Quotes of the Day:
"The meme is the new PSYOP leaflet" (please let slip our PSYOP dogs of war)
"Failing to learn from history is like flunking an open-book test."
- Gary McMahan
“There is no purgatory for war criminals. They go straight to hell, ambassador.”
- The Ukrainian Ambassador to the UN in an exchange with this month’s Chair of the Security Council, the Russian Federation Ambassador
“Kenya and almost every African country was birthed by the ending of empire. Our borders were not of our own drawing,. Had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later. Instead, we agreed that we would settle for the borders that we inherited. But we would still pursue continental political, economic and legal integration. Rather than form nations that looked ever backwards into history with a dangerous nostalgia, we chose to look forward to a greatness none of our many nations and peoples had ever known.”
- Ambassador Martin Kimani, Kenyan Ambassador to the UN
"Putin will be a pariah on the international stage. Any nation that countenances Russia's naked aggression against Ukraine will be stained by association."
- President Biden
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
-Bonaparte
1. RUSSIA-UKRAINE WARNING UPDATE: INITIAL RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT
2. Ukraine’s Plan B: Scoop: U.S. eyes training Ukrainian troops remotely
3. UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 7
4. This is why Ukraine matters
5. Ukraine's capital under threat as Russia presses invasion
6. Ukraine Conflict Update - Feb 25, 2022
7. Six Ways for America to Humble Russia
8. America Could Have Done So Much More to Protect Ukraine
9. On Ukraine’s Snake Island, a defiant last stand against Russian forces
10. Attack on Ukraine brings rare sight in Russia: Protests in cities against Putin and invasion
11. Ukraine Invasion by Russia Is the Beginning of the End for Putin and His Friends
12. The Eurasian Nightmare:Chinese-Russian Convergence and the Future of American Order
13. The Coming Ukrainian Insurgency: Russia’s Invasion Could Unleash Forces the Kremlin Can’t Control
14. Taiwan Watches Ukraine With an Eye Toward Security at Home
15. Calamity Again - No nation is forced to repeat its past. But something familiar is taking place in Ukraine.
16. Biden’s China Policy Could Benefit From Reflecting on Nixon’s Historic Beijing Visit
17. FDD | Senators Want More Out of SEC’s Proposed Rules on Cybersecurity
18. The Militant Drone Threat Is No Longer New. Why Does It Still Feel Novel?
19. Cable News Covers Ukraine With On-the-Ground Reporting and In-Studio Rhetoric
20. Official website of Russian Parliament, MoD and Kremlin go offline
21. Remarks by President Biden on Russia’s Unprovoked and Unjustified Attack on Ukraine
22. Russia's 74th Motor Rifle Brigade surrenders to Ukraine
23. Hacking collective Anonymous declares 'cyber war' against Russia
24. How Biden defeated Putin’s Ukraine disinformation campaign
25. Ukraine conflict will have a significant impact on Asia
26. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in four graphics
27.
1. RUSSIA-UKRAINE WARNING UPDATE: INITIAL RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT
RUSSIA-UKRAINE WARNING UPDATE: INITIAL RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT
Mason Clark, George Barros, and Kateryna Stepanenko
February 24, 3:00 pm EST
Russian President Vladimir Putin began a large-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24 likely aimed at full regime change and the occupation of Ukraine. His claimed objective to “demilitarize” and “de-nazify” Ukraine is a transparent cover for an unprovoked war of aggression to occupy a neighboring state. Putin and Kremlin media continue to deny that the Russian invasion is a war, instead describing it as a special military operation.[1] Putin’s messaging is likely aimed at a domestic Russian audience, which the Kremlin has not fully prepared for the costs of a war against Ukraine. Russian officials and state media have been denying and mocking Western warnings of the impending Russian invasion for months and as recently as February 23.[2] Russian forces remain much larger and more capable than Ukraine’s conventional military. Russia will likely defeat Ukrainian regular military forces and secure their territorial objectives at some point in the coming days or weeks if Putin is determined to do so and willing to pay the cost in blood and treasure.
Key Takeaways
- Ukrainian forces are successfully slowing Russian offensives on all axes of advance other than a Russian breakout from the Crimean Peninsula. Russian failure to ground the Ukrainian air force or cripple Ukrainian command and control is likely enabling these initial Ukrainian successes.
- Ukrainian forces are contesting the Hostomel military airport, 20 km northwest of Kyiv, as of 9:30 pm local time.[3] Russian VDV (Airborne) troops landed at Hostomel and have also failed to capture the Boryspil airport southeast of Kyiv. Ukraine’s contestation of the airport deprives Russian forces of any location to airlift forces onto Kyiv’s western flank overnight.
- Russian forces are rapidly advancing north from Crimea, securing Kherson city. Their deepest penetration to date is about 60 kilometers.
- Russian forces are advancing on Kyiv from Belarus on both sides of the Dnipro River. Russian forces secured the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (on the west bank) at 7:30 pm local time, but Ukrainian forces have slowed Russian advances east of the Dnipro at Chernihiv.
- Russian forces likely seek to cut off Ukrainian troops on the line of contact in Donbas using an envelopment behind the Ukrainian front lines through Luhansk Oblast. Russian frontal assaults have taken little territory in Donetsk and Luhansk at this time.
Russian military operations began with a short and incomplete air campaign on February 24 around 4:00 am local time targeting Ukrainian air defenses, supply depots, and airfields across unoccupied Ukraine. However, portions of the Ukrainian Air Force remain operational and Ukrainian command and control appears intact.
- US defense officials estimate initial strikes comprised over 100 missiles including a mix of short and medium-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and sea-launched missiles.[4] An estimated 75 Russian bombers participated in the attack.[5]
- Russia did not successfully ground the Ukrainian air force or cripple the Ukrainian armed forces, enabling several Ukrainian successes on February 24. ISW incorrectly forecasted that any Russian offensive would begin with a concentrated air and missile campaign to cripple Ukrainian command and control and infrastructure.
- The Russian failure to comprehensively strike key Ukrainian assets is a surprising break from expected Russian operations and has likely enabled stiffer Ukrainian defense. The Ukrainian military has shot down seven Russian aircraft and seven helicopters as of 8:00 pm local time, February 24.[6]
- Russia has not demonstrated its full air and missile capabilities and will likely conduct further waves of strikes in the coming days aimed at degrading Ukraine’s command and control and ability to redeploy forces.
Ukrainian forces are currently contesting the Hostomel military airport, 20 km northwest of Kyiv, against Russian VDV (airborne) troops likely from the 31st Guards Air Assault Brigade as of 9:30 pm local time after several unsuccessful counterattacks earlier in the day.[7] Russian airborne forces were additionally unable to secure the Boryspil airport (Kyiv’s primary international airport), southeast of Kyiv.[8] Ukraine’s contestation of the airport prevents Russia from airlifting reinforcements to isolate Kyiv from western Ukraine, as feared earlier in the day.
Russian ground forces are advancing on four primary axes, discussed in turn below:
- Belarus/Kyiv;
- Kharkiv;
- Donbas; and
- Crimea-Kherson.
1) Belarus/Kyiv axis: Russian forces in Belarus are advancing on Kyiv along both sides of the Dnipro River, likely seeking to isolate Kyiv. Russian forces have made greater progress west of the Dnipro, successfully securing the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
- Ukrainian forces reported halting Russia’s offensive by elements of the 36th Combined Arms Army into Kyiv Oblast from Belarus at Chernihiv, roughly 120 km northeast of Kyiv, including capturing an entire reconnaissance platoon of the Russian 74th Motor Rifle Brigade.[9]
- Russian forces secured the Chernobyl exclusion zone as of 7:30 pm local time.[10] Russian forces likely intend to cut Kyiv off from western Ukraine through a drive down the western bank of the Dnipro River. The failure of Russian airborne forces to secure the Hostomel airport will impede this envelopment.
- No Belarusian forces are confirmed to be participating in operations in Ukraine as of this time. Belarusian President Lukashenko claimed Belarusian forces will not participate in operations in Ukraine and instead cover the “western operational direction” against Poland and Lithuania.[11]
2) Kharkiv axis: Russian forces, including confirmed elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army, are conducting a frontal assault on Kharkiv from northeastern Ukraine.[12] Ukrainian forces are temporarily halting Russian advances but Russian forces will likely enter Kharkiv before the end of the day.
- Heavy fighting is currently ongoing on key roads leading from Russia to Kharkiv. Ukrainian forces are inflicting casualties on Russian tanks using US-provided Javelin antitank systems.[13] Elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army entered the outskirts of Kharkiv at 2:00 pm local time.[14] ISW cannot confirm at this time the extent of Russian advances into Kharkiv.
- Russian forces have additionally crossed the northeastern Ukrainian border at several points. Ukrainian forces appear to be conducting fighting withdrawals. Ukrainian forces halted Russian forces northwest of Kharkiv in Sumy Oblast.[15]
3) Donbas axis: Russian forces, likely elements of the 8th Combined Arms Army, are conducting an envelopment through Luhansk Oblast rather than a frontal assault from the Russian-occupied Donbas. Russian forces likely seek to cut off Ukrainian forces on the line of contact and/or drive them out of their prepared defensive positions, forcing them to fight in the open.
- Russian forces made achieved limited advances in northern Luhansk Oblast.
- Russian forces have likely not secured a breakthrough along the line of contact in Donbas but claim to have done so. The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed at 7:00 pm local time that Russian proxy troops with Russian air and artillery support broke through the line of contact in unspecified locations to a depth of 6-8 km.[16] The UK Ministry of Defense reported at 8:30 pm EET (Ukraine local time) that Russian forces have not achieved a breakthrough.[17] Ukrainian forces last reported they were holding firm along the entire line of contact at 5:00 pm local time.[18] ISW cannot confirm Russian MoD claims that proxy forces—rather than Russia’s 8th Combined Arms Army—are conducting frontal assaults in Donbas, though a decision not to deploy Russian frontline troops into occupied Donbas in advance of the invasion may explain limited Russian success. Russian forces have reportedly been unable to secure terrain in a frontal assault from Donetsk toward Mariupol as of 7:00 pm local time.[19]
4) Russian forces are making their greatest territorial gains advancing north from Crimea. Russian forces have reportedly penetrated to a depth of at least 60 km and captured Kherson city, securing access to the Crimean Canal.[20] President Zelensky identified the attack from Crimea as the “most problematic situation.”[21]
- Elements of the 7th VDV (airborne) Division and unknown elements of the 58th Combined Arms Army are conducting the breakout operation. Russian forces are advancing both east (toward Melitopol) and west (toward Odesa).[22]
- ISW cannot confirm reports of any Russian amphibious landings in Odesa or Mariupol. Initial reports of such landings appear to be incorrect. Russia may wait until forces from Crimea have secured crossings over the Dnipro River before attempting to seize Odesa by air and sea.
Immediate items to watch
- Russian Naval Infantry have not yet conducted amphibious landings but retain the capability to do so against the Odesa or the Azov Sea coasts or both.
- Russian Airborne forces may successfully secure the Hostomel military airport overnight, enabling Russia to airlift additional forces onto Kyiv’s western flank.
- Russia will likely conduct additional rounds of air and missile strikes in the coming 24 hours. Russian operations will likely steadily wear down Ukrainian air capabilities and eventually take the Ukrainian air force out of the fight.
- Russian forces have not yet attempted the decapitation strike several analysts and outlets have forecasted and may attempt to do so in the near future.
- It remains unclear how much of its total strength the Russian military has committed at this time.
- Russia has sufficient conventional military power to reinforce each of its current axes of advance and overpower the conventional Ukrainian forces defending them.
2. Ukraine’s Plan B: Scoop: U.S. eyes training Ukrainian troops remotely
Ukraine’s Plan B: Scoop: U.S. eyes training Ukrainian troops remotely
Axios on facebookAxios on twitterAxios on linkedinAxios on email
Ukrainians seek shelter in a Kyiv subway station on Thursday. Photo: Viacheslav Ratynsky/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told House lawmakers Thursday the Biden administration is considering ways to train Ukrainian forces remotely if the Russians seize control of Ukraine, officials on the call told Axios.
Why it matters: With the capital of Kyiv in danger of falling after Russia's invasion, the Pentagon is contemplating the next phase of the conflict.
- Austin told members of the House that military officials are looking at ways to provide more defense equipment — including ammunition — to Ukrainian forces, but it's more difficult now with Russian troops swarming the country.
- Russian mechanized forces, which came in from Belarus, were 20 miles outside of Kyiv, he said.
- Austin also emphasized the Biden administration would support President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government as long as it remained “viable,” raising questions about continued U.S. assistance if the president flees the country, is captured or is killed in combat.
- A Defense Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the contents of the private call.
The big picture: Western officials fear Kyiv could soon fall into Russian hands despite Ukraine's resilient fight.
- That would pave the way for Zelensky's government to be toppled and replaced with a pro-Kremlin puppet regime in a matter of days.
Driving the news: With the harsh sanctions imposed Thursday unlikely to stop Russia's advances, the next phase of the Western strategy will center on turning Ukraine into a "porcupine" of resistance.
- “I had to fight an insurgency in Iraq, so I know how effective an insurgency can be,” said Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.). “With the right spirit, right intel and right weaponry, the Ukrainians can make the Russians rethink if they want to occupy Ukraine.”
- “We have absolutely discussed [supporting an insurgency and sending arms to Ukrainians], but it’s not something that I can discuss,” said Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.).
- “I think that Putin and the Russian people are going to be in a long, hard war. And Putin may be winning today, but in the long run, he will run lose.”
- Both are Marine veterans.
Between the lines: Some lawmakers are calling on President Biden to share targeting intelligence with the Ukrainian military, but others are skeptical.
- Gallego said: “We are certainly going to aid Ukraine by giving them lethal aid and giving them the intelligence that they need to make that aid effective.”
- “I don’t consider that an escalation; I consider it a part of helping a country.”
Congress failed in its efforts to pass new aid and sanctions to fend off the invasion. It's now mobilizing to assemble a package of emergency support.
- Votes could come as soon as next week.
The big picture: The "porcupine strategy" is most commonly used to refer to the policy of bolstering Taiwan's asymmetric defenses to make an invasion by China as painful as possible.
Now, that's what the West wants to promote to punish Russia for its unprovoked assault half a world away: make Ukraine painful to digest.
- Ukrainian forces so far have been buoyed by foreign military aid and drastic modernization since 2014.
- The Biden administration has committed more than $650 million in security assistance since 2021, including a December tranche of $200 million in equipment that hasn't been fully delivered.
- More help may soon be on the way, though the logistical hurdles could be substantial with Russia in control of Ukraine's airspace.
What we're watching: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she wants to provide Ukraine with $600 million in "lethal defense weapons."
- House Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) told CNN the odds of passing a bill "in a rapid enough fashion to repel the invasion are remote."
- But he added that "it's quite possible that what we're looking at here is a more long-term insurgency," and "we need to be prepared to support the Ukrainian people in that effort."
- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said he wants votes on emergency assistance to start by next week.
What they're saying: Biden warned Russia during his address on Thursday.
- "History has shown time and again how swift gains in territory eventually give way to grinding occupations, acts of mass civil disobedience and strategic dead-ends," he said.
3. UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 7
Graphics at the link.
UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 7
Institute for the Study of War, Russia Team
February 24
Key Takeaways February 24
- Ukrainian forces are successfully slowing Russian offensives on all axes of advance other than a Russian breakout from the Crimean Peninsula.
- Russian failure to ground the Ukrainian air force or cripple Ukrainian command and control is likely enabling these initial Ukrainian successes.
- Russian forces remain much larger and more capable than Ukraine’s conventional military and Putin is likely to defeat Ukrainian regular military forces and secure his territorial objectives in the coming days or weeks if he is willing to pay the price.
- Ukrainian forces defeated a Russian operation to isolate Kyiv from the west, recapturing the Hostomel military airport from Russian VDV (Airborne) troops after several counterattacks throughout the day.
- Russian forces are rapidly advancing north from Crimea, securing Kherson city. Their deepest penetration to date is about 60 kilometers.
- Russian forces are advancing on Kyiv from Belarus on both sides of the Dnipro River, but have been temporarily halted east of the Dnipro at Chernihiv.
- Russian forces likely seek to cut off Ukrainian troops on the line of contact in Donbas using an envelopment behind the Ukrainian front lines through Luhansk Oblast. Russian frontal assaults have taken little territory in Donetsk and Luhansk at this time.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to obfuscate to Russian citizens that he launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine aimed at regime change, likely to mitigate blowback from a Russian population unprepared for a major war.
- The United States and its European allies approved sweeping new sanctions against Russia’s economic, military, technological, and energy sectors but attempted to mitigate the possible consequences of those sanctions for US and EU energy markets.
- US and NATO allies deployed additional forces to NATO’s eastern flank to deter a spillover from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
- International organizations warned of a looming humanitarian crisis as states bordering Ukraine deployed troops to their borders to prepare for a possible influx of Ukrainian refugees.
- The Kremlin detained hundreds of civilians across Russia for protesting the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Key Events February 23, 4:00 pm EST – February 24, 4:00 pm EST
Military Events
Russian President Vladimir Putin began a large-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24 likely aimed at full regime change and the occupation of Ukraine. Russian forces met several setbacks on the first day of major offensive operations. However, Russian forces remain much larger and more capable than Ukraine’s conventional military. Russia will likely defeat Ukrainian regular military forces and secure their territorial objectives at some point in the coming days or weeks if Putin is determined to do so and willing to pay the cost in blood and treasure.
Russian military operations began with a short and incomplete air campaign on February 24 around 4:00 am local time targeting Ukrainian air defenses, supply depots, and airfields across unoccupied Ukraine. US defense officials estimate initial strikes comprised over 100 missiles including a mix of short and medium-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and sea-launched missiles.[1] Russia did not successfully ground the Ukrainian air force or cripple the Ukrainian armed forces, enabling several Ukrainian successes on February 24. Russia has not demonstrated its full air and missile capabilities and will likely conduct further waves of strikes in the coming days aimed at degrading Ukraine’s command and control and ability to redeploy forces.
Ukrainian forces recaptured the Hostomel military airport, 20 km northwest of Kyiv, from Russian VDV (airborne) troops likely from the 31st Guards Air Assault Brigade as of 11:00 pm local time after several unsuccessful counterattacks earlier in the day.[2] Russian airborne forces were additionally unable to secure the Boryspil airport (Kyiv’s primary international airport), southeast of Kyiv.[3] Ukraine’s contestation of the airport prevents Russia from airlifting reinforcements to isolate Kyiv from western Ukraine, as feared earlier in the day.
Russian ground forces are advancing on four primary axes:
- Belarus/Kyiv axis: Russian forces in Belarus are advancing on Kyiv along both sides of the Dnipro River, likely seeking to isolate Kyiv. Russian forces have made greater progress west of the Dnipro, successfully securing the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
- Kharkiv axis: Russian forces, including confirmed elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army, are conducting a frontal assault on Kharkiv from northeastern Ukraine. Ukrainian forces are temporarily halting Russian advances but Russian forces will likely enter Kharkiv before the end of the day.
- Donbas axis: Russian forces, likely elements of the 8th Combined Arms Army, are conducting an envelopment through Luhansk Oblast rather than a frontal assault from the Russian-occupied Donbas. Russian forces likely seek to cut off Ukrainian forces on the line of contact and/or drive them out of their prepared defensive positions, forcing them to fight in the open.
- Crimea axis: Russian forces are making their greatest territorial gains advancing north from Crimea. Russian forces have reportedly penetrated to a depth of at least 60 km and captured Kherson city, securing access to the Crimean Canal. President Zelensky identified the attack from Crimea as the “most problematic situation.”
Russian Activity
Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to obfuscate to Russian citizens that he launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24 aimed at regime change likely to mitigate blowback from a Russian population unprepared for a major war.[4] Putin’s claimed objectives to “de-nazify” and “demilitarize” Ukraine are a transparent cover for an unprovoked war of aggression to occupy a neighboring state. Putin and other Kremlin officials repeatedly claimed Russia’s offensive is a “limited operation” necessary to defend against false Russian claims of an imminent Ukrainian offensive against Donbas and refused to call it a war.[5] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov refused to expand on the specific objectives of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, stating the Kremlin is interested in direct negotiations with Ukraine to secure Kyiv’s official neutrality between the West and Russia and the removal of all “weapons.”[6] Ukraine’s government is unlikely to agree to Putin’s demands. The Kremlin likely seeks to portray its offensive war as a limited action to the Russian population to prevent blowback after months of repeated denials Russia would launch an offensive against Ukraine.[7]
The Kremlin is presenting tightly controlled and largely fictitious media coverage of Russian operations in Ukraine to support the false narratives that Russia is not engaged in a large-scale invasion of Ukraine and that Russian forces are easily succeeding. Russia’s Ministry of Defense is not publishing updates beyond cherrypicked video briefings in contrast with the Ukrainian government’s constant updates on both successes and failures. Kremlin-sponsored TV programs do not show videos of explosions, battles, and military movements throughout Ukraine, presenting the conflict as occurring mainly in the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR).[8] Kremlin newswire TASS has not provided significant information on damaged infrastructure throughout Ukraine.[9] Russian TV outlets emphasize that the Russian Armed Forces only targeted 74 airstrikes at Ukrainian military infrastructure and supposedly disabled 11 airfields, 18 air defense radar stations, and a Ukrainian naval base while downplaying Russian ground troop presence in Ukraine.[10]
Russian media claims that the Ukrainian military is collapsing are likely aimed to reassure Russians that the war will end quickly and victoriously but could also reflect the Russian government’s erroneous expectations. Russian TV is amplifying claims that Russian operations will be quick and successful, falsely asserting that Ukrainian troops are surrendering en masse. Russian defense media cites fabricated social media reports that frustrated nationalists have opened fire against surrendering Ukrainian units. Russian media highlights claimed Russian humanitarian efforts in the context of fabricated Ukrainian mass surrenders, amplifying Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu’s special instructions for Russian troops to create safe corridors for surrendering Ukrainian servicemen on February 24.[11]
Thousands of Russian civilians protested Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in several major cities despite state crackdowns and mass arrests on February 24. Protesters in Moscow, St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, and 54 other cities chanted “no to war” and waved Ukrainian flags amid a heavy presence by Russian riot police.[12] Russian celebrities, political activists, sports stars, and artists condemned the war in statements on social media and to Western media outlets.[13] Russia’s Investigative Committee threatened to track down protest organizers and demonstrators, promising “severe punishment for mass riots.”[14] Russian police detained at least 966 demonstrators in Moscow and 432 in St Petersburg according to civil rights group OVD-Info.[15] Russian President Vladimir Putin likely intended to use a series of planned false flag attacks to build a media narrative and support for his invasion of Ukraine among the Russian public. However, repeated US and Ukrainian exposure of planned Russian actions likely led Putin to begin the invasion without widespread public backing.[16]
Proxy Activity
N/A
Belarusian Activity
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko gave a speech on February 24 setting information conditions for possible Belarusian operations against NATO's eastern flank, claiming Belarusian troops will defend against a NATO "stab in the back” and falsely claiming Poland may attack Belarus.[17] ISW has not observed any Belarusian forces operating in Ukraine as of February 24, though Lukashenko stated they will join Russian operations in Ukraine “if necessary.” Lukashenko stated Belarusian forces are shifting their efforts to protect Belarus’s border with Poland and Lithuania to prevent NATO from “stabbing Russia in the back.”[18] Lukashenko further claimed the Polish government “needs a war” to obfuscate its domestic unpopularity. Belarusian Defense Minister’s Aide for Ideology Major-General Leonid Kasinsky stated that Belarusian troops are reinforcing its borders to prevent an enemy “surprise attack” rather than participate in Russian operations in Ukraine.[19]
Ukrainian Activity
N/A
US Activity
The United States, the European Union (EU), and the United Kingdom announced new sanctions packages against Russia’s economic, military, technological, and energy sectors on February 24.[20] US President Joe Biden announced sanctions on major Russian banks and their subsidiaries; debt and equity restrictions on critical Russian enterprises and entities; additional sanctions on Russian elites and their family members; and restrictions on US exports to Russia.[21] Biden also announced sanctions on 24 Belarusian individuals, two Belarusian state-owned banks, nine defense firms, and seven Belarusian regime-connected officials and elites for supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.[22] Biden added that direct sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin are “still on the table.”[23] EU leaders held a February 24 emergency summit in Brussels to approve a second round of joint sanctions against Russia.[24] EU-adjacent countries including Switzerland, Israel, and Turkey condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but stopped short of joining European sanctions as of February 24.[25] The United Kingdom also announced comprehensive sanctions covering Russian elites, companies, and financial institutions, completely shutting off Russia’s banking system from UK financial system.[26]
The sanctions packages did not cut Russia off from the SWIFT high-security payment network, which could have imposed high costs on Russia’s financial activity abroad but would also likely spark an energy crisis in European countries that rely on Russian imports. The foreign ministers of Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania called on the EU to end Russia’s participation in SWIFT but Biden said on February 24 that removing Russia from SWIFT is not “the direction the rest of Europe wants go at this moment.”[27] Biden emphasized that the sanctions the United States imposed on Russian banks are “of equal consequence, maybe more consequence” than removing Russia from SWIFT.[28]
NATO and EU Activity
US and NATO allies deployed additional forces to NATO’s eastern flank to deter and prevent spillover from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24.[29] NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg stated on February 24 that NATO has activated defense plans to enable force deployments "where necessary,” including the capability to activate the NATO Response Force. NATO will deploy “additional land and sea forces to the eastern part of the Alliance” and will place air support on standby to strengthen the security and defense of its allies.[30] The United States deployed 7,000 US troops already stationed in Europe to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania; authorized additional US forces to be sent from the United States to Germany; extended the stay of 500 US troops in Lithuania; and authorized an unspecified number of F-35 fighter jets to Estonia.[31] The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) declared an expansion of its existing flight ban on US civilian aircraft over parts of Eastern Europe and Russian airspace to include all of Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia.[32] Germany sent 350 additional combat troops to Lithuania and three additional fighter jets to Romania.[33]
Eastern European states including Moldova, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland deployed troops to their borders to brace for a possible mass arrival of Ukrainian refugees.[34] The Lithuanian and Moldovan governments declared states of emergency on February 24. Lithuania deployed an unspecified number of forces along its borders with Belarus on February 24.[35] Denmark announced on February 24 that it will deploy 200 troops to Estonia and two F-16 fighter jets to police Poland’s air space in early March while preparing an additional battalion of 700-800 soldiers to contribute to NATO’s defense operations.[36]
NATO member states Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia, and Lithuania triggered Article 4 to launch consultations within NATO as a protective measure on February 24, triggering additional NATO deployments to its eastern flank.[37] Article 4 of the Washington Treaty allows member states to start formal consultations if a member state feels threatened, and can lead to collective NATO action.[38] NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg underscored that NATO will continue taking all necessary measures to bolster security by deploying additional land, air, and sea forces against Russia’s threat to Euro-Atlantic security.[39] Stoltenberg called on Russia to withdraw its military forces from Ukraine and engage in dialogue with NATO.[40] Stoltenberg called for a virtual summit of NATO heads of state on February 25 to discuss NATO’s response. Separately, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin emphasized that the US commitment to NATO Article 5 mutual defense commitment is “ironclad” in a call with NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg.[41]
Other International Organization Activity
N/A
Individual Western Allies’ Activity
Eastern European states and international aid organizations are preparing for a major influx of Ukrainian refugees.[42] United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced the UN will release $20 million from its humanitarian relief fund to support Ukrainian civilians. The UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) also stated its readiness to supply aid to Ukrainian civilians and urged neighboring countries to keep their borders open to accept Ukrainian refugees. The UNHCR estimates that several thousand Ukrainian refugees have fled to northern Moldova and Romania and approximately 10,000 have been displaced within Ukraine since Russia’s invasion began on February 24. The World Health Organization warned of a possible “humanitarian catastrophe” and expressed concern for civilians caught in the conflict. The Polish government announced it expects as many as one million Ukrainian refugees to enter Poland. Members of the US 82nd Airborne Infantry Brigade and Combat Team began preparations to assist local authorities in hosting refugees in Rzeszow, Poland.[43] Germany announced it would provide aid to Poland and other neighbors in the event of a large-scale refugee crisis.[44] Hungary and Slovakia also deployed troops along their borders with Ukraine to manage the expected influx of refugees.
Other International Activity
China refused to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine and announced new imports from Russia that could mitigate the impacts of Western sanctions on February 24. Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying denied China supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but refused to condemn it during a February 24 press conference.[45] Chunying stressed the importance of joint cooperation and addressing the legitimate security concerns of all parties. Chunying accused the United States of “fueling [the] fire” of tensions. Chunying also announced an agreement for China to import additional Russian wheat—a possible lifeline for the Russian economy and an early indicator of China’s future approach to Western sanctions against Russia. Chunying claimed that China and Russia finalized the agreement during Russian President Vladimir Putin's February 4 visit to Beijing.[46]
[15] https://ovd dot news/news/2022/02/24/spiski-zaderzhannyh-v-svyazi-s-akciey-v-protiv-voyny-s-ukrainoy-24-fevralya-2022
4. This is why Ukrinae Matters
Below this interesting list is a response from a friend who hails from Ukraine and is a retired US Special Forces soldier. This list and his comments are very much worth reflecting upon.
Why did Russia invade Ukraine? Why does Ukraine matter to the world?
Sharing a nice summary below that answers those questions.
“…This is why Ukraine matters.
Being the second largest country by area in Europe and has a population of over 40 million, Ukraine ranks:
1st in Europe in proven recoverable reserves of uranium ores
2nd place in Europe and 10th place in the world in terms of titanium ore reserves
2nd place in the world in terms of explored reserves of manganese ores (2.3 billion tons, or 12% of the world's reserves)
2nd largest iron ore reserves in the world (30 billion tons)
2nd place in Europe in terms of mercury ore reserves
3rd place in Europe (13th place in the world) in shale gas reserves (22 trillion cubic meters)
4th in the world by the total value of natural resources
7th place in the world in coal reserves (33.9 billion tons)
Ukraine is an important agricultural country:
1st in Europe in terms of arable land area
3rd place in the world by the area of black soil (25% of world's volume)
1st place in the world in exports of sunflower and sunflower oil
2nd place in the world in barley production and 4th place in barley exports
3rd largest producer and 4th largest exporter of corn in the world
4th largest producer of potatoes in the world
5th largest rye producer in the world
5th place in the world in bee production (75,000 tons)
8th place in the world in wheat exports
9th place in the world in the production of chicken eggs
16th place in the world in cheese exports
Ukraine can meet the food needs of 600 million people.
Ukraine is an important industrialized country:
1st in Europe in ammonia production
Europe's 2nd’s and the world’s 4th largest natural gas pipeline system
3rd largest in Europe and 8th largest in the world in terms of installed capacity of nuclear power plants;l
3rd place in Europe and 11th in the world in terms of rail network length (21,700 km)
3rd place in the world (after the U.S. and France) in production of locators and locating equipment
3rd largest iron exporter in the world
4th largest exporter of turbines for nuclear power plants in the world
4th world's largest manufacturer of rocket launchers
4th place in the world in clay exports
4th place in the world in titanium exports
8th place in the world in exports of ores and concentrates
9th place in the world in exports of defence industry products
10th largest steel producer in the world (32.4 million tons)
Ukraine matters. That is why its independence is important to the rest of the world. These resources are why Russia is chomping at the bits to take it.”
Michael Daves, MBA
Special Operations Civil Affairs Governance Officer
Spot checking (actually almost all) the minerals and agriculture (I don’t have visibility on turbines, rocket engines) – it is within accuracy. And this support Civil Affairs Mr. Dave’s assessments and azimuth:
Q1 -In 1941, Why was Hitler’s primary strategic target and Barbarossa’s greatest massed forces Ukraine and not Moscow: 1. agriculture to feed the German people because the UK and British Empire / Commonwealth were choking the German homefront the same way as the WW1 population hunger of the Imperial German homefront. 2. The huge strategic minerals deposits that Ukraine has. Parallel reasons for ruSSia’s operations today: to secure for themselves and to deny to the West. 3. Shackle an entire people as agricultural and mining slaves.
Q2 – In 1942, why was Ukraine the Nazis ONLY strategic target and massed forces (Operation Blau) to retain Ukraine and advance further again: 1. Same reason, to keep the German homefront from starvation. 2. To retain Ukraine’s strategic minerals to include the vital armor piercing enabling minerals. 3. Additionally to secure the rear area in order to seize the Caucasus oilfields – no way Romania could supply enough oil for the homefront and the military machine. Same reasons for ruSSia’s operations today: to secure the Ukrainian people as their agriculture and mining milk cows. And to deny these vital assets to the West to include rare minerals for which we (America and the West) find ourselves in an increasing dependent state globally.
Q3: In 1943, Why did the Nazis hang on so desperately to the Ukrainian Front when they should have shortened their lines: desperate need for Ukraine’s war enabling minerals and agriculture – same as ruSSia’s reasons today to secure these national security resource jewels for themselves, turn Ukrainians into agricultural and mineral milk cows (same as Hitler), to control the market and therefore demand any price from the West.
Q4: In 1944, why did the Germans desperately hang on and unnecessary lose tens of thousands of troops on to the left bank Dnieper (east bank) near Kherson (now a primary objective of RF assault this very moment): the strategic deposits of minerals on the right bank near Kherson (my cousin and grandchildren) that enabled armor piercing tank rounds and which ruSSia needs for its war industry and wants to deprive the West.
Break. Gas pipelines: of all the infrastructure targeting last night, WHY were the natural gas pipelines excluded? Doesn’t take a wizard to figure that one out. Depriving ruSSia of natural gas and oil petrol dollars will starve the ruSSia’s war machine AND the Russian good population who are caught up not of their own desires in a lunatic’s madness.
Sir, the vulnerable areas of a Sun Tzu “attack the strategy’ include the autonomous peoples (oxymoron for captive) of the Russian Federation and the captive intimidated near abroad peoples – Kazakhstan events recently were a signboard. I will search my old laptops for my trip report on Kazakhstan. Send me in, Coach.
2. All the ruSSian naval primary assets are in the Black Sea presently – Tartus naval base in Syria is exposed, as is the RF airfield, assets, and bandits at Khememin in Syria. I will mention again the Kaliningrad Exclave and Kuril Islands. The PRC is watching. As is our ROC Taiwan ally. And all threatened peoples who today and in the foreseeable future must choose between freedom / liberal democracy and evil protectors.
5. Ukraine's capital under threat as Russia presses invasion
Excerpts:
After Ukrainian officials said they lost control of the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear power plant, scene of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, Russia said Friday it was working with the Ukrainians to secure the plant. There was no corroboration of such cooperation from the Ukrainian side.
Zelenskyy said that 137 “heroes,” including 10 military officers, had been killed, and one of his advisers said about 400 Russian forces had died. Moscow has given no casualty count. Neither claim could be independently verified.
...
“If you don’t help us now, if you fail to offer a powerful assistance to Ukraine, tomorrow the war will knock on your door,” said the leader, who cut diplomatic ties with Moscow, declared martial law and ordered a full military mobilization that would last 90 days.
Zelenskyy said he’s the No. 1 target for the invading Russians but that he planned to remain in Kyiv. Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said early Friday that the Ukrainian attended a meeting of European Union leaders via video link from what appeared to be some sort of bunker.
Ukraine's capital under threat as Russia presses invasion
AP · by YURAS KARMANAU, JIM HEINTZ, VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV and DASHA LITVINOVA · February 25, 2022
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia pressed its invasion of Ukraine to the outskirts of the capital Friday after unleashing airstrikes on cities and military bases and sending in troops and tanks from three sides in an attack that could rewrite the global post-Cold War security order.
Explosions sounded before dawn in Kyiv and gunfire was reported in several areas, as Western leaders scheduled an emergency meeting and Ukraine’s president pleaded for international help to fend off an attack that could topple his democratically elected government, cause massive casualties and ripple out damage to the global economy.
Among the signs that the Ukrainian capital was increasingly threatened, the military said Friday that a group of Russian spies and saboteurs was seen in a district on the outskirts of Kyiv, and police told people not to exit a subway station in the city center because there was gunfire in the area. Elsewhere in the capital, soldiers established defensive positions at bridges, and armored vehicles rolled down the streets, while many residents stood uneasily in doorways of their apartment buildings.
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Kyiv “could well be under siege” in what U.S. officials believe is a brazen attempt by Russian President Vladimir Putin to install his own regime.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose grasp on power was increasingly tenuous, appealed to global leaders for even more severe sanctions than the ones imposed by Western allies and for defense assistance.
“If you don’t help us now, if you fail to offer a powerful assistance to Ukraine, tomorrow the war will knock on your door,” said the leader, who cut diplomatic ties with Moscow, declared martial law and ordered a full military mobilization that would last 90 days.
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Zelenskyy said he’s the No. 1 target for the invading Russians but that he planned to remain in Kyiv. Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said early Friday that the Ukrainian attended a meeting of European Union leaders via video link from what appeared to be some sort of bunker.
As air raids sirens sounded in the capital early Friday, guests of a hotel in the city center were directed to a makeshift basement shelter, lined with piles of mattresses and bottles of water. Workers, all local university students, served tea and cookies to the guests. Some people ducked out to a courtyard to smoke or get fresh air.
“We’re all scared and worried. We don’t know what to do then, what’s going to happen in a few days,” said one of the workers, Lucy Vashaka, 20.
The invasion began early Thursday with a series of missile strikes on cities and military bases, and then quickly followed with a multi-pronged ground assault that rolled troops in from several areas in the east; from the southern region of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014; and from Belarus to the north.
After Ukrainian officials said they lost control of the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear power plant, scene of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, Russia said Friday it was working with the Ukrainians to secure the plant. There was no corroboration of such cooperation from the Ukrainian side.
Zelenskyy said that 137 “heroes,” including 10 military officers, had been killed, and one of his advisers said about 400 Russian forces had died. Moscow has given no casualty count. Neither claim could be independently verified.
Fearing a Russian attack on the capital city, thousands of people went deep underground as night fell, jamming Kyiv’s subway stations.
At times it felt almost cheerful. Families ate dinner. Children played. Adults chatted. People brought sleeping bags or dogs or crossword puzzles — anything to alleviate the waiting and the long night ahead.
“Nobody believed that this war would start and that they would take Kyiv directly,” said Anton Mironov, waiting out the night in one of the old Soviet metro stations. “I feel mostly fatigue. None of it feels real.”
Many who spent the night in makeshift bunkers, emerged in the early hours of Friday to a relatively quiet city. Some traffic and cars moved along highways, along with columns of military. The lines at fuel stations the day before had evaporated.
Russia said it was not targeting cities, but journalists saw destruction in many civilian areas and Kyiv Mayor Vitaly Klitschko said a rocket hit a multistory apartment building in the city on Friday, starting a fire. Meanwhile, the mayor of the city in the rebel-controlled east said Ukrainian shelling hit a school building.
The Ukrainian military on Friday reported significant fighting near Ivankiv, about 60 kilometers (40 miles) northwest of Kyiv, as Russian forces apparently tried to advance on the capital from the north. Russian troops also entered the city of Sumy, near the border with Russia that sits on a highway leading to Kyiv from the east.
Later came the reports of at least some forces much closer.
“The hardest day will be today. The enemy’s plan is to break through with tank columns from the side of Ivankiv and Chernihiv to Kyiv,” Interior Ministry adviser Anton Gerashchenko said on Telegram.
Hours after the invasion began, Russian forces seized control of the now-decommissioned Chernobyl plant and its surrounding exclusion zone, presidential adviser Myhailo Podolyak told The Associated Press.
The conflict shook global financial markets: Stocks plunged and oil prices soared amid concerns that heating bills and food prices would skyrocket. Condemnation came not only from the U.S. and Europe, but from South Korea, Australia and beyond — and many governments readied new sanctions. Even friendly leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban sought to distance themselves from Putin.
U.S. President Joe Biden announced new sanctions that will target Russian banks, oligarchs, state-controlled companies and high-tech sectors, saying Putin “chose this war” and had exhibited a “sinister” view of the world in which nations take what they want by force. He added that the measures were designed not to disrupt global energy markets. Russian oil and natural gas exports are vital energy sources for Europe.
Biden was to meet Friday morning with fellow leaders of NATO governments in what the White House described as an “extraordinary virtual summit” to discuss Ukraine.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he aimed to cut off Russia from the U.K.’s financial markets as he announced sanctions, freezing the assets of all large Russian banks and planning to bar Russian companies and the Kremlin from raising money on British markets.
“Now we see him for what he is — a bloodstained aggressor who believes in imperial conquest,” Johnson said of Putin.
Zelenskyy urged the U.S. and West to go further and cut the Russians from the SWIFT system, a key financial network that connects thousands of banks around the world. The White House has been reluctant to do that, worried it could cause enormous economic problems in Europe and elsewhere in the West.
While some nervous Europeans speculated about a possible new world war, the U.S. and its NATO partners have shown no indication they would send troops into Ukraine, fearing a larger conflict. NATO reinforced its members in Eastern Europe as a precaution, and Biden said the U.S. was deploying additional forces to Germany to bolster NATO.
Ukrainians were urged to shelter in place and not to panic.
“Until the very last moment, I didn’t believe it would happen. I just pushed away these thoughts,” said a terrified Anna Dovnya in Kyiv, watching soldiers and police remove shrapnel from an exploded shell. “We have lost all faith.”
___
Isachenkov and Litvinova reported from Moscow. Francesca Ebel, Josef Federman and Andrew Drake in Kyiv; Angela Charlton in Paris; Geir Moulson and Frank Jordans in Berlin; Raf Casert and Lorne Cook in Brussels; Nic Dumitrache in Mariupol, Ukraine, Inna Varennytsia in eastern Ukraine; and Robert Burns, Matthew Lee, Aamer Madhani, Eric Tucker, Nomaan Merchant, Ellen Knickmeyer, Zeke Miller, Chris Megerian and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed.
___
AP · by YURAS KARMANAU, JIM HEINTZ, VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV and DASHA LITVINOVA · February 25, 2022
6. Ukraine Conflict Update - Feb 25, 2022
Ukraine Conflict Update - Feb 25, 2022 | SOF News
sof.news · by SOF News · February 25, 2022
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on Thursday, February 24, 2022, is continuing. For the most part, the Russians appear to have met their initial objectives for the first day of the invasion. Day two will likely see more progress on the ground and in the air on the part of the Russian military. However, the Ukrainians are putting up a stiff resistance.
Russian Advances into Ukraine. Russian aircraft and ballistic missiles appear to have significantly damaged much of the Ukraine air force, neutralized some of its air defense network, and conducted numerous air assaults by helicopter. The air campaign was shortly followed with simultaneous strikes across the Ukrainian border from the east (Russia), north (Belarus), and from Russian-occupied Crimea. Some Russian ground units have made it to the Dnieper River which runs north-south through Ukraine. Attempts by the Russians to seize an vital airport near the capital city of Kiev met stiff resistance.
Russian Invasion Force. In the weeks previous to the invasion it was reported widely that the Russians had staged up to 150,000 troops on Ukraine’s border. It now appears that close to 200,000 troops are taking part in the invasion. While the Russians can count on some quick victories in the days ahead, it will soon see that it will be bogged down in fighting a counter guerrilla / insurgent war should it ‘stay too long’. The equipment of the Russian forces – especially its artillery and armor gives it a distinct advantage.
Ukrainian Army. The country’s ground units are putting up a fierce fight – but they are outnumbered with troops and have a qualitative disadvantage in equipment. Their reserves in weapons and ammunition will slowly be depleted. Some of the ground units fighting in east Ukraine are likely to be cut off by a Russian ground pincer unit. Without lines of communication to the rear areas – the central and western part of Ukraine – these units will quickly run out of fuel for vehicles, ammunition, spare parts, and other vital supplies. A favorable attribute of the Ukrainian forces is how much better their training is than the Russians. While morale may suffer due to the steady advance of the Russians – the Ukrainians are fighting for their homeland; the Russians are conducting a war of aggression.
Ukraine Forces. The size of the Ukrainian military is small compared to that of the Russian military. Unclassified estimates readily available in the public domain indicate that Ukraine has about 255,000 soldiers, 2,400 tanks, 280 aircraft, and 25 ships. It has no nuclear weapons; transferring those to Russia after the United States made pledges for Ukraine’s security. The Ukrainian government is now calling for people of any age to come forward to fight the Russians. Although symbolic, there are reports that a Ukrainian airstrike hit a Russian airbase inside Russia early on Friday.
Battle for Antonov / Hostomel Airport. A Russian VDV unit tried to seize the airport on Thursday but met with defeat. A helicopter lift of specialized troops landed in the airport area but many of the infiltration helicopters were shot down by Ukrainian air defense and MiG-29s. Ukrainian troops defended the airport and were reinforced by additional Ukrainian units, to include the 4th Rapid Response Brigade and 45th (Ukrainian) Spetsnaz Brigade. From 18 to 20 large Il-76 transport planes carrying Russian paratroops were in the air to land at the airfield but turned back with the failure to seize the airport by the VDV unit.
Battle for Kiev. The capital city of Ukraine appears to be an important objective for the Russians. The ability to occupy Kiev will allow the Russians to establish a ‘new government’. No doubt it has its ‘Ukrainian patriots’ ready to assume power and extend thanks to the Russian ‘peacekeeping forces’. But first the Russians will need to capture the capital. As of Friday mid-day there are social media reports of fighting around and near the city. Some social media reports indicate that Russian special operations forces are in Kiev operating in civilian vehicles and wearing civilian clothes. It is quite possible they are targeting the civilian leadership of the Ukraine government.
Civilian Exodus. Thousands of Ukrainians are fleeing towards western Ukraine to avoid the fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces. Some are trying to cross the border into the neighboring countries – usually Poland.
Cyber and Info Wars. Russian cyber attacks against Ukraine continue. Russia is not immune to cyber attacks. Russia Today (rt.com) has seen an interruption of service over the past few days due to hackers. Russia has steadily worked social media and news outlets spewing out its disinformation in an attempt to legitimize its aggression against Ukraine. As of mid-day Friday the Russian Military of Defence website was down.
Threatening the West. President Putin has had some harsh words for the United States and nations of Europe. Has openly implied that nuclear weapons would be used if Russia experiences any military interference with its offensive in Ukraine.
NATO’s Response. Various countries of the NATO alliance are sending troops and aircraft into eastern Europe. Naval vessels are moving closer to the conflict region in the Mediterranean Sea. The United States Air Force has moved some of its aircraft closer to the conflict area. This includes the movement of some F-35 Lighting II aircraft from Germany to the Baltic Sea regions. NATO leaders are meeting once again today (Friday) to discuss the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Finland and Sweden will participate in the secure VTC as well. Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg will hold a press conference following the meeting. Some NATO member states, like the United Kingdom, are fiercely supportive of Ukraine, while others, like Germany, seem to be dithering and shocked that the invasion took place.
Outlook in the Near Term? If is quite possible that by the end of Day Two of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that they could hold most of the coastline on the Sea of Azov, a good part of the coastline along the Black Sea, and make inroads into the suburbs of Kiev. The Ukrainians will likely continue fighting rather than being truce talks or engage in negotiations for then next several days. The Russians will likely be faced with continued resistance in occupied areas of Ukraine.
********
Image: CIA map of Ukraine.
sof.news · by SOF News · February 25, 2022
7. Six Ways for America to Humble Russia
Excerpts:
First, minimize partisan recriminations at home and present a united front.
Second, inflict crippling economic sanctions on Russia, even if they hurt the West.
Third, directly target the assets of Russian oligarchs.
Fourth, arm the Ukrainian military and resistance.
Fifth, reinforce NATO’s frontiers.
Sixth, welcome Ukrainian refugees.
...
By launching an attack on Ukraine, Putin steps into the shoes of a long line of aggressive authoritarians, including, for example, Kaiser Wilhelm and Napoleon Bonaparte. Indeed, the fact that we can immediately recall a number of names of catastrophically aggressive European rulers highlights the danger of the moment.
What we face is not unique. It’s another chapter in an old story. Whether this chapter ends with the beginning of yet another era of great-power conflict will depend very much on whether Russia and other aggressive states (including China) ultimately view Putin’s attack on Ukraine as a great triumph or a terrifying cautionary tale of hubris and, ultimately, loss.
Six Ways for America to Humble Russia
Russia Must Pay
Deterrence has failed. Now it’s time for Putin’s defeat.
By David French
FEBRUARY 24, 2022
We are living at a hinge point in history. The world is witnessing the resurrection of a particular kind of great-power aggression—the effort to rearrange European boundaries by direct military force—that has led to countless conflicts on the continent itself and has triggered the most cataclysmic wars the world has ever seen.
For almost 80 years, the combination of military deterrence and Western alliances kept the peace, a peace that had become so familiar and comfortable that our eyes rebelled at what we were seeing on our television screens last night. As we watched the live video of Russia’s attack, it was hard to believe it was real.
But shock has to give way to resolve, and the resolve is this—Russia must pay. Its act of aggression must cost Vladimir Putin’s regime so dearly, its ultimate failure stands as a reminder that the world rejects aggressive war—that it is a path to ruin and loss, not victory and greatness.
This is easier said than done, especially since direct American or allied military intervention in the conflict is profoundly unwise. Simply put, we lack both the will and the immediate capacity to make a decisive difference in the battle, and we would immediately spark a broader conflict that could easily spiral out of control.
But that doesn’t mean we’re impotent—far from it. America and its allies still retain enormous power, including the power to help shape the course of the conflict in Ukraine itself. Here are the key steps:
First, minimize partisan recriminations at home and present a united front. It’s important for Americans to understand where the blame lies—with Putin, not with Democrats or Republicans. If you don’t understand Putin’s mindset, I’d urge you to read his February 21 speech to the Russian people.
His real grievance is against Ukraine‘s very existence, and he made that grievance clear in the opening moments of his address:
I would like to emphasize again that Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space. These are our comrades, those dearest to us—not only colleagues, friends, and people who once served together, but also relatives, people bound by blood, by family ties.
Indeed, he sees the country as essentially fabricated out of whole cloth during the Russian Revolution, a historical mistake that Soviet leaders never fixed:
So, I will start with the fact that modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia, or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia. This process started practically right after the 1917 revolution, and Lenin and his associates did it in a way that was extremely harsh on Russia—by separating, severing what is historically Russian land. Nobody asked the millions of people living there what they thought.
Never mind that Ukraine gained its independence after a 1991 referendum where “the millions of people living there” expressed exactly what they wanted. We now understand Putin’s real problem with Western influence in Ukraine, including potential NATO membership—it would guarantee the independence of a country that should not exist, at least not in its present form.
This war is not President Joe Biden’s fault or former President Donald Trump’s fault—even if we can critique different aspects of each president’s policies. Putin has been using violence as an indispensable element of his foreign policy from the moment he attained power, and he’s conducted successful military offensives under every American president since Bill Clinton.
He invaded Georgia in 2008. He first invaded Ukraine in 2014. He conducted offensive operations in Syria throughout the Trump administration. And now he’s invaded Ukraine again, this time with massive force. Deterrence has failed time and again. A united commitment to Russian defeat is now our best response.
Second, inflict crippling economic sanctions on Russia, even if they hurt the West. Economic warfare presents its participants with a version of the challenge presented by armed conflict: It can be difficult to inflict casualties on the enemy without suffering loss yourself. Russia doesn’t have a large economy (especially relative to its size and population), but dramatic economic action can, for example, increase energy costs in the United States and abroad.
We should bear that cost—and the related costs of disrupting Russia’s place in the world economy. Putin may be counting on the comprehensive softness of the West, the unwillingness to bear virtually any real consequence in the defense of the international order, to ease the economic pain of his aggression. We must prove him wrong.
Third, directly target the assets of Russian oligarchs. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, a small number of Russian citizens have grown both fantastically rich and disproportionately powerful. These Russian families park immense yachts in European ports, enjoy access to prime real estate in European capitals, and treat the world as their playground.
No more. They are part of the structure and system of Russian power, a structure and system that has proved itself to be recklessly aggressive. Seize their yachts. Seize their London flats. They should be made to pay directly for their complicity in Russia’s rise as a criminal regime.
Fourth, arm the Ukrainian military and resistance. Expect to see rapid Russian military gains in the first days of its offensive. It possesses overwhelming aerial superiority and overwhelming superiority in mobility and long-range fires. The Ukrainian military is outgunned.
But we know from experience that wars do not always end when capitals are seized or even when conventional battles are lost. So long as there are army formations (or insurgents) willing to fight, they should have access to Western arms. They should have access to Western training. Ukraine may not possess the capacity to defeat the Russians in a slugfest between armies in the field, but it does have the capacity to impose an unacceptable cost on the Russian military, if we’re willing to help. (Eliot A. Cohen, a former counselor of the State Department and an Atlantic contributing writer, has made a forceful case for exactly this.)
Fifth, reinforce NATO’s frontiers. It is Putin’s dream to not just reconstitute elements of the old Russian empire but to collapse NATO as an opposing force. Our allies on NATO’s eastern flank are watching us closely. They see Russia’s power up close. Will they see our response?
President Biden has already sent small numbers of reinforcements to Eastern Europe. He needs to send more—not in offensive formations that would indicate a potential attack (and possibly provoke a catastrophic Russian response), but in numbers and composition that demonstrate an unshakable defensive commitment and remind our allies that Russia, though dangerous, is not the most powerful force in Europe.
Sixth, welcome Ukrainian refugees. Wars breed refugee crises, and the United States should be willing to step up and absorb our share of the allied burden of care. One of the most grievous aspects of the right’s turn against immigration has been an unwillingness even to shelter and protect those who are suffering direct, violent repression.
But this is not the mainstream American position. It is not even the unified position on the right. Our nation should reaffirm its place as a haven for those facing death and persecution abroad.
I’m cautious about historical analogies. We’re often too quick in particular to stampede to World War II as a pattern for what we’re witnessing. Vladimir Putin doesn’t have to be Hitler to be dangerous, and the attack on Ukraine doesn’t have to mirror Hitler’s attack on Poland to be alarming.
By launching an attack on Ukraine, Putin steps into the shoes of a long line of aggressive authoritarians, including, for example, Kaiser Wilhelm and Napoleon Bonaparte. Indeed, the fact that we can immediately recall a number of names of catastrophically aggressive European rulers highlights the danger of the moment.
What we face is not unique. It’s another chapter in an old story. Whether this chapter ends with the beginning of yet another era of great-power conflict will depend very much on whether Russia and other aggressive states (including China) ultimately view Putin’s attack on Ukraine as a great triumph or a terrifying cautionary tale of hubris and, ultimately, loss.
8. America Could Have Done So Much More to Protect Ukraine
"coulda, shoulda, woulda."
Sir Lawrence Freedman: "Deterrence works. Until it doesn't."
The point about self deterrence is key. Perhaps that is another US strategic weakness.
We need to be able to employ flexible deterrent options and deploy necessary force enhancements (FDO/FE) (concepts we used to plan for as a matter of routine prior to the GWOT).
Soft power does not work without hard power to back it up.
Excerpts:
All the while, the Biden administration failed to pair diplomatic overtures with sufficiently powerful, credible military pressure, perhaps over fears of a bilateral conflict with Russia. These fears were misplaced. I can say from my significant experience dealing with the highest levels of Russia’s military leadership that it has no interest in a bilateral confrontation with the U.S. Russian leaders have zero desire for nuclear war, and they understand that they would inevitably lose in a conventional war. However, Russia excels at compelling the U.S. to self-deter.
Besides military pressure, the U.S. also failed to consider graduated response options once Putin’s preferred course of action had been established. The U.S. could have imposed targeted sanctions on Russian leadership or introduced long-overdue anti-corruption legislation to signal the impending costs of reinvasion to the Kremlin. By choosing to view these options through an all-or-nothing lens, the U.S. unnecessarily constrained its response. Biden’s administration was reactive when it should have been proactive. Over and over, the president’s longtime senior advisers seem to have recommended narrow, low-risk policy options, and these backfired.
Unlike during the Cold War, when the U.S. successfully deterred the Soviets for decades, the U.S. has now implicitly recognized Russia’s sphere of influence and perhaps undermined its own role as the most powerful global protector of democracy. This war marks the single biggest reversal of trends in the Western liberal order in the 21st century. Long-term tremors have culminated in a seismic shift that has injured both Western credibility and the foundations of international treaties. Overnight, the geopolitical outlook has become significantly worse for U.S. national-security interests, and now the U.S. must manage the fallout accordingly.
America Could Have Done So Much More to Protect Ukraine
The paths to deterrence were not taken.
Russia has launched another invasion of Ukraine. Countless Ukrainians and Russians will die. Countless more will flee. The economic and geopolitical second- and third-order effects of this war will not be fully understood for some time. The idea that this war can be quarantined will prove to be a pipe dream.
This moment might be surreal were it not for the overt warning signs. The Kremlin built up Russian forces along Ukraine’s borders even as it issued maximalist demands and shut down diplomatic off-ramps. Long-term geopolitical trends—such as Ukraine’s decisive pivot to the West and Russia’s irredentism—shaped the contours of conflict. Meanwhile, the Biden administration progressively raised the alarm about the Kremlin’s likely course of action. But even if this conflict was foreseeable, that does not mean it was inevitable.
After Ukraine became independent and forfeited the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, the West could have loosened the purse strings to guarantee the country’s economic independence. After the 2004 Orange Revolution, the West could have embraced Ukraine’s Western aspirations, accelerated an EU Association Agreement and a NATO Membership Action Plan, and driven domestic transformation to shield Europe’s largest country from nascent Russian revanchism. After the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, the West could have invested in a strategic security partnership with Ukraine that would have made the costs of a Russian offensive prohibitively high. Yet none of this came to pass.
Instead, for two decades, the U.S. entertained illusions about what might be accomplished with Russia, a reluctant partner, while remaining oblivious to opportunities in Ukraine, a far more willing one. In its relationship with Russia, the U.S. had limited prospects of achieving any objectives outside of arms control, whereas with Ukraine it might have successfully influenced regional development.
The seed of this conflict was planted many years ago, across multiple Republican and Democratic administrations. But the Biden administration and its successors will own the geopolitical consequences of this war.
Undoubtedly, things could have been worse—one need only imagine a world where the former president was still in office. I acknowledge that the Biden administration reacted to the warning signs with consistently powerful statements about the U.S. commitment to the safety of U.S. citizens abroad, its resolve to defend NATO’s eastern flank, and Ukraine’s right to sovereignty, territorial integrity, and self-determination in the international system. The Biden administration also marshaled unity among U.S. allies, though it remains to be seen whether the promised sanctions and security measures will materialize.
Nevertheless, U.S. leaders cannot absolve themselves of guilt by claiming they did all they could to prevent another invasion; they offered a necessary response, not a sufficient one. Like every administration since the end of the Cold War, Joe Biden’s fell victim to wishful thinking about the Kremlin’s ambitions in Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s basic commitment to international norms. In doing so, the Biden administration continued the decades-long practice of allowing deterrence to erode. The paths to prevention were not taken.
For instance, early in December, President Biden openly acknowledged that he would not send American troops to fight in Ukraine, thus removing any possibility of strategic ambiguity. The U.S. could have refused to elucidate its security commitments to Ukraine, much as it has done vis-à-vis Taiwan for decades. The implicit threat of U.S. and NATO intervention would have forced Putin to contend with the risks of further escalation. Instead, Biden granted Putin a free hand.
The U.S. also refused to provide advanced weapon systems to Ukraine, such as Patriot anti-aircraft missiles or Harpoon anti-ship missiles, because it determined that Ukraine’s armed forces were not sophisticated enough to handle them. Although Ukraine would have struggled to realize the full potential of these systems, they could nonetheless have affected Russia’s calculus for military operations. And for those who might argue that Russia would have preempted the shipment of weaponry by invading, I would contend that if invasion was already the predicted outcome, what was there to lose?
All the while, the Biden administration failed to pair diplomatic overtures with sufficiently powerful, credible military pressure, perhaps over fears of a bilateral conflict with Russia. These fears were misplaced. I can say from my significant experience dealing with the highest levels of Russia’s military leadership that it has no interest in a bilateral confrontation with the U.S. Russian leaders have zero desire for nuclear war, and they understand that they would inevitably lose in a conventional war. However, Russia excels at compelling the U.S. to self-deter.
Besides military pressure, the U.S. also failed to consider graduated response options once Putin’s preferred course of action had been established. The U.S. could have imposed targeted sanctions on Russian leadership or introduced long-overdue anti-corruption legislation to signal the impending costs of reinvasion to the Kremlin. By choosing to view these options through an all-or-nothing lens, the U.S. unnecessarily constrained its response. Biden’s administration was reactive when it should have been proactive. Over and over, the president’s longtime senior advisers seem to have recommended narrow, low-risk policy options, and these backfired.
Unlike during the Cold War, when the U.S. successfully deterred the Soviets for decades, the U.S. has now implicitly recognized Russia’s sphere of influence and perhaps undermined its own role as the most powerful global protector of democracy. This war marks the single biggest reversal of trends in the Western liberal order in the 21st century. Long-term tremors have culminated in a seismic shift that has injured both Western credibility and the foundations of international treaties. Overnight, the geopolitical outlook has become significantly worse for U.S. national-security interests, and now the U.S. must manage the fallout accordingly.
9. On Ukraine’s Snake Island, a defiant last stand against Russian forces
On Ukraine’s Snake Island, a defiant last stand against Russian forces
As the Russian military pounded targets across Ukraine with an array of bombs and missiles, a small team of Ukrainian border guards on a rocky, desolate island received an ominous message: Give up or be attacked.
“I am a Russian warship,” a voice from the invaders said, according to a recording of the communications. “I ask you to lay down your arms and surrender to avoid bloodshed and unnecessary deaths. Otherwise, you will be bombed.”
The Ukrainians responded boldly.
“Russian warship,” came the reply, “go f--- yourself.”
The Russians opened fire, eventually killing the 13 border guards.
News of the defiant last stand on the Black Sea went viral Thursday, highlighting the grim decisions that Ukrainians have faced during the largest attack on a European nation since World War II. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said hours later that the island’s defenders will be bestowed with the title “Hero of Ukraine,” the highest honorific the Ukrainian leader can award.
A copy of the recording was posted on the website of the Ukrainian news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda, and a Ukrainian official confirmed its authenticity to The Washington Post. A separate recording, posted on TikTok, shows what appears to be a border guard in a helmet and balaclava on the atoll, also known as Zmiinyi Island, or Snake Island, cursing after coming under fire. His profile lists him as a 23-year-old from Odessa, a port city on the Black Sea.
Stories of resistance amid bloodshed came from all over Ukraine. Zelensky, speaking at a news conference, said the border guards had attempted to protect the island for much of Thursday before they were killed. At least 137 Ukrainians were killed in less than a day of fighting, with operations continuing, he said.
A senior U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the operations candidly, said the Pentagon was aware of Ukrainians fighting back but declined to characterize their performance, citing a desire not to assist Russia.
“This is their country they’re fighting for,” the official said of the Ukrainians.
While isolated, the 42-acre island marks the edge of Ukraine’s territorial waters, giving it a strategic role within the Black Sea by connecting a shipping corridor to the Ukrainian cities of Odessa, Mykolaiv and Kherson.
The sparsely populated island has changed hands numerous times over the past century, serving as a military outpost for radar and other equipment.
After World War I, the island was seized by Romania. The Soviet Union took control of it after World War II, leading to the construction of a lighthouse and military base, according to a history of the dispute published at Queen’s University in Canada.
The island became Ukraine’s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, though Romania continued to dispute ownership. An international court ultimately left Ukraine in control of the island and Romania with possession of much of the surrounding waters.
Dalton Bennett and María Paúl contributed to this report.
10. Attack on Ukraine brings rare sight in Russia: Protests in cities against Putin and invasion
Mission for VOA and RFE/RL: Report on these protests 24/7.
Do these protests indicate resistance potential inside Russia? Or will Putin bring them to a halt with an iron fist?
Attack on Ukraine brings rare sight in Russia: Protests in cities against Putin and invasion
The Washington Post · by Robyn DixonToday at 2:22 p.m. EST|Updated today at 5:00 p.m. EST · February 24, 2022
MOSCOW — Thousands of people protested President Vladimir Putin’s attacks on Ukraine in cities across Russia on Thursday, a striking show of anger in a nation where spontaneous mass demonstrations are illegal and protesters can face fines and jail.
More than 1,700 people were arrested in at least 47 cities across the nation, according to rights group OVD-Info. The group was declared a foreign agent last year, when Putin launched a sweeping crackdown on activists, rights groups and opposition figures.
The protests came with an outpouring of horror from liberal Russians, social media influencers, athletes, actors, television presenters and others.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Thursday spoke out against the attacks during a court hearing, as members of the Russian political elite either remained silent or celebrated.
Navalny appeared via video link in court on charges of fraud, one of several cases against him, after he was nearly fatally poisoned with a chemical weapon by Russian security agents in 2020 and jailed in 2021 upon returning to Russia following medical treatment for the poisoning in Germany. His political organization was banned as extremist last year. He calls the charges against him political.
“I have no method of communicating with the outside world,” Navalny said at the Lefortovo District Court hearing. “I ask that my appeal to the court and to the world be recorded,” he said.
“I am against this war. I believe that this war between Russia and Ukraine is being waged to cover up the robbery of Russian citizens and to distract their attention from the problems that exist within the country from the degradation of the economy,” Nalvany added.
He said the war would lead to many casualties and ruined lives. “This group that has now seized power” was waging war to cling to the spoils of office, he said, including palaces in Moscow and on the Black Sea.
His arrest a year ago provoked the biggest protests seen in Russia in cities across the country. On Thursday, the anger and dismay for many Russians was just as visceral, although many were afraid to risk a criminal record and jail for taking to the streets.
With Putin’s moves to crush dissent, including a bar on critical reporting of the military and security agencies, analysts predicted the protests would probably be swiftly curtailed. Last year, many activists and opposition figures were either jailed, placed under house arrest or forced to flee the country to avoid prison.
About 1,000 protesters rallied in central Moscow, chanting “no to war,” with some of them carrying antiwar banners. Riot police closed in quickly, forcing them in to police vans. Large protests took place in other cities such as St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and Perm.
Russia’s Investigative Committee warned it would track down protest organizers and participants, threatening “severe punishment for mass riots.” At least 290 people were arrested in Moscow, 128 in St Petersburg, 50 in Perm and 37 in Yekaterinburg, OVD-Info reported. More than 290,000 people signed a petition against the attacks on change.org.
Marina Agaltsova, a lawyer with the Russian human rights group Memorial, said those who did protest were extremely brave, adding that “Russians are deeply terrified of arrests and court trials over rallying people to go out and protest.”
Human rights activist Marina Litvinovich urged Russians not to cry and “not to be afraid, but to just come out and say that they are against the war,” in comments on social media. Calling on people to protest is an offense under Russia’s restrictive laws.
Exiled Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Putin critic jailed in 2005 for 10 years on charges of fraud, said anyone who helped “this junta” was a war criminal. “I urge you to do everything possible, everyone in their place, to stop the war!” he wrote on Telegram.
Comedian and television presenter Maxim Galkin wrote on Instagram, “There can be no excuse for war! No war!” Ivan Urgant, a presenter and actor on state television, posted on Instagram, “Fear and pain. NO WAR.”
Liberal political analyst Vladimir Pastukhov called the attacks on Ukraine “the mistake of the whole nation” of Russia in commentary on the Echo of Moscow radio website. “The price will be incredibly high, which is frightening to think about,” he said. “This is a war already lost by Putin … the occupation of Ukraine, direct or indirect, would be a noose around Russia’s neck.”
Ekaterina Schulmann, a prominent liberal political analyst and journalist, said everyone was afraid and urged people to speak out after “the deafening silence of the initial horror.” She said, “Our old life is gone, and a new life is coming. It’s poorer, more dangerous, and more limited, but that’s no reason to change your principles. Good and evil do not change places just because our personal circumstances change.”
Alexei Kouprianov, a data analyst who runs a St. Petersburg Facebook information page on coronavirus data, condemned Russia’s aggression and “expressed solidarity with Ukrainians, guilt and remorse.” He said, “I regret we failed to overthrow the regime before it went too far.”
The Washington Post · by Robyn DixonToday at 2:22 p.m. EST|Updated today at 5:00 p.m. EST · February 24, 2022
11. Ukraine Invasion by Russia Is the Beginning of the End for Putin and His Friends
Is Putin vulnerable to opposition inside Russia? Are there covert action options?
Some useful themes and messages in this conclusion:
In the end, all these factors will contribute to Putin’s decline, will add to his vulnerability to domestic challenges, will isolate him, and will, in the end, destroy him. We should not minimize the toll he will take as he, already an aging man seeking to recreate a lost dream of his youth, tries to bend the world to his perverse vision. He will not go down easy and he will take many with him.
But if history is any guide, his over-reach and his miscalculations, his weaknesses as a strategist, and the flaws in his character will undo him. And, if there is justice in the world, if the people of the U.S. and Europe are paying attention, they will also serve to undo those Putin acolytes abroad who supported this monster and ignored the profound danger to us all that he embodies.
Ukraine Invasion by Russia Is the Beginning of the End for Putin and His Friends
GONE TOO FAR
Vladimir Putin's attack on Ukraine will result in the downfall of him and his friends.
Updated Feb. 24, 2022 4:47PM ET / Published Feb. 24, 2022 12:52PM ET
opinion
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
Five a.m. local time in Ukraine on Thursday, Feb. 24, 2022, the moment the Russian military launched its unprovoked, indefensible full-scale invasion of the largest country in Europe, marked the beginning of the end for Vladimir Putin.
The attack, which even in its first few hours has taken a devastating toll on Ukraine and its people, also will be seen as a turning point in the careers of those who supported Vladimir Putin—from the oligarchs now scrambling to keep their superyachts from being seized to cynical America political leaders who have since 2016 offered a chorus celebrating and defending the Russian president.
Despite his past crimes and abuses, Putin has somehow managed for two decades to be seen as something less than the threat he really was. He was largely accepted at the head tables of the world’s elite, even after he murdered and imprisoned his critics, stole vast fortunes from the Russian people. He spoke at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 and effectively rejected the post-World War II international order… and still the invitations kept coming. After he ordered the invasion of Georgia in 2008, he received a slap on the wrist from the international community but maintained his role attending international summits and hosting dignitaries.
Putin hosted the Olympics in 2014, shortly before he invaded Ukraine for the first time and seized Crimea. That cost him his G7 Summit privileges but still he was embraced by world leaders and business moguls as though he were a leading citizen of the world in good standing.
Vladimir Putin at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics just before Russia invaded Crimea.
Pascal Le Segretain/Getty
Putin preened and posed beaming as Russia hosted the FIFA World Cup beginning in June 2018. Although the U.S. intelligence community unanimously concluded Putin had interfered in U.S. elections in 2016, in the midst of the World Cup festivities, Putin welcomed a delegation of Republican senators on July 4, 2018. Less than two weeks later, he met with the U.S. president he explicitly sought to help elect—Donald Trump—in Helsinki. At this meeting, Trump fawned over the Russian leader and when asked whether he believed Putin or his own intelligence community about the election, Trump said, deferentially, “President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Sen. John McCain called it a “disgraceful performance” and said, “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.”
U.S. leaders were not alone in succumbing to the lure of Putin and the corrupt interlocking empire of businesses he controlled—and used to gain influence globally. Former German officials, led by ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and top German business people flocked to work for companies close to Putin. Other European leaders followed suit with jobs at key energy companies like Lukoil and Gazprom. Poisoning enemies, tossing them off of balconies, or imprisoning them, these things were just not enough to compromise Putin’s standing.
Just this week, former President Trump praised Putin for his “genius.” Fox News broadcast Russian talking points to its loyal, which is to say, gullible audiences across America. A month ago former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called Putin “talented,” “savvy,” and a “statesman.”
For years, Putin was the ultimate wolf in sheep’s clothing. He was known to be an enemy of democracy, a brutal dictator, and one of the world’s leading kleptocrats (which may well have made him the world’s richest man.) But whether it was the money or the hope that Putin would use his power to help them or their causes, world leaders turned to him. In many Western countries, Putin used that to his advantage, openly cultivating movements that supported his anti-internationalist, anti-NATO, anti-Western agenda not just in the U.S. but in the U.K., France, Italy, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and the Balkans. He and his oligarch friends supported groups from the NRA to the Brexit movement. To be honest, when it came to sheep’s clothing he barely needed a sweater.
In fact, he became brash enough to do as he did in Munich in 2007 and tell the world over and over again who he really was. At the ultimate club meeting for global insiders, the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos just last year, Putin warned of parallels between the global situation today and that of the 1930s. “Today, such a global hot conflict is, I hope, in principle impossible. But, I repeat, the situation can develop unpredictably and uncontrollably.”
In a lengthy article published in July of last year, Putin laid out his views on Ukraine. He began by saying Russians and Ukrainians were “a single whole.” He then laid out his twisted view of the history of the two countries, a journey more through his own mind than through the past, and concluded, “I am confident that the true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.”
And yet still, as the current crisis began, such was the prevailing view of the Russian leader, that few believed that Putin, despite past invasions, would ever do something so bold as to attack a European neighbor unprovoked, based on a transparent fabric of lies, regardless of the consequences for the people of Ukraine or, frankly, for the cost to his own troops or citizens. As recently as days ago, when the U.S. government was sharing intelligence that made Putin’s intentions clear, it was pooh-poohed, dismissed by some as an American provocation rather than an insight into the goals of the world’s most dangerous man.
In hours, the scales have fallen from the world’s eyes. All along he showed us who he was and we refused to believe him. For some that was because he did not fit with their preconceptions about the nature of the modern world. For others, it was more of a choice, they believed what they wanted to believe. They saw the Putin that advanced their interests.
UKRAINE-CRISIS/EAST-FRONTLINE
A Ukrainian service member on the front line near the village of Travneve in Donetsk region, Ukraine.
GLEB GARANICH/REUTERS
Now, he is mentioned in the same breath as the last man to shatter the peace of Europe, Adolf Hitler. Putin, again, even aided in this analogy when he used the same lies to justify his invasion of Ukraine that Hitler had used to justify entering the Sudetenland in 1938. (Hitler lied that Sudeten Germans were being persecuted by the Czechs, Putin said the same of Russians in Ukraine.)
The attack on Ukraine is not on par with carving away at a slice of Georgia. It is not even akin to seizing Crimea. It is an act of aggression on a scale that neither Europe nor the world has seen in eight decades. It came, thanks to Putin’s demented neo-tsarist reverie explaining his actions on Monday night, along with a warning that his vision of Russia includes other countries that were once part of the Russian empire. It was augmented by a threat so heavy-handed and crude that it might be dismissed had it not come from the man who controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal: “Whoever tries to interfere with us, and even more so, to create threats for our country, for our people, should know that Russia's response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences that you have never experienced in your history.”
The Putin of Davos cocktail parties who presented himself as just another world leader, a man who should be as admired as he was feared for his cunning and his unflinching use of power, is dead. He was buried in the debris of the first rocket that landed in Ukraine.
Putin will now be seen and treated as the greatest near-term threat to peace the world faces. The man who thought he could exploit the division he helped sow in the West, has now united it. NATO’s forward deployments in countries he threatened will not be withdrawn anytime soon. NATO, which was adrift, has once again found purpose in containing Putin. Europeans who flirted with Russia will no longer do so. Europe will finally start to turn away so they are no longer dependent on Russian energy.
Putin’s opponents in Russia will be empowered. That country’s democracy movement, like those in places like neighboring Belarus whose leader, Alexander Lukashenko, played the role of loyal Putin flunky in the current attack, will be energized. His oligarch friends will pay a high price and if Western sanctions are deep enough and last long enough they will come to resent their association with their capo di tutti capi. The Russian economy, already weak, will also suffer if those sanctions are maintained and, wherever possible, deepened.
Already, Ukraine’s inexperienced almost accidental president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has been elevated by this attack and the role he has played thus far in standing up to it. His speech, directed to his people and those of Russia, was a tour de force, the most humane address any leader has delivered in the course of this crisis. The support his people will get from the West will exceed what was thought possible days ago. It is now understood that the people of Ukraine are fighting for the rule of law, for democracy, and for the world order. If they suffer early defeats, the movement to ultimately restore what the Russians are trying to take from them will have a long list of active donors and supporters from across Europe, the U.S., and around the world. And each victory they win at any stage of this conflict will be seen not as a defeat of Russian forces but of Putin himself.
Even Putin’s supporters in the West will realize that their embrace of him will be their undoing. Pictures will emerge of Russian atrocities. Putin will be condemned as a war criminal. Fox News and Trump will no longer be able to glibly “both sides” the conflict between Russia and Ukraine or minimize the manifest evil of the man America’s 45th president sought to embrace.
In the end, all these factors will contribute to Putin’s decline, will add to his vulnerability to domestic challenges, will isolate him, and will, in the end, destroy him. We should not minimize the toll he will take as he, already an aging man seeking to recreate a lost dream of his youth, tries to bend the world to his perverse vision. He will not go down easy and he will take many with him.
But if history is any guide, his over-reach and his miscalculations, his weaknesses as a strategist, and the flaws in his character will undo him. And, if there is justice in the world, if the people of the U.S. and Europe are paying attention, they will also serve to undo those Putin acolytes abroad who supported this monster and ignored the profound danger to us all that he embodies.
12. The Eurasian Nightmare:Chinese-Russian Convergence and the Future of American Order
Excerpts:
The United States and its allies have the raw power to pursue a similar dual containment strategy today. As National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has noted, even a more united Sino-Russian axis would be dwarfed in economic, diplomatic, and military capabilities by Washington and its allies in Europe and the Asia-Pacific.
Granted, the United States and its friends can’t do this on the cheap. Checking dual challenges would likely require major rearmament programs and deeper cooperation against political and economic coercion, all underpinned by a sharper awareness of the threat posed by China and Russia’s autocratic convergence. Put differently, it won’t work to pursue a Cold War–style strategy with post–Cold War levels of urgency and investment. But the best way of resisting a familiar challenge—a bloc of autocracies at the heart of Eurasia—is through a familiar remedy: strengthening the collective resilience of the countries holding the balance along its periphery.
This strategy may initially encourage Sino-Russian cooperation. Yet history also suggests that driving ambivalent partners apart may first require pushing them together. During the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration wagered that a policy of pressure was more likely to break the Sino-Soviet pact than one of inducement, because it would force the weaker party—Beijing—into a position of reliance on the stronger—Moscow—that would ultimately make both countries quite uncomfortable. Eisenhower reasoned, correctly, that Washington might someday find an opportunity to exploit tensions between its two enemies, but only after it had shown that their partnership would produce more misery than profit.
If the United States is to promote an eventual strategic reorientation in Moscow, it first must demonstrate that Putin’s policy of revisionism and alignment with Beijing is not working—and that the alternative to decent relations with the West is an ever-greater dependence on a China whose abrasiveness seems to grow with its power. If that message can be driven home over a period of years, it could have a constructive effect on Russian thinking, if not under Putin then under his successor. Such an outcome may seem like a distant aspiration, which implies waging not one but two cold wars along the way. If nothing else, then, the Sino-Russian convergence has clarified how serious the new Eurasian challenge is—and what will be required to meet it.
The Eurasian Nightmare
Chinese-Russian Convergence and the Future of American Order
February 25, 2022
The greatest strategic problem the United States faces is the convergence of its two main rivals, China and Russia—countries that don’t always like or trust each other but nonetheless derive great benefits from their simultaneous assaults on the existing international order. And as Moscow and Beijing contest the balance of power at both ends of Eurasia, they are drawing together in ominous ways.
In January 2022, China publicly supported Russia’s intervention in Kazakhstan to thwart a “color revolution” in the two countries’ shared backyard. In early February, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping issued a long joint statement endorsing efforts to keep U.S. influence out of their near abroads, attacking the United States’ alliances as Cold War relics, defending their own autocratic models of government, and declaring that Sino-Russian friendship has “no limits.” All of this follows significant, sustained upticks in military, economic, diplomatic, and technological cooperation. Expect more in the future: as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine crystallizes tensions between Putin and the West, it also underscores his need for support from Beijing.
The Sino-Russian convergence gives both powers more room for maneuver by magnifying Washington’s two-front problem: the United States now faces increasingly aggressive near-peer rivals in two separate theaters—eastern Europe and the western Pacific—that are thousands of miles apart. Sino-Russian cooperation, while fraught and ambivalent, raises the prospect that America’s two great-power rivalries could merge into a single contest against an autocratic axis. Even short of that, the current situation has revived the great geopolitical nightmare of the modern era: an authoritarian power or entente that strives for dominance in Eurasia, the central strategic theater of the world.
That nightmare traces back to the writings of the political geographer Halford Mackinder, who warned in 1904 that the coming era would feature high-stakes struggles to rule Eurasia and its surrounding oceans. That prophesy played out in the two cataclysmic hot wars and one global cold war that followed. Mackinder’s vision has become newly relevant in the twenty-first century: the United States’ rivals are using old and new methods in their bids to create a radically revised global order with an autocratic Eurasia at its core.
THE HEART OF THE WORLD
Mackinder is considered by many to be the father of geopolitics, and argued in his famous “heartland” theory of political geography (as well as subsequent publications) that three revolutions were putting Eurasia at center stage in global affairs. First, the colonization of Africa and much of Asia meant that possibilities for easy imperial expansion were fading, presaging fiercer fights between great powers in Eurasia, the world’s geopolitical core. Second, the proliferation of railroads was making it possible to project power across vast territories and creating new opportunities for conquest on the Eurasian landmass. Third, illiberal states were harnessing rapidly industrializing economies to underwrite horrific repression at home and dramatic expansion abroad. If such states were able to dominate Eurasia, global supremacy would be within their reach.
Eurasia, Mackinder pointed out, controlled most of the world’s population and industrial potential. A power or coalition that gained control of Eurasia’s resources could then build unrivaled navies and expand its empire across the seas. The coming geopolitical dramas would thus play out on and around this vital landmass. Autocratic bids for expansion would trigger fights with coalitions linking offshore powers—the United Kingdom and later the United States—to onshore allies whose existence would be threatened by a Eurasian hegemon.
Mackinder got plenty wrong: the big challenges to Eurasian equilibrium initially came not from Russia, as he had expected, but from Germany and Japan. This led the strategist Nicholas Spykman to argue that the supercontinent’s crucial theaters were its European and East Asian “rimlands” rather than its Russian “heartland.” But Mackinder nailed the basic pattern. The three great showdowns of the twentieth century—World War I, World War II, and the Cold War—were brawls between autocratic states, which sought to dominate huge swaths of Eurasia and its adjoining oceans, and the amphibious alliances, anchored by London and then Washington, which sought to contain them.
The contours of these contests changed over time. Germany and Japan pursued outright conquest, often by exploiting new technologies—tanks and tactical airpower, submarines and aircraft carriers—to project power on an unprecedented scale. During the Cold War, nuclear stalemate led the Soviet Union to rely mostly on military intimidation, political subversion, and proxy forces. Yet the stakes remained the same: U.S. policymakers, from Woodrow Wilson to George Kennan, understood that a hostile, autocratic Eurasia would fundamentally reshape the globe. And after a brief, post–Cold War respite, the United States confronts a new version of the old nightmare today.
HEGEMONIC GAMBITS
The present Sino-Russian partnership naturally invites comparison to the Sino-Soviet alliance during the Cold War. But a better analogy might be Germany and Japan before World War II. Though formally allied, Tokyo and Berlin were ambivalent, distrustful partners with fundamentally different long-term visions. Nonetheless, each was committed to overthrowing the existing order, and each profited from the chaos created by the other’s advances.
Presently, neither China nor Russia has engaged in anything approaching World War II–scale aggression. But both countries fundamentally resent the U.S.-led international order because American influence obstructs their paths to domination in world affairs, and because the liberal principles enshrined in the international system are at odds with the illiberal orders that their leaders have constructed at home. China and Russia may be pursuing distinct agendas, but together they present a comprehensive challenge to the geopolitical balance in Eurasia and beyond.
Moscow and Beijing are drawing together in ominous ways.
China’s capabilities are greater than Russia’s, which makes its efforts more audacious. Beijing aims to excise U.S. power from maritime Asia in order to consolidate a Chinese sphere of influence encompassing much of the Western Pacific. China is simultaneously reaching into Eurasia through investment and infrastructure programs, such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the Digital Silk Road, that cast its economic, political, and military influence into Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and regions further afield. In short, Beijing is looking for hybrid hegemony on land and at sea.
China’s gambit intersects with Russia’s efforts to revise the status quo. For years, Putin has been vying to reestablish Russian primacy from Central Asia to eastern Europe. Putin seems to envision a Europe in which NATO is effectively rolled back to its Cold War frontiers and its relationship with Washington is badly weakened. As Russia has recovered its strength after the early post–Cold War era, Moscow has also projected power into the Artic, North Atlantic, Middle East, and other flanking theaters. Moscow has no hope of building a Russo-centric global order, but it can weaken the existing system from one direction as China attacks it from others.
As they have throughout the past century, attempts at Eurasian expansion reflect the shifting nature of global power. Beijing’s record-shattering naval buildup, Moscow’s serial aggression against disobedient neighbors, and both countries’ efforts to fundamentally upend the military balance in key regions such as eastern Europe and East Asia show that hard power hasn’t gone out of style. And both countries are also using more novel methods to weaken their rivals and spread their influence: Russian cyberattacks and digital disinformation campaigns are the counterpart to China’s infrastructure projects, efforts to control the world’s 5G networks, and other non-military measures that extend its global sway.
TOGETHER, AND SEPARATE
Because both China and Russia seek to break the existing order, it is unsurprising that convergence has birthed cooperation. The two countries have reportedly swapped tips on how to manage the Internet and control dissent at home; they have also worked, through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to fortify friendly dictators in Central Asia. The bilateral trade, finance, and energy relationship between China and Russia has broadened, and Beijing and Moscow have lent each other important, if sometimes tacit, diplomatic support in the UN Security Council. Not least, an expanding military relationship features joint exercises in Central Asia and the Baltic and South China Seas, transfers of weaponry, and burgeoning defense technological cooperation, some of which is likely happening in secret.
Yet formal cooperation between Beijing and Moscow is an insufficient measure of their partnership, because the two help each other simply by pursuing their individual goals. When China and Russia use disinformation and strategic corruption to meddle in liberal societies, or work to make international organizations friendlier to illiberal rule, they contribute to a global autocratic resurgence that benefits both states. And it is at the strategic level where the payoffs of convergence are most pronounced.
Both Beijing and Moscow seem to have learned a vital lesson from the Soviet defeat in the Cold War: that it makes poor strategy to compete with Washington on one front while antagonizing a second enemy on another. China and Russia have thus resolved to stand “back to back” along their shared Eurasian border, freeing them to focus on eroding the U.S.-led order.
Washington’s rivals are working to create a revised global order with an autocratic Eurasia at its core.
The Russian Far East, for instance, presently houses fewer military assets than at any time since Nazi forces were at Moscow’s gates in 1941, a testament to the way that reduced tensions with China enable Russia to concentrate on intimidating the West. By the same token, the existence of simultaneous threats from China and Russia prevents Washington from concentrating its power against either rival, and leaves it vulnerable to being whipsawed by two separate competitors. The Sino-Russian relationship isn’t an alliance, but it doesn’t need to be one in order to cause strategic migraines for the United States.
To be sure, the partnership suffers from real constraints. China and Russia are unlikely to come to each other’s defense in a conflict with Washington, although they might seek subtle ways—such as sharing intelligence or posturing troops menacingly—to prevent the United States from decisively defeating one opponent and then homing in on the other. Russia, having invaded Ukraine and facing comprehensive sanctions from the West, won’t find equivalent economic relief from Beijing, in part because China isn’t eager to bring down the financial wrath of the hegemon by engaging in sanctions-busting on a massive scale. Tensions lurk in Central Asia, where both countries can’t be preeminent simultaneously; in the Arctic, where Russia is a resident power and China is an interloper; and in Africa, where Moscow generates instability that hardly improves prospects for repayment of Chinese loans. Eventually, the overall clash of interests could be severe, because Russia wouldn’t particularly enjoy living in the Sinocentric world that Xi envisions.
For the time being, however, Washington’s Eurasian predicament will only get worse: threats to the existing order are intensifying, and its opponents’ bellicosity is increasing, on both sides of that landmass at once. Although Xi's and Putin's ultimate objectives diverge, their intermediate goals can keep them closely aligned for years to come.
BREAKING THE GREAT-POWER TRIANGLE
History suggests a solution to this predicament, but the obvious answer—using concessions and diplomacy to turn Moscow against Beijing—is the wrong one. Although the idea may tempt observers in Washington and Europe who hope to improve the strategic geometry of the great-power triangle, Sino-Russian tensions aren’t yet sharp enough to produce the sort of split that happened in the late 1960s, and any efforts to purchase Moscow’s cooperation would surely backfire.
Putin has made clear that the price of sustained de-escalation with the West is overturning the post–Cold War settlement in Europe—and if Putin were offered such a deal, he might well conclude that his strategy of pressure is working and push even harder. There is no diplomatic fix to the Sino-Russian alignment that doesn’t involve gravely weakening the United States’ position at one end of the Eurasian landmass. And it is hard to imagine that an effective U.S. global strategy can withstand such a blow.
A more useful lesson from history is that there may be no good alternative to facing challenges on both sides of Eurasia at once. In 1940 and 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt declined the advice of those who argued that he must appease Japan in order to concentrate on Nazi Germany, because he recognized that both countries posed mortal threats to the United States’ vision for the international order. And later, throughout the first two decades of the Cold War, the United States sought to contain both China and the Soviet Union after concluding that there was no acceptable way of separating them for the time being.
The United States confronts a new version of the old nightmare today.
The United States and its allies have the raw power to pursue a similar dual containment strategy today. As National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has noted, even a more united Sino-Russian axis would be dwarfed in economic, diplomatic, and military capabilities by Washington and its allies in Europe and the Asia-Pacific.
Granted, the United States and its friends can’t do this on the cheap. Checking dual challenges would likely require major rearmament programs and deeper cooperation against political and economic coercion, all underpinned by a sharper awareness of the threat posed by China and Russia’s autocratic convergence. Put differently, it won’t work to pursue a Cold War–style strategy with post–Cold War levels of urgency and investment. But the best way of resisting a familiar challenge—a bloc of autocracies at the heart of Eurasia—is through a familiar remedy: strengthening the collective resilience of the countries holding the balance along its periphery.
This strategy may initially encourage Sino-Russian cooperation. Yet history also suggests that driving ambivalent partners apart may first require pushing them together. During the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration wagered that a policy of pressure was more likely to break the Sino-Soviet pact than one of inducement, because it would force the weaker party—Beijing—into a position of reliance on the stronger—Moscow—that would ultimately make both countries quite uncomfortable. Eisenhower reasoned, correctly, that Washington might someday find an opportunity to exploit tensions between its two enemies, but only after it had shown that their partnership would produce more misery than profit.
If the United States is to promote an eventual strategic reorientation in Moscow, it first must demonstrate that Putin’s policy of revisionism and alignment with Beijing is not working—and that the alternative to decent relations with the West is an ever-greater dependence on a China whose abrasiveness seems to grow with its power. If that message can be driven home over a period of years, it could have a constructive effect on Russian thinking, if not under Putin then under his successor. Such an outcome may seem like a distant aspiration, which implies waging not one but two cold wars along the way. If nothing else, then, the Sino-Russian convergence has clarified how serious the new Eurasian challenge is—and what will be required to meet it.
13. The Coming Ukrainian Insurgency: Russia’s Invasion Could Unleash Forces the Kremlin Can’t Control
Just a reminder: "Unconventional warfare consists of activities to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power through and with an underground auxiliary, and (or) a guerrilla force in a denied area."
Traditional strategic unconventional warfare objectives may include the following:
•Undermining the domestic and international legitimacy of the target authority.
•Neutralizing the target authority’s power and shifting that power to the resistance organization.
•Destroying the confidence and will of the target authority’s leadership.
•Isolating the target authority from international diplomatic and material support while obtaining such support for the resistance organization.
•Obtaining the support or neutrality of the various segments of the society.
Access the UW pyramid HERE
Excerpts:
Early on, it is likely the Russians will uncover many rings of insurgents, quickly unmasking the insurgency’s initial leaders after years of Russian intelligence collection. But insurgencies adapt swiftly—far faster than the large, structured armies they are fighting—and new leaders emerge molded by their adverse early experiences. Their agility becomes an enormous advantage.
Russia would hope to either limit its incursion to parts of Ukraine whose populations might be more inclined to accept Russian rule or act with such lightning speed so as to seize and pacify the country before a viable resistance can find its legs. But Russia’s military advantages over Ukrainian forces will diminish as the enemy it fights changes from an organized army to a decentralized and mobile resistance. Occupation forces will be subject to harassing attacks designed to both inflict casualties and undermine military discipline. An influence campaign replete with horrific images of carnage—of both civilian Ukrainian and Russian military deaths—will aim to sow antiwar sentiment in Russia and counter Moscow’s narrative that their forces were welcomed as liberators by grateful locals.
Putin’s motivations in starting this war of choice remain the subject of great debate. They may become clearer in the coming days and weeks as Russia continues its offensive. But if his aims are maximalist—redrawing borders or even toppling the current government—an insurgency is inevitable. For both Putin and his enemies, it will be hard to control the forces that have now been unleashed.
The Coming Ukrainian Insurgency
Russia’s Invasion Could Unleash Forces the Kremlin Can’t Control
February 25, 2022
Foreign Affairs · by The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence · February 25, 2022
Russian forces have struck targets across Ukraine and seized key facilities and swaths of territory. The Ukrainian military is no match for this Russian juggernaut. Although some reports suggest Ukrainian troops have rebuffed attacks in certain parts of the country, it seems more likely that Russian President Vladimir Putin will decide just how far Russia goes into Ukraine. As a retired Russian-speaking CIA operations officer, who served in Central Asia and managed agency counterinsurgency operations, I did not think Putin would have attacked Ukraine unless he had already devised a reliable end game, given the costs of an intractable conflict. But Putin’s best laid plans might easily unravel in the face of popular Ukrainian national resistance and an insurgency.
If Russia limits its offensive to the east and south of Ukraine, a sovereign Ukrainian government will not stop fighting. It will enjoy reliable military and economic support from abroad and the backing of a united population. But if Russia pushes on to occupy much of the country and install a Kremlin-appointed puppet regime in Kyiv, a more protracted and thorny conflagration will begin. Putin will face a long, bloody insurgency that could spread across multiple borders, perhaps even reaching into Belarus to challenge Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, Putin’s stalwart ally. Widening unrest could destabilize other countries in Russia’s orbit, such as Kazakhstan, and even spill into Russia itself. When conflicts begin, unpredictable and unimaginable outcomes can become all too real. Putin may not be prepared for the insurgency—or insurgencies—to come.
WINNER’S REMORSE
Many a great power has waged war against a weaker one, only to get bogged down as a result of its failure to have a well-considered end game. This lack of foresight has been especially palpable in troubled occupations. It was one thing for the United States to invade Vietnam in 1965, Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003, likewise for the Soviet Union to enter Afghanistan in 1979; it was an altogether more difficult task to persevere in those countries in the face of stubborn insurgencies.
Russia can likely seize as much of Ukraine’s territory as it chooses. But plans to pacify Ukraine will require far more than the reserve forces Putin has suggested might occupy the territory as “peacekeepers” after initial combat objectives are met. Thanks to Putin’s aggression, anti-Russian fervor and homegrown nationalism have surged in Ukraine. Ukrainians have spent the last eight years planning, training, and equipping themselves for resisting a Russian occupation. Ukraine understands that no U.S. or NATO forces will come to its rescue on the battlefield. Its strategy doesn’t depend on turning back a Russian invasion, but rather in bleeding Moscow so as to make occupation untenable.
When conflicts begin, unpredictable and unimaginable outcomes can become all too real.
Any future insurgency will benefit from Ukraine’s geography. The country is bordered by four NATO states: Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. Belarus, a Russian ally, is itself bordered by Poland on the west and another NATO member Lithuania on the north. These long borders offer the United States and NATO an enduring way to support Ukrainian resistance and a long-term insurgency and to stoke unrest in Belarus should the United States and its allies choose to covertly aid opposition to Lukashenko’s regime.
Moldova, to the southwest of Ukraine, is also an intriguing player. Although nominally neutral (neutrality is written into its constitution), Moldova has cooperated in the past with the United States and NATO; it has a somewhat frigid relationship with Moscow thanks to ongoing tensions over the breakaway republic of Transnistria, a narrow strip of land along the Moldovan-Ukrainian border. Moscow props up this separatist entity, which is garrisoned by Russian troops in the name of “peacekeeping.” Its role in Transnistria is pushing Moldova toward the West. Last November, Maia Sandu, a former Moldovan prime minister, defeated the Russian-backed incumbent president. Moldova is not likely to overtly provoke the Kremlin, but Sandu might be willing to covertly cooperate with Ukraine’s resistance.
As the United States learned in Vietnam and in Afghanistan, an insurgency that has reliable supply lines, ample reserves of fighters, and sanctuary over the border can sustain itself indefinitely, sap an occupying army’s will to fight, and exhaust political support for the occupation at home. Russia would also have to think twice before trying to chase insurgents across the border in Poland, for instance, since such actions could trigger war with NATO.
LINES OF SUPPORT
The United States will invariably be a major and essential source of backing for a Ukrainian insurgency. During the Obama and Trump administrations, the United States acted with restraint in responding to Russian cyberattacks, disinformation, and military expansionism. Washington did not want to unleash a spiral of escalation it could not control, risking Russian reprisals against U.S. banks, businesses, and infrastructure. The Biden administration, however, has so far been less tentative in its dealings with Russia. To counter Russian moves, it has exposed Russian-associated hackers and recovered funds stolen through cyberattack ransoms, extradited Russian oligarchs to stand trial in the United States, and declassified intelligence on Russian plans in Ukraine to unify support among allies and shape the media narrative.
If a viable, independent Ukraine remains standing, whether ruled from Kyiv or Lviv (the largest city in the western part of the country), the United States and its NATO allies can openly aid in its in defense with weapons, training, and cash. It’s reasonable to deduce that the CIA’s legal charter to partner with foreign intelligence counterparts has allowed it to provide training and materials to its Ukrainian partners for years, just as U.S. military trainers have worked with and supplied their Ukrainian counterparts.
This aid will have to become covert if Russia seizes the government and fully occupies the country. Military support for action against a sovereign country with which the United States is not at war has to be clandestine, much like U.S. support for the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, for Iraq’s Kurds prior to the 2003 invasion, and, less successfully, for rebels in Syria a decade ago. Attacking behind enemy lines would require a presidential covert action finding funded by Congress. Of course, a version of this authorization probably already exists and might at most need modification by the White House as a new Congressional Memorandum of Notification to accommodate the shifting circumstances.
A Ukrainian soldier in Novoluhanske, Ukraine, February 2022
Gleb Garanich / Reuters
Supporting an insurgency is in the CIA’s DNA. Its forerunner, the Office of Strategic Services, came into its own during World War II through supporting resistance forces in France, the Netherlands, and East Asia. The CIA’s recent experience in both supporting insurgencies and fighting them in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria prepares it well for opposing Russia’s modern, conventional forces. The United States can help Ukrainian insurgents in hitting targets with the greatest military value and psychological impact.
A Yahoo News report in January described a covert CIA training program for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel that was launched in 2015 by the Obama administration following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. According to the report, the effort included the deployment of CIA paramilitary officers to Ukraine. Such programs mature over time as trust grows between the trainers and their foreign counterparts and as the recipients teach what they have learned to others.
U.S. and Ukrainian officials have long planned for this day. In all likelihood, a covert program to help organize the resistance to Russia already has communications infrastructure, intelligence collection capabilities, and operational plans in place. And the tactics developed to support defensive operations against an invader can transition to those aimed at hobbling an occupying force.
FORCES UNLEASHED
An anti-Russian insurgency will no doubt face obstacles and endure setbacks. Putin is aware of the possibility of Ukrainian resistance to a wider Russian occupation. U.S. officials have alleged that the Russian government maintains lists of Ukrainian political and security officials it would arrest—or even assassinate—once it has seized the country and those of pro-Kremlin figures it would hope to install. Russia would seek to undermine any insurgency by moving expeditiously to eliminate likely leaders and enablers of the resistance.
An insurgency against Russian forces in Ukraine will take time to gather steam and achieve its goals. Resistance movements can take years—not months—to mature, organize, and achieve a meaningful offensive tempo. Even as an American, I could have easily walked the streets or dined in the cafes of Kabul in 2002 and Baghdad in 2003 without a care in the world. But a year or two later, I had to wear body armor and be accompanied by a protective security detail that ferried me around in heavily armored vehicles hoping to avoid ambushes and improvised explosive device strikes.
Russia’s military advantages will diminish as the enemy it fights becomes a decentralized and mobile resistance.
Ukrainian insurgents will have to reckon with advances in modern technology that make their work more difficult. During World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, organized bands of partisans could disperse to the countryside or to the hills. Escaping the reach of occupying forces is harder now thanks to drones, satellites, and thermal imagery. Insurgents will undertake cross-border raids but sustained military operations further behind enemy lines will require help from those living in such areas—people leading ostensibly normal lives who secretly have access to weapons and secure communications and can thereby evade Russian detection. The Russians will label the attacks of these operatives as acts of terrorism while people in the West will applaud them as the deeds of freedom fighters.
Early on, it is likely the Russians will uncover many rings of insurgents, quickly unmasking the insurgency’s initial leaders after years of Russian intelligence collection. But insurgencies adapt swiftly—far faster than the large, structured armies they are fighting—and new leaders emerge molded by their adverse early experiences. Their agility becomes an enormous advantage.
Russia would hope to either limit its incursion to parts of Ukraine whose populations might be more inclined to accept Russian rule or act with such lightning speed so as to seize and pacify the country before a viable resistance can find its legs. But Russia’s military advantages over Ukrainian forces will diminish as the enemy it fights changes from an organized army to a decentralized and mobile resistance. Occupation forces will be subject to harassing attacks designed to both inflict casualties and undermine military discipline. An influence campaign replete with horrific images of carnage—of both civilian Ukrainian and Russian military deaths—will aim to sow antiwar sentiment in Russia and counter Moscow’s narrative that their forces were welcomed as liberators by grateful locals.
Putin’s motivations in starting this war of choice remain the subject of great debate. They may become clearer in the coming days and weeks as Russia continues its offensive. But if his aims are maximalist—redrawing borders or even toppling the current government—an insurgency is inevitable. For both Putin and his enemies, it will be hard to control the forces that have now been unleashed.
Foreign Affairs · by The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence · February 25, 2022
14. Taiwan Watches Ukraine With an Eye Toward Security at Home
Nothing can be considered in isolation. There are second and third order effects to most foriegn affairs actions around the world.
Taiwan needs a resistance operating concept with Taiwan characteristics.
Excerpts:
“[O]ur government agencies must step up their guard against cognitive warfare from external forces as well as their local collaborators, and must strengthen efforts to clarify disinformation in order to ensure Taiwan’s domestic social stability,” the read-out said.
Finally, Taiwan’s government shares similar concerns with many fellow resource-constrained Asian nations about the potential for the Ukraine conflict to drive up prices, particularly in the energy sector. Taiwan relies on Russia for about 17 percent of its coal imports and 14 percent of LNG imports.
At the NSC meeting, Tsai directed her administration to “[c]ontinue responding to economic developments while ensuring the stability of our supply of goods, commodity prices, and stock and foreign exchange markets.”
The NSC meeting summary makes clear that while Taiwan’s government wants to be prepared for a military contingency, it has its eye on other knock-on effects from the crisis in Ukraine. We shouldn’t let the remote possibility that China will launch a copycat invasion overshadow the far more likely, if more prosaic, ways the war in Ukraine will impact Taiwan. The Russian invasion of Ukraine will have ripple effects around the world, Taiwan included.
Taiwan Watches Ukraine With an Eye Toward Security at Home
Taiwan’s government is on alert for ripple effects from the Russian invasion in the form of “cognitive warfare” and economic difficulties.
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As tensions – and Russian troop numbers – mounted along the Ukraine border over recent weeks, Asia-focused analysts have wondered about the implications for Taiwan. Some argued that a lack of U.S. resolve or decisive action in response to Russia’s invasion would embolden China to seize control of Taiwan by force. Others downplayed any similarities, arguing that the U.S. was reluctant to take a more active stance on Ukraine’s defense precisely because Washington needs to keep its attention on the Indo-Pacific.
But what does Taiwan’s government think of the Russian invasion and the implications for Taiwan?
Unsurprisingly, given both Taiwan’s own self-identity as a peaceful, rule-abiding democracy and its close (albeit unofficial) relationship with the United States, Taiwan’s government spoke out against Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
“The people & government of #Taiwan strongly condemn #Russia’s military aggression against #Ukraine,” Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeted on the morning of February 24, as Russian troops moved into Ukraine. It ended the tweet with the hashtag “#StandWithUkraine.”
“Taiwan condemns Russia’s infringement on Ukrainian sovereignty & encourages all parties involved to resolve their disputes rationally & peacefully,” Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen tweeted on February 23, before the large-scale invasion began.
That stance was the outcome of a National Security Council meeting held on February 23. According to a summary of the NSC meeting by Presidential Office spokesperson Xavier Chang, “Our government condemns Russia’s infringement on Ukraine’s sovereignty—infringement which has led to increased tensions on the Russia-Ukraine border, and calls on all parties to continue working peacefully toward a rational resolution to the dispute in order to jointly uphold peace and stability in the region.”
Taiwan, along with other U.S. allies and close partners, is looking into possible sanctions to hold Russia to account for its invasion. According to the Taipei Times, the Ministry of Economic Affairs was considering sanction options, including a possible ban on semiconductor exports.
More than the international implications, though, the NSC discussed the potential for the crisis to directly affect Taiwan in three ways: physically (through the potential for military action in the Taiwan Strait), psychologically (through disinformation campaigns and “cognitive warfare”); and economically (through disruptions to supply chains, stock markets, and commodity prices).
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The worst-case scenario, posited by some analysts, is that China might use the chaos and distraction caused by a Russian invasion of Ukraine to try to seize Taiwan by force. It’s worth noting that there has been no sign of a military build-up on China’s east coast that would presage any large-scale military action. However, the Tsai administration sought to reassure its people (and the world at large) that it is carefully monitoring the situation in the Taiwan Strait even as Russian bombs fall on Ukraine.
“Our national security agencies and military remain on top of the current security situation in the Taiwan Strait and the Indo-Pacific region at large,” the NSC meeting summary said. “However, our national security agencies and military must ramp up their efforts to monitor and provide early warning of military developments in the Taiwan Strait and surrounding areas…”
The Tsai administration wants to signal that it is monitoring the situation closely, but its statement does not indicate immediate concern about military action.
Taiwan’s government expects a similar campaign to piggyback on the Ukraine crisis. The NSC meeting readout took pains to stress that Taiwan and Ukraine are not analogous: “In terms of geostrategic factors, geography, and the importance of our role in international supply chains, the situations in Taiwan and Ukraine are fundamentally different.” That said, the readout notes the potential for the crisis in Ukraine to affect “morale among the people of Taiwan.”
“[O]ur government agencies must step up their guard against cognitive warfare from external forces as well as their local collaborators, and must strengthen efforts to clarify disinformation in order to ensure Taiwan’s domestic social stability,” the read-out said.
Finally, Taiwan’s government shares similar concerns with many fellow resource-constrained Asian nations about the potential for the Ukraine conflict to drive up prices, particularly in the energy sector. Taiwan relies on Russia for about 17 percent of its coal imports and 14 percent of LNG imports.
At the NSC meeting, Tsai directed her administration to “[c]ontinue responding to economic developments while ensuring the stability of our supply of goods, commodity prices, and stock and foreign exchange markets.”
The NSC meeting summary makes clear that while Taiwan’s government wants to be prepared for a military contingency, it has its eye on other knock-on effects from the crisis in Ukraine. We shouldn’t let the remote possibility that China will launch a copycat invasion overshadow the far more likely, if more prosaic, ways the war in Ukraine will impact Taiwan. The Russian invasion of Ukraine will have ripple effects around the world, Taiwan included.
15.
Excerpts:
Ukraine is now under brutal attack, with tens of thousands of Russian troops moving through its eastern provinces, along its northern border and its southern coast. For like the Russian czars before him—like Stalin, like Lenin—Putin also perceives Ukrainianness as a threat. Not a military threat, but an ideological threat. Ukraine’s determination to become a democracy is a genuine challenge to Putin’s nostalgic, imperial political project: the creation of an autocratic kleptocracy, in which he is all-powerful, within something approximating the old Soviet empire. Ukraine undermines this project just by existing as an independent state. By striving for something better, for freedom and prosperity, Ukraine becomes a dangerous rival. For if Ukraine were to succeed in its decades-long push for democracy, the rule of law and European integration, then Russians might ask: Why not us?
I am not romantic about Zelensky, nor am I under any illusions about Ukraine, a nation of 40 million people, among them the same percentages of good and bad people, brave and cowardly people, as anywhere else. But at this moment in history, something unusual is happening there. Among those 40 million, a significant number—at all levels of society, all across the country, in every field of endeavor—aspire to create a fairer, freer, more prosperous country than any they have inhabited in the past. Among them are people willing to dedicate their lives to fighting corruption, to deepening democracy, to remain sovereign and free. Some of those people are willing to die for these ideas.
The clash that is coming will matter to all of us, in ways that we can’t yet fathom. In the centuries-long struggle between autocracy and democracy, between dictatorship and freedom, Ukraine is now the front line—and our front line too.
Calamity Again
No nation is forced to repeat its past. But something familiar is taking place in Ukraine.
Dear God, calamity again!
It was so peaceful, so serene;
We had just begun to break the chains
That bind our folk in slavery
When halt! Once again the people’s blood
Is streaming …
The poem is called “Calamity Again.” The original version was written in Ukrainian, in 1859, and the author, Taras Shevchenko, was not speaking metaphorically when he wrote about slavery. Shevchenko was born into a family of serfs—slaves—on an estate in what is now central Ukraine, in what was then the Russian empire. Taken away from his family as a child, he followed his master to St. Petersburg, where he was trained as a painter and also began to write poetry. Impressed by his talent, a group of other artists and writers there helped him purchase his freedom.
By the time Shevchenko wrote “Calamity Again,” he was universally recognized as Ukraine’s most prominent poet. He was known as Kobzar or “The Minstrel”—the name taken from his first collection of poems, published in 1840—and his words defined the particular set of memories and emotions that we would now describe as Ukraine’s “national identity.” His language and style are not contemporary. Nevertheless, it seems suddenly important to introduce this 19th-century poet to readers outside Ukraine, because it seems suddenly important to make this same set of memories and emotions tangible to an audience that isn’t going to read Shevchenko’s romantic ballads. So much has been written about Russian views of Ukraine; so many have speculated about Russian goals in Ukraine. The president of Russia on Monday even informed us, in an hour-long rant, that he thinks Ukraine shouldn’t exist at all. But what does Ukraine mean to Ukrainians?
The Ukrainians emerged from the medieval state of Kyivan Rus’—the same state from which the Russians and Belarusians also emerged—eventually to become, like the Irish or the Slovaks, a land-based colony of other empires. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Ukrainian noblemen learned to speak Polish and participated in Polish-court life; later some Ukrainians strived to become part of the Russian-speaking world, learning Russian and aspiring to positions of power first in the Russian empire, then in the Soviet Union.
Yet during those same centuries, a sense of Ukrainianness developed too, linked to the peasantry, serfs, and farmers who would not or could not assimilate. The Ukrainian language, as well as Ukrainian art and music, were all preserved in the countryside, even though the cities spoke Polish or Russian. To say “I am Ukrainian” was, once upon a time, a statement about status and social position as well as ethnicity. “I am Ukrainian” meant you were deliberately defining yourself against the nobility, against the ruling class, against the merchant class, against the urbanites. Later on, it could mean you were defining yourself against the Soviet Union: Ukrainian partisans fought against the Red Army in 1918 and then again in the dying days of the Second World War and the early years of the Cold War. The Ukrainian identity was anti-elitist before anyone used the expression anti-elitist, often angry and anarchic, occasionally violent. Some of Shevchenko’s poetry is very angry and very violent indeed.
Because it could not be expressed through state institutions, Ukrainian patriotism was, like Italian or German patriotism in the same era, expressed in the 19th century through voluntary, religious, and charitable organizations, early examples of what we now call “civil society”: self-help and study groups that published periodicals and newspapers, founded schools and Sunday schools, promoted literacy among the peasants. As they gained strength and numbers, Moscow came to see these grassroots Ukrainian organizations as a threat to the unity of imperial Russia. In 1863 and then again in 1876, the empire banned Ukrainian books and persecuted Ukrainians who wrote and published them. Shevchenko himself spent years in exile.
Still, Ukrainianness survived in the villages and grew stronger among intellectuals and writers, remaining powerful enough to persuade Ukrainians to make their first bid for statehood at the time of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Though they lost that chance in the ensuing civil war, the Bolsheviks immediately realized that Ukraine should have its own republic within the Soviet Union, run by Ukrainian Communists. Ukrainian mistrust of authority, especially Soviet authority, remained. When Stalin began the forcible collectivization of agriculture all across the Soviet Union in 1929, a series of rebellions broke out in Ukraine. Stalin, like the Russian imperial aristocracy before him, began to fear that he would, as he put it, “lose” Ukraine: Even Ukrainian Communists, he feared, did not want to obey his orders. Soon afterward, Soviet secret policemen organized teams of activists to go from house to house in parts of rural Ukraine, confiscating food. Some 4 million Ukrainians died in the famine that followed. Mass arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals, writers, linguists, museum curators, poets, and painters followed.
There are no simple lines to be drawn between the past and the present. There are no direct analogies; no nation is forced to repeat its past. But the experiences of our parents and grandparents, the habits and lessons they taught us, do shape the way we see the world, and it is perhaps not an accident that in the late 20th century, Stalin’s greatest fear came to pass and the Ukrainians once again organized, this time successfully, a grassroots civic movement that won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Nor, perhaps, is it an accident that many Ukrainians remained wary of the state, even of their own state, in the ensuing years. Because the state—the government, the rulers, the “power”—had always been “them,” not “us,” there was no tradition of Ukrainian civil service or military service; there was no tradition of public service at all. If the cancer of corruption, which afflicted all of the weary, cynical, exhausted republics formed in the wreckage of the Soviet Union, was particularly virulent in Ukraine, this is a part of the explanation.
But, in the long tradition of their parents and grandparents, millions of Ukrainians did continue to resist both corruption and autocracy. And precisely because it was opposed to the post-Soviet kleptocracy, Ukrainianness in the 21st century became intertwined with aspirations for democracy, for freedom, for rule of law, for integration in Europe. By the beginning of the 21st century, Ukrainians began to object to the post-Soviet establishment, linked by financial interests to Russia, and began once again agitating for something more fair and more just.
Twice, in 2005 and 2014, self-organized Ukrainian street movements toppled kleptocratic, autocratic leaders who, backed by Russia, had tried to steal Ukrainian elections and override the rule of law. In 2005, Russia responded with a renewed effort to interfere in Ukrainian politics. In 2014, Russia responded with the invasion of Crimea and multiple assaults on eastern-Ukrainian cities. The only attacks that succeeded were in the far east, in Donbas, because the Russian-created “separatist” movement could be backed up by the Russian army.
But Ukraine’s character remained unchanged. In 2019, 70 percent of Ukrainians once again voted against the establishment. A total outsider became president: a Jewish actor born in eastern Ukraine with no political experience but a long history of making fun of those who are in power—the kind of humor that Ukrainians value the most. Volodymyr Zelensky was famous for playing a downtrodden schoolteacher who rants against corruption and is filmed by a student. In the television series, the clip goes viral, the teacher accidentally wins the presidency, and then everyone—his unpleasant boss, his unsympathetic family, rich strangers—is suddenly sycophantic. Zelensky the actor makes fun of them, outsmarts them. Ukrainians wanted Zelensky the real-life president to do the same.
During his election campaign, Zelensky also promised to end the war with Russia, the ongoing, debilitating conflict along the border of eastern Ukraine that has taken more than 14,000 lives in the past decade. Many Ukrainians hoped he would achieve that too. He did seek to establish links to the inhabitants of occupied Crimea and Donbas; he asked for meetings with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin; meanwhile, he kept seeking Ukrainian integration with the West.
And then, calamity again.
It was so peaceful, so serene;
We had just began to break the chains
That bind our folk in slavery
When halt! Once again the people’s blood
Is streaming …
Ukraine is now under brutal attack, with tens of thousands of Russian troops moving through its eastern provinces, along its northern border and its southern coast. For like the Russian czars before him—like Stalin, like Lenin—Putin also perceives Ukrainianness as a threat. Not a military threat, but an ideological threat. Ukraine’s determination to become a democracy is a genuine challenge to Putin’s nostalgic, imperial political project: the creation of an autocratic kleptocracy, in which he is all-powerful, within something approximating the old Soviet empire. Ukraine undermines this project just by existing as an independent state. By striving for something better, for freedom and prosperity, Ukraine becomes a dangerous rival. For if Ukraine were to succeed in its decades-long push for democracy, the rule of law and European integration, then Russians might ask: Why not us?
I am not romantic about Zelensky, nor am I under any illusions about Ukraine, a nation of 40 million people, among them the same percentages of good and bad people, brave and cowardly people, as anywhere else. But at this moment in history, something unusual is happening there. Among those 40 million, a significant number—at all levels of society, all across the country, in every field of endeavor—aspire to create a fairer, freer, more prosperous country than any they have inhabited in the past. Among them are people willing to dedicate their lives to fighting corruption, to deepening democracy, to remain sovereign and free. Some of those people are willing to die for these ideas.
The clash that is coming will matter to all of us, in ways that we can’t yet fathom. In the centuries-long struggle between autocracy and democracy, between dictatorship and freedom, Ukraine is now the front line—and our front line too.
16. Biden’s China Policy Could Benefit From Reflecting on Nixon’s Historic Beijing Visit
In releasing its Indo-Pacific strategy this month, the White House emphatically denied that it was a “China policy.” Instead, officials argued that the strategy simply recognizes the Indo-Pacific as a “particularly intense region of competition,” albeit without referencing the actual competitor—China. White House officials have also sought to jettison the term “extreme competition” when describing U.S.-China relations, focusing instead on establishing “guardrails” in the relationship. That is despite scant evidence that Beijing is also seeking guardrails to bound the competition. This Nixonian redux, in which the Biden administration won’t say what it means or mean what it says, explains why the Biden administration has achieved so little progress in its dealings with Beijing.
Ultimately, the American public rewarded Nixon for his China gambit, and his polling greatly improved. He later won a landslide victory in the 1972 election, in part because his outreach to Mao was seen as a decisive action intended to split the Communist bloc. Certainly, Biden could benefit from a similar polling bump, as a recent CBS poll revealed that six in ten Americans disapprove of his approach to China. In crafting a clear-eyed China policy, one that does not tiptoe around sensitive issues and that recognizes competition is a means, not an end, Biden could potentially match Nixon’s boldness without repeating his many mistakes.
Before his death, Nixon privately acknowledged that he had misjudged China and its leaders and, in one particularly blunt remark, he stated that his policies “may have created a Frankenstein’s monster.” For their part, Americans have been told for decades that engagement with Beijing would yield positive dividends, such as economic liberalization and improvements in human rights. Neither came to pass.
To be fair, America’s hopes for China may have been and could very well remain woefully unrealistic. But, as we mark the week that changed the world, President Biden would be wise to embrace the lessons of Nixon’s China legacy. Putting forward a China policy that is open, honest, and upfront with both China and the American people would be as good a place to start as any.
Biden’s China Policy Could Benefit From Reflecting on Nixon’s Historic Beijing Visit
GAME CHANGER
Nixon’s trip to China 50 years ago is known as “the week that changed the world.” If Biden wants to improve his political fortunes he would do well to learn from it.
Updated Feb. 24, 2022 6:10PM ET / Published Feb. 24, 2022 3:53PM ET
opinion
Byron Schumacher/White House Photo Office
Nixon became the first, but certainly not the last, U.S. president to visit the mainland while in office. His diplomatic gamble, one preceded by decades of little-to-no contact, ultimately set the stage for a resumption of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China.
However, hindsight suggests that Nixon’s optimism about China was foolhardy, if not naïve. Some observers have since suggested that Nixon got conned by Mao Zedong. No doubt, Nixon’s China legacy remains mixed, just as many other China experts have misjudged Beijing’s intentions. That might explain why this momentous anniversary is unlikely to garner much attention.
Nevertheless, there are important lessons to be gleaned from Nixon’s trip to what was once known as Peking. One is that the Chinese have almost always been upfront and direct about the issues they most care about, Taiwan among them. Even when the Chinese have been silent on certain matters, their message and often their intentions were clear, at least to those willing to listen. The same holds true today.
Unfortunately, President Biden’s China policy largely remains a mystery to the American people and to Beijing. To get things right, Biden needs to learn from Nixon’s mistakes and behave more, not less, like China. Put differently, Washington needs to finally shoot straight with Beijing.
Nixon’s decision about whether and how to engage with China closely mirrors Biden’s current calculus. Nixon’s trip occurred months before a consequential election and prior to his meeting with Mao only one-third of Americans approved of Nixon’s dealings with China. Less than half approved of his job performance. Nixon needed a win, but charming Mao was risky, as other polling revealed that the most common terms used by Americans to describe the Chinese people were “ignorant,” “sly,” and “treacherous.”
Before Nixon’s fateful voyage, foreign policy realists had little cause for concern. Writing in Foreign Affairs in 1967, Nixon warned that “rushing to grant recognition to Peking, to admit it to the United Nations and to ply it with offers of trade” would only “serve to confirm its rulers in their present course.” Nixon remarked that, “a policy of firm restraint, of no reward,” could “persuade Peking that its interests could be served only by accepting the basic rules of international civility.”
Nixon then turned around and did the opposite.
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President Richard Nixon holds his chopsticks in the ready position as Premier Chou En-lai (left) and Shanghai Communist Party leader Chang Chun-chiao reach in front of him for some tidbits at the beginning of the farewell banquet here.
Bettmann/Getty Images
During their only face-to-face meeting in China, Nixon and Mao avoided controversial topics, choosing instead to talk around the major issues that existed between the two nations. The real heavy lifting was left to Henry Kissinger, who by his own admission knew little of China or its history. Unsurprisingly, mistranslations and misunderstandings contributed greatly to Kissinger’s misbegotten strategy as he hashed out the now infamous Shanghai Communique.
For instance, at one pivotal point in the negotiations, China’s Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai referred to America as “the ba.” Kissinger was told this phrase meant “America is the leader,” when in actuality the term ba, which dates back to China’s “Warring States” period, more closely translates to “tyrant.” Beyond this and other miscommunications, China never wavered in its demands. On Taiwan, Nixon and Kissinger re-affirmed their “interest in a peaceful settlement” to the long-standing issue. Left unsaid was that prior to his arrival in Peking, Nixon, as a goodwill gesture, had ordered the withdrawal of some U.S. forces from Taiwan.
However, Kissinger later remarked in his book, On China, that Mao was emphatic in declaring that “Beijing would not foreclose its option to use force over Taiwan,” and indeed “expected to have to use force someday, [even in] a hundred years.”
The reason Nixon violated his self-imposed restraint had more to do with his re-election than realpolitik. The Nixon administration believed that conceding on Taiwan would convince Mao to “slow down the provision of aid” to China’s allies in North Vietnam, as well as persuade China to “encourage Hanoi to make a deal with the United States” to end the war, which was weighing on Nixon’s ratings. Nevertheless, at no point did Mao’s support for the North Vietnamese waver, even while he recognized the link Nixon made between that issue and Taiwan.
Kissinger thus learned that “in foreign policy you never get paid for services already rendered,” and Nixon’s graceful exit from Vietnam never came to be.
The effects of Nixon’s trip linger today. Sure, liberal internationalists and realists alike argue that engagement yielded positive benefits, including pulling China out of the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. For many observers, Nixon’s trip and the subsequent breakdown of U.S.-China relations are considered either one giant missed opportunity or the logical culmination of an anarchic international system.
The reality is somewhere in between. America’s complicated history with China is not simply a story about broken promises or serial misjudgments. Rather, it reflects a failure of American presidents to listen to what China’s leaders have been saying for decades – namely, that they had little interest in modeling themselves after the West—while also recognizing that Beijing intended to stay true to its word.
The similarities to Nixon’s era do not end there, even as China’s ambitions remain very much the same as they were in the early '70s.
In releasing its Indo-Pacific strategy this month, the White House emphatically denied that it was a “China policy.” Instead, officials argued that the strategy simply recognizes the Indo-Pacific as a “particularly intense region of competition,” albeit without referencing the actual competitor—China. White House officials have also sought to jettison the term “extreme competition” when describing U.S.-China relations, focusing instead on establishing “guardrails” in the relationship. That is despite scant evidence that Beijing is also seeking guardrails to bound the competition. This Nixonian redux, in which the Biden administration won’t say what it means or mean what it says, explains why the Biden administration has achieved so little progress in its dealings with Beijing.
Ultimately, the American public rewarded Nixon for his China gambit, and his polling greatly improved. He later won a landslide victory in the 1972 election, in part because his outreach to Mao was seen as a decisive action intended to split the Communist bloc. Certainly, Biden could benefit from a similar polling bump, as a recent CBS poll revealed that six in ten Americans disapprove of his approach to China. In crafting a clear-eyed China policy, one that does not tiptoe around sensitive issues and that recognizes competition is a means, not an end, Biden could potentially match Nixon’s boldness without repeating his many mistakes.
Before his death, Nixon privately acknowledged that he had misjudged China and its leaders and, in one particularly blunt remark, he stated that his policies “may have created a Frankenstein’s monster.” For their part, Americans have been told for decades that engagement with Beijing would yield positive dividends, such as economic liberalization and improvements in human rights. Neither came to pass.
To be fair, America’s hopes for China may have been and could very well remain woefully unrealistic. But, as we mark the week that changed the world, President Biden would be wise to embrace the lessons of Nixon’s China legacy. Putting forward a China policy that is open, honest, and upfront with both China and the American people would be as good a place to start as any.
17. FDD | Senators Want More Out of SEC’s Proposed Rules on Cybersecurity
Conclusion:
As companies across private industry find themselves in the crosshairs of cyberattacks from both nation-states and criminals, they must not ignore cybersecurity as a key component of their corporate responsibility.
FDD | Senators Want More Out of SEC’s Proposed Rules on Cybersecurity
RADM (Ret) Mark Montgomery
CCTI Senior Director and Senior Fellow
Trevor Logan
Research Analyst
fdd.org · by RADM (Ret) Mark Montgomery CCTI Senior Director and Senior Fellow · February 24, 2022
A bipartisan group of senators sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) earlier this month, urging it to require publicly traded companies to disclose information about cybersecurity incidents and policies. A day later, the SEC approved proposed rules that align with the letter’s recommendations but apply only to investment companies and advisers — a more limited approach that is unlikely to ensure accountability for cybersecurity preparedness across the entire private sector.
The SEC’s proposed rules would require registered investment advisers and investment-related companies to develop and implement written cybersecurity policies, to report significant cyber incidents privately to the SEC, and to publicly disclose cybersecurity risks and incidents in company documents.
The SEC noted that it is taking these steps because despite its warnings to investment firms, “certain advisers and funds show a lack of cybersecurity preparedness, which puts clients and investors at risk.” Additionally, while some advisers and firms disclose cybersecurity risk information to their clients, the SEC is concerned that this information may be insufficient for individuals to make “informed investment decisions.”
The SEC says it aims to “to enhance cybersecurity preparedness and improve the resilience of investment advisers and investment companies.” The Senate letter, however, proposes a more robust approach focusing on all publicly traded companies. “Investors deserve a clear understanding of whether companies and investment managers are prioritizing cybersecurity,” the senators argue. “They also have a right to prompt notification of serious cybersecurity incidents.”
The letter also urges the SEC to consider requirements like those outlined in pending legislation sponsored by the signatories to require companies to disclose if they have a cybersecurity expert on their board of advisers. The rationale for this disclosure is to bolster investor confidence that firms are developing a culture of accountability for cybersecurity. Oversight of cybersecurity risk by the board of directors would demonstrate this culture.
The most effective way to increase cybersecurity accountability in the private sector, as originally proposed by the congressionally mandated Cyberspace Solarium Commission, would be to follow the approach of the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002. Passed in the wake of the Enron scandal, the law aims to protect investors from inaccurate financial reporting by requiring companies to accurately represent their business operations through financial reporting validated by third-party audits.
Yet incomplete or inaccurate cybersecurity information inflicts the same harm on investors as inaccurate financial reporting did 20 years ago. Thus, Washington should now require all publicly traded companies to also disclose cybersecurity risks and incidents, and should hold corporate boards accountable for this information, as they are for financial disclosures.
In particular, the House and Senate should add a cybersecurity reporting requirement to SOX through a congressional amendment. Alternatively, the SEC should promulgate new rules to account for cyber risks as part of companies’ financial reporting assessments pursuant to section 404 of SOX. In so doing, Washington would provide investors with a clear understanding of which companies are prioritizing cybersecurity.
As companies across private industry find themselves in the crosshairs of cyberattacks from both nation-states and criminals, they must not ignore cybersecurity as a key component of their corporate responsibility.
Mark Montgomery serves as senior director of FDD’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) and as senior adviser to the chairmen of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. Trevor Logan is a cyber research analyst at CCTI. For more analysis from the authors and CCTI, please subscribe HERE. Follow Mark and Trevor on Twitter @MarkCMontgomery and @TrevorLoganFDD. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CCTI. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by RADM (Ret) Mark Montgomery CCTI Senior Director and Senior Fellow · February 24, 2022
18. The Militant Drone Threat Is No Longer New. Why Does It Still Feel Novel?
Conclusion:
The drone threat is here to stay, but the innovation-response gap can be narrowed. The Pentagon’s budgetary emphasis on counterdrone research and development (roughly $636 million for fiscal year 2022) and procurement (roughly $75 million) is encouraging in this regard. It not only represents an increased prioritization of the drone threat, but also signals the need for evidence-based, resilient, and reliable tech solutions. Ultimately, the solution to the problem set will depend on containing and mitigating drones’ disruptive capacity in a flexible and cost-effective manner. Developing, procuring, and deploying counterdrone tech based on the three principles highlighted here will be conducive to this end.
The Militant Drone Threat Is No Longer New. Why Does It Still Feel Novel? - Modern War Institute
In a now ubiquitous quote, as he spoke of the challenges faced by US and coalition forces in 2016, Gen. Raymond A. Thomas, commander of US Special Operations Command, stated that the “most daunting problem was an adaptive enemy who, for a time, enjoyed tactical superiority in the airspace under our conventional air superiority in the form of commercially available drones and [field]-expedient weapons systems.” In 2021, the military’s assessment carried the same tone. Just last year, US Gen. Kenneth McKenzie referred to the proliferation of small drones as the “most concerning tactical development” within US Central Command’s area of responsibility.
At this point, the militant drone threat is not “new” so much as it is persistent. Yet the threat still feels novel. This dissonance is partly due to the slow rate of progress made toward developing an effective and sustainable counterdrone infrastructure. Put another way, the threat feels new because it is unresolved.
There have been some promising advancements, to be sure. This year has already offered some hope that the innovation-response gap may be closing—and certainly not for militants’ lack of trying to stay ahead. The first week of the new year saw at least three drone attacks in Iraq. On January 4, for example, local militants aligned with Iran used small fixed-wing systems to attack the Iraqi Ain al-Asad airbase, which hosts US forces. Online footage of the attack seems to show one drone being destroyed by what appears to be a missile. Soon after, the video shows a Counter–Rocket, Artillery, and Mortar system—known as a C-RAM—bringing down the second. Reportedly, none of these attacks resulted in casualties and all were intercepted.
The rate of successful drone interceptions is encouraging, but notable challenges lay ahead in building the infrastructure needed to execute an effective and sustainable counterdrone approach. For US forces, the most pressing problems arise from innovations related to small systems, especially commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) drones. A select number of groups, like the Houthis in Yemen, have access to larger systems capable of traveling hundreds of miles and carrying larger payloads. Most groups, though, use smaller fixed-wing systems or retrofitted commercial quadcopters. In some instances, the Islamic State manufactured its own. While these have more limited flight range, speed, and payload capacity, these systems also pose unique challenges to interception.
Countering a militant drone attack requires the successful execution of a specific task sequence (i.e., “the kill chain”: detect, track, identify, and defeat). Therein lies the rub. The status quo is a Frankenstein’s monster of tactical solutions. There are over five hundred different counterdrone products sold by nearly three hundred different firms. None currently excels at all four tasks.
As recently reported, the Department of Defense is working toward a unified system that can provide early warning, identify a drone’s origin and altitude, and provide options for engagement. Most of the deployed counterdrone systems are based on air defense systems, which are designed to identify and shoot down large and fast-moving objects. Drones, especially makeshift or COTS drones, are typically small, slow, low flying, and able to sustain erratic flight patterns—a tactical mismatch. Given the number of specialized tasks required of the kill chain, the variety of drone types faced by US military forces, and the likelihood of continued innovation by militant actors, a single-system solution is unlikely to be effective and sustainable in the short and intermediate term.
Looking ahead, the following three principles will be important to establishing an effective and sustainable counterdrone approach—including both development and procurement.
You’ve Not Defeated a New Threat Until You’ve Done It Affordably
In a now-infamous case, in 2017, an unidentified ally of the United States shot down a small quadcopter drone with a $3.4 million Patriot missile. That cost-benefit ratio is unique but illustrates an important point. To be viable and sustainable, a counterdrone approach must be cost effective, rather than exacerbate the asymmetric nature of state-militant conflict.
According to a recent report, among counterdrone products for which pricing information is available, over 60 percent cost more than $100,000. That’s troubling. Most COTS drone systems cost well under $1,000. Any fielded counterdrone components must be relied on to counter numerous drone attacks over a significant period of time. If they become outmoded immediately or soon after arrival, that’s a far less sustainable model.
It’s safe to say that the Islamic State did not spend anywhere near the hundreds of millions that the United States will spend on developing tech to counter small armed drone systems. The current prioritization of counterdrone research and development is necessary. The question of cost effectiveness requires that the systems produced in the research and development process are also accessible enough to not break the bank in the procurement stage.
Solutions Will Require Regular Iterations of Assessment and Adaptation
A system capable of executing all tasks in the counterdrone kill chain remains the objective, but an unfulfilled one. Gen. McKenzie recently reflected that “[the United States does] not yet have a single system that can do all that. . . . And that’s part of the problem. We’re not integrated.” In the case of counterdrone systems, the Pentagon is unlikely to find a silver bullet. Instead, it will likely come to rely on a suite of integrated components. Different kinds of drones are better at handling different elements of the kill chain, making a single system approach elusive at best. Moreover, it is likely that militants will innovate when faced with the next generation of counterdrone tech, making the rigidity of a single-system solution a costly liability.
Put another way, when new counterdrone systems are developed and deployed, militants will almost certainly innovate rather than throw in the towel. They will find new applications or novel ways to work around existing obstacles. In a parallel space, militants’ use of improvised explosive devices in Iraq began as a rudimentary practice but became more sophisticated as opposing forces got better at identifying and intercepting them. This back-and-forth of adaptation prompted groups like the Islamic State to innovate, eventually turning toward vehicle-borne and even suicide, vehicle-borne explosives. We may see similar patterns of malevolent innovation occur within militant drone programs as counterdrone technology becomes more reliable and common.
Most innovations will be small in scale, but carry potential for outsized tactical and strategic effects. For instance, in campaigns in Iraq and Syria, Islamic State fighters reportedly wrapped tape around parts of their drones to avoid detection by masking the radar signature. If kinetic, weapons-based options are used to intercept drones, then militants may switch to using them in more populous areas to discourage government forces from harming civilian bystanders. Radio frequency and radar systems are best at detecting incoming drones when they have a clear line of sight, and the physical complexity of urban spaces offers militants a means of avoiding detection. The possibilities for innovation and avoidance are sufficiently large that it will be wise to avoid placing all eggs in a single basket.
Integrating Counterdrone Tech into a Holistic Strategy
Finally, counterdrone technology is necessary, but it will not be sufficient. Traditional elements of a comprehensive strategy to counter militants will remain essential. This means focused attention on not just the tooth but also the tail of the militant drone problem: disrupting supply chains and logistical support, targeting militants’ sources of revenue, and cutting militant forces off from the territorial safe havens that allow for uninhibited crossborder transfer of material.
In other words, multiple elements of a holistic counterdrone approach will take place well before the drones are in the air, preemptively reducing the number of drones that require detection, tracking, identification, and defeat. Operationally, this means causing logistical and supply-chain disruptions. Practically, in many cases, this will require intergovernmental, interagency, and public-private partnerships.
The drone threat is here to stay, but the innovation-response gap can be narrowed. The Pentagon’s budgetary emphasis on counterdrone research and development (roughly $636 million for fiscal year 2022) and procurement (roughly $75 million) is encouraging in this regard. It not only represents an increased prioritization of the drone threat, but also signals the need for evidence-based, resilient, and reliable tech solutions. Ultimately, the solution to the problem set will depend on containing and mitigating drones’ disruptive capacity in a flexible and cost-effective manner. Developing, procuring, and deploying counterdrone tech based on the three principles highlighted here will be conducive to this end.
Austin C. Doctor is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the director of Counterterrorism Research Initiatives at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education (NCITE) Center, the Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence for counterterrorism studies. He also serves as a nonresident fellow with the Modern War Institute at West Point.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Nancy C. diBenedetto, US Navy
19. Cable News Covers Ukraine With On-the-Ground Reporting and In-Studio Rhetoric
CNN certainly has the most on the ground reporting and maintains its reputation as the go to network for news on foreign conflicts.
The most effective reporter on Fox News is Jennifer Griffin.
Cable News Covers Ukraine With On-the-Ground Reporting and In-Studio Rhetoric
Fox News stars like Tucker Carlson questioned why Americans hated Vladimir Putin, and CNN showed Russian tanks and rockets in live war-zone dispatches.
Russian tanks rolled in the background of live shots on CNN.Credit...CNN
Feb. 24, 2022, 6:28 p.m. ET
The 24-hour television news cycle took on a new kind of challenge on Thursday: a ground war unfolding in Europe.
On CNN, Russian tanks rolled in the background of live shots from Ukraine as explosions rumbled and rockets arced overhead. Wearing body armor and crouched behind a building, the correspondent Matthew Chance delivered a live report as Russian soldiers, just a few feet away, seized an airport just outside the capital city, Kyiv.
The coverage hearkened back to CNN’s reporting on the Persian Gulf war in 1990, which helped cement the network as a destination for breaking news of foreign conflicts. For the invasion of Ukraine, the channel has six correspondents and three anchors deployed in the country along with their crews.
Every major network pre-empted regular programming to air President Biden’s sober remarks from the White House on the conflict. On Wednesday night, moments after the invasion had begun, CBS broke into the medical drama “Good Sam” for a special report from the anchor Norah O’Donnell, who told viewers, “We may be witnessing now what is the beginning of the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II.”
Then there was the bifurcated coverage on Fox News, where solemn reports from correspondents — some in Kyiv and Lviv — were interlaced with the isolationist rhetoric of right-wing stars like Tucker Carlson, who questioned why American leaders had vilified Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president.
“Not a single Republican leader has stood up to point out how insane all of this is and how completely divorced it is from anything that American voters actually care about,” Mr. Carlson said on Wednesday evening, criticizing the Republican minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, for his anti-Putin remarks.
Clarissa Ward, the chief international correspondent for CNN, reported from a subway station turned makeshift bunker in Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine. Credit...Marcus Yam
Hours later, Jennifer Griffin, Fox News’s national security correspondent, delivered a different message to viewers. “The way in which Putin is describing Ukraine, he is describing it as an existential threat to Russia,” Ms. Griffin said. “This is a figment of his imagination. This is a man — if you look in his eyes, you see someone who has gone completely mad.”
On Thursday, Ms. Griffin offered a corrective to the “Fox & Friends” host Steve Doocy, who had questioned why the threat of American sanctions had not deterred Russia from its attack. “You talk about how the sanctions haven’t worked,” Ms. Griffin replied. “I don’t know if we can say that yet. Overnight, the stock market in Russia fell by half.”
Across television news on Thursday, the coverage included haunting overhead shots of the emptied streets of Kyiv, punctuated by the sounds of air raid sirens and occasional explosions. Some correspondents narrated the events from the safety of hotel room balconies; others were seen wearing flak jackets and helmets in more perilous situations.
Clarissa Ward, CNN’s chief international correspondent, interviewed frightened Ukrainians from inside a crowded Kharkiv subway station where people had fled to hide from bombings. “Just as we arrived here there were more explosions, people came flooding down the stairs into this subway station,” Ms. Ward told viewers.
The head of CNN International, Mike McCarthy, said in an interview that the network had 75 people in Ukraine, including drivers and local interpreters. The network is using the city of Lviv in western Ukraine as its base, in part to ensure that broadcasts were not interrupted by cyberattacks that may affect Kyiv. He said CNN had “six or seven” backup communications systems in case any failed.
CNN’s newsroom has faced turmoil this month with the abrupt ouster of its longtime president, Jeff Zucker. On Thursday, David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery Inc., which is close a merger with CNN’s parent company, WarnerMedia, said on an earnings calls that the network’s coverage of the invasion was “a proud moment.”
MSNBC also went into breaking news mode, although like Fox News it highlighted its most popular opinion hosts. Rachel Maddow, who is on a two-month hiatus from the network, was set to return on Thursday to host prime-time coverage.
Russia’s Attack on Ukraine and the Global Economy
Card 1 of 6
A rising concern. Russia’s attack on Ukraine could cause dizzying spikes in prices for energy and food and could spook investors. The economic damage from supply disruptions and economic sanctions would be severe in some countries and industries and unnoticed in others.
The cost of energy. Oil prices already are the highest since 2014, and they have risen as the conflict has escalated. Russia is the third-largest producer of oil, providing roughly one of every 10 barrels the global economy consumes.
Gas supplies. Europe gets nearly 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia, and it is likely to be walloped with higher heating bills. Natural gas reserves are running low, and European leaders have accused Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, of reducing supplies to gain a political edge.
Shortages of essential metals. The price of palladium, used in automotive exhaust systems and mobile phones, has been soaring amid fears that Russia, the world’s largest exporter of the metal, could be cut off from global markets. The price of nickel, another key Russian export, has also been rising.
Financial turmoil. Global banks are bracing for the effects of sanctions designed to restrict Russia’s access to foreign capital and limit its ability to process payments in dollars, euros and other currencies crucial for trade. Banks are also on alert for retaliatory cyberattacks by Russia.
Amid the gravity of a high-stakes international conflict that has threatened the modern security structure of Europe, some viewers seized on lighter moments. Some partisan accounts on Twitter pointed out the jarring nature of an Applebee’s commercial, with a jingle about “a little of bit of chicken fried,” that aired during CNN’s coverage. (Applebee’s said later that it had contacted CNN to pause its advertising on the network; “it never should have aired,” a representative for the restaurant chain said.)
Tucker Carlson questioned why Americans hated President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in a segment on Tuesday night.Credit...Fox News
Shortly after the invasion began on Wednesday night, former President Donald J. Trump called in to Laura Ingraham’s prime-time show and blamed the “weakness and the incompetence” of the Biden administration for the Russian military strike. Ms. Ingraham, who bumped her scheduled guest, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, to speak with Mr. Trump, also described a speech by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine imploring Mr. Putin not to invade as “a really pathetic display.”
In the lead-up to the invasion, Mr. Carlson, Fox News’s top-rated host, has taken an isolationist approach. On Tuesday night, he asserted that Democrats believed Americans had a “patriotic duty to hate Vladimir Putin,” but questioned why the Russian president had been vilified.
“It might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious: What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much?” Mr. Carlson said. He added, “Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia?” He also argued that Ukraine was not a democracy.
“But Joe Biden likes Ukraine, so Putin bad, war good,” Mr. Carlson said.
The comments from Mr. Carlson contrasted with the reporting from the network’s own journalists. Fox News has four correspondents reporting from Ukraine, with Steve Harrigan and Trey Yingst in Kyiv and Mike Tobin and Lucas Tomlinson in Lviv.
On Monday, Ms. Griffin pushed back against the host Sean Hannity, who suggested that Mr. Biden was to blame for the conflict.
“Sean, how we got to this point is a long story, and it predates the Biden administration,” she said, adding, “It includes mistakes made by every U.S. president since the Soviet Union fell apart.”
Tiffany Hsu contributed reporting.
20. Official website of Russian Parliament, MoD and Kremlin go offline
Perhaps the hacking group Anonymous is having an effect? Or perhaps this is the result of a nation state's cyber operations?
Official website of Russian Parliament, MoD and Kremlin go offline
The Kremlin domain is the official website of President Vladimir Putin which according to NetBlocks is among the multiple government websites to go offline.
The official website of the Kremlin and multiple other top Russian government websites have gone offline following the Russian attack on Ukraine, Hackread.com can confirm.
Currently, the websites to go offline include Kremlin (kremlin.ru) which is the official website of President Vladimir Putin, the Russian Ministry of Defense, and the official website of the Russian parliament (aka the Duma).
Although it is unclear whether these websites went down due to a cyberattack or technical glitch, Ukraine on the other hand has been hit by a series of DDoS attacks along with data wiper malware.
The incident was also confirmed by NetBlocks. For your information, NetBlocks is a watchdog organization that monitors cybersecurity and cyberattacks related events globally also confirmed the attack.
In a tweet, the organization said that:
Confirmed: Multiple government websites in Russia including the Kremlin and the State Duma have fallen offline; the incident comes amid a spate of cyberattacks targeting neighboring Ukraine
NetBlocks has also reported Internet service interruption in Ukraine amid the entrance of Russian troops into the country. Nevertheless, Hackread.com is keeping eye on the situation, and in case or whenever the disrupted sites are back online we will update this article.
21. Remarks by President Biden on Russia’s Unprovoked and Unjustified Attack on Ukraine
By whitehouse.gov16 min
East Room
1:43 P.M. EST
THE PRESIDENT: Sorry to keep you waiting. Good afternoon. The Russian military has begun a brutal assault on the people of Ukraine without provocation, without justification, without necessity.
This is a premeditated attack. Vladimir Putin has been planning this for months, as I’ve been — as we’ve been saying all along. He moved more than 175,000 troops, military equipment into positions along the Ukrainian border.
He moved blood supplies into position and built a field hospital, which tells you all you need to know about his intentions all along.
He rejected every good-faith effort the United States and our Allies and partners made to address our mutual security concerns through dialogue to avoid needless conflict and avert human suffering.
For weeks — for weeks, we have been warning that this would happen. And now it’s unfolding largely as we predicted.
In the past week, we’ve seen shelling increase in the Donbas, the region in eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed separatists.
Rus- — the Russian government has perpetrated cyberattacks against Ukraine.
We saw a staged political theater in Moscow — outlandish and baseless claims that Ukraine was — Ukraine was about to invade and launch a war against Russia, that Ukraine was prepared to use chemical weapons, that Ukraine committed a genocide — without any evidence.
We saw a flagrant violation of international law in attempting to unilaterally create two new so-called republics on sovereign Ukrainian territory.
And at the very moment that the United Nations Security Council was meeting to stand up for Ukraine’s sovereignty to stave off invasion, Putin declared his war.
Within moments — moments, missile strikes began to fall on historic cities across Ukraine.
Then came in the air raids, followed by tanks and troops rolling in.
We’ve been transparent with the world. We’ve shared declassified evidence about Russia’s plans and cyberattacks and false pretexts so that there can be no confusion or cover-up about what Putin was doing.
Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war. And now he and his country will bear the consequences.
Today, I’m authorizing additional strong sanctions and new limitations on what can be exported to Russia.
This is going to impose severe costs on the Russian economy, both immediately and over time.
We have purposefully designed these sanctions to maximize the long-term impact on Russia and to minimize the impact on the United States and our Allies.
And I want to be clear: The United States is not doing this alone. For months, we’ve been building a coalition of partners representing well more than half of the global economy.
Twenty-seven members of the European Union, including France, Germany, Italy — as well as the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and many others — to amplify the joint impact of our response.
I just spoke with the G7 leaders this morning, and we are in full and total agreement. We will limit Russia’s ability to do business in Dollars, Euros, Pounds, and Yen to be part of the global economy. We will limit their ability to do that. We are going to stunt the ability to finance and grow Rus- — the Russian military.
We’re going to impose major — and we’re going to impair their ability to compete in a high-tech 21st century economy.
We’ve already seen the impact of our actions on Russia’s currency, the Ruble, which early today hit its weakest level ever — ever in history. And the Russian stock market plunged today. The Russian government’s borrowing rate spiked by over 15 percent.
In today’s actions, we have now sanctioned Russian banks that together hold around $1 trillion in assets.
We’ve cut off Russia’s largest bank — a bank that holds more than one third of Russia’s banking assets by itself — cut it off from the U.S. financial system.
And today, we’re also blocking four more major banks. That means every asset they have in America will be frozen. This includes V.T.B., the second-largest bank in Russia, which has $250 billion in assets.
As promised, we’re also adding names to the list of Russian elites and their family members that are sanctioning — that we’re sanctioning as well.
As I said on Tuesday, these are people who personally gain from the Kremlin’s policies and they should share in the pain. We will keep up this drumbeat of those designations against corrupt billionaires in the days ahead.
On Tuesday, we stopped the Russian government from raising money from U.S. or European investors.
Now, we’re going to apply the same restrictions to Russia’s largest state-owned enterprises — companies with assets that exceed $1.4 trillion.
Some of the most powerful impacts of our actions will come over time as we squeeze Russia’s access to finance and technology for strategic sectors of its economy and degrade its industrial capacity for years to come.
Between our actions and those of our Allies and partners, we estimate that we’ll cut off more than half of Russia’s high-tech imports.
It will strike a blow to their ability to continue to modernize their military. It’ll degrade their aerospace industry, including their space program. It will hurt their ability to build ships, reducing their ability to compete economically. And it will be a major hit to Putin’s long-term strategic ambitions.
And we’re preparing to do more. In addition to the economic penalties we’re imposing, we’re also taking steps to defend our NATO Allies, particularly in the east.
Tomorrow, NATO will convene a summit — we’ll be there — to bring together the leaders of 30 Allied nations and close partners to affirm our solidarity and to map out the next steps we will take to further strengthen all aspects of our NATO Alliance.
Although we provided over $650 million in defensive assistance to Ukraine just this year — this last year, let me say it again: Our forces are not and will not be engaged in the conflict with Russia in Ukraine. Our forces are not going to Europe to fight in Ukraine but to defend our NATO Allies and reassure those Allies in the east.
As I made crystal clear, the United States will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full force of American power. And the good news is: NATO is more united and more determined than ever.
There is no doubt — no doubt that the United States and every NATO Ally will meet our Article 5 commitments, which says that an attack on one is an attack on all.
Over the past few weeks, I ordered thousands of additional forces to Germany and Poland as part of our commitment to NATO.
On Tuesday, in response to Russia’s aggressive action, including its troop presence in Belarus and the Black Sea, I’ve authorized the deployment of ground and air forces already stationed in Europe to NATO’s eastern flank Allies: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania.
Our Allies have also been stepping up, adding — the other Allies, the rest of NATO — adding their own forces and capabilities to ensure our collective defense.
And today, within hours of Russia’s unleashing its assault, NATO came together and authorized and activated — an activation of response plans.
This will enable NATO’s high-readiness forces to deploy and — when and where they’re needed to protect our NATO Allies on the eastern boundaries of Europe.
And now I’m authorizing additional U.S. forces and capabilities to deploy to Germany as part of NATO’s response, including some of U.S.-based forces that the Department of Defense placed on standby weeks ago.
I’ve also spoken with Defense Secretary Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley, about preparations for additional moves should they become necessary to protect our NATO Allies and support the greatest military Alliance in the history of the world — NATO.
As we respond, my administration is using the tools — every tool at our disposal to protect American families and businesses from rising prices at the gas pump.
You know, we’re taking active steps to bring down the costs. And American oil and gas companies should not — should not exploit this moment to hike their prices to raise profits.
You know, in our sanctions package, we specifically designed to allow energy payments to continue.
We are closely monitoring energy supplies for any disruption. We have been coordinating with major oil producing and consuming countries toward our common interest to secure global energy supplies.
We are actively working with countries around the world to elevate [evaluate] a collective release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves of major energy-consuming countries. And the United States will release additional barrels of oil as conditions warrant.
I know this is hard and that Americans are already hurting. I will do everything in my power to limit the pain the American people are feeling at the gas pump. This is critical to me.
But this aggression cannot go unanswered. If it did, the consequences for America would be much worse. America stands up to bullies. We stand up for freedom. This is who we are.
Let me also repeat the warning I made last week: If Russia pursues cyberattacks against our companies, our critical infrastructure, we are prepared to respond.
For months, we have been working closely with our private — with the private sector to harden their cyber defenses, sharpen our ability to respond to Russian cyberattacks as well.
I spoke late last night to President Zelenskyy of Ukraine and I assured him that the United States, together with our Allies and partners in Europe, will support the Ukrainian people as they defend their country. We’ll provide humanitarian relief to ease their suffering.
And in the early days of this conflict, Russian propaganda outlets will keep trying to hide the truth and claim success for its military operation against a made-up threat.
But history has shown time and again how swift gains in territory eventually give way to grinding occupations, acts of mass civil — mass civil disobedience, and strategic dead-ends.
The next few weeks and months will be hard on the people of Ukraine. Putin has unleashed a great pain on them. But the Ukrainian people have known 30 years of independence, and they have repeatedly shown that they will not tolerate anyone who tries to take their country backwards.
This is a dangerous moment for all of Europe, for the freedom around the world. Putin has a — has committed an assault on the very principles that uphold global peace.
But now the entire world sees clearly what Putin and his Kremlin — and his Kremlin allies are really all about. This was never about genuine security concerns on their part. It was always about naked aggression, about Putin’s desire for empire by any means necessary — by bullying Russia’s neighbors through coercion and corruption, by changing borders by force, and, ultimately, by choosing a war without a cause.
Putin’s actions betray his sinister vision for the future of our world — one where nations take what they want by force.
But it is a vision that the United States and freedom-loving nations everywhere will oppose with every tool of our considerable power.
The United States and our Allies and partners will emerge from this stronger, more united, more determined, and more purposeful.
And Putin’s aggression against Ukraine will end up costing Russia dearly — economically and strategically. We will make sure of that. Putin will be a pariah on the international stage. Any nation that countenances Russia’s naked aggression against Ukraine will be stained by association.
When the history of this era is written, Putin’s choice to make a totally unjustifiable war on Ukraine will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger.
Liberty, democracy, human dignity — these are the forces far more powerful than fear and oppression. They cannot be extinguished by tyrants like Putin and his armies. They cannot be erased by people — from people’s hearts and hopes by any amount of violence and intimidation. They endure.
And in the contest between democracy and autocracy, between sovereignty and subjugation, make no mistake: Freedom will prevail.
God bless the people of a free and democratic Ukraine. And may God protect our troops.
Q President Biden —
THE PRESIDENT: Associated Press, Zeke.
Q Chris Megerian. So, do you have any plans to speak with President Putin at this point? And what interactions have you had with the Russian government?
THE PRESIDENT: I heard the first part: Do I have any plans to speak with Putin at this point. And what?
Q What communications have you had with the Kremlin as far as military (inaudible) in Ukraine and making sure this does not spiral into a larger conflict?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, it’s a large conflict already. The way we’re going to assure it’s not going to spiral to a larger conflict is by providing all the forces needed in the Eastern European nations that are members of NATO. NATO is more united than it’s ever been.
And I have no plans to talk with Putin.
Wall Street Journal, Tarina [Tarini].
Q Mr. President, you didn’t mention SWIFT in your sanctions that you announced. Is there a reason why the U.S. isn’t doing that? Is there disagreement among Allies regarding SWIFT and whether Russia should be allowed to be a part of it?
THE PRESIDENT: The sanctions that we have proposed on all their banks is of equal consequence — maybe more consequence than SWIFT — number one.
Number two, it is always an option. But right now, that’s not the position that the rest of Europe wishes to take.
Cecilia Ve- — Vega, ABC.
Q Thank you, sir. Sir, sanctions clearly have not been enough to deter Vladimir Putin to this point. What is going to stop him? How and when does this end? And do you see him trying to go beyond Ukraine?
And a second question I’ll just give to you now: This statement that he gave last night will — that the We- — the threat that he gave — the West “will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history.” Is he threatening a nuclear strike?
THE PRESIDENT: I have no idea what he’s threatening. I know what he has done, number one.
And number two, no one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening. That has to sh- — this is going to take time. And we have to show resolve so he knows what’s coming and so the people of Russia know what he’s brought on them. That’s what this is all about.
This is going to take time. It’s not going to occur — he’s going to say, “Oh my God, these sanctions are coming. I’m going to stand down.”
He’s going to test the resolve of the West to see if we stay together. And we will. We will and it will impose significant costs on him.
Q Will he go beyond Ukraine, sir? Do you see him going beyond Ukraine?
Q Mr. President — Mr. President —
THE PRESIDENT: (Points to reporter.) Yes.
Q Thank you. Two topics, just really quick. First, markets are down and gas prices are up. I know you always stress the difference between Wall Street and Main Street, but everybody seems to be in for some economic pain. How economically painful is it going to get for people in this country?
And I do have one more question.
THE PRESIDENT: First of all, there’s no doubt that when a major nuclear power attacks and invades another country that the world is going to respond and markets are going to respond all over the world. So, there’s no doubt about that, number one.
Number two, the notion that this is going to last for a long time is highly unlikely, as long as we continue to stay resolved in imposing the sanctions we’re going to impose on Russia, period.
What’s your next question? I’m sorry.
Q The next question is: Did you underestimate Putin? And would you still describe him the way that you did in the summer, as a “worthy adversary”?
THE PRESIDENT: At the time, he was — I made it clear he was an adversary, and I said he was “worthy.” I didn’t underestimate him.
And I’ve read most of everything he’s written. Did you read the — I shouldn’t sa- — I’m not being a wise guy. The — you heard the speech he made — almost an hour’s worth of speeches — why he was going into Ukraine.
He has much larger ambitions in Ukraine. He wants to, in fact, reestablish the former Soviet Union. That’s what this is about.
And I think that his — his ambitions are — are completely contrary to the place where the rest of the world has arrived.
Q President Biden — President Biden —
Q And — and with that — with his ambitions, you’re confident that these devastating sanctions are going to be as devastating as Russian missiles and bullets and tanks?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes. Russian bullets, missiles, and tanks in Ukraine. Yes, I am.
Q Thank you, President Biden. If sanctions cannot stop President Putin, what penalty can?
THE PRESIDENT: I didn’t say sanctions couldn’t stop him.
Q But you’ve been talking about the threat of these sanctions for several weeks now —
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, but the threat of the sanctions and imposing the sanctions and seeing the effect of the sanctions are two different things.
Q Okay, but —
THE PRESIDENT: They’re two different things. And we’re now going to — he’s going to begin to see the effect of the sanctions.
Q And what will that do — how will that change his mindset here, given he’s attacking Ukraine as we speak?
THE PRESIDENT: Because it will so weaken his country that he’ll have to make a very, very difficult choices of whether to continue to move toward being a second-rate power or, in fact, respond.
Q You said, in recent weeks, that big nations cannot bluff when it comes to something like this. You recently said that the idea of personally sanctioning President Putin was on the table. Is that a step that you’re prepared to take? And if not —
THE PRESIDENT: It’s not a bluff; it’s on the table.
Q Sanctioning President Putin?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
Q Why not sanction him today, sir? Why not sanction him today, sir?
Q Mr. President —
Q Mr. President, if I can, you detailed some severe and swift new sanctions today and said the impact it will have over time, but given the full-scale invasion, given that you’re not pursuing disconnecting Russia from what’s called “SWIFT” — the international banking system — or other sanctions at your disposal, respectfully, sir, what more are you waiting for?
THE PRESIDENT: Specifically, the sanctions we’ve imposed exceed SWIFT. The sanctions we imposed exceed anything that’s ever been done. The sanctions we imposed have generated two thirds of the world joining us. They are profound sanctions. Let’s have a conversation in another month or so to see if they’re working.
Yes.
Q Let me ask you about — can I ask you about Zelenskyy? Sir, you spoke to Volodymyr Zelenskyy yesterday, sir, if I could follow up —
Q What’s the risk that we are watching the beginning of another Cold War? And is there now a complete rupture in U.S. and Russian relations?
THE PRESIDENT: There is a complete rupture right now in U.S.-Russian relations if they continue on this path that they’re on.
And in terms of a Cold War, that depends. You have the vast majority of the rest of the world in total opposition to what he’s doing — from Asia to South America to Europe to acr- — around the world.
And so, it’s going to be a cold day for Russia. The idea — you don’t see a whole lot of people coming to his defense.
Q And are you — are you — if I could follow-up, sir. Are you urging China to help isolate Russia? Are you urging China to help isolate Russia?
THE PRESIDENT: I’m not prepared to comment on that at the moment.
(Cross-talk by reporters.)
Q Mr. President —
THE PRESIDENT: Wait. No, no. (Points to reporter.) Yeah.
No, no, no. He’s had his hand up a long time.
Q Thank you, Mr. President. How concerned are you that Putin wants to go beyond Ukraine into other countries and the U.S. will have to get involved if he moves into NATO countries?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, if he did move into NATO countries, he will be involved — we will be involved. The only thing that I’m convinced of is: If we don’t stop now, he’ll be emboldened. If we don’t move against him now with these significant sanctions, he will be emboldened.
Look, you know, every — well, anyway.
Q And can you talk anything more about your conversation —
(Cross-talk by reporters.)
THE PRESIDENT: I’m sorry, I can’t hear you.
Q Sir, India, which is a major defense partner of the United States — is India with — fully with you on the issue of Ukraine and Russia?
THE PRESIDENT: Does the Defense Department of the United States —
Q Sir, India is one of your major defense partners. Is India fully in sync with United States on Russia?
THE PRESIDENT: We’re going to be — we’re in consultation with — with India today. We haven’t resolved that completely.
Q One more question —
(Cross-talk by reporters.)
THE PRESIDENT: Okay, thank you all very much. Thank you.
2:05 P.M. EST
22. Russia's 74th Motor Rifle Brigade surrenders to Ukraine
This was a platoon size element (perhaps between 20 and 40 personnel). Obviously the headline editor is taking some liberty to make this more sensational. That said, surrender by any amount of Russian troops is an interesting indicator.
Excerpt:
When asked about the number of Russian troops that surrendered, Markarova responded, “Platoon, so, I don’t know the exact number.”
Russia's 74th Motor Rifle Brigade surrenders to Ukraine
The Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces (CinC AF) of Ukraine announced on Thursday that a platoon of Russian troops surrendered because they didn’t know “they were brought to Ukraine to kill Ukrainians.”
In a Facebook post, the top Ukrainian commander wrote that “Russian invaders” surrendered to “Ukrainian defenders.”
“Russian invaders, facing the total resistance of Ukrainian defenders, surrender themselves to captivity. Under Chernihiv, a whole intelligence unit of 74 motorcycle rifle brigade surrendered,” the CinC AF stated, adding that the Russian soldiers “thought they would return home” and that they were “collecting information” instead of fighting.
During a press briefing, Ukraine Ambassador Markarova also told reporters that a platoon of the Russian 74th Motorized Rifle Brigade surrendered to Ukrainian forces.
“Just before I came here, we got information from our chief commander that one of the platoons of the 74th motorized brigade…surrendered, also noting that they didn’t know that they were brought to Ukraine to kill Ukrainians. That they thought they were doing something else there,” she explained.
“Again, Ukraine is defending our home. We will defend our home and it’s time for all free and democratic nations who value the principles and the territorial integrity and the right of any country for peace, to stand together with us — but not only stand together with us, act together with us to stop the war in Europe.”
When asked about the number of Russian troops that surrendered, Markarova responded, “Platoon, so, I don’t know the exact number.”
Markarova said Ukraine is asking the nation’s partners and friends to enact “massive sanctions” for the recent Russian aggression, as well as the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. Ukraine also needs help with “defensive capabilities,” she said.
“Our military and every Ukrainian is ready to defend our country. We need help in order to be able to defend our country. Humanitarian assistance, because the damages that Russia is inflicting on Ukraine right now are large, and of course, the day-to-day life of ordinary people is at risk and is disrupted greatly,” Markarova said.
The ambassador also addressed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claim that he is seeking the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine.
“This is absurd. In 2014, Ukraine has chosen a path again to Democracy…Since 2014, Ukraine has been not only reforming itself, but preserving and developing a democracy in Ukraine. We are a country that now has our sixth president, and it’s all during the same time that Russia has one president,” Markarova said. “We are a democratic country. All of our friends and allies can attest that Ukraine is a very accepting community. That actually after the freedoms disappeared in Russia, all of the people, many of the people, actually, you know, starting from Radio Free Europe and others, found their home in Ukraine. Especially when they were first forced out from Russia, and then forced out from Belarus.”
“So, I not only reject those claims, they are completely false. And I know that many people of different nationalities call Ukraine their home, and moreover, many people of different nationalities defend their home in Ukraine right now,” she concluded.
23. Hacking collective Anonymous declares 'cyber war' against Russia
This will be fascinating to observe. What effects can Anonymous achieve? As an aside, and not discounting the suffering that is taking place among the Ukrainian people, there are going to be many lessons derived from this war that will shape the future of warfare in the 21st Century.
Hacking collective Anonymous declares 'cyber war' against Russia
Hacking collective Anonymous declares 'cyber war' against Vladimir Putin's government before announcing they have 'taken down' website of Kremlin-backed TV channel RT
- The elusive computer experts issued the stark announcement on Twitter
- They said they were 'officially' in 'cyber war against the Russian government'
- Shortly afterwards they revealed they had targeted Kremlin-backed RT
PUBLISHED: 21:18 EST, 24 February 2022 | UPDATED: 02:23 EST, 25 February 2022
Daily Mail · by Harry Howard For Mailonline · February 25, 2022
Hacking group Anonymous has declared 'cyber war' against Vladimir Putin's government after he mounted a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The elusive computer experts issued the stark announcement on their Twitter account on Thursday evening.
They said shortly before 10pm: 'The Anonymous collective is officially in cyber war against the Russian government.'
Around 30 minutes later, they announced that they had taken down the website of the Kremlin-backed TV channel RT, which broadcasts in Britain and has been heavily criticised for its coverage.
When MailOnline attempted to access the site this morning, it was still inaccessible and only displayed an error message that said 'this site can't be reached'.
Hacking group Anonymous (file photo) has declared 'cyber war' against Vladimir Putin's government after he mounted a full-scale invasion of Ukraine
The elusive computer experts issued the stark announcement on their Twitter account on Thursday evening
The cyber war declaration raises the prospect that Russia could be subjected to systematic hacking attempts in the coming days.
Prior to the invasion of Ukraine on Thursday, the country's government and banks were targeted by a massive cyber attack that was believed to have been carried out by Russia.
People on social media responded positively to Anonymous's cyber war declaration against Putin.
The cyber war declaration raises the prospect that Russia could be subjected to systematic hacking attempts in the coming days. Above: Vladimir Putin
One person wrote: 'THANK YOU! Now, work on draining their finances.'
Another said: 'You are awesome, thanks.'
A third wrote: 'THANK YOU! I love you! The most beautiful thing EVER...'
Anonymous said in their tweet about RT: 'The #Anonymous collective has taken down the website of the #Russian propaganda station RT News.'
The group also announced that they had taken down the website of the Kremlin-backed TV channel RT, which broadcasts in Britain and has been heavily criticised for its coverage
Anonymous have previously targeted groups including the Ku Klux Klan and Islamic extremists.
Members are known as 'Anons' and are distinguished by their Guy Fawkes masks.
In July last year, the collective warned Tesla founder Elon Musk that they planned to target him after saying he wields too much power over the cryptocurrency markets.
When MailOnline attempted to access the RT site this morning, it was still inaccessible and only displayed an error message that said 'this site can't be reached'
Daily Mail · by Harry Howard For Mailonline · February 25, 2022
24. How Biden defeated Putin’s Ukraine disinformation campaign
We have done some very good things but it is not over yet. We need to sustain a supporting political warfare campaign against Russia and other revisionist and rogue powers. The Russians have not ended their disinformation campaign and will not as long as Putin is in power.
How Biden defeated Putin’s Ukraine disinformation campaign
When Russia seized Crimea in 2014, it was an act of gray war. Russian soldiers wearing uniforms without insignia—”little green men”—seized strategic points there and in eastern Ukraine. It wasn’t clear if these were separatists, foreigners, or both, confusion that Vladimir Putin promoted until the facts on the ground were in his favor.
Ahead of this Russian invasion of Ukraine, the US government knew that clarity would be critical to rallying global public opinion against an invasion. It attempted an unusual diplomatic tactic: Sharing intelligence in near real-time to reveal Russia’s military build-up.
As Vladimir Putin ordered soldiers and tanks to surround Ukraine, the US publicly announced its deployments, demonstrating that Russia wasn’t reacting to a provocation but preparing to start a war. And when Putin suggested he was pulling his forces back, American officials were able to demonstrate he was lying.
“The US has done a very good job of frustrating Russia’s plans to create a pretext for war,” Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert at the Middlebury Institute for International Affairs, says. “The narrative of this crisis has really been driven by the fact that the US has lots of evidence to back up its claims, while the Russians have often been caught saying things that are manifestly untrue.”
Russia’s aggression has been clear to see
US intelligence agencies are some of the best in the world at intercepting communications and using satellites to keep tabs on adversaries. It is harder to estimate the extent of its human intelligence sources, but the US undoubtedly seeks access to Putin’s regime and encourages defectors. While this information is typically shared with trusted allies, this time that conversation is taking place in the open.
“The pace at which they are releasing intel information is new,” says Emily Harding, a former CIA analyst now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The cost is potentially losing access to sources, she says, “[but] if you’re not going to declassify intelligence that might prevent a war, when would you declassify intelligence?”
As Putin and his allies have claimed, falsely, that Ukraine is committing genocide, controlled by Nazis, developing nuclear weapons, or launching attacks on pro-Russian civilians, the US has worked to “prebunk” these narratives, Harding says, arguing that “the final accounting is going to show that the strategy made Russia’s life much harder.”
“Our theory has been that putting true information into the public domain, which was bearing out in real time because everybody can see what they’re actually doing, was the best way to prevent the Russians and what they always do, which is to try to control the narrative with disinformation,” an anonymous US official told the New York Times.
What the US and its allies gained from calling out Putin
This was not an attempt to deter Russia from invading, but rather to prepare to fight back.
Rob Lee, who studies the Russian military at King’s College in London, wrote a prescient analysis of Putin’s thinking last month. He noted the US had few options to deter Russia, but that “better deterrence options would not take effect unless Russia conducted a significant escalation, making Moscow the initiator. Such an approach would worsen Russia’s security situation, potentially negating whatever security benefits it hoped to achieve by escalating in Ukraine.”
The US has used its intelligence as a tool for coalition building. The fruits of that effort can be seen in the unity of the NATO alliance in the face of Russia’s activities, exemplified by Germany’s decision to cancel the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. But they can also be seen in global outrage against the war, like the speech delivered by Kenya’s UN ambassador that explicitly framed Putin’s invasion as an act of imperialism.
“Sanctions depend on the willingness of countries to enforce them, so making it clear that Russia is the aggressor is a major part of any sanctions effort,” Lewis says.
Now, US officials will have to follow through by pushing through a sanctions package with more teeth, and being willing to suffer the economic consequences of higher gas prices and other economic dislocations. Russia’s economy does not rival that of the West, but it remains an important producer of key commodities.
The other way these intel dumps help the US is undermining the Russian government, Harding points out. The spectacle of Putin dressing down his cabinet members earlier this week underscored the fragility of the regime.
“You can bet the Russians will start looking at each other to figure out where there might be a leak,” she points out. “Having your adversary second-guessing who it can trust is a benefit to releasing intelligence.”
25. Ukraine conflict will have a significant impact on Asia
Global effects.
I am not optimistic that this could create an uptick in US-PRC relations.
Excerpts:
It is even possible to see the Ukraine crisis creating a bit of an uptick in U.S.-China relations. Ironically, compared to Russia's behavior, some of China's activities to which the U.S. objects may look more measured to some U.S. leaders. And if China can be helpful in pushing the situation back to a negotiation, Washington would be grateful. That approach is something U.S. policymakers are quietly broaching with their interlocutors in Beijing.
Look for the crisis to consolidate alignment among the Asian democracies, who will strenuously object to the Russian invasion.
It may also create a small opening for the U.S. and China, and a shared interest in calming the international economic system. The underlying competition between the U.S. and China will continue strategically, but Ukraine may provide a tactical respite worth exploring.
Ukraine conflict will have a significant impact on Asia
Look for the crisis to consolidate alignment among Asia's democracies
February 24, 2022 17:10 JST
Admiral James Stavridis was 16th supreme allied commander of NATO and 12th dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He spent the bulk of his operational career in the Pacific, and is author of "2034: A Novel of the Next World War."
In the midst of the Ukraine crisis created by Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of his neighbor and deployment of Russian "peacekeepers" in the Donbas region, there are ripple effects reaching far into the Pacific.
Whether or not Putin deepens the crisis with a further shock and awe attack to conduct a regime change in Kyiv or decides to consolidate his conquests in the southeast of Ukraine, there will be a series of significant impacts in Asia.
Most obviously, Putin's conduct thus far will cause a massive tranche of sanctions applied to important elements of Russia's economy.
The nation will likely be detached from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication system, commonly known as the SWIFT system, face curtailment of access to international capital markets, and have to deal with restrictions on doing business with any Russian oil, gas, or financial company.
Look for very personal and targeted sanctions applied to high-level oligarchs and government advisers. Assets in the U.S., the European Union and other democracies will be frozen. Overall the sanctions will be both broad and highly targeted personally at certain individuals.
We have a pretty good idea how impactful such sanctions will be because they will mirror a similar set that was levied on Iran and caused an over 60% contraction in Tehran's economy.
They will be mitigated somewhat based on the work Putin has done since falling under some sanctions following his first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. He has also stockpiled cash for this moment.
Russian ruble banknotes: Putin has stockpiled cash for this moment. © Reuters
Despite such fireproofing, the Russian economy will contract fairly significantly. For Asian nations with significant trading relations with Moscow, this will have a growing effect over time as the Russian economy contracts.
The West will also likely cut off exports of high-tech products, including advanced microchips and any devices that contain them. This will not only impact Russian consumers, but the loss of Russian markets will reduce aggregate global demand for such products, ultimately affecting nations that produce them if they depend on sales to Russia.
Moscow can also be expected to put Beijing in an uncomfortable economic position. Putin has signaled that part of his "phone-a-friend" strategy will include leaning on China to provide markets to make up sanctions levied by the West, allow access to Chinese capital and facilitate the transfer of funds to and from Russian entities that are denied access to traditional international financial markets, such as via the SWIFT system which facilitates financial transactions between banks worldwide. China will not want to provide blanket support to Russia's economy but will feel pressure to do so from Putin.
In terms of energy markets, gas and oil prices will face upward pressure depending on how successful Russia is at unloading hydrocarbons in the face of such sanctions. With many developed economies currently experiencing surging inflation, this will have a depressive impact on global manufacturing, causing slowdowns across many Asian countries.
Geopolitically, the invasion of Ukraine will cause some Asian nations to have to choose sides. The U.S. will put considerable pressure on Japan, South Korea, Australia, Singapore and other techno-democracies to fully condemn Russian behavior in invading and annexing portions of a neighboring sovereign state. All indications thus far indicate there will be strong alignment among this Asian group and the U.S.
For India, the Ukraine crisis presents a difficult dilemma. While India condemns Chinese encroachment in the Himalayas, and there is always in tension with Pakistan over territorial issues in Kashmir, they also have strong strategic ties to Russia. Nearly 70% of Indian military hardware, for example, comes from Moscow.
The Indians will try to walk a fine line and call for de-escalation, negotiation and avoiding a full-blown war, but they are unlikely to give the kind of full-throated condemnation the U.S., Europe and Japan would like to see.
A more interesting geopolitical impact will be upon U.S.-China relations.
China has been nuanced thus far, which makes sense given their overall opposition to nations interfering with other sovereign nations as a general proposition. On the other hand, the parallels with the Taiwan situation have caused some observers to opine that the fall of Ukraine will make China more likely to bring the "rogue province" to heel.
A more likely outcome is that China will be mildly helpful economically to Russia where it makes economic sense for the Chinese, push the West to impose the minimum sanctions necessary to reduce impact to the global economy and continue to bide its time in terms of resolving the Taiwan issue.
This is particularly true given the upcoming 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in late fall, an event during which President Xi Jinping will be consolidating his third term at the helm of China. In essence, the Chinese are hoping for a quiet year to facilitate that important internal event.
It is even possible to see the Ukraine crisis creating a bit of an uptick in U.S.-China relations. Ironically, compared to Russia's behavior, some of China's activities to which the U.S. objects may look more measured to some U.S. leaders. And if China can be helpful in pushing the situation back to a negotiation, Washington would be grateful. That approach is something U.S. policymakers are quietly broaching with their interlocutors in Beijing.
Look for the crisis to consolidate alignment among the Asian democracies, who will strenuously object to the Russian invasion.
It may also create a small opening for the U.S. and China, and a shared interest in calming the international economic system. The underlying competition between the U.S. and China will continue strategically, but Ukraine may provide a tactical respite worth exploring.
26. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in four graphics
The timeline is especially useful for those who do not know the background to the current conflict.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine in four graphics
Russia has launched an attack on Ukraine. Tanks are rolling in, and explosions going off in several cities across the country. Four graphics explain the history and current situation.
Ukrainian troops prepare to repel an attack in Luhansk on February 24
Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine early February 24, 2022. Since then it has fired rockets at Ukraine, setting off explosions across the country. Russian tanks have rolled into Ukrainian territory, and helicopters are attacking ground targets from the air. This map shows the locations of verified Russian attacks on the first day of the invasion.
Russian attacks in Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Russia's military power is superior to Ukraine's in virtually every way — on land, at sea and in the air. Some experts say Ukraine's only chance of getting Russian troops to retreat is partisan warfare. The goal of this would be to break the morale of Russian troops with small, targeted strikes.
Russia outnumbers Ukraine in personnel, equipment and weapons
The history of the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine dates to the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. As Ukraine has oriented itself more toward the European Union, tensions have escalated, particularly since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and separatists gained control of Donetsk and Luhansk. The following timeline plots out the course of the current conflict, from the breakdown in diplomacy to invasion.
A chronology of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine since 2014
Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly pointed to the eastward expansion of NATO as a threat to the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation. This map shows how the borders of the alliance have shifted toward Russia since the end of the Cold War.
This article was originally written in German
27. Reservist in Ukraine, with a surprising past, had to decide whether to stay and fight
Reservist in Ukraine, with a surprising past, had to decide whether to stay and fight
February 25, 20225:14 AM ET
