviv. The Ukrainian government — its defense, intelligence and foreign ministries that our diplomats visit every day — are in Kyiv. Maintaining up-to-the minute contacts will be more difficult, and meetings with key sources will be disrupted. How effective can the embassy be in Lviv when all the people they need to see are in Kyiv? National security and foreign policy is a deeply personal business. Relationships with individuals and institutions are built over years. An out-of-school comment or quiet warning may prove crucial in a crisis. We have all learned over the past few years that it is hard to build or maintain close relationships over Zoom and phone calls. This is compounded when the communication is sensitive or needs to be secure, as these are easily intercepted by hostile actors. For these reasons and others, almost all of my former intelligence community colleagues say the same thing: They would be looking to beef up the presence in Kyiv, rather than drawing it down.
Many of our most damaging foreign policy debacles took place in areas where there was no U.S. Embassy or other official U.S. presence. There was no U.S. Embassy in Cuba before the missile crisis, no U.S. Embassy in Iraq before the 2003 invasion, no Embassy in Afghanistan when we went to war after 9/11. In all those cases, we were blind. Before the invasion of Iraq, we were easily misinformed by an Iraqi refugee in Germany who reported to the German government that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons program. We accepted the information as true, even though no Americans met the source — we had nobody in Iraq to put together the pieces or confirm the information by in-person observation. We have no U.S. presence today in Iran, North Korea or Afghanistan. That means the public should be skeptical of any future claims that officials understand the decision-making processes of those closed societies. “Over-the-horizon” engagement doesn’t work.
On a more practical level, our embassies house sensitive information that can be lost if we move out too hastily. As the United States prepared to punish Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia for its actions in Bosnia and Kosovo, U.S. diplomats in 1999 were ordered to rapidly burn sensitive documents, destroy technical gear and depart the country before a threatened NATO bombing campaign began. When U.S. security experts returned to the embassy after the war, they found that the Serbs, Russians and Chinese had ransacked the embassy and discovered a trove of sensitive documents mistakenly left behind. Before and during the war, the United States had nobody in country to check the coordinates of a planned airstrike in central Belgrade. In May 1999, U.S. forces mistakenly bombed the Chinese Embassy there, killing several journalists and leading to an ugly diplomatic crisis. A simple walk-by could have averted the tragic mistake. I can only imagine how much the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Taliban and others are learning from ransacking the former U.S. Embassy building in Kabul. Don’t let anyone tell you that nothing was left behind.
It is a mistake to view foreign embassies as a relic of the past or to use their closure to send signals to adversaries. On-the-ground reporting and personal relationships are the backbone of successful diplomacy, intelligence collection and military action. As recently reported in the New York Times, the lack of local knowledge and sustained presence led to the death of innocent civilians in Syria: A U.S. military unit killed “farmers trying to harvest, children in the street, families fleeing fighting, and villagers sheltering in buildings.”
The world is full of dangerous places, and we need to protect our professionals. But we also need to put people in those dangerous places, or we will be blind and deaf the next time we face a crisis.
13. What Nato is doing to prevent a Russia-Ukraine war and what it could do if there is an invasion
What Nato is doing to prevent a Russia-Ukraine war and what it could do if there is an invasion
Nato’s repeated warnings against an invasion do not seem to have had much of an impact on Russia
The US and its Nato allies have repeatedly warned that Russia will pay a high price for any invasion - but they have sometimes struggled to present a united front.
So far, Nato's threats of retaliation have had little impact, with Russia increasing the number of troops in the area and launching drills in Belarus, its ally.
Moscow is seeking a guarantee from Nato that it will not permit Ukraine and other former Soviet countries to join as members.
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, also wants the alliance to halt weapons deployments and roll back its forces from Eastern Europe. Nato has flatly rejected these demands.
Joe Biden said on Friday night that the US and its allies are "prepared to defend every inch of Nato territory" should Russia invade Ukraine.
Here is what Nato could do next:
What does Nato have to do with the Ukraine conflict?
Ukraine has repeatedly said that it intends to become a Nato member. Joining would up Ukraine's defensive strength as, under Article 5, an attack against one ally is an attack against all allies. This bounds the member states to protect each other.
Mr Putin is vehemently against Ukraine joining Nato and views the alliance's expansion as an existential threat to Russia. He claims that Moscow’s military movements are a response to Ukraine’s growing ties to the alliance.
Mr Putin argues that Moscow has been betrayed by the West as they broke commitments made at the end of the Cold War that Nato would not move eastward. Nato denies any such assurances were made.
Ex-Soviet states Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland joined in 1999, then Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia and Slovenia joined in 2004.
A promise from 2008 states that Ukraine will eventually have the chance to join which could bring the US-led alliance to Russia's border in the event of conflict.
Moscow demands assurances that Ukraine will never become a member of Nato and that the West's expansion eastward is curbed.
Would Ukraine ever join Nato?
Any European country that can "contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area" can join Nato, but the process can take decades: it took 20 years for Macedonia to join.
Before a country joins it must be unanimously approved by other Nato members. So, it is unlikely that Ukraine will join Nato anytime soon, if at all.
A lot of Nato states are reluctant for Ukraine to join because of Article 5 which obliges the alliance to protect any country in the event of an invasion. The threat of imminent conflict between Russia and Ukraine would force the West to engage in military action against Russia.
Could Ukraine back down to appease Russia?
Ukraine's ambassador to Britain said the country could drop its bid to join Nato to avoid conflict, in what would amount to a major concession.
"We might - especially being threatened like that, blackmailed by that, and pushed to it," Vadym Prystaiko said when asked if Kyiv could change its position on Nato membership.
Mr Prystaiko later walked back his comments. However, the Kremlin responded saying Ukraine abandoning its Nato ambitions would significantly help address Russian security concerns.
What are world leaders doing?
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has asserted that Ukraine’s right to join Nato cannot be traded away. He is engaged in ongoing diplomatic talks.
Mr Johnson has warned that Russia will face "very tough" new sanctions if it invades, but Moscow's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said the UK would face reciprocal action if that happened.
"Sanctions could be imposed against any legal entities and individuals just for being Russian," Mr Lavrov claimed about the UK plans at a press conference in Moscow.
Warning against a new round of "sanction wars", he said: "Both the Russian government and our parliament, they won't be idle when they see such things are happening in the West."
US intelligence officials worry that weeks of crisis talks have given Russia the time to prepare a major offensive, should Mr Putin make the ultimate decision to attack Ukraine.
In an hour long call with Mr Putin last week, Mr Biden said that invading Ukraine would cause "widespread human suffering" and that the West was committed to ending the crisis but "equally prepared for other scenarios”.
Following a meeting in Kyiv with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor said Kyiv could count on Germany for solidarity - but it is unclear whether Mr Zelensky will be convinced.
Ukrainian officials have publicly criticised Germany for refusing to sell weapons to Kyiv.
Meanwhile, Germany’s reluctance to pull the plug on the controversial Russian-German gas pipeline project is another point of tension.
French President Emmanuel Macron has been the only Western leader to repeatedly deny chances of a conflict.
After a meeting with Mr Putin, a presidency official said there were no indications from what the Russian leader said to Mr Macron that Moscow was preparing an offensive, though Paris remained "extremely vigilant".
What is the military response?
Western nations have been redistributing their troops across Nato territory, but have stopped short of deploying forces to Ukraine.
A German military aircraft carrying troop reinforcements, the first of several planned Nato deployments, landing in Lithuania on Monday, the first of several planned Nato deployments.
The A400M airplane carried around 70 soldiers of what is expected to grow to a 360-strong German deployment, which comes on top of existing Nato forces in the region.
The new deployments include reconnaissance and artillery troops and medics from units throughout Germany, as well as around 100 howitzer and other vehicles.
The US ordered an additional 3,000 troops into Poland last week. They join 300 troops from 18th Airborne Corps and 2,000 from the 82nd Airborne Division. A total of 1,000 troops have moved from Germany into Romania.
The two countries are Nato members and both share borders with Ukraine. They are bracing for an influx of refugees as well as potential border concerns.
What would Nato do if Russia invaded Ukraine?
If the invasion happens, Nato would not be obliged to come to Ukraine's defence because Kyiv is not a member of the security alliance.
The situation would be very different if Ukraine were a Nato member, as in that scenario an attack on Ukraine would be deemed an attack on the whole alliance under Article 5.
Ukraine's ambitions to join the pact partly explains why Nato members have been sending so-called lethal aid packages such as missiles and ammunition to bolster Ukraine's defences against Russia.
Nato members could decide to respond militarily to an invasion on their own individual terms, but for now this looks unlikely. Britain and the United States have already ruled out sending troops into Ukraine to battle Russian invaders.
Nato allies have signalled that instead of military action they would respond with severe sanctions designed to cause maximum pain to the Russian economy.
14. Putin is forcing the West to confront a 'new normal.' He may not like it.
Putin is forcing the West to confront a 'new normal.' He may not like it.
Allying a vast military buildup on Ukraine's borders with bold security demands, the Kremlin has seized a new relevance but perhaps also given one to the Western alliance.
As he delivered the stark assessment that Putin has already ‘made the decision’ to attack Ukraine, President Joe Biden similarly said Friday that the Russian leader “is focused on trying to convince the world that he has the ability to change the dynamics in Europe.”
Feb. 19, 202203:04
Allying a vast military buildup on Ukraine’s borders with bold security demands, the Kremlin has seized a new relevance but perhaps also given one to the Western alliance.
“Putin has an achievement under his belt by getting all this attention,” said James Nixey, director of the Russia-Eurasia program at Chatham House, a London think tank.
“On the other hand, he has put himself in a very difficult position whereby he’s made a list of demands, and if he doesn’t get those met — and he won’t — then that will look like failure.”
The United States and some of its allies say they have rock-solid intelligence that war is imminent. That has drawn criticism in Kyiv and mockery in Moscow, which denies the 150,000-plus Russian troops clustered around Ukraine will be used in an assault on the former Soviet republic.
Satellite images from the past week have shown that the Russian military buildup has increased, even as Moscow claimed a pullback.Maxar / via Reuters
There is much for Putin to gain and lose whichever path he takes in the coming days.
Even if he holds back his troops, the mere threat of war has seen French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, to name a few, all hurry to Moscow in a bid to help defuse the crisis.
The efforts at diplomacy have produced some suggestions of common ground on more limited demands, including arms control and increased transparency on military exercises.
All this gives outsize influence to Russia, which has a gross domestic product smaller than that of Canada, a military budget dwarfed by that of NATO, and an international status long since faded from the hegemonic struggle of the U.S. and the former Soviet Union.
For Putin the stakes may be that existential, driven by a desire to stop Ukraine and his former Soviet neighbors from becoming more closely aligned with the democratic West.
The U.S. and others would rather focus on China and its real clout, which is only getting stronger.
“He got some attention which he feared to lose, especially from the United States because of the focus of the U.S. administration on China,” said Fabrice Pothier, a consulting senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London think tank.
“But once you have that face time, what do you do with it?”
All of that attention has not been without consequences.
Putin has galvanized NATO, which until this standoff was struggling for meaning and purpose after the Cold War.
In response to the Ukraine buildup, the alliance has deployed 5,000 troops to Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. And it said Wednesday it was drawing up plans for deployments in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia, its biggest shift in posture since Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
“He is getting plenty of attention all right — but not the kind he wishes,” according to retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commander of U.S. Army in Europe.
NATO is looking more united than at any time since 1995, Germany is looking to decrease its reliance on Moscow for natural gas, and Sweden and Finland are openly discussing joining the alliance, Hodges said. “This is entirely a manufactured crisis of the Kremlin‘s own doing.”
While Russia has used cyberattacks, assassinations, unmarked proxy forces and mercenaries for its foreign endeavors, it now appears to be threatening a full-scale invasion of a democratic neighbor without provocation.
Such a move would mark “the end of the post-cold war and the beginning of something dramatically and tragically different, the end of our hopes and illusions,” said Gerard Araud, former French Ambassador to the U.S., on Twitter.
No matter what attention Putin does manage to win, he is unlikely to ever get NATO to agree to his central demands that Ukraine be barred from joining the alliance, and that the U.S. and others move to roll back their deployments in Eastern Europe.
In that sense, the Russian president risks looking weak if he stands down militarily without having achieved this, according to some analysts, who worry that this makes the risk of war palpable.
If Putin does attack Ukraine, there are huge risks, too. Namely the prospect of becoming mired in a costly, grinding conflict as an international pariah facing brutal financial punishments from the U.S. and its allies.
“But if you demand that NATO pulls back to its 1997 positions, which it simply cannot do, and you also don’t want to go to war, then that’s a difficult thing to spin your way out of,” Nixey at Chatham House said. “Not moving militarily on Kyiv puts Putin, ultimately, in a diplomatically and politically weaker position at home and abroad.”
The West may fear the Russian leader has made the same calculation.
Alexander Smith is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital based in London.
15. Former top Trump Russia adviser details the sharp contrast between the former President and Biden
Former top Trump Russia adviser details the sharp contrast between the former President and Biden
CNN · by Analysis by John Harwood, CNN
Hill has a special vantage point on this slow-rolling crisis that US officials say could bring war in Europe at any moment. As a White House national security aide, she advised then-President Donald Trump on Russia and Ukraine -- and became a star witness in impeachment proceedings that resulted from his conduct.
Now, outside the government as a Brookings Institution senior fellow, she's among the Russia specialists Biden has consulted as he revives foreign policy priorities shared by every president since World War II except Trump.
After Trump derided and weakened the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Biden has rallied NATO on Ukraine's behalf.
After Trump pressured Russia's beleaguered neighbor for his personal benefit, Biden has steeled Americans for shared sacrifice in defense of Ukraine's right of self-determination.
Read More
After Trump deferred to Russian President Vladimir Putin over the US government's own intelligence agencies, Biden has deployed those agencies' tradecraft in a multi-pronged transatlantic effort to deter Russian aggression.
"You couldn't get a sharper contrast," Hill observed in an interview.
For the moment, at least, she sees Biden's approach paying some dividends.
As described in her recent memoir, There Is Nothing For You Here, Hill followed an unusual path to becoming one of America's leading experts on Russia. Raised in a working-class family in Britain, she parlayed academic scholarships into advanced degrees from Harvard and an analyst's job at the National Intelligence Council beginning in 2006 during President George W. Bush's administration.
Witnessing Britain's industrial decline helped her understand the populist appeals Trump rode to the White House. But the celebrity real-estate developer's handling of foreign policy in the Oval Office -- driven not by expertise or the national interest but by his personal experiences, impulses and interests -- was like nothing Hill or her national security colleagues had ever seen.
"There's no Team America for Trump," Hill recalled. "Not once did I see him do anything to put America first. Not once. Not for a single second."
It showed in Trump's praise for the authoritarian leader of Russia, an American adversary that had boosted his finances as a business executive. It showed in his reluctance to embrace America's mutual defense commitments to European allies, which for decades have constrained Russian behavior; instead, Trump treated NATO as what Hill called a "protection racket."
Most notoriously, it showed in Trump's attempt to squeeze Ukraine's President for manufactured dirt on Biden to help his 2020 election campaign. He held up American military aid as a political lever as Ukraine faced the long-running Russian military threat that now has the entire world on edge.
"All this did was say to Russia that Ukraine was a playground," Hill said.
At home, Trump softened Republicans' once-hawkish approach to Russia. Today, the leading Fox News hosts and other conservative voices -- "the ultimate stooges," as Hill calls them -- buttress Russian arguments as armed conflict looms.
Yet even friendly foreign counterparts found limitations in Trump's scattershot style, which for Hill evokes the old saw about "playing chess with a pigeon." Russia's bid to upend the post-Cold War security order in Europe, beginning in 2008 with its invasion of Georgia and continuing with its 2014 seizure of Crimea -- requires a steadier negotiating partner.
"Ultimately Putin wants some kind of deal," Hill said. "They think Biden is the kind of president who could actually make a deal. Trump never could."
So far, Biden has held NATO allies together in rejecting Russia's core demands, bolstering their forces in Europe and threatening punishing sanctions even though they guarantee domestic economic blowback. Steeped in decades of bipartisan foreign policy consensus, the Democratic President has also drawn support from top Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who have shunned Trump's embrace of Putin.
That demonstration of resolve has at minimum made Putin stop and think. Biden has warned for weeks that Russia could launch a new invasion of Ukraine at any time. It hasn't yet.
"They might have thought we were going to crumble, and we didn't," said Hill, who became an American citizen twenty years ago. "It might have deterred a full-scale invasion. Now (Putin) is basically recalibrating, recalculating."
But durable success for Biden and European allies will depend on staying power. Even if Russian tanks don't roll across the border, Hill envisions an extended "boa constrictor" siege in which Putin applies escalating pressure in hopes of bending Ukraine to Russia's will.
"The real challenge is keeping everyone together for a considerable period," Hill concluded. "It's going to go on a long time."
CNN · by Analysis by John Harwood, CNN
16. Yuval Noah Harari argues that what’s at stake in Ukraine is the direction of human history
Fascinating commentary. We should reflect on this.
Conclusion:
But they chose differently. Despite history, despite grinding poverty and despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Ukrainians established a democracy. In Ukraine, unlike in Russia and Belarus, opposition candidates repeatedly replaced incumbents. When faced with the threat of autocracy in 2004 and 2013, Ukrainians twice rose in revolt to defend their freedom. Their democracy is a new thing. So is the “new peace”. Both are fragile, and may not last long. But both are possible, and may strike deep roots. Every old thing was once new. It all comes down to human choices.
Yuval Noah Harari argues that what’s at stake in Ukraine is the direction of human history
Humanity’s greatest political achievement has been the decline of war. That is now in jeopardy
AT THE HEART of the Ukraine crisis lies a fundamental question about the nature of history and the nature of humanity: is change possible? Can humans change the way they behave, or does history repeat itself endlessly, with humans forever condemned to re-enact past tragedies without changing anything except the décor?
One school of thought firmly denies the possibility of change. It argues that the world is a jungle, that the strong prey upon the weak and that the only thing preventing one country from wolfing down another is military force. This is how it always was, and this is how it always will be. Those who don’t believe in the law of the jungle are not just deluding themselves, but are putting their very existence at risk. They will not survive long.
Another school of thought argues that the so-called law of the jungle isn’t a natural law at all. Humans made it, and humans can change it. Contrary to popular misconceptions, the first clear evidence for organised warfare appears in the archaeological record only 13,000 years ago. Even after that date there have been many periods devoid of archaeological evidence for war. Unlike gravity, war isn’t a fundamental force of nature. Its intensity and existence depend on underlying technological, economic and cultural factors. As these factors change, so does war.
Evidence of such change is all around us. Over the past few generations, nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into a mad act of collective suicide, forcing the most powerful nations on Earth to find less violent ways to resolve conflict. Whereas great-power wars, such as the second Punic war or the second world war, have been a salient feature for much of history, in the past seven decades there has been no direct war between superpowers.
During the same period, the global economy has been transformed from one based on materials to one based on knowledge. Where once the main sources of wealth were material assets such as gold mines, wheat fields and oil wells, today the main source of wealth is knowledge. And whereas you can seize oil fields by force, you cannot acquire knowledge that way. The profitability of conquest has declined as a result.
Finally, a tectonic shift has taken place in global culture. Many elites in history—Hun chieftains, Viking jarls and Roman patricians, for example—viewed war positively. Rulers from Sargon the Great to Benito Mussolini sought to immortalise themselves by conquest (and artists such as Homer and Shakespeare happily obliged such fancies). Other elites, such as the Christian church, viewed war as evil but inevitable.
In the past few generations, however, for the first time in history the world became dominated by elites who see war as both evil and avoidable. Even the likes of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, not to mention the Merkels and Arderns of the world, are very different types of politicians than Attila the Hun or Alaric the Goth. They usually come to power with dreams of domestic reforms rather than foreign conquests. While in the realm of art and thought, most of the leading lights —from Pablo Picasso to Stanley Kubrick—are better known for depicting the senseless horrors of combat than for glorifying its architects.
As a result of all these changes, most governments stopped seeing wars of aggression as an acceptable tool to advance their interests, and most nations stopped fantasising about conquering and annexing their neighbours. It is simply not true that military force alone prevents Brazil from conquering Uruguay or prevents Spain from invading Morocco.
The parameters of peace
The decline of war is evident in numerous statistics. Since 1945, it has become relatively rare for international borders to be redrawn by foreign invasion, and not a single internationally recognised country has been completely wiped off the map by external conquest. There has been no shortage of other types of conflicts, such as civil wars and insurgencies. But even when taking all types of conflict into account, in the first two decades of the 21st century human violence has killed fewer people than suicide, car accidents or obesity-related diseases. Gunpowder has become less lethal than sugar.
Scholars argue back and forth about the exact statistics, but it is important to look beyond the maths. The decline of war has been a psychological as well as statistical phenomenon. Its most important feature has been a major change in the very meaning of the term “peace”. For most of history peace meant only “the temporary absence of war”. When people in 1913 said that there was peace between France and Germany, they meant that the French and German armies were not clashing directly, but everybody knew that a war between them might nevertheless erupt at any moment.
In recent decades “peace” has come to mean “the implausibility of war”. For many countries, being invaded and conquered by the neighbours has become almost inconceivable. I live in the Middle East, so I know perfectly well that there are exceptions to these trends. But recognising the trends is at least as important as being able to point out the exceptions.
The “new peace” hasn’t been a statistical fluke or hippie fantasy. It has been reflected most clearly in coldly-calculated budgets. In recent decades governments around the world have felt safe enough to spend an average of only about 6.5% of their budgets on their armed forces, while spending far more on education, health care and welfare.
We tend to take it for granted, but it is an astonishing novelty in human history. For thousands of years, military expenditure was by far the biggest item on the budget of every prince, khan, sultan and emperor. They hardly spent a penny on education or medical help for the masses.
The decline of war didn’t result from a divine miracle or from a change in the laws of nature. It resulted from humans making better choices. It is arguably the greatest political and moral achievement of modern civilisation. Unfortunately, the fact that it stems from human choice also means that it is reversible.
Technology, economics and culture continue to change. The rise of cyber weapons, AI-driven economies and newly militaristic cultures could result in a new era of war, worse than anything we have seen before. To enjoy peace, we need almost everyone to make good choices. By contrast, a poor choice by just one side can lead to war.
This is why the Russian threat to invade Ukraine should concern every person on Earth. If it again becomes normative for powerful countries to wolf down their weaker neighbours, it would affect the way people all over the world feel and behave. The first and most obvious result of a return to the law of the jungle would be a sharp increase in military spending at the expense of everything else. The money that should go to teachers, nurses and social workers would instead go to tanks, missiles and cyber weapons.
A return to the jungle would also undermine global co-operation on problems such as preventing catastrophic climate change or regulating disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. It isn’t easy to work alongside countries that are preparing to eliminate you. And as both climate change and an AI arms race accelerate, the threat of armed conflict will only increase further, closing a vicious circle that may well doom our species.
History’s direction
If you believe that historic change is impossible, and that humanity never left the jungle and never will, the only choice left is whether to play the part of predator or prey. Given such a choice, most leaders would prefer to go down in history as alpha predators, and add their names to the grim list of conquerors that unfortunate pupils are condemned to memorize for their history exams.
But maybe change is possible? Maybe the law of the jungle is a choice rather than an inevitability? If so, any leader who chooses to conquer a neighbour will get a special place in humanity’s memory, far worse than your run-of-the-mill Tamerlane. He will go down in history as the man who ruined our greatest achievement. Just when we thought we were out of the jungle, he pulled us back in.
I don’t know what will happen in Ukraine. But as a historian I do believe in the possibility of change. I don’t think this is naivety—it’s realism. The only constant of human history is change. And that’s something that perhaps we can learn from the Ukrainians. For many generations, Ukrainians knew little but tyranny and violence. They endured two centuries of tsarist autocracy (which finally collapsed amidst the cataclysm of the first world war). A brief attempt at independence was quickly crushed by the Red Army that re-established Russian rule. Ukrainians then lived through the terrible man-made famine of the Holodomor, Stalinist terror, Nazi occupation and decades of soul-crushing Communist dictatorship. When the Soviet Union collapsed, history seemed to guarantee that Ukrainians would again go down the path of brutal tyranny – what else did they know?
But they chose differently. Despite history, despite grinding poverty and despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Ukrainians established a democracy. In Ukraine, unlike in Russia and Belarus, opposition candidates repeatedly replaced incumbents. When faced with the threat of autocracy in 2004 and 2013, Ukrainians twice rose in revolt to defend their freedom. Their democracy is a new thing. So is the “new peace”. Both are fragile, and may not last long. But both are possible, and may strike deep roots. Every old thing was once new. It all comes down to human choices.■
Copyright © Yuval Noah Harari 2022.
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Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher and author of “Sapiens” (2014), “Homo Deus” (2016) and the series “Sapiens: A Graphic History” (2020-21). He is a lecturer in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s history department and co-founder of Sapienship, a social-impact company.
17. Mainers among them, ‘Ghost Army’ tricked Nazis to give Allies an edge
Mainers among them, ‘Ghost Army’ tricked Nazis to give Allies an edge
The Congressional Gold Medal will be awarded posthumously to Donald C. Mead, father of a Maine judge, and others who served in a little-known mission to deceive the German army.
Andrew M. Mead often wondered about his father’s role in World War II, but it wasn’t until Mead was in his mid-20s that his father, Donald C. Mead, finally began sharing details of his secret mission.
Mead for many years believed his father served as a tank commander. But Donald Mead, who died in 1981 at the age of 58, actually served as a member of the Ghost Army, a group of soldiers assigned to a top secret Army unit that used deceptive warfare tactics to give American troops a battlefield advantage.
Andrew M. Mead
Soldiers in the Ghost Army were instructed to use their brains to mislead and deceive the German army, including by pretending to be a much larger and better-equipped fighting force. After the war ended, the unit’s soldiers were sworn to secrecy, records were classified, and their equipment was placed in storage.
Accounts of the Ghost Army’s undercover role started to circulate more openly in the 1970s and the United States officially declassified their mission in 1996, although it remained a little-known piece of World War II history.
Now, members of the Ghost Army are being honored with Congressional Gold Medals recognizing the risks they took and the lives they saved. Only a small number of the soldiers are still alive, but medals also will be given to the families of those who have since died, including Donald Mead.
Andrew Mead, who lives in Bangor and who serves as an associate justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, provided the Press Herald with a copy of a letter written by his father and published by the Armed Forces Journal in 1981. The headline to his letter read, “The Sonic Deception Facet of Electronic Warfare.”
In the letter, Donald Mead describes his unit’s role in weakening Nazi defenses in northern Italy by persuading the German commander, through deceptive sounds, to move German troops away from the main thrust of the Allied forces’ attack. That allowed the Allies to break through German lines, cross the Po River, and successfully win the Italian campaign.
“Nowhere in any official history or archive has this contribution to Allied victory been recounted,” Donald Mead wrote. “Believing that this part of World War II history should not be forgotten, I would be glad to make available to any serious researcher any information I have.”
In a separate letter to the National Archives and Records Section, dated February 1976, Mead requested a copy of his unit’s combat journal. He describes in even greater detail his unit’s mission of sonic deception, which involved the use of high-powered amplifiers and loud speakers mounted on tank-destroyer vehicles. During the night, the sound devices broadcast recordings of armored vehicles moving, “to delude the enemy into believing” a large United States armored truck force attack was being mounted.
“When … my father told us that his WWII service involved inflatable rubber tanks, I must admit that as a young man I was unimpressed and possibly amused,” Andrew Mead wrote in an email. “But many years later as I began to put the pieces together, I came to understand how extraordinary it truly was. But, by then he had passed away and it was too late to have the conversations I wish we had had earlier. The Ghost Army Gold Congressional Medal project has provided a welcome opportunity – albeit well after the fact – to pay tribute to him and the other courageous and creative men whose exploits might have otherwise disappeared into the void over the years.”
Ghost Army soldiers used air compressors to inflate rubberized tanks, and trucks equipped with ear-piercing sonic units designed to emulate troop movements to mislead the Nazis about the true size and location of American troops. They also dispatched false radio communications to befuddle German intelligence. The Army’s entire objective was to fool the Germans into thinking that American troop size was much larger than it actually was, a diversionary tactic that gave American troops the time they needed to maneuver their actual forces into position.
The National World War II museum in New Orleans may have described the Ghost Army best when it staged a special exhibit from March 2020 through January 2021 called: “Ghost Army: The Combat Con Artists of World War II.”
There were two branches of the Ghost Army – the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, which served primarily in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany. It was the largest unit with 1,100 soldiers. Mead was a sergeant in the 3133rd Signal Corps Special Command, which served in Italy. More than 200 soldiers served in Mead’s unit.
A total of eight Ghost Army soldiers were born in Maine, according to the Ghost Army Legacy Project, a nonprofit organization based in Chicago that is dedicated to ensuring that the efforts of those soldiers receive recognition. None of the nine surviving members are in Maine.
The Ghost Army used specially equipped tanks, later replaced with half-track vehicles, equipped with powerful speakers to broadcast recordings of large troop movements to fool the German army. Photo courtesy of Andrew Mead
Andrew Mead said he wanted to honor his father’s memory by making the Ghost Army’s efforts more public. He contacted Maine Sen. Susan Collins, whom Mead described as being “very supportive.” Collins agreed to co-sponsor legislation that will result in surviving members of the Ghost Army and their families receiving the Congressional Gold Medal – the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster, D-N.H., joined Collins to sponsor the bicameral legislation. President Biden signed the bill into law Feb. 1. The nine surviving Ghost Army members who live across the United States and the relatives of other members who have died will receive the Congressional Gold Medal.
“Our nation will always be grateful to the members of the Ghost Army, the top-secret Army units who served with distinction during World War II. I am pleased that our bipartisan legislation has been signed into law, which will recognize these soldiers by bestowing Congress’ highest civilian honor,” Collins said in a statement. “Their courage and resourcefulness were pivotal in the European theater and likely saved many American lives.”
Ghost Army units “were instrumental to Allied successes at the Battle of the Bulge and the final battles in Italy’s Po Valley,” the legislators pointed out. Collins’ own father, Don Collins, was a World War II veteran who was wounded twice in the Battle of the Bulge. He earned two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star for his service. Collins, Markey and Kuster estimate that 15,000 to 30,000 American soldiers’ lives were saved as a result of the Ghost Army’s efforts.
Donald Mead grew up in Marblehead, Massachusetts. As a youth he operated a private radio station and was an accomplished telegrapher. He enrolled in 1941 at the University of Maine in Orono, where he studied electrical engineering.
Andrew Mead said his father’s military career began in 1943 during his sophomore year at the University of Maine. Donald Mead joined a “large group” of friends who traveled to Bangor to enlist in the United States Army.
Mead said his father received his basic training at Fort Dix in New Jersey before he was invited to an interview at a nondescript office building in New York City. He was dismissed after the interview and didn’t fully understand what the interviewer’s intentions were until he was ordered to report to a secret training facility at Pine Camp in upstate New York. Pine Camp was renamed Fort Drum in 1974. Mead said his father deployed to Italy in 1943 as a member of the 3133rd Signal Corps Special Command.
Rick Beyer serves as president of the Ghost Army Legacy Project. Beyer is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, best-selling author and history enthusiast. He produced and directed the PBS documentary “The Ghost Army” and is the co-author of the “The Ghost Army of World War II.”
Beyer said the 3133rd’s assignment was to create sound deceptions created by installing sonic units on tanks, including speakers that could be heard miles away. A platoon of British engineers equipped with inflatable tanks was also attached to the unit, giving the 3133rd the means to carry out limited visual deception as well.
Beyer said the 3133rd was in action for 19 days. They carried out two successful missions in Italy. The soldiers of the 3133rd created their own unofficial uniform arm patch that showed the devil thumbing his nose.
Another unit of the Ghost Army, the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, saw significantly more action in Europe. The 23rd used inflatable tanks, fake sound effects, radio trickery and illusions to fool the Germans into thinking they were facing much larger enemy units than they actually were in the field of combat. The 23rd operated in northern Europe, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Germany, and carried out 20 missions, according to Beyer.
Donald Mead, the young commander, at second from right. Photo courtesy of Andrew Mead
Beyer said one Gold Medal will be produced by the U.S. Mint and presented to the Smithsonian Museum. It will contain 300 grams of gold, worth an estimated $20,000. It will take two years to create the design and mint the medal. Bronze duplicates will be presented to the surviving veterans and their families.
An official presentation ceremony will be hosted by members of Congress in two years. Beyer said the Congressional Gold Medal dates back to the American Revolution and is the highest distinction Congress can bestow.
The nine surviving Ghost Army soldiers are all in the late 90s, according to Beyer. They live in Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, North Carolina, Florida and New York.
After the war ended, Donald Mead returned to the University of Maine, where he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. After graduation he was hired by Western Electric, where he became involved in a number of Department of Defense projects, his son said.
He died in August 1981, the same year his letter was published publicly offering to share his story in the hope “that this part of World War II history should not be forgotten.” Four decades later, he has helped to make sure it never will be.
18. Who Is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints
I am waiting for Q (or these two posing as Q) to come forward and admit they started this as a joke and just to see if they could dupe a few people and had no idea that it would evolve to this cult movement. They would admit that the "conspiracy" theories they have created are all fake and have no basis in fact. They are sitting back both laughing and in amazement of the havoc they have created.
Who Is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints
Using machine learning, separate teams of computer scientists identified the same two men as likely authors of messages that fueled the viral movement.
Credit...Illustration by Adam Ferriss
By
Feb. 19, 2022
“Open your eyes,” the online post began, claiming, “Many in our govt worship Satan.”
That warning, published on a freewheeling online message board in October 2017, was the beginning of the movement now known as QAnon. Paul Furber was its first apostle.
The outlandish claim made perfect sense to Mr. Furber, a South African software developer and tech journalist long fascinated with American politics and conspiracy theories, he said in an interview. He still clung to “Pizzagate,” the debunked online lie that liberal Satanists were trafficking children from a Washington restaurant. He was also among the few who understood an obscure reference in the message to “Operation Mockingbird,” an alleged C.I.A. scheme to manipulate the news media.
As the stream of messages, most signed only “Q,” grew into a sprawling conspiracy theory, the mystery surrounding their authorship became a central fascination for its followers — who was the anonymous Q?
Now two teams of forensic linguists say their analysis of the Q texts shows that Mr. Furber, one of the first online commentators to call attention to the earliest messages, actually played the lead role in writing them.
Sleuths hunting for the writer behind Q have increasingly overlooked Mr. Furber and focused their speculation on another QAnon booster: Ron Watkins, who operated a website where the Q messages began appearing in 2018 and is now running for Congress in Arizona. And the scientists say they found evidence to back up those suspicions as well. Mr. Watkins appears to have taken over from Mr. Furber at the beginning of 2018. Both deny writing as Q.
The studies provide the first empirical evidence of who invented the toxic QAnon myth, and the scientists who conducted the studies said they hoped that unmasking the creators might weaken its hold over QAnon followers. Some polls indicate that millions of people still believe that Q is a top military insider whose messages have revealed that former President Trump will save the world from a cabal of “deep state” Democratic pedophiles. QAnon has been linked to scores of violent incidents, many of the attackers who stormed the Capitol last year were adherents, and the F.B.I. has labeled the movement a potential terrorist threat.
The forensic analyses have not been previously reported. Two prominent experts in such linguistic detective work who reviewed the findings for The Times called the conclusions credible and persuasive.
In a telephone interview from his home near Johannesburg, Mr. Furber, 55, did not dispute that Q’s writing resembled his own. Instead, he claimed that Q’s posts had influenced him so deeply that they altered his prose.
Q’s messages “took over our lives, literally,” Mr. Furber said. “We all started talking like him.”
Linguistic experts said that was implausible, and the scientists who conducted the studies noted that their analyses included tweets by Mr. Furber from the first days Q emerged.
Mr. Watkins, in a telephone interview, said, “I am not Q.”
But he also praised the posts. “There is probably more good stuff than bad,” he said, listing as examples “fighting for the safety of the country, and for the safety of the children of the country.” His campaign signs in the Republican primary refer to the online name he uses in QAnon circles, CodeMonkeyZ, and he acknowledged that much of the initial support for his campaign came from the movement. Relying mainly on small donors, Mr. Watkins, 34, trails the primary’s front-runners in fund-raising. (Two other Republicans who have expressed support for QAnon were elected in 2020 — Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado.)
67 Nov 03, 2017 5:33:30 PM EDT
Anonymous ID: GVUvg1M7 No. 147816901
Where is John PODESTA?
Where is Tony PODESTA?
Did one or both escape the country and was let out?
WHERE IS BO?
WHERE WAS BO YESTERDAY?
What is the difference between commercial and private re: security clearance for departure?
4chan pol
Paul Furber @paul_furber · Mar 15, 2019
Questions the media should be asking:
- What is Tarrant's real background?
- Why did he travel to both NK and Pakistan recently?
- How did he get hold of so many restricted weapons?
- Why does his "manifesto" not ring true for a real 8chan denizen?
67 Nov 03, 2017 5:33:30 PM EDT
Anonymous ID: GVUvg1M7 No. 147816901
Where is John PODESTA?
Where is Tony PODESTA?
Did one or both escape the country and was let out?
WHERE IS BO?
WHERE WAS BO YESTERDAY?
What is the difference between commercial and private re: security clearance for departure?
4chan pol
Paul Furber @paul_furber · Mar 15, 2019
Questions the media should be asking:
- What is Tarrant's real background?
- Why did he travel to both NK and Pakistan recently?
- How did he get hold of so many restricted weapons?
- Why does his "manifesto" not ring true for a real 8chan denizen?
Mar 03, 2019, 6:17:55 PM EST
Q ID: 4c2e92 No. 5488382
Reading the comments on these Tweets further demonstrates the seriousness of media brainwashing in our Country whereby statements are considered fact w/o the need to provide proof.
Group-Think.
Control of the Narrative.
If enough people state the same thing w/o providing evidence and/or support does it become FACTUAL to those caught in the loop?
NATIONAL CRISIS.
Q
8chan qresearch
Ron Watkins @CodeMonkeyZ · Dec 27, 2020
We all know that @Mike_Pence has the complete authority to SAVE THE REPUBLIC on January 6.
If he takes decisive action as a LEADER on January 6, then VP Pence will surely be the 2024 Presidential front runner and will have HUGE SUPPORT to KAG in 2024!!
Computer scientists use machine learning to compare subtle patterns in texts that a casual reader could not detect. QAnon believers attribute this 2017 message to an anonymous military insider known as Q.
Paul Furber wrote this tweet after a mass shooting in New Zealand. Scientists who studied the Q posts say Mr. Furber played a leading role in writing the earliest, formative messages.
The scientists say that in 2018 a collaborator took control of the writing as Q: Ron Watkins. This message from Q appeared in 2019, and Mr. Watkins wrote this tweet shortly after the 2020 election.
The two analyses — one by Claude-Alain Roten and Lionel Pousaz of OrphAnalytics, a Swiss start-up; the other by the French computational linguists Florian Cafiero and Jean-Baptiste Camps — built on long-established forms of forensic linguistics that can detect telltale variations, revealing the same hand in two texts. In writing the Federalist Papers, for example, James Madison favored “whilst” over “while,” and Alexander Hamilton tended to write “upon” instead of “on.”
Instead of relying on expert opinion, the computer scientists used a mathematical approach known as stylometry. Practitioners say they have replaced the art of the older studies with a new form of science, yielding results that are measurable, consistent and replicable.
Sophisticated software broke down the Q texts into patterns of three-character sequences and tracked the recurrence of each possible combination.
Their technique does not highlight memorable, idiosyncratic word choices the way that earlier forensic linguists often did. But the advocates of stylometry note that they can quantify their software’s error rate.
The Swiss team said its accuracy rate was about 93 percent. The French team said its software correctly identified Mr. Watkins’s writing in 99 percent of tests and Mr. Furber’s in 98 percent.
Machine learning revealed that J.K. Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter, had written the 2013 mystery “Cuckoo’s Calling” under another pen name. The F.B.I. used a form of stylometry to show that Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber. In recent years, such techniques have helped detectives in the United States and Britain solve murder cases involving a forged suicide note and faked text messages.
The teams studying Q got in touch with each other after the Swiss scientists released an earlier, preliminary study showing that the writing had changed over time. Each team applied different techniques. The Swiss scientists used software to measure similarities in the three-character patterns across multiple texts while comparing the complexity of vocabulary and syntax. The French team used a form of artificial intelligence that learns the patterns of an author’s writing in roughly the same way that facial-recognition software learns human features.
The teams shared text samples, including more than 100,000 words by Q and at least 12,000 words by each of the 13 other writers they analyzed.
Gerald McMenamin of the University of Nevada, Reno, a renowned forensic linguist critical of the machine-learning techniques, said he doubted that software could pick out the telltale individual variations from the quirks of the distinctive voice assumed in the Q messages — full of short sentences, cryptic statements, military jargon and Socratic questions.
Q’s messages “took over our lives, literally,” Paul Furber said. “We all started talking like him.”
To counter the danger that texts spanning different forms or genres might confuse the software, the scientists said, they compared other writing samples that were all of the same type: social media posts, primarily tweets. And the writings by Mr. Furber and Mr. Watkins stood out over all the others in similarity to Q’s.
David Hoover, an English professor at New York University and an expert in author identification, said the scientists seemed to effectively address the potential problem of Q’s distinctive voice. He found the work “quite persuasive,” he said.
“I’d buy it,” said Patrick Juola of Duquesne University, a mathematician who identified Ms. Rowling as the author of “Cuckoo’s Calling.”
“What’s really powerful is the fact that both of the two independent analyses showed the same overall pattern,” Dr. Juola added.
Neither team ruled out the possibility that other writers had contributed to Q’s thousands of messages, especially during what appears to have been a period of collaboration between Mr. Furber and Mr. Watkins around late 2017.
But the scientists relied on other facts to narrow the list of feasible writers to test. That evidence, the scientists said, increased their confidence that they had unmasked the main authors.
Some QAnon followers had begun to suspect as early as mid-2018 that one or more of the commentators who first claimed to stumble onto the Q messages had actually written them. Without prior knowledge, how could anyone have plucked those almost nonsensical postings out of the online torrent? An NBC news report that summer identified Q’s earliest boosters as Mr. Furber (known online as Baruch the Scribe) and three others. The report emphasized that the three others had possible financial motives for stoking the craze because they had solicited donations for Q “research.” (Mr. Furber did not.)
The Swiss team studied writings by those four, as well as by Mr. Watkins and his father, who owns the message board.
In addition to examining those six potential authors, the French scientists added seven more to the mix. They tested tweets by another online Q booster close to the Watkinses as well as by Mr. Trump, his wife, Melania, his son Eric, and three others close to the former president who had publicly encouraged QAnon: Michael T. Flynn, his onetime national security adviser; the political consultant Roger Stone; and Dan Scavino, a Trump White House deputy chief of staff.
Ron Watkins said in a telephone interview, “I am not Q.”Credit...
“At first most of the text is by Furber,” said Mr. Cafiero, who works at the French National Center for Scientific Research. “But the signature of Ron Watkins increased during the first few months as Paul Furber decreased and then dropped completely.”
Mr. Furber said in an interview that he had inherited his passion for American politics from his parents, who had taught in Canada and traveled around the United States. He visited often while building a career in software development and writing for trade publications.
His fascination with conspiracy theories, he said, began with questions about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Then, around 1996, he found a site spinning alternative stories about the suicide of Vincent Foster, the Clinton White House counsel, and other deaths falsely said to be linked to the Clintons. “That sort of kicked off my interest,” he said.
The early Q messages, which the scientists say resemble Mr. Furber’s writing, lay out the core QAnon myths and slogans that later messages repeat. That was also when Mr. Furber and a few other early promoters helped attract the interest of entrepreneurial YouTube creators who amplified the messages.
But at the start of 2018, both studies found, the writing changed conspicuously. Where the 2017 posts were filled with Socratic questions, the later posts were more declarative and expository, with heavy use of exclamation points and words written in all capital letters. Sometimes, Q shared internet memes.
The Q messages had recently jumped from an older message board to the one run by Ron Watkins and owned by his father, Jim — the site known then as 8chan and now as 8kun. Jim Watkins, a former U.S. Army helicopter repairman who had settled in the Philippines, also owned pig and honey farms and dabbled in the online pornography business. Around the 2016 election, he had created a conspiracy-minded pro-Trump website, with his son overseeing the technical side.
The evident change in writing style at the start of 2018 coincided with an unusual exchange between the Q account and Ron Watkins. After a period of confusion, whoever was writing as Q publicly asked Mr. Watkins to confirm that the messages were still coming from the original Q. Mr. Watkins immediately did, and then Q declared all future posts would appear exclusively on Mr. Watkins’s platform.
Mr. Furber began complaining that Q had been “hijacked” and that Mr. Watkins was complicit.
From then on, the scientists said, the messages very closely matched the writing of Ron Watkins alone. “When QAnon started to be successful, one of them took control,” said Mr. Roten of OrphAnalytics.
In a podcast interview in 2020, Fredrick Brennan, who started the message board that the Watkinses now own, asserted without proof that Q was the invention of Mr. Furber. An HBO documentary released last year, “Q: Into the Storm,” built a case that Ron Watkins was behind the messages, and in it Mr. Watkins briefly seemed to admit that he had written as Q. He then smiled, laughed and resumed his denials.
A QAnon rally in 2019. Adherents of the movement may number in the millions, some polls indicate.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times
Q has now gone silent, without posting a message since December 2020.
Mr. Furber, in an interview, said he believed that QAnon was “an operation that has run its course.” He said he was still convinced that it was orchestrated by a true insider “to awaken people to this massive secret war against the cabal,” and that “the next phase is coming.”
In an online memoir he posted about the QAnon movement, he writes wistfully about the early days before “the hijacking.” Q’s messages, he says, seemed to validate conspiracy theories he had subscribed to for years — tying the Clintons and George Soros to the Rothschilds and the Illuminati.
“Like a child being taken around his father’s workshop for the first time,” Mr. Furber writes, “we were being given a behind-the-scenes look into the ugly and corrupt world of geopolitics.”
Produced by Gabriel Gianordoli.
19. Don't slip into the 'lazy analogy' of referring Quad as Asian NATO, says Jaishankar
Yes the Quad is not an "Asian NATO"it should not be described as one.
But the name "Quad" may also be based on "laziness." I believe the name arose simply out of the foreign affairs process for naming a meeting of four parties, a quadrilateral meeting - after bilateral and trilateral.
After all, we just completed another "Quad" meeting - an "Atlantic Quad" of the US, UK, France, and Germany. There was an article that used Quad in the title to refer to these four countries.
I actually think the Quad (the Asian one) needs to do a better job of marketing the grouping and perhaps they need to come up with a puthy new name.
Don't slip into the 'lazy analogy' of referring Quad as Asian NATO, says Jaishankar
The incarnation of the Quad started in 2017. It's not post-2020 development, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said.
Dismissing the notion that the Quad is an Asian NATO, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has said that there are "interested parties" who advance such analogies and one should not slip into it, underlining that the four-nation grouping is a kind of 21st century way of responding to a more diversified and dispersed world. Jaishankar was speaking during a panel discussion on 'A Sea Change? Regional Order and Security in the Indo-Pacific' at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) 2022 on Saturday evening.
"Quad is a grouping of four countries who have common interests, common values, a great deal of comfort, who happen to be located at four corners of the Indo-Pacific, who found out that in this world no country, not even the US, has the ability to address global challenges all on their own," Jaishankar said.
Jaishankar dismissed the notion that the four-member grouping is an Asian-NATO as "completely misleading term" and said "there are interested parties who advance that kind of analogies."
"I would urge you not to slip into that lazy analogy of an Asian-NATO. It isn't because there are three countries who are treaty allies. We are not a treaty ally. It doesn't have a treaty, a structure, a secretariat, it's a kind of 21st century way of responding to a more diversified, dispersed world," he said on the Quad grouping which has the United States, India, Australia and Japan as its members.
The incarnation of the Quad started in 2017. It's not post-2020 development, he said, referring to the tension along the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh with China.
"Our relations with the quad partners -- the US, Japan and Australia -- have steadily improved in the last 20 years. The quad has a value in itself. It is four countries who recognise today that the world would be a better place if they cooperated. And that's essentially what's happening," the minister said.
He said that the Quad has a range of views on its COVID-19 vaccine project, including on the TRIPS waiver, and observed if it was right to conduct "business as usual" when it comes to producing vaccines to contain the once-in-a-century pandemic with such horrific consequences.
"The Quad has agreed to do a vaccine project. I don't think the quad necessarily has an identical view on all subjects, including on the TRIPS waiver. I think we have a range of views on that. Perhaps ours are, in my view, the most progressive.
"The point which is troubling is... if you have a once-in-a-century pandemic with such horrific consequences and then say it has to be business as usual when it comes to producing vaccines, ask yourself- are we doing the right thing?" Jaishankar said.
In October 2020, India and South Africa had submitted the first proposal, suggesting a waiver for all WTO (World Trade Organisation) members on the implementation of certain provisions of the TRIPs Agreement in relation to the prevention, containment or treatment of COVID-19.
In May last year, a revised proposal was submitted by 62 co-sponsors, including India, South Africa, and Indonesia.
Jaishankar said that one of the deep worries for the international order is that large parts of the world will be under or non-vaccinated.
"This will be stretching out of a pandemic possibly which need not have happened. If we collectively had had more effective policies," he said.
He said that it is not just with the issue of vaccines but the same is happening when it comes to climate change.
"And this is not a one-off on vaccines. I would argue that is what is happening on climate change as well. We get these homilies on how this is an existential issue but when it comes down to actually putting resources or spreading technology for public good, we don't see that. There are real issues, I think the global south has serious concerns," Jaishankar said during the discussion.
Jaishankar said that India will come out of the COVID-19 pandemic more competitive.
"We expect a 9.2/9.3 growth rate this year which I think is more than decent. Secondly, our exports are at a record high. So it shows that despite not being a member of free trade arrangements, the reforms we have done, the belt tightening we have done, and the learnings of the COVID period have actually created a fairly resilient economy," he said.
It is working on assuring more reliable supply chains, it is looking at critical emerging technologies, making sure that 5G, 6G domains are trusted and transparent. It is looking at promoting education, maritime security, ensuring that connectivity projects are market-based and viable.
"There is a lot of a global element to what Quad is doing. Now, obviously, if there are challenges to global norms, global order, to international law, to rules-based order, it makes sense that anybody who is working for the good will also look at the challenges to the good," Jaishankar said.
Speaking about connectivity, Jaishankar said that each of the Quad partners today has a connectivity initiative as the EU and if connectivity initiatives are based on similar outlooks like the vaccine policy, it's natural that you would congregate, synergise and see how it works for each other.
"We would certainly encourage countries whose connectivity principles and policies are similar and I have spent some time discussing with the German development minister how we can work our development policy much closer. It is a conversation we have had with the Japanese, Americans, Australians within Quad but a lot of them are bilateral as well and I think this is going to be among the big issues in intl relations in the coming decades," he stressed.
Replying to a query that a recent poll published last week indicates that the levels of trust between India and South East Asian countries is fairly low. India ranks 5th after Japan and the US, UAE and China, Jaishankar said that India's relations with the ASEAN are growing well.
"I am a politician, so I believe in polls. But I have never seen any polls which made any sense to me when it comes to foreign policy... but I would like to say that our relations with ASEAN are right now actually growing well..." he said.
He said that India has much stronger physical connectivity and security cooperation with the ASEAN. The country has signed agreements for military supplies to the Philippines and has strong bilateral relations with Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam among others.
Talking about India's G20 chairmanship next year, Jaishankar said that it would be too early to say anything.
He said that being a very strongly contributing member to the G20, India's priority is to make sure that the Indonesian chair of the G20 this year is completely successful.
Other panelists in the discussion included Jean-Yves Le Drian, French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne, Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi, US Senator and Chairwoman of the Senate Subcommittee on Europe and Regional Security Cooperation Jeanne Shaheen and Lynn Kuok (Moderator), Shangri-La Dialogue Senior Fellow for Asia Pacific Security, International Institute for Strategic Studies.
20. Families of U.S. troops killed in Kabul airport bombing question whether Pentagon distorted investigation findings
Families of U.S. troops killed in Kabul airport bombing question whether Pentagon distorted investigation findings
As the sun faded on another anxious, adrenalized day, Kareem Nikoui, a 20-year-old U.S. Marine from Southern California, balanced on top of a concrete traffic barrier and scanned the crowd. Thousands of Afghans had packed into the fetid, open-air corridor outside Kabul’s airport, desperate to flee Taliban rule and undeterred by warnings of a suicide bomber in the area.
Nearly 8,000 miles away, Nikoui’s mother, Shana Chappell, had a sinking feeling. She was aware the hastily orchestrated evacuation was growing increasingly perilous and worried about how her son would process the reality that thousands would be left behind.
It was Aug. 26. At 5:36 p.m. local time, the bomber struck, detonating a vest packed with explosives and ball bearings. Nikoui, standing barely 30 feet away, was killed, along with 12 other U.S. service members and an estimated 170 Afghans.
The attack at Hamid Karzai International Airport’s Abbey Gate was not preventable, the Pentagon determined, though critics of commanders’ decision-making have said the entry point was especially vulnerable and questioned why it was left open. The Americans were due to close the gate for the final time within a matter of minutes.
“All those Marines who were there will tell you that they felt scared,” Chappell said. “They were surrounded by the freaking Taliban. They were out in the wide open, and they were sitting ducks.”
For Chappell and some of the other families of those killed that day, the release this month of a U.S. military investigation examining the attack has caused them to question whether Defense Department officials distorted its findings. In interviews, they castigated the Biden administration for placing their loved ones — most, like Nikoui, barely 20 years old — into such a dangerous situation and said that the Marines who survived the explosion told them they endured a firefight afterward — claims the Pentagon has dismissed.
The release of a 2,000-page investigative report — first obtained by The Washington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request — has revealed stark new detail about the operation, providing the fullest account yet of what happened during the 17-day sprint to exit Afghanistan after 20 years of war.
Among the documents are sworn witness statements from senior U.S. military commanders, who told investigators that they believe administration officials lacked a sense of urgency as the likelihood of a total Taliban takeover became increasingly evident and failed to heed their warnings to prepare for an evacuation weeks before Kabul fell. In response to those assertions, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby has said there was no effort in Washington to slow-roll the final withdrawal and that the White House coordinated closely with senior defense officials.
The airlift succeeded in getting 124,000 people to safety. It has been celebrated as a historic achievement by the U.S. military, even as the full scope of the danger and misery involved have become apparent.
Administration officials have defended their decision-making, saying it was unclear the Afghan government would collapse so completely and so abruptly. Once the capital fell on Aug. 15, more than 5,000 U.S. troops were rushed to the airport to bolster a skeleton force of roughly 600 who had remained in Kabul to protect American diplomats. Senior U.S. officials then reached an uneasy arrangement with the Taliban for militant fighters to provide external security at the airport. In exchange, the U.S. military agreed to be gone no later than Aug. 31.
Killed in the attack were 11 U.S. Marines: Nikoui, a lance corporal; Lance Cpl. David Espinoza, 20; Sgt. Nicole Gee; 23; Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover, 31; Cpl. Hunter Lopez, 22; Lance Cpl. Dylan Merola, 20; Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum, 20; Cpl. Daegan Page, 23; Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo, 25; Cpl. Humberto Sanchez, 22; and Lance Cpl. Jared Schmitz, 20. Hospitalman Maxton Soviak, 22, a Navy corpsman deployed with the Marines, and Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Knauss, 23, also died.
Pentagon officials estimate that 45 additional U.S. troops were wounded, with some suffering brain injuries that surfaced later. The attack, they said, was perpetrated by Islamic State-Khorasan, an affiliate of the terrorist group based in Syria and Iraq that also has been at war with the Taliban.
President Biden has praised the service members involved and called those killed heroes, while maintaining that after 20 years and 2,461 U.S. military deaths, it was time for U.S. forces to leave Afghanistan. A deal that former president Donald Trump made with the Taliban in February 2020 to withdraw all U.S. troops by May 2021 left few alternatives, Biden noted.
“They were part of the bravest, most capable, and the most selfless military on the face of the Earth,” Biden said of the personnel involved in the evacuation hours after the attack. “And they were part of, simply, what I call the backbone of America. They’re the spine of America, the best the country has to offer.”
On Feb. 4, U.S. military officials announced at the Pentagon that, after an extensive investigation, they had determined that a single suicide bomb with “disturbing lethality” caused the staggering loss of life.
But according to their full report, survivors of the attack described a more complex situation. In witness statements, Marines recalled coming under and returning gunfire, sprinting to the blast site to treat survivors with tourniquets and clotting agents, and struggling to find enough refrigerated storage for all of the remains.
One reconnaissance Marine with 15 years of military service said that, after the explosion, he heard “snaps and cracks of rounds all around him” and observed what appeared to be people suffering from gunshot wounds. Like all but a few witnesses, this individual’s name was redacted from the report.
Another Marine recalled shooting numerous times.
“I went in and saw a lot of Marines shooting by the Jersey barrier,” the Marine said. “There was a lot of smoke. I couldn’t see where they were firing. They grabbed me and I started firing my weapon as well. I don’t know what I was firing at.”
A Marine scout sniper who was in a nearby tower said he saw a child suffering from what he surmised were gunshot wounds, because of the size of the injuries. He recalled beginning to treat the child, only to discover a much larger fatal exit wound.
“I can say for sure that we could have been hit,” he told investigators. “Three shots hit the tower. One was in line with my head.”
Chappell, who lives about 100 miles from Camp Pendleton in Norco, Calif., said that her son’s Marine friends have visited her frequently and believe they were attacked with small-arms fire after the bombing.
“I talked to one kid personally, face-to-face at my son’s burial,” she said. “That’s how I found out about gunfire. He showed me his scar and told me had been shot.”
Mark Schmitz, whose son was killed in the blast, said in an email that he saw “MAJOR conflicting reports” in the investigation and asked the military to turn over metal fragments found in his son so he could have them privately analyzed. Military officials told them the fragments had been discarded, he said.
The parents of Hoover — Darin Hoover Sr. and Kelly Barnett — said in an interview that they have concerns about gunfire, but believe their son was killed in the blast and that investigators did their best to assess what had happened. But they remain deeply frustrated, they said.
“They were put in an untenable situation,” Hoover said of the military personnel sent to Kabul. “Yes, it was a humanitarian effort on their part. And they did the absolute best that they could do given the circumstances. However, they should not have been put in those circumstances in the first place.”
Other families have taken an apolitical tone.
“What we have learned of his last hours does not change that he is gone forever,” Soviak’s family posted Feb. 4 on a Facebook page established in his memory. “Our family is standing together and we choose to remember Maxton not as a victim, we choose to remember him for the hero he is. Remember his name.”
Marine Col. C.J. Douglas, who investigated the reports of gunfire, said during the Pentagon news conference that there is “no proof that any U.S. or Afghan person was injured or killed by gunfire.” The confusion, he said, likely stemmed from “the fog of war and disorientation due to blast effects.”
“Plainly put,” Douglas said, “the blast created instant chaos and sensory overload.”
Navy Capt. Bill Urban, a U.S. Central Command spokesman, said analysis by certified medical examiners and explosives experts determined that the “majority of casualties” attributed to the bomb came from ball bearings, primarily five millimeters in diameter each. The ball bearings caused entry and exit wounds “similar to rifle gunshots caused by 5.56 mm bullets,” and prompted doctors to classify some injuries as gunshot wounds that were not, he said.
“As a point of fact, no bullets were found in any of the 58 service members that were killed or wounded, nor in any of the dozens of Afghans treated by military medical facilities at HKIA,” Urban said, using the military’s shorthand for Kabul’s airport. “Also, we are unaware of any bullets being removed from any of the estimated nearly 240 killed and wounded examined and operated on at Afghan hospitals.”
At the Feb. 4 briefing, military officials said they interviewed no Afghans during the review. Investigators assessed that British troops fired 25 to 35 warning shots over the heads of the crowd, and that one Marine fired less than a magazine holding 30 rounds of ammunition, Urban said.
One Marine officer told investigators that, after the blast, he observed Taliban foot soldiers sitting in lawn chairs and laughing at the Americans. They did not appear to know the explosion was going to happen, he said.
The officer said the shooting was “short-lived” and that his Marines “may have believed they were being fired on and fired at the Taliban.”
Surviving U.S. troops said they were able to remove all of the American casualties from the blast site within minutes, packing them into a bus and other vehicles that had been left behind at the airport and rushing them to operating rooms and other forms of care. But the chaos continued for hours.
An Air Force medical officer based at the airport told investigators that his team received their first patient 12 minutes after the explosion. One service member had no pulse, and a surgeon cracked the person’s chest, initiated a cardiac massage and performed emergency surgery.
“That was a good save,” the medical officer recalled.
Wounded survivors flew out around dawn the next morning. U.S. troops searched the airport to find enough U.S. flags to cover each set of human remains before a ceremony that afternoon to see them off.
“Normally, you iron the flag, but in this situation it wasn’t possible,” said a mortuary affairs soldier. “We didn’t have a table but had an iron. I tried my best to make it look as nice as possible.”
Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement that “we grieve alongside these Gold Star families,” while backing the inquiry’s principal conclusions.
“We do not pretend to understand the depths of their grief, but we respect their concerns and their unique perspectives about the loss of their loved ones,” he said. “To that end, we stand by the investigation’s finding that the attack on Abbey Gate could not have been prevented and that the decision made by commanders on the ground to keep the gate open was consistent with their mission of trying to evacuate as many people as possible.”
Rick Herrera, Gee’s father, called the operation a “blunder” carried out without enough time to prepare. His daughter had followed her husband, Jarod Gee, into the Marine Corps. A straight-A student in high school, she had sent him pictures of her guiding Afghans onto planes, but never mentioned that she also took shifts searching women entering the airport at Abbey Gate.
Herrera, a self-described “die-hard Republican” from Roseville, Calif., said he has not talked with senior administration officials about the death of his daughter. During a visit to Washington to bury her at Arlington National Cemetery, he and several other family members visited Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R.-Calif.), who phoned Trump on a golf course so he could offer condolences.
Trump, Herrera said, offered to pay for their stay and meals at Trump International Hotel in Washington. A hotel manager followed up later to say he had talked to Trump and that the bill was covered, Herrera said. Another person familiar with the situation, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the former president’s private conversation, confirmed hearing the phone call. Trump’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Barnett, Hoover’s mother, said she hopes that Biden and the senior military commanders in charge of the operation will acknowledge it was poorly planned and carried out with “total disregard for the lives of our service members.”
She said that while her son considered the mission to be mismanaged, he wanted to help and told his commanding officer that he saw his sisters and nieces in the women and children they were evacuating.
Cheryl Merola, of Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., said that her son Dylan had joined the military just a few years earlier and was wrapping up a deployment in Jordan when his unit was reassigned to assist in the evacuation. The families of the U.S. troops killed speak frequently, she said, and many struggle to understand how relatively inexperienced Marines could be assigned such a dangerous, weighty task.
“It’s hard to call the operation a success,” she said, “when you got 13 kids killed.”
21. Is NATO A Dead Man Walking? – OpEd
I do not think so and I certainly hope not.
Conclusion:
Changing realities on both the domestic and international fronts could make a substantial change in European foreign policy a not-so-farfetched possibility. After all, the US’s descent into woke insanity, coupled with its unsustainable economic policies, will put it on the path to socioeconomic instability, making it a less attractive partner to align with. With so many problems at home, the US will have trouble dedicating resources toward its international mischief.
The potential unraveling of NATO could mark the beginning of the end of American geopolitical supremacy and usher in a new era of heightened competition across the globe, with countries holding distinct visions for trade, foreign policy, and broader statecraft, something long overdue. The US’s vast military footprint has done scant little to uphold middle American interests, but it has fattened the pockets of the defense industry and kept many self-proclaimed foreign policy “experts” employed at DC think tanks.
Moreover, NATO’s disintegration would incentivize countries to pursue more independent foreign policies and start taking defense matters into their own hands, like any self-respecting nation that believes in sovereignty should.
Is NATO A Dead Man Walking? – OpEd
By José Niño*
While geopolitical commentators are fixated on Russia’s border with Ukraine, a more interesting development is slowly boiling underneath the surface of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict that could potentially reorder international relations—namely, the death of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Founded in 1949, NATO began with only twelve member nations. Presently, NATO counts on thirty member nations, with national security elites in the Anglo-American sphere wanting to bring Georgia and Ukraine into the fold. In both countries’ cases, NATO membership is in limbo.
Despite calls for expanding NATO, the military alliances undergirding the organization could be in for an unexpected shake-up. Ever since French president Emmanuel Macron declared in 2019 that NATO was experiencing “brain death,” a new reality has gradually dawned upon the European continent.
Additionally, the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is currently exposing contradictions within Europe regarding security and economic priorities. Countries such as Italy have taken more balanced stances toward Russia, stressing the importance of dialogue while maintaining robust trade ties. Croatian president Zoran Milanović recently announced that Croatia will withdraw all its NATO forces from eastern Europe if a hot conflict between Ukraine and Russia breaks out. Germany itself has refused to send arms to Ukraine amid alleged threats of an imminent Russian invasion. Other NATO members like Hungary believe that Russia’s security concerns are reasonable and are aiming to boost natural gas commerce with the nation.
In France, populist presidential candidates like Eric Zemmour have explicitly called for a rapprochement between Russia and France. This includes lifting sanctions on Russia and moving away from American-dominated institutions such as NATO.
Zemmour is no fan of American hegemony. He has previously suggested that the American and British 1944 landing in Normandy opened the door for France to be turned into a client state. Zemmour’s skepticism toward American influence in France has continued well into his presidential campaign, during which he has called on France to stop “being a tool of the United States.”
Zemmour maintains that Washington tries to play European countries off against Russia, proclaiming, “The US is trying to divide Russia from France and Germany, and every time they get closer to each other, the Americans find a way to divide them.” In many respects, the United States is the geopolitical successor to the United Kingdom when it comes to the divide-and-rule tactics it pursues to ensure that a Berlin-Paris-Moscow rapprochement never occurs on the European continent.
Macron himself is not the most enthusiastic supporter of a US-led order but he couches his opposition in centrist terms. Instead, Macron wants to copy and paste the American-dominated rules-based international order but give it a Eurocrat flavor.
In fairness, Macron acknowledges the need for dialogue between Russia and France, a kind of dialogue that other Western powers are not keen on having. Most “liberal democracies” are thoroughly consumed by moral righteousness and believe that any countries who deviate from their political norms are not worthy of dialogue and must be internationally isolated.
French concerns about the US’s influence reflect a vestigial legacy of former president Charles de Gaulle’s foreign policy outlook. During the former French military officer’s time in office, de Gaulle made it a point to maintain French equidistance from the Cold War behemoths—the Soviet Union and the United States—so that France could chart its own path. De Gaulle’s decision to remove France from NATO’s integrated military command was among the boldest moves he made to distance the country from American influence.
One of the drawbacks of the universalist foreign policy dogma the Washington blob follows is its failure to realize that countries have their own unique national interests. Members of the blob always assume that countries will always move in lockstep with Washington’s agenda, completely ignoring the diverse priorities and grand strategies that different countries hold. These interests often conflict with Washington’s strategic vision.
In addition to the problems created by the Russia question, NATO faces internal problems among its member states. For example, Turkey and Greece—both members of NATO—got into a tiff over disputed energy claims in the eastern Mediterranean in 2020. France considered sending warships and imposing sanctions on Turkey if it continued escalating with Greece at the time. Cooler heads eventually prevailed.
Even with regard to China, which many in the DC blob are beginning to regard as America’s primary strategic challenge, NATO members are not on the same page. For example, in the summer of 2021, Hungary blocked the European Union’s statement criticizing China’s national security law in Hong Kong and has opened itself up to Chinese investment. Poland, a key ally in DC’s saber-rattling against Russia, did not participate in the diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics and had President Andrzej Duda meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Changing realities on both the domestic and international fronts could make a substantial change in European foreign policy a not-so-farfetched possibility. After all, the US’s descent into woke insanity, coupled with its unsustainable economic policies, will put it on the path to socioeconomic instability, making it a less attractive partner to align with. With so many problems at home, the US will have trouble dedicating resources toward its international mischief.
The potential unraveling of NATO could mark the beginning of the end of American geopolitical supremacy and usher in a new era of heightened competition across the globe, with countries holding distinct visions for trade, foreign policy, and broader statecraft, something long overdue. The US’s vast military footprint has done scant little to uphold middle American interests, but it has fattened the pockets of the defense industry and kept many self-proclaimed foreign policy “experts” employed at DC think tanks.
Moreover, NATO’s disintegration would incentivize countries to pursue more independent foreign policies and start taking defense matters into their own hands, like any self-respecting nation that believes in sovereignty should.
*About the author: José Niño is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. Sign up for his mailing list here. Contact him via Facebook or Twitter. Get his premium newsletter here. Subscribe to his Substack here.
22. The Key to Blunting Russia’s Strategic Victory in Ukraine and Beyond? Irregular Warfare
America may not be interested in irregular warfare but irregular warfare is interested in America (with no apologies to Trotsky).
Excerpts:
Irregular warfare can also raise opportunity costs for Russian global power projection, which is based in part on everything from trade to basing agreements, but increasingly also on Russian PMCs. However, the United States maintains a powerful advantage over Russia through its global partnerships, both as a legacy of the partnership network that has taken shape over two decades of countering violent extremism and the simple fact that US special operations forces out-compete any Russian PMC in both reputation and effect. This is where Ukraine’s international supporters, especially the United States, can augment Ukrainian information efforts. Messaging that comparison—and Russian setbacks in the event of a Ukraine invasion—to would-be customers can limit Russian opportunities, and over time undermine the value of PMCs as a tool of Russian power projection. That would be a serious cost to Putin, and much of it can start in Ukraine, the one place he likely assumes an easy victory.
Ultimately, if Ukraine implements an irregular warfare response to a Russian invasion, the costs of defending Ukraine would be substantially borne by Ukrainian resistance fighters. But just as Belgian resistance slowed the Schlieffen Plan for several critical days in 1914, enabling French forces to pivot and blunt the German advance, Ukraine’s citizen-soldiers can delay Russian victory, and raise Putin’s costs by prolonging any effort to bring Ukraine to its knees. That time may be all that is needed to galvanize a decisive international response. Even though David may lose the initial fight with Goliath, he has many more brothers and sisters armed with far more than a sling. Irregular warfare is the means by which they are brought into the fight.
The Key to Blunting Russia’s Strategic Victory in Ukraine and Beyond? Irregular Warfare - Modern War Institute
Vladimir Putin has all the cards in his favor. Even if Russian forces do not attack Ukraine in the coming days, he is poised to gain another strategic victory at comparatively low cost. If he gains nothing else, Putin has already successfully maneuvered the international community to attend to his demands. If negotiations succeed, he can hold Ukraine hostage under threat of the next exercise-turned-invasion, just as he did with last year’s rehearsal. Building on the recent incursion into Kazakhstan, Putin’s plans are primed to deliver a renewed Russian empire in its near abroad, even as it expands in Africa, Latin America, and the Arctic.
Increased US and European troop deployments closer to Ukraine help neutralize potential threats of regional escalation. However, the deterrent effect remains negligible inside Ukraine itself. Military posturing is an essential part of strategic competition, but one that has little direct impact on Putin’s most likely offensive plan. Even in the extreme, Russian order of battle does not favor activities beyond Ukraine’s borders. Why goad a reluctant NATO into the fight by attacking its edges?
However, beyond the initial clash of arms, forcibly maintaining a permanent pro-Russian government in Kyiv to prevent Ukraine’s entrance into NATO remains less certain than battlefield victories or seizure of the capital. This is especially true if, as looks likely to be the case, Ukraine adopts a strategy of irregular warfare.
The Utility of Irregular Warfare in Ukraine
For several years, United States and NATO partners have provided more than lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine. Even though types and amounts of assistance have varied, the heart of support has been training in irregular warfare. At its foundation, irregular warfare centers on the population as a critical source of strength and victory. As such, popular resistance against attack and resilience in the fight rely on identifying and mobilizing nascent capabilities within the population. Citizen-soldiers are trained to target crucial vulnerabilities in the enemy forces’ advance, sabotaging their ability to consolidate gains along the way. Irregular warfare makes victory more costly than the aggressor can endure, and those costs grow over time.
It does so by maximizing the advantages weaker forces can have over their stronger opponents—advantages of terrain, local knowledge, and social connections. As a result, irregular warfare utilizes trained soldiers fighting in and among the people, as well as civilians providing aid and intelligence on enemy movement and capabilities. Whether hiding in plain sight or attacking from the shadows, irregular warfare increases the number of combatants while making them harder to identify. This provides a powerful toolkit against Russian conquest of Ukraine.
US and allied special operations forces have gotten very good at training partners to use that toolkit. Built on Cold War operations against Soviet proxies, post-9/11 missions have included a range of security force assistance, counterterrorism, and information operations. Most of all, the past twenty years have refined the special operations joint task force, a model replicated across multiple operational environments worldwide. As a result, irregular warfare support has brought more than traditional resistance training. It has helped build a network approach to resistance that Ukrainian special operations forces have put into practice and in preparation for a Russian invasion.
Recent certification for service in the NATO Response Force confirms a high level of special operations interoperability with partner forces, a critical requirement in irregular warfare. Equally critical is the perception of legitimacy among the population and ability to mobilize support, and in Ukraine—a country that already holds the military in extraordinarily high regard—special operations forces are especially celebrated. Ukraine also has a legacy of popular resistance dating back over centuries. Adding to that legacy, the Euromaidan uprising was supported by more than signs and songs—it had teeth. Groups like “Common Cause” and “Self Defense” armed and organized the defense of critical buildings as symbols of freedom and sources of strength. So long as they stood, the fight went on, and the fight was eventually won by violent resistance.
In short, Russia has amassed troops on the border of a country in which two of the most important building blocks of a successful irregular warfare campaign are in place: special operations forces that have received vital training and have become substantially more capable, and a public that is once again demonstrating its willingness to fight to defend the country.
Irregular Warfare Will Raise the Costs of Invasion
The Russian armed forces bearing down on Ukraine bear little resemblance to their Soviet predecessors. Previous large-scale operations in Chechnya (1994–2000) and Georgia (2008) led to significant force modernizations to increase functional combat power. The 2008 New Look reforms moved the Russian Army away from Soviet-era masses led by layers of redundant command authorities, and added greater integrated cyber and logistics support. Additionally, Russia’s military involvement in Syria since 2015 has increased Spetsnaz counterinsurgency experience while also presenting an opportunity to refine joint C4ISR capabilities (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance). Coupled with extensive electronic warfare advances, Russian forces present a hybrid behemoth that poses serious threats to NATO, to say nothing of Ukraine.
However, the longer a fight in Ukraine continues, the greater the costs felt in the Kremlin, and not just from worsening international relations and increasing sanctions. In that regard, while the Zapad 2021 exercise may have been designed as a proof of concept, but the lessons produced by it may not prove sufficient to guide an invasion. In Russia’s large-scale exercises, the configuration of Russian forces have been vast, but also complicated—and would be even more so in an invasion scenario. Large troop movements across Russia show the ability to project power over great distances, but they also stress command and control. The scale of a Ukrainian invasion further complicates Russia’s personality-driven decision making and intra-elite power struggles. If things do not go smoothly or quickly, internal frictions will likely create more than headaches in the Kremlin; they may undermine a coordinated effort.
Even if Russian forces are able to capture Kyiv in just a few days, there would remain the difficult task of rapidly consolidating gains across eastern Ukraine. Simply traversing nearly eight hundred miles between the capital and the Donbas would likely consume previously stockpiled reserves—and that assumes they do not meet active resistance. Nor can Russia quickly replace vital supplies as drawing additional resources from Russia becomes problematic over time due to limitations of rail and road systems.
All the while, Russian forces would be forced to contend with Ukrainian irregular warfare capabilities that directly impose costs along Russia’s advance and supply lines. A mechanized advance from the Belarus border to Kyiv or northwest from the Donbas would rely on Ukraine’s three main highways east of the Dnieper river and one to the west. Normally, roads in mid-February are covered in layers of compacted ice and snow, which later melt to expose a minefield of potholes. This year, however, has seen unusual warming that threatens to turn highways into mush and fields to mud. Early spring is a bad time to invade Ukraine if the main roads have been destroyed, a task well within Ukraine’s irregular warfare toolkit.
Although Putin retains a firm grasp on power and the ability to whip the various components of Russia’s defense apparatus into a coordinated war effort, this does not mean that fissures do not exist. A Ukrainian irregular warfare campaign that seeks to exploit these could have an outsized impact. Despite the prevalence of Russian intelligence and security agents in Ukraine, Ukrainian information saboteurs can push out disinformation to thwart Russian occupation. They have already done so by penetrating and frustrating past Russian espionage. Post-invasion FSB and GRU elements will need Ukrainian helpers if they intend to do more than murder people. That vulnerability creates opportunity for Ukrainian partisan networks to manipulate, misdirect, and undermine Russian coordination.
Finally, the longer Russian troops attack and hold Ukrainian cities, the greater the chances the real message will get out. An information blackout across Ukraine means nearly as much to the watching world as do images of Russian atrocities. Although denial of service and broadcast interruptions have long been part of Russia’s repertoire in Ukraine, doing so for any length of time is exceedingly difficult in the contemporary information environment. This would be especially true if the Ukrainian diaspora community becomes involved from afar, amplifying the facts of Russia’s actions that do emerge through the tenuous clampdown on information dissemination Russia will seek to enforce. Flooding the international narrative space with demands for the truth will reveal the megaphone of lies behind the silence of Russian occupation.
Irregular Warfare Abroad Can Cost Even More
If Ukraine effectively marshals the irregular warfare capabilities at its disposal, Putin will see broad strategic costs accrue alongside operational ones. People fighting and dying to defend their homes undermines the Kremlin narrative of kicking out the fascists to restore Slavic unity. Persistent Ukrainian resistance also threatens the bottom line for many in the Kremlin’s inner circle. Russia is expending enormous capital just to maintain the threat of an invasion, and elites are looking for an easy payoff in Ukraine. They stand to gain even larger ones abroad through increased arms sales and security contracts. A long fight in Ukraine can not only drain their coffers, but also undercut their profit margins, destabilizing Putin’s position at home and abroad.
Irregular warfare bridges the physical, human, and information dimensions of conflict to bring about those effects. Linking battlefield failures in Ukraine to failures in places far beyond the Russian empire degrades Russia’s reputation as a military powerhouse. Pointing out “bad” Russian actions is one thing, but exposing Russian foolishness hurts far worse. Specifically, highlighting operational ineptitude and technical malfunctions in Ukraine can impact global arms sales and the Russian brand in the competitive market for private military companies (PMCs). Both costs would heighten intra-elite rivalries in Moscow as losses mount elsewhere. When those failures leave dead Russians in their wake, oft-repeated lies about training deaths in Ukraine, Syria, and the Central African Republic cannot easily convince the growing list of grieving Russian mothers.
Irregular warfare can also raise opportunity costs for Russian global power projection, which is based in part on everything from trade to basing agreements, but increasingly also on Russian PMCs. However, the United States maintains a powerful advantage over Russia through its global partnerships, both as a legacy of the partnership network that has taken shape over two decades of countering violent extremism and the simple fact that US special operations forces out-compete any Russian PMC in both reputation and effect. This is where Ukraine’s international supporters, especially the United States, can augment Ukrainian information efforts. Messaging that comparison—and Russian setbacks in the event of a Ukraine invasion—to would-be customers can limit Russian opportunities, and over time undermine the value of PMCs as a tool of Russian power projection. That would be a serious cost to Putin, and much of it can start in Ukraine, the one place he likely assumes an easy victory.
Ultimately, if Ukraine implements an irregular warfare response to a Russian invasion, the costs of defending Ukraine would be substantially borne by Ukrainian resistance fighters. But just as Belgian resistance slowed the Schlieffen Plan for several critical days in 1914, enabling French forces to pivot and blunt the German advance, Ukraine’s citizen-soldiers can delay Russian victory, and raise Putin’s costs by prolonging any effort to bring Ukraine to its knees. That time may be all that is needed to galvanize a decisive international response. Even though David may lose the initial fight with Goliath, he has many more brothers and sisters armed with far more than a sling. Irregular warfare is the means by which they are brought into the fight.
Dr. Spencer Meredith is a professor of national security strategy at the National Defense University. He serves as strategic advisor and Russian subject matter expert for multiple special operations commands, including ongoing Irregular Warfare planning efforts in Ukraine and abroad.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, National Defense University, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Sgt. Jeremiah Woods, US Army
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David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
