Quotes of the Day:
"The truth does not drown in water and it doesn't burn in fire."
-Ukrainian proverb
"Always remember, however sure you are that you could easily win, that there would not be a war if the other fellow did not think he also had a chance."
-- Winston Churchill
"No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance."
-- Alan Bullock, British historian
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 29 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. Ukraine War Update - March 28, 2022 | SOF News
3. What the horrors of Syria and Chechnya can tell us about Russia’s tactics in Ukraine
4. Leadership at War
5. The Cruelty of Half Measures in Ukraine
6. In Cyber: Resilience is about Capabilities, not Plans
7. Biden’s ‘Integrated Deterrence’ Fails in Ukraine
8. Ukraine Proposes Neutral Status With Guarantees, and Zelensky Seeks More Western Help
9. America’s Declining Military
10. Rival Networks Aided Fox News After Ukraine Tragedy, Highlighting War-Zone Collaboration
11. Ukraine will not be like Korea – dogged resistance will turn it into Putin’s ‘bleeding ulcer’
12. Biden’s Defense Budget Sends the Wrong Message
13. Opinion | What if Putin Didn’t Miscalculate?
14. U.S. and Europe Should Stop Congratulating Themselves
15. Biden risking new wars with Iran 'diplomacy' — and our Middle East allies know it
16. Generation Jihad Ep. 67 — Meanwhile in Africa
17. Ukraine War Offers Opportunity To Bring Turkey and its Defense Industry into NATO Fold
18. Marines Head to Lithuania as Russians Relent Around Kyiv
19. Russia Has Fired Hypersonic Missiles Into Ukraine, US General Confirms
20. True or False? The Fight Against Disinformation
21. Biden’s Unbalanced Ukraine Policy
22. The Rhino of Kyiv
23. Open source intelligence observers gain growing role in how war is viewed
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 29 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 29 (putin's War)
Frederick W. Kagan, George Barros, and Kateryna Stepanenko
March 29, 5:00 ET
The Russians have not yet abandoned their attacks on Kyiv, claims by Russian Defense Ministry officials notwithstanding. Russian forces continued fighting to hold their forwardmost positions on the eastern and western Kyiv outskirts even as badly damaged units withdrew to Russia from elsewhere on the Kyiv and Chernihiv axes. The Russian high command has likely concluded that it cannot seize Kyiv and may not be able to move artillery closer to the center of the city. It may have decided to stop its previous practices of forcing units that have already taken devastating losses to continue hopeless offensive operations and of feeding individual battalion tactical groups into the battle as they become available rather than concentrating them to achieve decisive effects. Russian officials are likely casting these decisions driven by military realities as overtures demonstrating Russia’s willingness to engage in serious ceasefire or peace negotiations, possibly to conceal the fact that they have accepted the failure of their efforts on the Kyiv axis.
Russia continues to reinforce its efforts in Ukraine’s northeast likely attempting to link its positions southeast of Kharkiv and Izyum with its forces in Luhansk Oblast. The Russians have reportedly redirected forces from the Chernihiv-Kharkiv axis to the Izyum-Slovyansk axis, most likely reassigning reinforcements rather than redeploying units already committed to fighting. Russian forces in the Izyum-Slovyansk area continue fighting to hold and expand their penetration to the southeast.
The Russian advance in Mariupol continues to gain ground, and Russian forces have likely bisected or even trisected the city. Pockets of Ukrainian defenders continue to hold out in Mariupol, likely in several areas, but the Russians will likely complete the conquest of the city within days. Russian forces have likely taken significant casualties in the tough urban fighting in Mariupol, making it difficult to evaluate how much combat power the Russians will be able to harvest from Mariupol to use for further advances north and west.
Russian operations in southeastern Ukraine have left large portions of Donetsk Oblast under Ukrainian control. Securing the boundaries of Donetsk Oblast along with the entirety of Luhansk Oblast will likely require a major offensive operation. Much of the area of Donetsk Oblast outside Russian control is flat and sparsely populated—terrain similar to that on which Russian forces elsewhere have been able to advance rapidly, at least earlier in the war. Russian offensive operations in similar terrain more recently have struggled, however. It is too soon to tell how feasible the Russian conquest of all of Donetsk and Luhansk will be for the Russian military in its current state.
Key Takeaways
- We now assess that Russian forces have given up on encircling or seizing Kyiv at this time. Russian forces continue to fight to hold their current front-line trace near the city, however, remaining dug into positions to the east, northwest, and west. Russian forces withdrawing from the area around Kyiv appear to be moving north from behind the front line to positions in Belarus.
- Russia is directing some reserves to the effort to connect gains southeast of Kharkiv and Izyum with its front line in Luhansk.
- Ukrainian forces continue to defend in likely isolated pockets in Mariupol. The city will likely fall to the Russians within days.
- A Russian offensive operation to take the rest of unoccupied Donetsk Oblast would be a significant undertaking. It remains unclear if Russia can harvest enough combat power from Mariupol after securing the city or divert reinforcements from elsewhere on a large enough scale to complete it.
Russia reportedly continues to struggle in its efforts to generate new combat power and replenish equipment. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on March 29 that Russian troops are drawing equipment out of long-term storage in Boguchar, Voronezh Oblast, but that 40% of that equipment is inoperable.[1] The General Staff also reported that Russian efforts to generate reinforcements from the Pacific Fleet could not produce even a single battalion because of refusals to fight.[2] We have no independent confirmation of these assessments, but Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu‘s March 29 statement that Russia would not deploy conscripts to “hot spots” corroborates assessments of Russian soldiers’ unwillingness to enter the war.[3] The UK Ministry of Defense reported on March 28 that the Wagner Group is deploying forces, including senior leaders, to eastern Ukraine to make up for heavy Russian combat losses.[4]
We do not report in detail on the deliberate Russian targeting of civilian infrastructure and attacks on unarmed civilians, which are war crimes, because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
Russian forces are engaged in four primary efforts at this time:
- Main effort—Kyiv (comprised of three subordinate supporting efforts);
- Supporting effort 1—Kharkiv;
- Supporting effort 1a—Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts;
- Supporting effort 2—Mariupol; and
- Supporting effort 3—Kherson and advances northward and westward.
Main effort—Kyiv axis: Russian operations on the Kyiv axis were aimed at encircling the city from the northwest, west, and east. It is unclear if forces on this axis have been given a new mission and, if so, what it might be.
Russian forces have likely abandoned efforts to encircle or seize Kyiv at this time, although they continue to fight to hold their current front lines on both banks of the Dnipro River. Multiple Ukrainian and Western reports indicate that some Russian forces are pulling back from the Kyiv axis.[5] Belarussian media showed videos of Russian forces moving back into Belarus from Ukraine on March 28 and March 29.[6] Russian forces continue to defend their current front-line trace, however, according to the Ukrainian General Staff and additional reporting below.[7] The Russians reportedly continued to bring artillery and missiles, including Iskander systems, toward the Ukrainian border in Belarus, presumably for use in the Kyiv and Chernihiv region.[8]
Subordinate main effort along the west bank of the Dnipro
Russian forces are actively resisting Ukrainian counteroffensives in the Irpin and Hostomel areas and continued to shell Makariv and Irpin on March 29.[9] Russian troops remain dug in in the Bucha and Nemishyev areas just northwest of Irpin.[10] Russian artillery and rockets continue to fire at Ukrainian positions at many locations north and west of the capital.[11]
Subordinate supporting effort—Chernihiv and Sumy axis
The Ukrainian General Staff reported on March 29 that Russian forces are attempting to hold their current positions in and around Brovary on the east bank of the Dnipro River.[12] Russian forces remained in likely isolated or encircled positions around Bashyrivka, roughly 58 kilometers from Kyiv, on March 29, and at Kalytyanske and Velyka Dymerka, roughly 48 and 31 kilometers east of Kyiv respectively.[13]
Russian forces continued their encirclement and bombardment of Chernihiv city on March 29.[14]
The Ukrainian General Staff reported on March 29 that elements of the Russian 1st Guards Tank Army that had been concentrated in Russia near Sumy were diverted to “different directions”—presumably toward the southeast.[15] Another Ukrainian source noted that elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army were reinforcing Russian positions around Kamyanka, roughly 130 kilometers southeast of Kharkiv and close to the city of Izyum, which the Russians bypassed.[16] It is not clear if these are the same forces.
Russian forces may be preparing to take up a defensive position along the Snov River east of Chernihiv, as they have destroyed bridges in a number of towns along that river according to the March 28 Ukrainian General Staff report.[17] This activity combined with the reported reallocation of reserve units from the Sumy area could indicate preparations to separate the lines of advance from Kharkiv east toward Kyiv from the axis driving south through Chernihiv toward the capital.
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv:
Russian forces do not appear to have conducted significant operations in or immediately around Kharkiv in the last 24 hours.
Supporting Effort #1a—Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts:
Russia reinforced its efforts to take Slovyansk, roughly 160 kilometers southeast of Kharkiv, with elements of the 20th Combined Arms Army in addition to the elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army reportedly diverted from near Sumy.[18] Fighting along the road from near Izyum toward Slovyansk continued on March 29.[19]
Supporting Effort #2—Mariupol:
Russian forces continued to make steady but likely painful progress in seizing the city of Mariupol on March 29. Fighting has been intense, with Donetsk People’s Republic leaders claiming that Russian forces have made significant advances and the Ukrainian General Staff claiming that Ukrainian forces continue to maintain a coherent defense.[20] Mariupol will likely fall within days.
Supporting Effort #3—Kherson and advances northward and westwards:
There were no reported significant changes in the situation in the Kherson or Zaporizhiya regions in the last 24 hours.
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces will likely capture Mariupol or force the city to capitulate within the coming days;
- Russian reinforcements may enable a renewed Russian offensive through Slovyansk to link up with Russian forces in Luhansk Oblast;
- Russian withdrawals from near Kyiv and Chernihiv will become significant if Russian troops begin to pull back from front-line positions around either city.
[9] https://t dot me/kyivoda/2787
[13] https://t dot me/s/kyivoda
[16] https://t dot me/chernigivskaODA/709
2. Ukraine War Update - March 28, 2022 | SOF News
Ukraine War Update - March 28, 2022 | SOF News
Curated news, analysis, and commentary about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tactical situation on the ground, Ukrainian defense, and NATO. Additional topics include refugees, internally displaced personnel, humanitarian efforts, cyber, and information operations.
Photo: Special Forces Soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 10th Special Forces Group deploy light tactical vehicles from a CH-47 Chinook helicopter from the 1st Combat Aviation Brigade during exercise Saber Junction in Germany. The 10th SFG(A)’s primary area of responsibility is Europe. (photo SOCEUR Twitter 12 Dec 2019).
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Russian Campaign Update
In an apparent shift in campaign objectives, Russia has decided to focus on the areas of eastern Ukraine along the Russian border. It stated in a recent press conference that Kyiv is no longer an objective, although the Russian troops arrayed around much of Kyiv have not departed. Russia is moving reinforcements from the country of Georgia, a country that was invaded by Russia in 2008. Now that some of Russia’s forces are in defensive positions, they are emplacing mines in front of their perimeters. This will slow down Ukrainian counterattacks and pose a problem for Ukraine far into the future.
Fight for the Skies. Apparently, some of Russia’s precision-guided missiles are not that precise. Some are failing to launch, many miss their intended targets, and some that do, fail to detonate. The United States has estimated that the missiles have between a 20% to a 60% failure rate. On Saturday (Mar 26) a record 70 missiles were fired by Russia on Ukraine. The US DoD estimates that as of Friday (Mar 25) the Russians have launched over 1,250 missiles into Ukraine.
Russian Generals and Upward Mobility. By some counts, at least seven Russian generals have been killed in Putin’s War. At this rate, if this war continues, the number of senior officer promotions will accelerate in the Russian army.
Russian Artillery – MIA. One aspect of the war in Ukraine that deserves further study is the lack of effectiveness of Russia’s much-vaunted artillery. Considered a mainstay of the Russian offense, the artillery support seems deficient. Perhaps the striking of civilian infrastructure is diverting the artillery barrages from being used during tactical operations. Read more in “Russian Prototypes, Cope-cages, and Missing Artillery”, Vantage Point North, March 27, 2022.
Russian Armor. The tank columns of the Russian army have been decimated by the Ukrainian forces. Small, roving bands of Ukrainian soldiers are ambushing the tanks using anti-tank weapons. Many tanks have been stuck in mud, out of fuel, or victims of Russian tank crews abandoning the fight. “With Captured Tanks, Ukraine Now Has More Armor Than When The War Began”, by Howard Altman, Coffee or Die Magazine, March 26, 2022.
Russian Comms. There are some apparent deficiencies in the planning and execution of the communications plan for the invasion of Ukraine. Some units are relying on unencrypted push-to-talk radios and cell phones. Some units have their comms systems up and running while others do not. The Ukrainian military and intelligence services are taking advantage of the poor communications practices of the invaders. “Russian troops’ tendency to talk on unsecured lines is proving costly”, The Washington Post, March 27, 2022.
Ukrainian Defense
Conducting some limited counterattacks, the Ukrainian military has put up a successful defense of many of the cities the Russians had attempted to capture. But now “the real hard task begins”. Read more in an article posted by Andrew Milburn from Kyiv in “Russia’s war in Ukraine is far from over”, Task & Purpose, March 26, 2022.
Ukraine’s Intel Chief Speaks Out. Howard Altman interviews Brig. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the defense intelligence agency head, on how the war is progressing and the intelligence coups that have helped the Ukrainian military face off against the Russians. “Ukraine’s Intel Chief: We have sources in the Kremlin, but we need jets”, Coffee or Die Magazine, March 27, 2022.
Insurgency and Resistance – a Critical Role. Russian forces are still slowly advancing. They are not likely to give up much of the territory that they currently hold, unless the Ukrainian military forces them off that terrain. So the war, in those occupied territories, may become one of insurgent versus counter-insurgent. While there are plenty of fighters that will conduct guerrilla operations in the enemies rear – they won’t last long without the support of the civilian population. This means an underground, shadow government (on the local level), and auxiliary are critical. An Army Civil Affairs officer explains in “Oft Forgotten but Critical Elements of Ukrainian Resistance”, War on the Rocks, March 28, 2022.
Tactical Situation
Donbass. The bulk of the Ukrainian army is concentrated in eastern Ukraine and the Russians are attempting to secure all of the area referred to as Donbas. They are likely attempting reposition their forces, shorten their supply lines, and cut off Ukrainian forces in the east from their own supply lines. The key objective in this ‘new plan’ is the besieged city of Mariupol.
Mariupol. The Russians continue to make small, incremental advances into the city. Located on the Sea of Azov, the coastal city of Mariupol is under siege by the Russians. France and Turkey are in talks with Russia to assist in a joint humanitarian mission for Mariupol. Over 100,000 residents remain in the seaport on the Sea of Azov.
Kyiv. At one time, the capital city of Ukraine was considered the primary objective of the Russians. The capture of Kyiv would allow Russia to put in place its puppet government. But now, with the successful defense of Kyiv, Russia seems to have moved the goalposts. Apparently, according to a briefing by Russian defense officials a few days back, Kyiv was never the primary objective; just a way of keeping Ukrainian troops tied down and away from the eastern front. However, Ukrainian officials are wary of recent Russian statements and say that it is too early to dismiss the danger to Kyiv. Residents of Kyiv are in a lighter mood although the air raid sirens are still blaring through the night and missile attacks continue.
Kharkiv. The second largest city of Ukraine, Kharkiv, continues to experience Russian shelling with Grad and Uragan missile launch systems. The city is holding out and still has open supply lines to the west.
Mykolayiv. Located on the west bank of the Dnieper River close to the coast of the Black Sea, Mykolayiv is a strategic objective for the Russians that is on the road to Odessa located further west along the coast of the Black Sea. It now appears unlikely that the Russians will take this city. The Ukrainian forces have been conducting limited counterattacks around the city.
General Information
Negotiations. The talks are continuing. On Saturday Turkish President Recep Erdogan claimed that Ukraine and Russia were nearing consensus on four of Russia’s demands. Ukraine’s membership in NATO and the status of the Russian language are two key points of the negotiations. More talks will take place on Tuesday (Mar 29) in Istanbul, Turkey.
Chornobyl – A Constant Worry. When the Russians attacked and took control of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine there was a concern that a radiative leak could occur. Thus far, that has not happened. However, there are some worries about radioactive materials that may fall into the wrong hands. “Dirty bomb ingredients go missing from Chornobyl monitoring lab”, Science.org, March 25, 2022.
IO and Cyber
Chinese Disinformation. Beijing has amplified Russian conspiracy theories to spread disinformation about the war in Ukraine to a global audience. It has been parroting the Kremlin’s talking points to include the need to conduct a “de-Nazification” of Ukraine. “Chinese Disinformation Seeks to Support Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine”, The Soufan Center IntelBrief, March 28, 2022.
‘Conversational Receptiveness’. Some Harvard University colleagues are reaching out to the Russians about Putin’s War. Using a crowd-sourcing method of sending emails to Russians, they hope to educate Russians about the war – providing information not available in their government controlled media. The approach used by www.mail2ru.org encompasses the lessons of research on receptiveness to opposing views. “Blending technology with psychology to engage Russian people on the Ukraine war”, Harvard Kennedy School, March 22, 2022.
World Response
Biden’s Visit to Europe. The U.S. president made a decent display of leadership during the visit to NATO, European organizations (G7), and then to Poland last week. He has his detractors, of course, who will point out various gaffes and slips of the tongue. But overall, he seemed to say what Europe needed and wanted to hear. A speech in Warsaw, Poland on Friday (Mar 26) caught the attention of the world when he said “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” The president of France was not thrilled with those words – he is currently working with Putin to bring an end to the conflict.
“A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never erase a people’s love for liberty. Brutality will never grind down their will to be free. Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia. For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
German Military Aid. A shipment of 1,500 “Strela” anti-aircraft missiles and some MG3 machine guns arrived in Ukraine on March 25, according to the German Press Agency. Food, medical supplies, and 50 medical transport vehicles were also provided.
Norway-Russian Border. A 200 kilometer long border shared by two countries is a possible flashpoint in this new Cold War 2.0 era. The Kola Peninsula is a strategic area of the world for Russia. Russia’s fleet of ballistic missile submarines pass by the North Cape to head to their Atlantic Ocean patrols. Despite the possibility of conflict, tensions along the border remain low. This is in part, due to a direct line of communication between the Norwegian Joint Headquarters near Bodo and Russia’s Northern Fleet in Severomorsk. (The Barents Observer, Mar 21, 2022).
Informal Military Equipment Shipments. Citizens across Europe are augmenting the supply of military and other equipment heading to Ukraine. Some are with non-profit groups that have been established in past years and others are with newly-formed volunteer groups. Read more: “Inside the secret transfer of military equipment to Ukrainian soldiers”, Stars and Stripes, March 18, 2022.
Belarusian Volunteer Battalion. A lot of foreign fighters have joined the Ukrainian military to take part in the defense of that country. Some have come from the country located to the north of Ukraine and allied with Russia – calling themselves the Belarusian Volunteer Battalion. (The Kyiv Independent, Twitter, Mar 26, 2022).
Video – Spirit of America. Jim Hake, the founder and CEO of the Spirit of America, talks about the work his group is doing to assist members of Ukraine’s military. “Jim Hake on Supporting Ukraine’s Military”, Washington Journal, C-Span, March 27, 2022.
GSMSG. A U.S. volunteer group, many who are Special Forces veterans, is now operating in Ukraine. Dr. Aaron Epstein, the founder of GSMSG, and 10 other members of the organization are now on the ground in Ukraine providing training in emergency medical services. The Global Surgical and Medical Support Group was founded in 2015. It is a non-profit organization made up of more than 1,500 volunteers. Recently it has been focused on training Ukrainians on being able to handle combat injuries. GSMSG has also translated the US Army’s Tactical Combat Casualty Care course into Ukrainian and it has been viewed by over 20,000 viewers online. The organization has been utilizing the U.S. Army Special Forces model of developing host nation capabilities. “US special ops veterans, medical professionals training Ukrainian soldiers, civilians in combat care”, Fox News, March 27, 2022.
Commentary
How to Defeat Russia. An Australian special forces veteran, Adrian McKenzie, expresses his frustration in not being able to help but then proposes how the Ukrainians (and the west can defeat Russia). “Full-spectrum warfare and Russia’s path to defeat”, The Strategist, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, March 28, 2022.
Europe’s ‘Hot Peace’ is now ‘Cold War 2.0’. Graeme Dobell explores the consequences of Putin’s War and how it has drastically changed international relations not only in Europe but in Asia as well. “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine killed Europe’s hot peace”, The Strategist, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, March 28, 2022.
Ukraine Invasion – Could Have Been Prevented. The president of Latvia argues that if NATO had reacted more strongly in 2008 to the Russian invasion against Georgia and the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Moscow would not have troops threatening Kyiv today. He says the West has been naïve about Putin. Latvia suffered for over 50 years under rule by the Soviet Union before getting its independence. (USNI News, Mar 25, 2022).
Putin’s Dream Evaporates. The attempt by the Russian president to reverse the course of history and re-establish the Russian empire – returning to the days of glory of the Soviet Union are dashed. His ‘three-day war’ is now into its second month. Some reports (NATO officials and Ukraine MoD) say Russia has lost more soldiers in one month than almost ten years during the Afghanistan conflict. “The number that puts Vladimir Putin at risk”, by Peter Bergen, CNN, March 27, 2022.
Upcoming Events
Online Event – Ukraine: The Humanitarian Catastrophe. Tuesday, March 29. A massive humanitarian crisis threatens millions of lives. A hobbled health care system and lack of heat, water, electricity, and food are compounding the ravages of a raging conflict in Ukraine. Watch a 30-min presentation on the scope of the problem and what can be done. Presented by the Harvard University Humanitarian Initiative, YouTube. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/event/ukraine-the-humanitarian-catastrophe/
SOF News welcomes the submission of articles for publication. If it is related to special operations, current conflicts, national security, defense, or the current conflict in Ukraine then we are interested.
Maps and Other Resources
UNCN. The Ukraine NGO Coordination Network is an organization that ties together U.S.-based 501c3 organizations and non-profit humanitarian organizations that are working to evacuate and support those in need affected by the Ukraine crisis. https://uncn.one
Maps of Ukraine
Ukraine Conflict Info. The Ukrainians have launched a new website that will provide information about the war. It is entitled Russia Invaded Ukraine and can be found at https://war.ukraine.ua/.
UNHCR Operational Data Portal – Ukraine Refugee Situation
Ukrainian Think Tanks – Brussels. Consolidated information on how to help Ukraine from abroad and stay up to date on events.
Janes Equipment Profile – Ukraine Conflict. An 81-page PDF provides information on the military equipment of the Russian and Ukrainian armed forces. Covers naval, air, electronic warfare, C4ISR, communications, night vision, radar, and armored fighting vehicles, Ukraine Conflict Equipment Profile, February 28, 2022.
Arms Transfers to Ukraine. Forum on the Arms Trade.
3. What the horrors of Syria and Chechnya can tell us about Russia’s tactics in Ukraine
What the horrors of Syria and Chechnya can tell us about Russia’s tactics in Ukraine
Russia is bringing the deadly tactics used in Chechnya and Syria to Ukraine’s cities.
Global Security Reporter
March 29, 2022
Abdulkafi Alhamdo remembers the day he asked his wife to take their infant daughter out of Aleppo. “I told her to take my daughter through the [humanitarian] corridor just to stay alive,” Alhamdo said. “I thought this was the last time I would see them, the last time I would kiss my daughter. I remember my daughter was holding my knees and crying. Perhaps she knew something.”
His wife refused to leave. The family stayed together through the punishing bombardment of what was once Syria’s largest city by the Syrian military and its most powerful ally — Russia. Alhamdo, an English teacher who gained a global social media following with his video reports during Syria’s civil war, now lives in the rebel-held city of Idlib. Speaking with Grid by phone, he said he’s been glued to coverage of the war in Ukraine, particularly the heavy bombardment of the southeastern city of Mariupol. “I’m living with this war emotionally,” he told Grid. “Maybe not physically, but believe me, emotionally. Every scene I see, it happened to me once. I lived this many, many times.”
Shocking as they are, the scenes the world is now watching in Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities are not without precedent. As the last European Union diplomat to leave Mariupol, Greek Consul General Manolis Androulakis, put it, “Mariupol will become part of a list of cities that were completely destroyed by war; I don’t need to name them — they are Guernica, Coventry, Aleppo, Grozny, Leningrad.”
The ancient city of Aleppo and Grozny, in Chechnya, stand out on that list as modern examples of the kind of urban destruction more often associated with the era of Hitler and Stalin, and because both involved the Russian military. Charles Lister, a senior fellow and Syria specialist at the Middle East Institute, told Grid that the tactics on display in Ukraine are “a clear attempt by the Russian military to do exactly what they did in Syria, and certainly what they did in Grozny: a mass shelling campaign to instill fear, terror, destruction, chaos and to create conditions in which the civilian population flees en masse, then creating conditions in which eventually, even the largest urban territories will end up falling under their control.”
The fear now is that as the war in Ukraine drags on, and Russia’s conventional military campaign continues to falter, it will use these tactics on more and larger cities. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has warned Russia may even try to “Groznify” the capital, Kyiv.
But what does this grim tactic actually entail?
The Grozny model
Grozny, which in 1994 had a population of around 490,000, is the capital of Chechnya, a semi-autonomous republic in the North Caucasus with a long history of fighting against Russian rule. Chechnya declared its independence in 1991 amid the chaotic breakup of the Soviet Union, and after years of rising tensions, then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered troops into Grozny in December 1994 to overthrow the rebellious republic’s government.
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The parallels to the early days of the Ukraine war are striking. As a Rand Corporation report put it, the Russian troops deployed to Chechnya “did not expect a fight. They were confident that their enemy … was untrained and unorganized; that the sight of tanks in the streets would be sufficient to make them back down.” But the Chechens proved a far tougher adversary than expected, and urban warfare was a more formidable challenge than the much-degraded post-Soviet military was expecting.
Dan Mogulof, who covered the first Chechen War as a producer for CBS News, recalled in an interview with Grid that the Russian advance was characterized by a mix of “incompetence and brutality.” He said that “in the initial conflicts in Chechnya between the Russian military and Chechen rebels, the Russian military was so decimated that they pulled back to the outskirts of the city and began indiscriminate shelling. Is this starting to sound familiar?”
After 20 days of heavy artillery shelling of the city center — sometimes at a rate of 4,000 rounds an hour — the Russian military eventually took Grozny on Jan. 20, 2005. But the hard-won victory was short-lived: The Russians were eventually forced to withdraw from Chechnya after a rebel counteroffensive and a ceasefire negotiated in 2006.
The heavy bombardment of Grozny “worked” in one sense. The Russians took the city. But Mogulof and other observers believe it may have made the Chechens more resolved to fight back. “It’s mechanized terrorism,” he said. “There’s no other discernible purpose, other than to scare people, literally, to terrorize them into fleeing. It just ignores so many lessons about the extent to which that sort of tactic can produce results that are antithetical to a military strategy by cohesion and resolve in the people you’re bombing.”
It wasn’t just civilians who suffered in the assault. “One of the things I saw that, to this day boggles the mind, was that the Russian army left its wounded and dead on the field,” Mogulof said. “I’m a military veteran. One of the most profound and sacred promises a military makes to its soldiers is that they won’t be left behind. That was being violated, which says a lot about the army and national leadership’s attitude toward these young men.”
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In 1999, Yeltsin installed a new prime minister, the previously obscure Vladimir Putin, who set to work to resolve the Chechen situation once and for all. This time the Russians relied heavily on air power and artillery from the start, to pound the Chechens into submission before sending troops into the city. The air assault killed tens of thousands of civilians and left Grozny in ruins. The United Nations called it “the most destroyed city on earth.” Between those killed and those who fled, the city was almost entirely depopulated. The Russian military took control in February 2000, installing a former rebel commander who had switched sides, Akhmad Kadyrov, as the new leader of the region.
Two decades later, Grozny has been almost entirely rebuilt and Chechnya is ruled as an absolute dictatorship by Kadyrov’s son Ramzan, ever faithful to the Russian leadership. In a full-circle historical turn, Ramzan Kadyrov currently claims to be in Ukraine with his personal militia, fighting for his patron: Putin.
The heavy civilian and military costs may have brought outrage from the rest of the world, but victory in Chechnya helped cement Putin’s popularity and lift him to Russia’s presidency. From there he would put the lessons learned in Grozny into effect again.
Lister told Grid, “I’ve sat in Syria-focused meetings with Russian officials, many of them from military backgrounds, and they frequently cite Grozny as the archetypal example of what they call a counterterrorism campaign. With absolute seriousness, they consider that to be the most effective way of eliminating what they see as a terrorist threat.”
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Aleppo —“a kind of hell”
Aleppo, in northwestern Syria, is one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities. It had a prewar population of about 2.3 million and stayed relatively quiet throughout 2011, the first full year of the Arab Spring, when protests and then armed rebellion against Bashar al-Assad’s government began to spread in the rest of the country. In 2012, rebels took control of about half the city. In late 2013 and early 2014, the Syrian military launched a brutal campaign to retake the rebel-held areas of Aleppo, dropping crude and massively destructive “barrel bombs” — large containers filled with metal shards and explosives — to destroy buildings and anyone inside them. The conflict settled into a bloody stalemate.
In 2015, Russian forces began an intervention in Syria on Assad’s behalf, using air power to tip the balance in his favor. In Aleppo, the rebel-held territories were completely encircled in mid-2016, leaving 250,000 people under siege and subject to heavy Russian airstrikes. The Russian and Syrian militaries were both accused of war crimes, including deliberately targeting medical facilities, using indiscriminate weapons such as cluster munitions and attempting to starve the city’s population.
Looking back on the months of the siege, Alhamdo reflected on what life must be like now for civilians in Ukraine and, in particular, the city of Mariupol. “Of course, the shortage of food, shortage of electricity, everything, but what is probably mostly affecting them now is the psychological situation,” he said. “Being surrounded, there is an emotion, a fear. You’re confined and enemies are all around and they can invade at any time. And if they catch you, they would never differentiate whether you are a fighter or not. It’s a kind of hell.”
Syrian non-governmental organizations estimate that more than 440 civilians, including 90 children, were killed in the 2016 airstrikes, and much of Aleppo’s historic old city was demolished. In December 2016, Syrian forces retook the entire city. More than 34,000 people fled Aleppo as part of a ceasefire deal; Alhamdo and his family were among them. “We left our city, the paradise that we dreamed of but was turned to hell by the Russians and Assad,” he said.
Crude as these tactics were, Alhamdo said they can be effective. “Nothing destroys fighters’ resistance more than killing civilians. It kills the spirit,” he said. “Our revolutionaries were fighting, but when they hear that their families were killed, their children were killed, their brothers and sisters were killed, [they think] they should leave the front line.”
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Lessons for Ukraine
Burning and destroyed apartment buildings in Mariupol, Ukraine. (Maxar)
Lister worries that the Grozny and Aleppo models are now being replayed in Ukraine.
“What we’ve seen most glaringly is that the Russian air force is quite happy and content to use unguided, so-called ‘dumb bombs,’ in fairly significant numbers, and that much of its aerial bombardment is largely indiscriminate,” he said.
Mariupol, a city of 400,000 in the Ukrainian-held portion of the divided province of Donetsk, has been subjected to days of this sort of bombing, leaving large parts of the city decimated and its people short of food and water. According to the city’s mayor, 5,000 people, including 201 children, have already been killed; 90 percent of the city’s buildings have been damaged, and more than half the population has fled. Negotiated evacuation corridors have also reportedly come under fire, and Russia has been accused of forcibly evacuating residents to its own territory.
There appears to be a deliberate attempt to depopulate the city, reminiscent of the Russian approach that decimated both Aleppo and Grozny. While Russia’s Ukraine strategy is in flux, the conditions now seen in Mariupol could well be used on other cities, as Russian ground forces stall or are pushed back. Kharkiv and Chernihiv are among the cities already facing siege-like conditions.
“I think we’ll start to see more kinds of siege warfare,” said Lister. “Clearly the Russians are maneuvering themselves to impose these kinds of siege conditions in certain areas of Ukraine already, but it takes time to set that up.”
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Putin and the Russian military were never held to account for the atrocities committed against Grozny or Aleppo. To those who lived through the horrors then, what is unfolding now feels far too familiar.
“I feel that Ukraine is another part of Syria,” Alhamdo said. “We are sharing the same destiny.”
Thanks to Alicia Benjamin for copy editing this article.
4. Leadership at War
Excerpts:
What happens next will depend on many different things, from the resolution of the Ukrainians themselves to the volume and type of weapons each side will acquire. But it will also depend on the decisions and leadership of the key players. Will Biden manage to keep the Western alliance together and continue to provide firm support to Ukraine in a carefully calibrated response to Russian actions? Will Xi Jinping, as so many have hoped, use his influence to persuade Putin to come to a settlement? What will be acceptable to the Ukrainians? Will Putin even accept a way out in Ukraine, or will he persist? The answers can only be guessed at—and, given Putin’s record, the West may have to prepare for a long and costly effort to contain Putin’s aggression as it did in the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Leadership at War
How Putin and Zelensky Have Defined the Ukrainian Conflict
March 29, 2022
If anyone doubts the importance of individual leaders in the shape of world events, surely the war in Ukraine has dispelled them. It is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war and no one else’s, just as World War II in Europe was Adolf Hitler’s. Both men wanted war; both embraced it as a test of virility against a decadent enemy.
Nor would the invasion of Ukraine have followed the course that it has if Volodymyr Zelensky were not the president of Ukraine. Though Zelensky was an unlikely leader before the war began, the former comedian has overwhelmingly defined the country’s remarkable resistance against the far superior Russian military, telling U.S. intelligence officials who offered to evacuate him that he needed ammunition, “not a ride.” And it is Zelensky who has, in his continual direct appeals to Western leaders, the U.S. Congress, the British Parliament, and the Bundestag, made the Ukrainian cause one that the West cannot ignore. At the same time, it matters enormously that Joe Biden, and not Donald Trump, is in the White House and able to lead a unified and tough, but mostly cool-headed transatlantic response.
To assign special agency to these men is not to return to the now discredited “great man” theory of history. It is simply to recognize that who holds office at a particular moment in a particular place can make a critical difference. In a great crisis, the eve of a war, for example, it matters who has the final authority to say stop or go. It also matters who is leading the country that is under attack and how its leader chooses to respond. As modern history has amply demonstrated, the greatest conflicts, and their outcomes, have often been shaped as much by personal leadership as by objective factors such as resources or military strength.
In the Cuban missile crisis, another U.S. president might have given way to the pressures coming from the U.S. military and many of his senior civilian advisers. But John F. Kennedy did not authorize a full-scale attack on Cuba or on the Soviet ships and submarines approaching the island, even though he was told that he was risking the defeat and destruction of the United States. His decision spared the world a war that almost certainly would have involved nuclear weapons.
In the present crisis, there can be no doubt that the two leaders, Putin and Zelensky, have determined the shape of the conflict. In Russia, Putin has re-established the highly centralized leadership style of Stalin, or of the tsars he admires so much. What he thinks and wants becomes Russian policy because he controls the levers of power and makes the key decisions. Yet it is already clear that one of Putin’s biggest mistakes was not take into account the personal qualities and resolve of the man whose country he was invading, a man who chose not to flee or surrender but to stay and fight. And that decision of Zelensky’s has already had momentous consequences.
War for Its Own Sake
Although the question of leadership is an old one—think of the attention paid to Alexander the Great or Napoleon—it has tended to be overlooked as experts focus on systems or quantifiable measures of power. The outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914, for example, has been studied intensively in such terms to understand why wars start. As historians and international relations experts have variously suggested, the slide from peace to war in Europe can be interpreted as an example of a breakdown in a balance of power, a dangerously polarizing alliance system, imperial or economic rivalries, an arms race, too rigid military plans, or perhaps the result of domestic factors such as the upper classes seeking to overcome internal divisions through war. Less often scrutinized are the individuals who contributed to or failed to prevent that slide. And their decisions were not those of rational actors thinking calmly about what advantages they or their countries might gain but the result of their values, assumptions, and emotions.
It is impossible to ignore the backgrounds from which the leaders of Europe in 1914 came. Those making the key decisions were products of their families, their class, and their era. Their ideas—about honor, for example, or the utility of war as an instrument of state—were part of the Zeitgeist. What also mattered was how much power they had. If Napoleon had remained on Corsica he might have become a prominent local leader, but as ruler of a powerful revolutionary France he could use his great abilities to dominate Europe. Unlike Napoleon, the hereditary rulers at the head of the three key powers of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia did not set out to master all of Europe. Rather, they wanted to ensure the future of their dynasties and preserve what they had. They persuaded themselves, or were persuaded by those close to them, that war, even a general war, was the only way to do that.
But individual characteristics also mattered. Kaiser Wilhelm II loved his soldiers but knew that they thought he was a coward. He wanted to be a powerful ruler and feared that he was not. Through his reckless actions and speeches, he helped create the fear of a belligerent, militaristic Germany, which in turn led to the growing partnership between France and Russia and ultimately Great Britain. Following the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, hawks in the Austro-Hungarian imperial government, such as Conrad von Hötzendorf, the chief of the general staff, were prepared to wage war on Serbia, even in the knowledge that Russia might declare war on Austria as a result. “It will be a hopeless struggle, but it must be pursued, because so old a Monarchy and so glorious an army cannot go down ingloriously,” Conrad wrote.
Like Hitler, Putin had absolute power but wanted more.
Other leaders failed to take seriously the threat of a Europe-wide conflict, with far-reaching consequences of their own. Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, was perhaps too ready to assume that Europe’s leaders, following the assassination, would judge the costs of a general war too high and therefore would behave sensibly. He persisted in dismissing the assassination as but yet another unfolding crisis in the Balkans until it was too late. In the last frantic days of July 1914, as their respective militaries urged mobilization of their vast armies and other war preparations, the three hereditary rulers of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia, with their great power, still could have refused to sign the orders. All gave way to the pressures on them: Wilhelm, who did not want to back down in the face of crisis, as he had done before; Austrian Emperor Franz Josef, who was old and alone; and, in Russia, Tsar Nicholas II, who gave up his resistance to war, apparently because he was told it was the only way to save his dynasty. In the ensuing catastrophe, Europe and the world changed forever. Some nine million combatants died, as well as an unknown number of civilians; Russia was transformed by revolution; Austria-Hungary disintegrated; and a defeated Germany emerged smaller and a republic. The Great War, as it was known until a second even greater one came, was not inevitable. With other, stronger, more skillful leaders, those mass armies need not have been set in motion.
Similarly, World War II could not have happened as it did without the man who controlled Germany. Hitler determined its start, its expansion across Europe and into the Soviet Union, and the final destruction of Germany. The leaders of the allies Britain and France did their best to avoid war through appeasement. Stalin knew how unprepared the Soviet Union was for war, and he hoped to sit out any conflict between capitalist nations and build his own strength. But Hitler wanted a war in Europe for its own sake and to demonstrate the superiority of the Aryan race.
For Hitler, it was never enough that he had made Germany the dominant power on the continent by the end of the 1930s. He had acquired the prosperous countries of Austria and Czechoslovakia without a shot having been fired; other powers in the center of Europe, such as Hungary and Romania, were falling under his sway; and Italy was an ally. His generals and his closest colleagues in the Nazi Party were content to consolidate Germany’s position. Hitler was not. He regarded the avoidance of war in 1938, when Czechoslovakia was carved up at Munich, as a defeat. He was shocked at the relief expressed by many Germans that peace had been maintained, and he ordered Joseph Goebbels, his minister of propaganda, to start a campaign to imbue the population with the right warlike spirit. And it is unlikely that another German leader would have kept fighting as long as Hitler did. In the late stages of World War II, he persisted in the war long after it was lost—long after many of his own generals had turned against him—and he went to his death, in the ruins of Berlin, complaining that the German people had let him down and did not deserve to survive.
The World Is Not Enough
Like Hitler’s decision to start a world war, Putin’s decision to undertake a full-scale invasion of Ukraine is very difficult to understand as a rational choice, designed to maximize his or his country’s advantage. In wealth and power, Putin already had it all, down to the gold toilet seats in his absurd palace in Crimea. In Moscow, he had eliminated all rivals, surrounded himself with compliant servitors whose own wealth and lives depended on him, turned the Duma into a piece of window dressing, and tamed the Russian media. Abroad, Russia was doing well, with its growing relationship with China and friendly leaders in countries such as India, Hungary, and Serbia. Putin had successfully fostered divisions in Europe, the European Union, and NATO. Pro-democracy protest movements in Belarus and Kazakhstan, whose autocratic regimes were backed by Moscow, had offered worrying indications that those countries could be slipping from Russia’s embrace—but in both countries, Moscow had quickly ensured that control was reestablished.
Moreover, Putin had already scored a series of victories over the West. He had successfully tested the willingness of the United States and its allies to confront Russia when, as President Boris Yeltsin’s prime minister, he ordered the flattening of Grozny, in Chechnya, at the end of the 1990s; when, as president, he waged war on Georgia in 2008; and when, during the Syrian civil war, he helped Bashar al-Assad destroy Aleppo and use poison gas against his own people. Going further, in 2014 Putin seized Crimea and created the two breakaway republics in the Donbas. In all of these cases, the West, either as individual nations or collectively, did little.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaking via videolink, Kyiv, March 27, 2022
Handout/Reuters
From 2016 to 2020, Putin could also watch the chaotic and irresponsible foreign policy of the Trump administration, which suited Russia well. In attacking NATO—saying it was obsolete, even hinting that the United States might withdraw—Trump threatened to weaken an organization that Putin loathed. As useful, from Putin’s point of view, were Trump’s threats to withhold American military aid from Ukraine. The first year of Biden’s presidency did little to alter Russian perceptions that the United States was preoccupied with Asia and uninterested in what was happening in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The badly managed withdrawal of American forces in Afghanistan could be read as evidence of the decline of American power and resolve. By the fall of 2021, Putin could sit back and enjoy the apparent weakness and division of his enemies, and his growing profits from Russian’s energy sector, on which most of Europe seemed to rely.
But like Hitler, Putin wanted more. He wanted a Russia restored to its greatest extent and treated as the world power he insisted it was, with himself as a world leader. His increasing isolation during the pandemic, during which he often interacted with only a few courtiers and bodyguards, and his hypermasculinity led him to become increasingly convinced of his own infallibility. Power, as Lord Acton pointed out, corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. History gives many examples of rulers who came to believe that they were always right and who would not listen to contrary views. Stalin forged ahead with forced collectivization and exported grain to raise money for his industrialization as millions of his people starved, and then he shattered his own Communist Party and his military with his purges. Mao killed far more of his own citizens than the brutal Japanese invasion did, as he pursued his ruinous Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution. Who among the terrified survivors who served the dictators was going to tell them they were wrong?
No One to Say No
Putin has built a system in which he is not challenged—not by the Duma, not by the media, most of which is now firmly under his control, not by the supine judiciary. He has his own guards; the intelligence services and the military answer to him; and the oligarchs, who control much of the Russian economy, depend on his favor. He has been preparing to invade Ukraine. He has patiently built up Russia’s financial resources and redirected its trade toward China as insurance against Western sanctions and has re-equipped and modernized his military. For the most part he also controls the narrative inside Russia, insisting on Russia’s former greatness and portraying Ukraine and Ukrainians as an indissoluble element of greater Russia. Ukraine, he maintains, is separate today only because of malign outside influences and the traitorous “Nazis” and “anti-Semites” who control it. So far, a large majority of Russians apparently believe him.
Dictators often find history useful for mobilizing their peoples against others and for giving them cause to reconstitute the glories of the past. Mussolini boasted of the glories of ancient Rome and promised to build a second Roman Empire. The Nazis celebrated the battle of Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD, when Germanic tribes defeated three Roman legions and venerated Frederick the Great. Putin sees himself as a historian and looks back not just to the Soviet Union, whose disappearance he called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century, but to the reign of Peter the Great (1672–1725), when Russia became the dominant power in northeastern Europe. His long 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” (which, curiously, is no longer available on the Kremlin’s website) uses his version of history to argue that there never was and never can be a separate Ukrainian nation. And he goes back further still, to Kievan Rus, the first Slavic state in the ninth century, and to the conversion of the Slavs to Orthodoxy in the tenth century, which in the Russian nationalist vision makes Russia the legitimate heir to the Byzantine Empire. (It is a tragic irony that Putin is prepared to kill Ukrainians and destroy today’s Kyiv in the name of what he calls the centuries-old spiritual and territorial unity of Russians and Ukrainians.)
What also shapes Putin's worldview are the toxic theories of his favorite Russian nationalists: Ivan Ilyin, a Russian fascist of the interwar years, who held that God made the Russian nation the only pure one on the earth, and Lev Gumilev, who held that different races were created by cosmic rays, and that since Russia got zapped last its people are the youngest and most energetic. Conveniently, Ilyin also foresaw that a manly redeemer would lead Russia to triumph.
If Putin were a rational leader, committed to protecting his own position in Russia and ensuring its security abroad, he would not have gambled on a huge war. He would not have apparently assumed, along with his generals, that Russian troops would be greeted by Ukrainians with flowers, and the traditional bread and salt. He was blinded by his own convictions. As the war has quickly made clear, he is not a redeemer but a war criminal. He has damaged, perhaps fatally, his own armed forces, and made Ukraine more of a nation than ever before. He has strengthened his hated enemies NATO and the European Union, and he has provoked a rare bipartisan response in a United States long riven by deep political divisions. And he has stimulated resistance in Russia, which will surely grow as word spreads about Russian casualties. China may be a friend, but a weakened Russia will now have to bend to Beijing’s will.
Churchill in Kyiv
One reason that Putin’s invasion hasn’t gone according to plan has been the leader on the other side. Along with men like Putin and Hitler, history has occasionally produced another sort of leader: the one who appears, sometimes out of nowhere, to rally his people against what seems like long or impossible odds, and in so doing alters the course of events. In 1939, when World War II started, Winston Churchill was widely regarded as a has-been politician with an interesting but checkered career. The British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain brought him back to the admiralty only because of his experience and growing support in Parliament. In 1940, as Hitler’s armies attacked France, Chamberlain was forced out of office and a reluctant King George VI invited Churchill to become prime minister.
Suddenly, as many of those who worked for him later wrote in their memoirs, the government was suffused with a new sense of purpose and a new energy. Churchill’s steady stream of questions and orders, covering even the smallest details of the war effort, were “like the beam of a searchlight, ceaselessly swinging round,” the cabinet secretary, Lord Normanbrook, wrote. And in his great series of wartime speeches, Churchill spoke to the British people and gave them the hope that they would endure and triumph.
Zelensky’s decision to stay and fight has changed the war.
If Chamberlain had stayed on, or if another of his possible successors had taken office, it is possible, indeed probable, that the British government would have tried to come to an agreement with the Nazis, leaving Germany in control of the continent and Britain still in possession of its empire, at least until Hitler decided to invade the British Isles or bomb the British into submission.
Zelensky is an even more improbable leader than Churchill was in 1940. When Zelensky was elected in a landslide in 2018, the headlines were all about the television comic with no political experience. He had charm but few clear policies, and he was bullied by Trump and by Putin, who continued to support separatists in a grinding conflict in the eastern part of Ukraine. On the eve of Putin’s invasion, Zelensky’s approval rating among Ukrainians was abysmal. Yet abilities that he had developed as a comedian—teamwork, communication skills, and, above all, courage—made him the wartime leader that Ukraine needs. Having been an actor, he knows instinctively how to deliver lines well, and how to play to his audiences in Ukraine, Russia, and the world at large. Like Churchill, he leads by example, refusing to leave his country and sharing its travails. Putin, and it must gall him, looks by comparison a frustrated and isolated old man huddled at the end of a ludicrously long table.
Bleeding Chips, Upping the Ante
Putin did not think that it would turn out this way: by all objective measures, Russia was so much stronger than Ukraine and the Ukrainian leadership should have conceded or fled as soon as Russian forces moved on Ukrainian soil. And the West, Putin must have assumed, would not have had the time or inclination to do anything. Putin had got away with seizing Crimea, setting up the two breakaway republics in the Donbas, multiple disinformation campaigns and cyberattacks, and making trouble around the world for the West. His overconfidence showed in his failure to order his military to prepare for resistance, with the result that Russian logistics were so inadequate that their vehicles were running out of gas after a couple of days. Putin’s gamble has gone badly wrong; good poker players understand that you must know your opponents and be prepared for their unexpected moves.
As a single month of war in Ukraine has already shown, a leader’s personal qualities can often be of far more consequence than any amount of hard military power. And the West ignores those qualities at its peril. Although Putin has concealed his tracks and keeps his private life as secret as possible, much is known about him, his thinking, and his ambitions. He has not concealed his designs on Ukraine: for the past decade, he has been speaking and writing about how it belongs with Russia. Nor has he concealed his resentment at the expansion of NATO or his convictions that the West is divided and decadent, incapable of acting firmly and with unity. So far, Zelensky and his supporters in Europe and the United States have proved Putin wrong.
What happens next will depend on many different things, from the resolution of the Ukrainians themselves to the volume and type of weapons each side will acquire. But it will also depend on the decisions and leadership of the key players. Will Biden manage to keep the Western alliance together and continue to provide firm support to Ukraine in a carefully calibrated response to Russian actions? Will Xi Jinping, as so many have hoped, use his influence to persuade Putin to come to a settlement? What will be acceptable to the Ukrainians? Will Putin even accept a way out in Ukraine, or will he persist? The answers can only be guessed at—and, given Putin’s record, the West may have to prepare for a long and costly effort to contain Putin’s aggression as it did in the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
5. The Cruelty of Half Measures in Ukraine
Conclusion:
The historians of the future will judge us harshly for exploiting and squandering the gift every fallen Ukrainian has given us. Let us honor and applaud the courage, determination and resilience of the Ukraine people and loudly condemn the barbaric Russian aggression. Let us also not have illusions about the real impact of feelgood measures that do not change final outcomes in place of decisive NATO support. Cruelty comes in many forms.
The Cruelty of Half Measures in Ukraine
Doug Wise, Former Deputy Director, Defense Intelligence Agency
Douglas H. Wise served as Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from August 2014 until August 2016. Following 20 years of active duty in the Army where he served as an infantry and special operations officer, he spent the remainder of his career at CIA.
Robert Papp, Former Senior Executive, CIA
Robert Papp retired from the Central Intelligence Agency as a senior executive with extensive service abroad and command experience. He began his career in the U.S. Navy as a cryptologic officer and Russian linguist. He has a PhD in Russian history from Columbia University an M.A. in Russian Area Studies from Georgetown University and a B.S. from the U.S. Naval Academy.
OPINION — As of this article, the slaughter continues to increase, the Russian military juggernaut stumbles forward and backward, and the negotiations stalemate. At some point in the not-too-distant future, historians and political scientists will try to answer the question, when does encouraging and incentivizing a valiant nation fighting brutal aggression become an act of geopolitical cynicism as well as a source of inspiration?
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues in “full force,” NATO continues with a set of “half measures,” and overly cautious initiatives. For this article, we define “half-measures” as the provision of military support, encouragement of Ukrainians to fight, and the economic “warfare” against the Russia – all done to respond to the invasion while avoiding direct combat with the Russian military (the authors believe the deployment of NATO forces into Ukraine should have been done before the Russian military violated Ukraine sovereignty).
We believe those in the future will judge us harshly for being overly cautious and not intervening earlier and more decisively. It’s also likely they will harshly criticize us for exploiting the limitless courage and determination of the Ukraine people. We acknowledge the provision of NATO anti-tank weapons, surface-to-air missiles, and other equipment and intelligence support by NATO member states has made a major difference on the Ukraine battlefield. As a consequence, observers around the globe are consuming a steady diet of social media images of burned-out Russian tanks and helicopters falling to earth.
Additionally, we internalize a degree of comfort by expressing our “solidarity” and encouraging Ukrainian resistance while we remain inspired by the brave defiance of President Zelenskyy. Because we culturally champion the underdog, we harbor a fervent hope Russian forces are stalled, out of ammunition, suffering from poor morale and training, incapable of a full victory, and the tide will turn in favor of the Ukraine Army. But hope is not a plan, and we must remain receptive to the objective reality Ukraine cannot force the Russian army from Ukraine soil.
Despite the poor military advice Putin received from his armed forces leaders, matched by his own fantasies about a quick conquest of the largest country in Europe, we need to look objectively at what is happening on the ground. Comparing a current tactical map of Russian advances to Putin’s infamous “historical” map of an illegitimate Ukrainian state, suggests he is not decisively winning, unless winning to Putin is the slaughter of thousands of innocent Ukraine civilians. We also have a yearning for regime change in Russia. But is Russia really turning against him while we silently plead for the mothers of those Russian soldiers killed in action to rise up and confront the Putin regime? Or are we blinded by our own optimism because we narrowly focus on street protests, bloggers, and newsroom embarrassments in Moscow?
We may vilify Putin as a national leader, but doubt he is truly isolated and need to keep in mind he enjoys the support of the majority of the Russian population, and it is also important to remember parts of the world have not spoken out against him, and some are even supporting him. Unable to achieve victory on the ground, Putin’s immoral recourse (which we’ve already started to see) is to turn to indiscriminate missile and air attacks, and barbaric rocket and artillery strikes against innocent civilians. As Putin becomes more enraged with losses on the ground, he is already “culturally compelled” to use the time-tested Russian method of pounding cities into submission.
These tactics have been used by the Russia throughout history from the Berlin in World War II, Grozny in Chechnya, and Raqqa in Syria. Since Putin’s inner circle is personally named in sanctions, threatened with designation as war criminals, and facing the ultimate economic collapse of the Russian Federation, they are trapped. Like Putin’s childhood “cornered rat”, they have little recourse but to join with him and fight to the end because their wealth and power derives from him, and his from the state.
The wounded bear must win and do so quickly. Total war in Ukraine is a logical outcome as NATO’s half measures are unlikely to dissuade Putin from seeking total and unconditional victory. While we painfully ponder why Russia is taking this violent path, it is important to keep in mind that Putin’s “special military operation” is as much about humiliating and punishing Ukraine as it is about military accomplishment. As we watch the “irresistible Russian force meet the immovable Ukrainian object,” can we credibly assess that a decisive Ukrainian victory on the ground is achievable?
Ukrainians will certainly die trying, while NATO remains on the sidelines debating ever-expanding ideas about what constitutes an act of war while conveniently defining the limits of NATO’s moral obligations (in the absence of the Article V ethos of “an attack on one, is an attack on all”) to conveniently avoid doing more.
It might be useful to note at this point the NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999, to defend the Kosovar Albanians, was done outside the Article V obligation. Nobody, including the authors, advocates abandoning the Ukrainians to their fate or encouraging them to sue for peace under draconian terms. But who gains and who loses from the continued carnage and human suffering that NATO’s almost-but-not-quite good-enough-to-turn-tide-of victory military support is inevitably enabling?
Soon the Ukrainian population, which has already seen the flight of some three million refugees, will have little remaining but rubble for where cities once stood. The humanitarian implications of this wanton Russian destruction on the ground are only just starting to be felt and it is unlikely the Russian occupiers will accept future humanitarian aid and assistance from the West fearing it will bring the spirit of freedom in addition to critically needed food, water, and medical care.
Other losers across the globe and far from the carnage have yet to be fully defined. The dizzying levels of NATO economic warfare, as a surrogate for NATO military action, may not produce decisive results, but will remain satisfying for Western leaders. Forget for now the effects on supply chains and global markets, stock market portfolios, hedge funds, and currencies in developed economies. Forget even potential cyberattacks or the possible disabling of the internet. Consider instead the epic plight of poor nations, who even now are staggering from the price of wheat in the Middle East and beyond.
One constant in this war is its unpredictability. We have been surprised at every turn and it is very possible that in spite of NATO’s cautious actions we will find ourselves in direct military confrontation with Russian forces. Should this happen, we will regret we had not confronted the Russians some 10,000 fallen Ukrainians ago. We missed our opportunity to intervene as the Russians were massing their invasion forces, so now we are fighting “by, with, and through” Ukrainian courage while NATO stands and watches.
The historians of the future will judge us harshly for exploiting and squandering the gift every fallen Ukrainian has given us. Let us honor and applaud the courage, determination and resilience of the Ukraine people and loudly condemn the barbaric Russian aggression. Let us also not have illusions about the real impact of feelgood measures that do not change final outcomes in place of decisive NATO support. Cruelty comes in many forms.
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6. In Cyber: Resilience is about Capabilities, not Plans
Excerpt:
Bottom line: the most resilient organizations are so because they have a tremendous set of base capabilities (people, process and technology) already established, they have sustained organizational muscle memory to arrange (and constantly rearrange) those capabilities in response to a developing situation and the culture to constantly adjust both of those – quickly.
In Cyber: Resilience is about Capabilities, not Plans
Phil Venables is VP and Chief Information Security Officer at Google Cloud. He also serves on the President's Council of Advisors for Science and Technology. Follow him on Twitter @philvenables [...] Read more
EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Over the past 2 years, since I wrote the first version of this post, we’ve had a lot of opportunity to test our collective resilience. Resilience in the face of a global pandemic and the under- and over-reaction in certain ways to that, which in turn had knock-on effects that we also had to be resilient to. Resilience in the face of weather and seismic events, kinetic and cyber conflict, supply chain impacts, economic challenges, and increasing levels of disruptive and destructive crime. We will continue to be tested and who knows what is to come in the coming months and quarters.
Despite some bumps along the way I think it’s fair to say the world has shown a lot of resilience in the face of all this. Governments, organizations, and individuals have coped remarkably well. All have adapted and shown resilience and much of that was done not according to a plan but due to inherent adaptability utilizing capabilities built and established over time. For example, I know many organizations that moved confidently into the pandemic response of remote work not because they had an explicit documented plan to do so but rather because they had invested in the pervasive capability to support 100% continuous remote work for their workforce and had regularly tested that capability. This is just an example of where a portfolio of capabilities assembled in response to any event with the organizational muscle-memory to be flexible beats relying on arbitrarily comprehensive binders full of detailed plans and procedures for specific events. Such operational resilience is vital. Let’s take a step back and look at the correct focus on resilience as capabilities not plans.
Resilience can be thought of as the ability to absorb shocks, adjust as needed and continue operation in the face of adversity. In other words, to meet your obligations no matter what is thrown at you – perhaps with some graceful degradation of specific service levels. It is not simply the ability to deflect, avoid or prevent events. Events in this context can be across all business and technology risk domains – whether they are slow or fast moving – from cyber to pandemics. One of the common mistakes many organizations make is to think that resilience can be obtained by simply writing down comprehensive plans and procedures on what to do and how to respond to specific events. When someone thinks of a new event or scenario then a new plan is written and carefully filed away in a Big Book of Plans. Eventually there is a whole shelf full (or virtual equivalent) of these things. Sometimes plans are even tested to see if they actually work. There are three major problems with this, when facing the reality of actual events:
- In an actual crisis situation, adrenaline-fueled people are unlikely to take the time to consult large manuals to tell them what to do.
- Most crisis or significant events are unique and even if you consulted the plans it would be a lot of effort to contort them to the specific situation you are facing.
- Not all plans can be tested frequently and so the underlying means (people, process, technology) of implementing actions in those plans may not have been sufficiently maintained and may only be seen to be deficient when most needed.
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The answer to these problems is deceptively simple but profoundly effective. That is to focus on capabilities not plans. Established capabilities are combined / utilized at a time of need by a trained workforce to deal with whatever event is thrown at them. Capabilities are constantly maintained and tested independent from crisis / event drills. Drills then focus on building crisis response muscle memory across the organization. I have seen many organizations shift to this approach and they are immensely more resilient for it – and those that operated in this way before the past 2 years of resiliency challenges have coped superlatively relative to their competition who hadn’t. More specifically (general) resilience comes from:
- Baseline Capabilities. A set of people, process and technology capabilities that are maintained to defined service levels and continuously monitored as being able to meet those service levels. Examples: remote access services for your workforce able to support everyone connected simultaneously, dispersed physical offices and back-up sites, pre-negotiated contracts to expand office space or add new temporary locations, employee wellness / medical support, dispersed technology delivery, tested burst capacity, distributed voice and video communications including the capability to be used on non-corporate devices in secure ways, and critical business operations pre-dispersed among disparate locations or regions.
- Use the Capabilities. Run day to day business using these capabilities as much as you can, so that they are assured of correct operation. If you can’t, then test them regularly such that they meet defined service levels. Example: if your crisis communications technologies are not the same as the technologies people use every day then they are unlikely to be used successfully in a crisis, instead create inherently resilient / survivable communications approaches – and if do you need something totally different then use it regularly across your population such as holding staff meetings on the back-up communications system.
- Capacity. Understand the capacity constraints of your capabilities and if you can’t economically run with excess capacity then conduct regular testing of your ability to quickly ramp up.
- Scenario Catalogs. Develop a scenario catalog that can be used to assess whether your capabilities have the means to respond to and operate well in such a scenario. Pick scenarios that exercise the whole spectrum of the risk distribution from expected to tail events. Looking at the extremes is useful to see where your capabilities break down and if that is appropriate for your risk appetite. Remember, scenarios aren’t plans, and shouldn’t become detailed plans.
- Capability Testing. Separate out capability operational testing from crisis response drills. I’ve come across many large-scale drills that have had issues because of failures in basic capabilities such as crisis communications technology (e.g. bridge lines, video conferencing), deficiencies in technology at back-up sites, lack of access to back-up sites, or revealed capacity constraints that have caused the drill to fail early. At one level these are still a success because the organization learnt and fixed these things, at another level it’s a failure because they never got to really fulfill the intent of the crisis drill: to build muscle memory for adaptive response. Rather, make sure that all the capabilities that are needed for resilience have regular testing so that their failure never has to be revealed during a drill.
- Micro-drills. The goal of drills is to build and constantly enhance the organization muscle memory of how to respond to events or crises. You need to constantly drill /exercise but you can’t do this if you only do massive ones – the sort maybe you can only do a few times a year. You can increase the volume and frequency of drills using “micro-drills”. These are small tests typically less than 1 hour involving subsets of the organization to assure response to various types of events or broader scenarios, for example: launching an executive crisis response call, ramping up DDoS capacity, coordinating a leadership meeting at short notice from a back-up location, walking the floor and asking people where they would work from if a crisis event were called, rotating people to work from home periodically, fully failing over to back-up systems in the event of any IT failure. In fact, getting “trigger happy” in invoking crisis responses to any and many events is a useful practice. If you find yourself thinking whether a situation is worthy of going into full response mode then occasionally do it no matter what, just to exercise your response and sustain your muscle memory for the real deal. If you can’t afford to get trigger happy then use that as a signal that you’re not resilient enough. Think of this like chaos monkey for people processes.
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Blast radius. Minimize the blast radius of potential events and increase loose coupling of systems and processes (including those in your supply chain) such that response to any event is easier to deal with. Apply resilience engineering principles to your systems design, maintenance and operational processes – including chaos engineering techniques.
- Look around corners. Broaden how you think about threat intelligence to include sourcing data about incidents and close calls across the spectrum of risks from all types of organizations across all sectors. Use this feed to challenge assumptions and, with your scenario catalog, do the work to assess how well your capabilities would perform. Use these as sources for future drills. Think about the worst case by combining scenarios in more extreme ways: a WOW (Worst of the Worst) scenario planning exercise in which you assess how well you can be resilient in the face of several bad scenarios happening at once can really test your mettle.
- Playbooks and checklists. Now, having said you should focus on capabilities not plans, you do need some operational documentation. However, these become much more abbreviated in the form of playbooks or checklists for the use of capabilities (e.g. how to activate a crisis call tree), time bound activities as people are forming response (e.g. 8 things to do in first 30 mins of a security incident), or trigger-based action plans (e.g. what to enact when W.H.O. declares a Phase 5 pandemic).
- Establish effective crisis leadership structures. A large part of the success criteria for dealing with events that become serious is how leadership manages the response. This is as much organization design and culture as opposed to just the inherent qualities of particular leaders. Having separate but highly linked response forums / calls for executives (enterprise crisis management) and operators/engineers (incident response teams) is critical to ensure people remain focused. How many times have you been on an incident response call when numerous Senior VPs or C-suite join at random times and ask for an immediate update? This can derail the response process. Instead, there should be rehearsed communication protocols, prepared responses (think of this as a communications toolkit capability) and designated “runners” to bridge different forums. Throughout a drill or an actual event response constantly ask is the team working effectively, remembering that sometimes your best crisis leaders are not those is positions of utmost authority in regular situations.
Bottom line: the most resilient organizations are so because they have a tremendous set of base capabilities (people, process and technology) already established, they have sustained organizational muscle memory to arrange (and constantly rearrange) those capabilities in response to a developing situation and the culture to constantly adjust both of those – quickly.
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Phil Venables is VP and Chief Information Security Officer at Google Cloud. He also serves on the President's Council of Advisors for Science and Technology. Follow him on Twitter @philvenables
7. Biden’s ‘Integrated Deterrence’ Fails in Ukraine
To beat a dead horse, as Sir Lawrence Freedman says: Deterrence works, until it doesn't." What we have to learn is that deterrence is not a silver bullet and we cannot count on it to work. Therefore we need a strong defensive capability that can contribute to deterrence but prepared for when deterrence fails.
I think we should describe integrated deterrence as nuclear deterrence, conventional deterrence, and unconventional deterrence. But we must understand we cannot deter every action and we should not say we are trying to deter everything *e.g., such as a north Korean provocation).
But there is some good that can possibly come from Putin's War in Ukraine. The resistance and resilience of the Urkainians may give other authoritarian leaders some pause about invading a country that has tasted freedom and given them a will to resist. Unconventional deterrence may be strengthened in the future and such deterrence may contribute to deterrence of a conventional attack if the aggressor knows that getting bogged down by resistance forces could bleed them, possibly catastrophically. On the other hand if Putin shift's to scorched earth and draconian and brutal tactics to suppress the resistance it will cause great suffering and authoritarian leaders will likely prepare to use such tactics.
Biden’s ‘Integrated Deterrence’ Fails in Ukraine
The buzzy term is being used to justify cuts to conventional hard power that please progressives.
That may sound reasonable, but the administration’s embrace of integrated deterrence is an abandonment of the Pentagon’s previous strategy of deterrence by denial. That required the U.S. to maintain enough military strength to turn back an adversary’s aggression, particularly in Taiwan and Eastern Europe. In April 2021, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin justified the new approach under the premise that allies and “galloping advances in technology” can pick up the slack.
Innovative technologies and allied cooperation are important, but deterrence ultimately rests on an adversary’s assessment of existing U.S. military power and Washington’s willingness to employ it. That’s why integrated deterrence failed its first big test in Ukraine, where the Biden administration relied on the threat of nonmilitary punishment to deter Vladimir Putin. The administration delayed lethal assistance to Kyiv for months and repeatedly signaled that military force was off the table for fear of provoking Mr. Putin. Instead, the White House threatened to punish Mr. Putin with sanctions and diplomatic isolation if he invaded. Even though the Ukrainians have since inspired the world through their courage and the Russians have shocked the world with their incompetence, integrated deterrence didn’t work.
Nevertheless, anonymous Pentagon officials are spiking the football and moving the goal posts, arguing that integrated deterrence is working because Mr. Putin hasn’t expanded his war into North Atlantic Treaty Organization territory. This is a low bar for geopolitical success and ignores the obvious reality that a NATO-Russia war is more, not less, likely since the invasion of Ukraine.
Moreover, the war isn’t over, and while certain Pentagon officials are celebrating, others in the Biden administration are warning of Russian cyberattacks on U.S. domestic infrastructure. Many are concerned that Mr. Putin could use tactical nuclear weapons. The confidently anonymous Pentagon officials are crowing “that the model of integrated deterrence comes out smelling pretty good from this” should go to Kyiv or Mariupol, take in the smell, and spend some time looking at the bombed-out city blocks and bodies lying in the street. If this is the success of integrated deterrence, what would failure look like?
Not content to confine their hubris to Eastern Europe, anonymous Pentagon officials are also suggesting that integrated deterrence is working in the Western Pacific, where Xi Jinping may be rethinking a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. If Ukraine turns out to be Mr. Putin’s graveyard, perhaps Mr. Xi will abandon his ambitions. But there is little evidence to support this wishful thinking, especially since China may yet provide Russia with military assistance in Ukraine. It is also possible Mr. Xi senses an opportunity and will decide to expedite his timeline for Taiwan, especially since Mr. Biden has consistently signaled a desire to avoid direct military confrontation with a nuclear-armed adversary.
Defending Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion would require the U.S. to engage directly a nuclear-armed state. Deterring such an invasion in the first place, which the destruction on display in Ukraine reminds us is a far preferable outcome, will require America to integrate more conventional hard power into deterrence as quickly as possible. Sanctions, diplomacy and promising but unproven technologies can’t substitute for hard power. Nor will they substitute for arming Taiwan to the teeth with asymmetric capabilities before Mr. Xi launches an invasion.
The Pentagon, while taking an anonymous victory lap, appears to be moving in the opposite direction. Its new defense budget fails to keep pace with inflation. Rather than growing the Navy, the budget proposes to purchase four fewer ships than the 13 that Congress funded in the current fiscal year. It also includes no plan to arm Taiwan to deny a Chinese invasion. This lack of urgency confirms that the Biden administration is using the academic jargon of “integrated deterrence” to justify cuts to conventional hard power and avoid the hard work of fielding combat-credible forces capable of denying our enemies their objectives.
It isn’t hard to understand why. The administration is cutting corners on defense because of pressure from progressives who view it as a distraction from their domestic spending agenda. Even after the dismemberment of Ukraine, a $2 trillion Covid stimulus bill and a $1 trillion so-called infrastructure bill, Democrats are still talking about building back better. They’ve gone so far as to project these preferences onto Mr. Putin. “The Russian people don’t need another foreign adventure,” an anonymous senior administration official said, rebuking the Russian dictator. “What they need is better health care, build back better, roads, schools, economic opportunity.”
Unfortunately, integrated deterrence didn’t sway Mr. Putin. It failed, at great cost to the Ukrainian people and at great risk to the world. That is nothing to brag about, even anonymously.
Mr. Gallagher, a Republican, represents Wisconsin’s Eighth Congressional District and is a member of the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees.
8. Ukraine Proposes Neutral Status With Guarantees, and Zelensky Seeks More Western Help
Is there an acceptable durable political arrangement that can end this?
A lot of photos at the link.
Ukraine Proposes Neutral Status With Guarantees, and Zelensky Seeks More Western Help
Cease-fire talks advanced as deadly Russian strikes continued and Ukrainian forces pushed back Moscow’s troops near Kyiv
Updated Mar. 29, 2022 5:04 pm ET
Ukraine and Russia said they made progress in talks to end the war, with Kyiv presenting its proposal for a neutral status and international security guarantees as Moscow continued deadly strikes across Ukraine despite promises to focus its campaign on the eastern Donbas region.
Though the latest round of negotiations, opened by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul, made advances toward drafting a peace treaty, violence continued unabated, with dozens of reported civilian casualties.
In a sign of progress, Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the initialing of the treaty once the negotiations are completed, said Moscow’s chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky. He also said that, in a show of good will, Russia would limit its operations near Kyiv and the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, though that step didn’t amount to a cease-fire.
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As the talks began, a Russian cruise missile hit the regional government building in the southern city of Mykolaiv during normal work hours. Rescuers were searching the damaged building, half of which was destroyed, for survivors. Ukraine’s state emergency service put the initial death toll at 12 people, with 33 others injured. Mykolaiv Gov. Vitaliy Kim said Russia waited for the building to be full of employees before the strike. He added that he wasn’t hurt because he overslept on Tuesday.
Another Russian missile strike on Tuesday destroyed the fuel depot in the western Ukrainian town of Starokostyantyniv, the local mayor said.
President Biden said the U.S. and European allies were waiting to see if Russia was sincere in cease-fire talks with Ukraine but had no intention of lifting sanctions against Moscow at this stage.
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“We’ll see if they follow through on what they’re suggesting,” he said. “We’re going to continue to keep a close eye on what’s going on.”
Ukraine Outlines Proposal for Neutral Status as War Hits Stalemate
Ukraine Outlines Proposal for Neutral Status as War Hits Stalemate
Play video: Ukraine Outlines Proposal for Neutral Status as War Hits Stalemate
Ukraine outlined its proposal for accepting neutral status for the country during cease-fire talks with Russia in Istanbul on Tuesday. Russian attacks continue in cities across Ukraine, including at a regional government building in Mykolaiv. Photo: Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi for The Wall Street Journal
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said later in the day the U.S. has seen a “small number” of Russian troops around Kyiv move “northward” after failing to take the capital or “hold any major population centers” in Ukraine. The U.S. believes the forces will be moved to other parts of Ukraine, Mr. Kirby said, and that Russia continues to threaten Kyiv with airstrikes.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Tuesday that Moscow has switched its strategy in Ukraine and will now focus on the parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that remain under Kyiv’s control. Mr. Putin last month recognized the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics as independent nations in their claimed borders, which included the two-thirds of the region administered by Kyiv at the time.
“In general, the main objectives of the first stage of the operation have been achieved,” Mr. Shoigu said. “The combat capacity of Ukrainian armed forces has been significantly lowered, which allows us to focus our main attention and efforts on the principal goal—liberating Donbas.”
Russia’s change of course on the battlefield, and apparent progress in peace talks, weighed on oil prices. Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, fell about 2% to settle around $110.23, down from the $123.70 recorded earlier in March.
Local officials have put the civilian death toll Mariupol, where many neighborhoods have been leveled, at over 5,000.
PHOTO: ALEXEI ALEXANDROV/ASSOCIATED PRESS
While Ukrainian officials were cautious about Russian promises of de-escalation near Kyiv and Chernihiv, they welcomed the step, saying it could facilitate humanitarian relief efforts.
PHOTO: ATEF SAFADI/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK
Oil prices rose after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when Western boycotts and sanctions imposed on Russia constricted world-wide supply.
Russia’s initial plan for the war was to quickly seize the capital, Kyiv, and other big cities, installing a puppet regime. Mr. Putin at the time publicly called on Ukrainian forces to stage a coup and oust Mr. Zelensky. Fierce Ukrainian resistance has inflicted heavy losses on Russian forces since then.
In Donbas, Russian troops have entered the port city of Mariupol, besieged for about a month, but fierce battles with Ukrainian forces continue. Local officials have put the civilian death toll in the city, where many neighborhoods have been leveled, at over 5,000. In the rest of Donbas, Russia so far has failed to seize the principal cities of Kramatorsk, Slovyansk and Severodonetsk.
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Ukrainian troops have launched counteroffensives in several areas in recent weeks, including near Kyiv and Chernihiv, and in the regions of Mykolaiv, Kharkiv and Sumy. On Tuesday, Ukraine’s military said it destroyed two battalion tactical groups of the Russian army’s 200th infantry brigade near Kharkiv and killed the brigade’s commander, Col. Denis Kurilo. There was no immediate confirmation of the claim by Russia.
Ukrainian officials reported advances in other parts of the country. Oleksandr Vilkul, mayor of Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine, said Ukrainian forces had repelled Russian attacks and pushed Russian forces 25 miles from the city, which is Mr. Zelensky’s hometown.
“The main thing is that after the stress of the first days, we have realized that we can not only halt the enemy, but strike and defeat it,” Mr. Vilkul said in a video address.
While Ukrainian officials were cautious about Russian promises of de-escalation near Kyiv and Chernihiv, they welcomed the step, saying it could facilitate humanitarian relief efforts. Chernihiv has been under siege for weeks, and its mayor said Tuesday at least 350 civilians had been killed in the city.
The Ukrainian proposal in Istanbul calls for binding guarantees for Ukraine’s security from the U.S., U.K., France, Turkey, Germany, Canada, Poland and Israel.
“This is the system we would like to build the future of Ukraine on,” said Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia, the majority leader in the country’s parliament.
“We want an international mechanism of security guarantees where guarantor countries will act in a similar way to NATO’s article number five,” Mr. Arakhamia said, referring to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s mutual-defense promise.
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A man inside the regional government building in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, that was hit in a Russian missile attack.
PHOTO: DIANA ZEYNEB ALHINDAWI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has sharpened his criticism of Western leaders for their reluctance to tighten sanctions on Russia or provide heavier weapons for Ukraine’s defense.
PHOTO: SEDAT SUNA/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said the arrangement would be subject to a referendum of the Ukrainian people, as well as the approval of the guarantor countries and their parliaments. Mr. Zelensky has said that any referendum can only be held following a full Russian withdrawal to the contact line in Donbas before Feb. 24.
Mr. Podolyak said Ukraine had offered Russia a 15-year period of negotiations on the status of Crimea, which Russia annexed by force in 2014, and that the status of the areas of Donbas controlled by Russia before Feb. 24 would be discussed directly by Mr. Putin and Mr. Zelensky.
Mr. Medinsky, the chief Russian negotiator, confirmed the receipt of written proposals from the Ukrainian side, saying they would be communicated to Moscow.
Turkey’s president briefly visited the Russian and Ukrainian negotiators, who met in a former Ottoman palace on the banks of the Bosporus.
“We are entering a period when concrete results should be achieved from negotiations,” Mr. Erdogan said. “The whole world is waiting for good news from you.”
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Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who survived an alleged poisoning earlier this month, was photographed inside the room with the negotiators. Mr. Abramovich appeared to be greeting Mr. Erdogan and sitting at a table with Russian and Ukrainian officials, according to news footage viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Before the talks, Mr. Zelensky escalated his criticism of Western leaders for their reluctance to tighten sanctions on Russia or provide heavier weapons for Ukraine’s defense.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, wearing a red tie, greeted negotiators Tuesday before the Russia-Ukraine talks in Istanbul.
PHOTO: MURAT CETINMUHURDAR/PPO/VIA REUTERS
Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, wearing a blue suit, listened through headphones as Turkey’s president addressed negotiators.
PHOTO: TURKISH PRESIDENCY/VIA REUTERS
In a video address Tuesday, Mr. Zelensky warned that Ukraine won’t compromise its sovereignty and renewed his calls for intensifying international sanctions on Russia. “Signals from the negotiating table are positive, but they do not offset the sound of explosions of Russian shells,” Mr. Zelensky said.
Ties between Russia and EU countries have deteriorated sharply following Mr. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. On Tuesday, four European countries announced they were kicking out more than 40 Russian officials over national security threats, citing spying and influence operations as reasons. Russia also announced Tuesday it was expelling a number of diplomats from the EU’s Baltic countries.
But the EU has so far rejected calls to sever its main business dealings with Russia: the purchase of oil and gas, which are Moscow’s main sources of export earnings. The U.S. banned Russian oil, gas and coal imports on March 8.
Many observers believe public pressure on EU leaders to act could become overwhelming if Mr. Putin orders the use of chemical or other unconventional weapons in Ukraine. At an EU summit last week, some officials argued that the bloc should impose further sanctions only in reaction to a further escalation by Russia.
“There are simply no words. Just think about what it has come down to. Waiting for chemical weapons. We, living people, have to wait,” Mr. Zelensky said in his televised address. “Doesn’t everything the Russian military has done so far deserve an oil embargo?”
Ukrainian troops have launched counteroffensives in several areas in recent weeks, including near Kyiv and Chernihiv, as well as in the regions of Mykolaiv, Kharkiv and Sumy.
PHOTO: FADEL SENNA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Ukraine’s state emergency service put the initial death toll at the regional government building in the city of Mykolaiv at 12, with 33 injured.
PHOTO: PETROS GIANNAKOURIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Some eastern and northern EU countries support sanctions on Russian energy imports, but Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, has rejected an immediate cutoff of Russian oil and gas. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Sunday warned of devastating economic consequences for his country if it bans Russian oil, dismissing studies by economists that say the impact would be manageable.
German officials have, however, said the country would find ways to cope if Moscow, rather than Berlin, cuts off oil and gas deliveries, raising doubts about Mr. Scholz’s claim that Germany couldn’t get along without Russian energy imports.
Losing access to Russian gas during colder months would mean activating German emergency plans to conserve fuel for heating, including suspending some industrial activities—such as in the chemicals sector—that use gas in the production process.
Some German politicians, such as former Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, have called for an immediate if temporary embargo on all energy purchases from Russia to destroy the economic underpinnings of Mr. Putin’s military offensive.
Mr. Zelensky also called for more weapons, including warplanes, tanks, artillery and shells.
“Ukrainians should not die just because someone cannot find enough courage to hand over weapons to Ukraine,” he said. “Fear always makes you an accomplice.”
Yuliya Chernova, Marcus Walker, Elvan Kivilcim, Bojan Pancevski, Sabrina Siddiqui and Laurence Norman contributed to this article.
9. America’s Declining Military
I listened to some members of the president's party today who think the defense budget should be reduced and more resources shifted to domestic priorities.
America’s Declining Military
Biden’s budget widens a window of vulnerability for at least a decade.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
The Pentagon is seeking $773 billion for fiscal 2023, and spending on national defense reaches $813 billion when other accounts are included. This sounds large, and Mr. Biden is pitching it as a big increase over his request last year. But even defense officials say the Pentagon would see only a 1.5% real increase over last year’s funding after inflation. Defense spending will still be about 3.1% of the economy, close to post-Cold War lows and heading lower over the next decade. (See the nearby chart.)
The Administration calls China a “pacing challenge,” and Russia an “acute threat,” and it touts $130 billion for research and development, including crucial efforts on artificial intelligence and 5G applications. Also welcome is $24.7 billion for missile defense, including a badly needed $892 million to defend Guam from Chinese missiles, and $27.6 billion for space capabilities. The Pacific Deterrence Initiative would get $6.1 billion.
But the overall budget picture is that the Biden team is betting on weapons that don’t yet exist for a war they hope arrives on someone else’s watch. They want to save money now in order to spend on what they say will be a more modern force in a decade.
To this end, the 298-ship U.S. Navy would buy only nine ships next year while retiring 24. The fleet would shrink to 280 ships in 2027, even as the Navy says it needs a fleet of 500 to defeat China in a conflict. That trend won’t impress Xi Jinping as he eyes Taiwan.
As for the Army, Mr. Putin’s revanchism will require more forward deployments by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The alliance will need more troops and hardware in the Baltics, and much of this will have to come from the land branch. But the Army is seeking $177.5 billion, barely up from $174.7 billion last year and a cut after inflation.
End strength would fall to 473,000 from the 485,000 authorized last year. The Army shrugs because it hasn’t been able to fill all its spots in a hot labor market. This may relieve a recruiting headache for some general, but it won’t reduce the threats the Army may have to address in multiple theaters.
The Air Force “is now the smallest, oldest, and least ready it has ever been in its 75-year history,” as the Air Force Association put it this week, but the Pentagon plans to cut its buy of F-35 fighter jets this year.
The Air Force wants 33 F-35s, down from 48 requested in years past, which was still too few to upgrade the fleet in any reasonable time. In a future conflict, the U.S. will need these advanced aircraft to survive against sophisticated air defenses. Reducing purchases will put pressure on the supply chain and raise the per copy cost of the aircraft.
These hard-power priorities were squeezed in order to request, with great self-congratulation, $3.1 billion for climate change. This is consistent with a White House that wants to create a Civilian Climate Corps with more personnel than the Marine Corps. This $3.1 billion could be spent on weapons. The Navy’s ship retirements save $3.6 billion over five years, and the country needs that offensive power more than it does electric vans.
A couple more questionable decisions: The Administration appears to have canceled a program to develop a nuclear sea-launched cruise missile, precisely the kind of weapon designed to deter Mr. Putin from using tactical nukes in Europe. The Air Force also wants to retire much of its aging airborne warning and control fleet (Awacs) without a replacement in hand, but this capability is essential to air dominance in any conflict.
***
A decades-long decline in American military power is an under-appreciated reason the world’s authoritarians are on the march. We never thought we’d write this given its penchant for military pork, but Congress can do a lot to improve the Pentagon request, which should be a baseline. Republicans are suggesting the military budget needs to grow 5% in real terms. Congress should set a goal of returning the U.S. to its deterrent strength of the Cold War years, when defense spending was 5% or more of the economy.
If lawmakers don’t intervene, the U.S. might not be ready for the next war until a decade after we lose it.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
10. Rival Networks Aided Fox News After Ukraine Tragedy, Highlighting War-Zone Collaboration
This is what professionals and good people do.
Rival Networks Aided Fox News After Ukraine Tragedy, Highlighting War-Zone Collaboration
Journalists are coordinating on an array of challenges, including travel routes, evacuation plans and access to supplies
WSJ · by Alexandra Bruell and Benjamin Mullin
Ms. Ward and Mr. Yingst called Ukrainian military officials and passed along information about their last known whereabouts, the people said. Security personnel from NBC and Sky News also offered to help Fox News during that period, they said. Later, Fox News’s security team received a tip that their remains had been located, some of the people said.
A third Fox News journalist, foreign-affairs correspondent Benjamin Hall, survived and had already been taken to the hospital with severe injuries.
The tragedy underscored the tremendous risks journalists face in covering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that has resulted in the deaths of five media workers in the past month, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The event also demonstrated the teamwork and coordination among news organizations with staffers on the ground.
Cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski, Fox correspondent Trey Yingst and Oleksandra ‘Sasha’ Kuvshynova, a consultant for the network, reporting in Ukraine.
Photo: Fox News/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Such coordination is common in war zones, but the Ukraine conflict has exposed news organizations to different types of threats compared to some other conflicts of recent years. The security risks for journalists in Afghanistan and Iraq were also severe—among them, the threat of improvised explosive devices, kidnappings or suicide bombers. In Ukraine, there is a heightened concern about missiles and artillery fire raining down on civilian areas, news executives and security experts said.
“Here, death comes out of the sky indiscriminately,” said a head of global newsgathering at a large U.S.-based news network.
David Rohde, a former New York Times reporter who was kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2008 while working on a book, said in an interview that the information shared among news organizations helps journalists in the country avoid danger.
“We should compete aggressively against each other in terms of stories but shouldn’t compete when it comes to safety,” said Mr. Rohde, who is now executive editor for news at the New Yorker’s website.
In the event a journalist is injured or killed, the U.S. military doesn’t have a presence in Ukraine to offer help. In the case of Mr. Hall, Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin worked with an organization called Save Our Allies to transport the injured journalist and get him access to medical care, Fox News has reported.
Mr. Hall was evacuated to Poland and was eventually transported back to the U.S.
Elena Cosentino, the director of the International News Safety Institute, which supports outlets covering hazardous situations, said she began organizing daily safety calls in the weeks before the war with news executives from organizations including the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse and Dow Jones & Co., which publishes The Wall Street Journal. The frequency of the calls and amount of information being shared—regarding safe travel routes, hard-to-navigate military checkpoints and access to supplies—is unprecedented, she said.
“Ultimately, the aim is to raise the bar for safety and have the best mitigations in place while doing the best-possible journalism,” Ms. Cosentino said.
David Rohde in 2013. The former New York Times reporter was kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2008 while working on a book.
Photo: Gary Cameron/Reuters
The Associated Press and other news outlets, including Reuters, are sharing information that can help them shape individual decisions, such as about where to send correspondents, according to people familiar with the matter. Some news organizations are teaming up to identify ways to evacuate their personnel, secure lodging and transport journalists into the country. Recently, outlets with correspondents on the ground began exploring ways to handle medical emergencies together, one of the people said.
Journalists are also facing risks on the other side of the Ukrainian border. Early this month, Russia passed a law that threatens as much as 15 years of prison time for anyone publishing what authorities consider to be false information about the country’s invasion of Ukraine, which the Kremlin refers to as a special military operation.
A number of news outlets, including CNN and Bloomberg News, suspended the work of their journalists in the country. New York Times Co. also decided to pull its editorial staff from Russia, and the Washington Post at the time said it would remove bylines from articles reported in Russia. Dow Jones said in a statement that being in Moscow is key to its mission of covering the Ukraine-Russia story.
After news organizations communicated their plans in response to the new law, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned several correspondents to discuss the matter, according to people familiar with the situation. In the meeting, a Russian official grilled some correspondents about their justification for being in Russia, with their companies’ operations suspended, one of the people said. Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs didn’t respond to a request for comment about the meeting.
“There were challenges living and working as a journalist in Russia, but this new law essentially made it impossible by criminalizing independent fact-based reporting,” said Michael Slackman, assistant managing editor for international at the Times.
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The British Broadcasting Corp. suspended its broadcasts from Russia and sought legal advice from specialists, including lawyers based in Russia, said Richard Burgess, interim head of news content for BBC News. Days later, the BBC said its correspondents could resume reporting in English from Russia, as long as they used specific language that complied with the BBC’s interpretation of the law. Instead of calling the invasion of Ukraine a war, for example, BBC News Russia Editor Steve Rosenberg uses language such as, “what the Kremlin refuses to call the war,” said Mr. Burgess.
“Nobody knows definitively the way that the Russian government will interpret this new law, but we made a judgment call,” he said.
The level of risk was too great to continue coverage in Russian, he said.
BBC World News coverage that aired in English in Russia was banned, and BBC News websites were blocked in Russian and English, said a BBC spokeswoman. To distribute its news content, the BBC launched an account on TikTok in Russian and English and has been broadcasting over shortwave radio in Ukraine and parts of Russia to locals, said Mr. Burgess.
“We are doing what we can to get news to people,” he said.
—Ann M. Simmons contributed to this article.
WSJ · by Alexandra Bruell and Benjamin Mullin
11. Ukraine will not be like Korea – dogged resistance will turn it into Putin’s ‘bleeding ulcer’
"Operation Bleeding Ulcer."
I do not think the author knows the history of the Korean War. It took 5 years for South Korea to capture or kill the remaining guerrilla forces in central South Korea. (until 1958). And low intensity conflict continued through the 1960s.
Ukraine will not be like Korea – dogged resistance will turn it into Putin’s ‘bleeding ulcer’
The Russian army reached a “point of culmination” on around March 20. This meant that with the available supplies and reserves, it could make no further significant advances. Local actions, such as its effort to take Mariupol, continue. But on all major fronts, Russia’s advance has been largely held by ferocious and competent Ukrainian resistance. Russia has hundreds of thousands of reserves, but very few have been mobilised and neither they nor their equipment are in any way combat ready.
Russia has stalled – and Vladimir Putin is reported to have redefined Russia’s main goal as “the liberation of Donbas”. This is the region in the east of Ukraine where fighting has been continuing since 2014 and where two breakaway pro-Russian republics were recognised by the Russian president two days before the invasion. The chief of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, said on March 27 that Putin will try “to pull the occupied territories into a single quasi-state structure and try to pit it against Ukraine”.
There is always the possibility of deception – but, for the first time in an incoherent and incompetently executed war, the Russian army will have a focus. This will be centred on what the Ukrainian military calls the “joint forces operation” in the Donbas.
Where then does the war go from here? Until now, Russian forces have been conducting three largely separate operations: around Kyiv in the north, centred on Kharkiv in the east and currently focused on Mariupol in the south. In the absence of any evident central command, these efforts have been competing against each other for ever-dwindling supplies.
Now Russian forces are likely to continue to pressurise Kyiv, but not try to take it. They will continue their criminal assaults on civilians there and in other Ukrainian cities. In the east, they will try to hold what they have, to provide leverage for negotiations. In doing so, the Russians will attempt to damage the Ukrainian army so badly they cannot reinforce the south and especially the Donbas.
How the two sides now measure up
The challenge for Ukraine will be to continue the fight in the joint forces operation area, hold the Russians off and perhaps retake ground where they can, probably around Kyiv and in parts of the south.
The challenge for the Russians is even more formidable. Since the beginning of the war, and probably long before, US military and intelligence agencies have been planning for a transition from war to a more comprehensive national resistance. On the front lines, Russian forces will receive reinforcements, especially from the April 2022 draft of conscripts, who were called up early. These new troops, when they do arrive in a few months, are unlikely to constitute effective, cohesive units. It remains to be seen whether Russia can replace its losses in men and military hardware.
Playing the long game: Ukraine is gearing up to fight an irregular war with the help of Nato weapons. EPA-EFE/Sergey Dolzhenko
Russian soldiers, as they always do, will begin to adapt. But Ukraine’s armed forces will continue to benefit – as Russia’s will not – from ever better training and weaponry supplied by a newly revitalised Nato. In addition, Ukraine’s forces have shown a considerable edge in their military culture, notably using “mission command”. This means empowering and trusting junior leaders to carry out commanders’ orders and use their initiative. This is vital in a fast-flowing combat environment. Russia’s traditional top-down military approach cannot compete with that.
The Ukrainian military’s ability to innovate has also been important, allowing for aggregation of small, new and effective capabilities. Behind the lines, Ukraine’s partisans will continue to take a severe toll on Russian forces. As the British and US saw in Iraq, even when largely unsupported by outside powers, this kind of war can be brutally effective.
New thinking
Nato has applied the lessons of Iraq to develop new thinking on setting up effective resistance forces against Russian forces. For some time Ukrainian, US and other intelligence agencies will have been identifying and supplying the territorial defence leaders behind Russian lines, and they have been effective in disrupting Russian supply lines and logistics.
Should Ukraine be split as Putin plans, this will not be a frozen conflict, as Korea is. Nor will it resemble Abkhazia or Chechnya, uneasy though they both remain, under the control of a Russian puppet Ramzan Kadyrov in Chechnya and military occupation in the breakaway Georgian region. Even Afghanistan in the 1980s will pale in comparison.
From 1807 to 1814 on the Iberian peninsula, Napoleon had to fight Spanish, Portuguese and British armies while beset by ubiquitous, ferocious insurgents. He described this war as his “bleeding ulcer”, draining him of men and equipment. It is the west’s aim to make Ukraine for Putin what Spain was for Napoleon.
In the absence of a negotiated settlement, Ukraine and Nato will continue to grind away at Russia’s army, digging away at that bleeding ulcer and prolonging Russia’s agony on the military front, as the west continues its parallel assault on its economy. If Putin’s plan is to proceed with the Korea model, he will fail. There is a strong possibility that Putin has only a limited idea of how badly his army is faring. So be it – he’ll find out soon enough that there is now no path for him to military victory.
12. Biden’s Defense Budget Sends the Wrong Message
A very blunt critique of the Biden national security team.
Excerpts:
All of which raises serious questions about whether the Biden administration’s strategy documents have much connection to its policies. For a presidency that is championing integrated deterrence, it is oddly bad at integrating the threat and use of military force into its strategy and policies.
A photograph from the meeting of the secretaries of state and defense and their Ukrainian counterparts perfectly captures the administration’s reflexes: Secretary of State Antony Blinken is at one end of the American delegation, with the Ukrainian delegation fixated on him, while Secretary Austin is at the tail end, looking intently at his notes, in the opposite direction of the conversation.
What the Biden administration has done with its policies, strategy, and budget is demonstrate that it doesn’t understand how to integrate all the elements of national power; it is so reluctant to use military force that both allies and adversaries will wonder whether there is anything the U.S. will actually fight for.
Biden’s Defense Budget Sends the Wrong Message
The Biden administration’s latest budget request has overshot the target, in the wrong way.
By Kori Schake
Russia has invaded a country on NATO’s borders, its leader has repeatedly invoked the specter of nuclear war, and its military is mercilessly bombing civilian targets. China, meanwhile, is ramping up its defense spending, has overtaken the United States in some important areas of defense technology, and just signed a treaty of “friendship” with Russia. Elsewhere, North Korea is testing missiles that can reach the U.S., Iran continues to be a malign actor in the Middle East, and terrorist groups have not gone away.
Yet in its latest budget request for defense, the Biden administration has sought to downplay the U.S. military’s role in national security, and the resources it has asked for are insufficient for even that reduced role. In seeking to diminish the dominance of military elements in American strategy, the Biden administration has overshot the target: Defense is nowhere to be found in its thinking about strategy; defense serves merely as a supply depot for other militaries, and a cash cow for other priorities. In sum, the strategy is wrong, but even if it were right, the administration has not adequately paid for it.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin describes the strategy as “a new way of approaching deterrence,” a method known as “integrated deterrence.” Basically, it calls on all of America’s various resources—military, cyber, diplomatic, nuclear, and others—to work together to deter the country’s enemies from either waging all-out war or undertaking so-called gray-zone tactics. The notion itself isn’t a problem, and indeed it doesn’t actually break new ground—national-security experts have for more than 15 years argued for better integration of the country’s levers of power, and for stronger nonmilitary tools.
What is different—and mistaken—about the Biden strategy is the absence of defense. According to The Washington Post, “Senior Pentagon officials are brimming with newfound confidence in American power,” and believe that their response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine amounts to a successful example of integrated deterrence. Yet a central element of the Biden administration’s policy has been repeatedly and publicly assuring Russia that the U.S. military will not defend Ukraine. The president has ably organized allies into a creative and strong economic front, adroitly orchestrated intelligence and cyber elements of policy—but rushed American trainers out of Ukraine and limited the military’s role to weapons supplier. The administration claims that this approach has succeeded in preventing Vladimir Putin from attacking NATO, but this argument not only lacks supporting evidence that Putin planned to attack NATO; it also writes off the tragedy being experienced by Ukraine.
The White House budget claims, “As America leads with diplomacy, we are also investing in our military—the strongest fighting force the world has ever known. We are investing in our warfighting advantages, understanding that a combat-credible military is the foundation of deterrence and America’s ability to prevail in conflict.” But the president doesn’t even mention defense in his statement about the budget, and national security’s placement at the very end of the document indicates that it is the administration’s last priority. The money budgeted for defense reinforces that placement.
The president’s budget includes $773 billion for the Defense Department, an increase of $30 billion over what Congress enacted last year (which was itself $29 billion more than the president had asked for). That request is certainly a lot of money, equivalent to about 3.9 percent of the U.S. economy. There’s a reason most countries don’t have the ability to defend themselves and their interests: Defense is an expensive proposition. And 3.9 percent of GDP is roughly what the defense budget was in 1995, after the peace dividend and reduction in forces that followed the end of the Cold War, when international tensions were much lower than they are now. The budget for defense (excluding funding for the intelligence community and the Department of Energy, which is responsible for America’s nuclear weapons) also assumes that inflation for the coming fiscal year will be only 2.3 percent, but inflation is running at 7.5 percent. So the Department of Defense is losing ground to inflation.
The president’s budget also shifts money within the defense budget from procurement of equipment to potential future developments, and includes new priorities such as climate change and global health, which will have to compete for resources with actual military requirements.
Nor is the problem just about money. A well-ordered process would have the White House produce a national-security strategy from which a national-defense strategy can be derived, thereby narrowing the focus to how the Department of Defense plans to use its civilian and military resources to carry out the overall White House strategy. This national-defense strategy then gives direction to a national-military strategy that aligns military forces to the administration’s priorities. Those planning documents should inform the budget; none of them is yet completed, except for interim guidance for preparation of the national-security strategy.
All of which raises serious questions about whether the Biden administration’s strategy documents have much connection to its policies. For a presidency that is championing integrated deterrence, it is oddly bad at integrating the threat and use of military force into its strategy and policies.
A photograph from the meeting of the secretaries of state and defense and their Ukrainian counterparts perfectly captures the administration’s reflexes: Secretary of State Antony Blinken is at one end of the American delegation, with the Ukrainian delegation fixated on him, while Secretary Austin is at the tail end, looking intently at his notes, in the opposite direction of the conversation.
What the Biden administration has done with its policies, strategy, and budget is demonstrate that it doesn’t understand how to integrate all the elements of national power; it is so reluctant to use military force that both allies and adversaries will wonder whether there is anything the U.S. will actually fight for.
13. Opinion | What if Putin Didn’t Miscalculate?
Interesting analysis.
Excerpts:
If this analysis is right, then Putin doesn’t seem like the miscalculating loser his critics make him out to be.
It also makes sense of his strategy of targeting civilians. More than simply a way of compensating for the incompetence of Russian troops, the mass killing of civilians puts immense pressure on Zelensky to agree to the very things Putin has demanded all along: territorial concessions and Ukrainian neutrality. The West will also look for any opportunity to de-escalate, especially as we convince ourselves that a mentally unstable Putin is prepared to use nuclear weapons.
Within Russia, the war has already served Putin’s political purposes. Many in the professional middle class — the people most sympathetic to dissidents like Aleksei Navalny — have gone into self-imposed exile. The remnants of a free press have been shuttered, probably for good. To the extent that Russia’s military has embarrassed itself, it is more likely to lead to a well-aimed purge from above than a broad revolution from below. Russia’s new energy riches could eventually help it shake loose the grip of sanctions.
This alternative analysis of Putin’s performance could be wrong. Then again, in war, politics and life, it’s always wiser to treat your adversary as a canny fox, not a crazy fool.
Opinion | What if Putin Didn’t Miscalculate?
Bret stephens
What if Putin Didn’t Miscalculate?
March 29, 2022, 7:39 p.m. ET
Credit...Pool photo by Mikhail Klimentyev
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The conventional wisdom is that Vladimir Putin catastrophically miscalculated.
He thought Russian-speaking Ukrainians would welcome his troops. They didn’t. He thought he’d swiftly depose Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. He hasn’t. He thought he’d divide NATO. He’s united it. He thought he had sanction-proofed his economy. He’s wrecked it. He thought the Chinese would help him out. They’re hedging their bets. He thought his modernized military would make mincemeat of Ukrainian forces. The Ukrainians are making mincemeat of his, at least on some fronts.
Putin’s miscalculations raise questions about his strategic judgment and mental state. Who, if anyone, is advising him? Has he lost contact with reality? Is he physically unwell? Mentally? Condoleezza Rice warns: “He’s not in control of his emotions. Something is wrong.” Russia’s sieges of Mariupol and Kharkiv — two heavily Russian-speaking cities that Putin claims to be “liberating” from Ukrainian oppression — resemble what the Nazis did to Warsaw, and what Putin himself did to Grozny.
Several analysts have compared Putin to a cornered rat, more dangerous now that he’s no longer in control of events. They want to give him a safe way out of the predicament he allegedly created for himself. Hence the almost universal scorn poured on Joe Biden for saying in Poland, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
The conventional wisdom is entirely plausible. It has the benefit of vindicating the West’s strategy of supporting Ukraine defensively. And it tends toward the conclusion that the best outcome is one in which Putin finds some face-saving way out: additional Ukrainian territory, a Ukrainian pledge of neutrality, a lifting of some of the sanctions.
But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the West is only playing into Putin’s hands once again?
The possibility is suggested in a powerful reminiscence from The Times’s Carlotta Gall of her experience covering Russia’s siege of Grozny, during the first Chechen war in the mid-1990s. In the early phases of the war, motivated Chechen fighters wiped out a Russian armored brigade, stunning Moscow. The Russians regrouped and wiped out Grozny from afar, using artillery and air power.
Russia’s operating from the same playbook today. When Western military analysts argue that Putin can’t win militarily in Ukraine, what they really mean is that he can’t win clean. Since when has Putin ever played clean?
“There is a whole next stage to the Putin playbook, which is well known to the Chechens,” Gall writes. “As Russian troops gained control on the ground in Chechnya, they crushed any further dissent with arrests and filtration camps and by turning and empowering local protégés and collaborators.”
Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.
“Under the guise of an invasion, Putin is executing an enormous heist,” said Canadian energy expert David Knight Legg. As for what’s left of a mostly landlocked Ukraine, it will likely become a welfare case for the West, which will help pick up the tab for resettling Ukraine’s refugees to new homes outside of Russian control. In time, a Viktor Orban-like figure could take Ukraine’s presidency, imitating the strongman-style of politics that Putin prefers in his neighbors.
If this analysis is right, then Putin doesn’t seem like the miscalculating loser his critics make him out to be.
It also makes sense of his strategy of targeting civilians. More than simply a way of compensating for the incompetence of Russian troops, the mass killing of civilians puts immense pressure on Zelensky to agree to the very things Putin has demanded all along: territorial concessions and Ukrainian neutrality. The West will also look for any opportunity to de-escalate, especially as we convince ourselves that a mentally unstable Putin is prepared to use nuclear weapons.
Within Russia, the war has already served Putin’s political purposes. Many in the professional middle class — the people most sympathetic to dissidents like Aleksei Navalny — have gone into self-imposed exile. The remnants of a free press have been shuttered, probably for good. To the extent that Russia’s military has embarrassed itself, it is more likely to lead to a well-aimed purge from above than a broad revolution from below. Russia’s new energy riches could eventually help it shake loose the grip of sanctions.
This alternative analysis of Putin’s performance could be wrong. Then again, in war, politics and life, it’s always wiser to treat your adversary as a canny fox, not a crazy fool.
14. U.S. and Europe Should Stop Congratulating Themselves
"Always with the negative waves Moriarty, always with the negative waves." - Oddball
But it ain't over until the rather large opera singer sings.
This is more than a critique of Putin's War. The author is not fond of the international rules based order either.
U.S. and Europe Should Stop Congratulating Themselves
Stirring rhetoric about Western unity and resolve in the face of Russia’s brutal attacks may sound impressive, but it’s as likely to backfire as the response to Sept. 11 did.
Cold War language about Western unity and the “long fight” against autocracy has become more rousing as Russia flounders in Ukraine. It is time to start worrying that the response to Vladimir Putin's aggression, led by U.S. President Joe Biden, might cause more widespread damage than even the Russian despot had planned.
One only has to recall the Western reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. After that atrocity, politicians and journalists freely indulged in the kind of spine-stiffening rhetoric Biden used in Warsaw last week. Those few dissenters who warned against self-congratulatory hawkishness — including the late writer Susan Sontag, who pleaded, “Let's not be stupid together” — were viciously attacked.
As it happened, the decision to declare an open-ended war on terror — quickly taken and fulsomely endorsed in that atmosphere of fervent unanimity — led to violence on multiple continents and helped unravel entire societies.
The fanatics of al-Qaeda never posed a serious threat to Western political, military and economic power. Their suicidal attack was, arguably, symptomatic of the overall decline of militant Islam worldwide. Putin’s brutal assault on Ukraine seems another sign of thwarted energies that have turned self-destructive.
Yet rhetorical overkill and thoughtless policy from Western powers might well accelerate their own loss of legitimacy while helping turn a regional crisis into a global conflagration.
Certainly, memories of the counter-productive response to 9/11 weigh heavily on the minds of those — a large part of the world’s population — who do not share the Western goals of isolating and punishing Russia through sanctions. Since 9/11, most people around the world have regarded the Western ideology and practice of humanitarian intervention, democracy-promotion and regime change with increasing distrust. Such skeptics are unlikely to be stirred by Biden’s denunciations of autocracy, broadcast from illiberal Poland of all places.
Russophobia, latent or manifest in a range of actions in the West today, is about as likely to bring about positive change as Islamophobia. There is little evidence that global isolation and humiliation can motivate a people to overthrow their oppressive leaders.
And Putin is more equipped than any Islamist demagogue to take advantage of his citizens’ anger at the West. He is adept at packaging his imperialism as a riposte to the real and perceived humiliations of Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even if Putin is overthrown at some point, a more unhinged form of chauvinism may well emerge from a defeated, immiserated and still nuclear-armed Russia.
Those Western hawks comparing Putin to Adolf Hitler and lamenting appeasement at Munich in 1938 should go back a bit further in history and remember how the Treaty of Versailles after World War I made another global calamity inevitable.
They ought also to reflect on how the West’s talk of antagonistic and irreconcilable blocs undermines its own ideology of globalization. It was Western politicians, businessmen and journalists, after all, who claimed that the end of the Cold War had made possible a new world order in which market forces rightly prevailed over state sovereignty and soft power over hard, creating a “win-win” scenario for all nations and peoples.
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This “flat world” was, of course, always an optical illusion. The West’s advanced nation-states deeply influenced transnational networks of trade and capital. The ownership, assets and intellectual property of multinational banks, companies and insurance firms remained largely in their home countries. And the global economy remained subject to regulation by Western-dominated organizations such as the G-7, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Most non-Western countries resented this “rules-based liberal order” even as they went along with it. When globalization seemed to empower a rival to the West, such as China, they were quick to note how quickly leaders such as former U.S. President Donald Trump moved to undermine it.
The swift abandonment of Russia by Western businesses has reinforced the idea that this new world order is controlled by and primarily designed for the benefit of a minority of Europeans and Americans. The weaponizing of globalization by its principal movers and shakers undercuts their claim to be creating a moral, political and economic universalism that transcends nation-state rivalries.
Western cold warriors would do better to direct their energies to negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. It is swift peace-making that can stave off, among other things, a bleak future of hunger and chaos, especially for the poor countries of Asia, Africa and the Middle East that depend on Russia and Ukraine for energy, fertilizer and food.
Biden can’t seem to stop talking about the importance of Western unity. But unity in itself is not a virtue. As Sontag noted, it is always possible to be stupid together.
More From Other Writers at Bloomberg Opinion:
-
How to Hold Vladimir Putin Accountable for War Crimes: Editorial
-
First Help Ukraine to Survive, Then Beat Putin: Clive Crook
-
Putin’s Nuclear Threat Brings Back the Cold War: Max Hastings
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15. Biden risking new wars with Iran 'diplomacy' — and our Middle East allies know it
Excerpts;
As the region braces for greater instability, the Biden White House has demonstrated a desperate obsequiousness to rejoin the framework of the 2015 nuclear deal that defies logic. There apparently is no Iranian demand so outrageous as to solicit a “no” from Robert Malley, the U.S. envoy to the nuclear negotiations. While feigning a commitment to nuclear restraints that begin to unravel in 2025, the regime is planning a massive expansion of its military machine.
The White House may believe its own spin, but no Middle Eastern state does. They understand what awaits because they have already seen it. The 2015 nuclear deal led to an uptick in regional violence by Iran’s terrorist proxies. But now the global landscape has changed. The dangers are greater. America is taking a grave risk. Rather than ending “endless wars,” new fronts may be on the verge of opening.
Biden risking new wars with Iran 'diplomacy' — and our Middle East allies know it
The Hill · by Michael Rubin and Jonathan Schanzer, opinion contributors · March 28, 2022
Look no further than Ukraine: Vladimir Putin understood that American retrenchment amounted to lack of appetite for confrontation.
Biden has all but encouraged this Iranian malign activity. As a candidate, he excoriated the Trump administration’s policy of squeezing Iran as a “a self-inflicted disaster.” The former vice president and his top aides, many of whom helped craft the Obama administration’s appeasement of Tehran, blamed both Trump’s 2018 departure from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal and the subsequent maximum sanctions pressure campaign for the regime’s recent strides on the nuclear front.
This was wrong for three reasons. First, Iran’s program remains governed by its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement. Regardless of whether the JCPOA is in force, this applies. Second, the Islamic Republic’s decision to violate its nuclear commitments rests on the Supreme Leader. To accept his efforts to blame the West for his dangerous choices is to serve as useful idiot for world’s most prolific sponsor of terrorism. Third, the vast majority of Iran’s nuclear advances came after Biden took office. Until then, the regime was remarkably careful not to provoke the unpredictable, even volatile, commander-in-chief. All the more so after Trump removed Iran’s most capable military commander, Qassem Soleimani, from the battlefield in January 2020.
Moreover, Trump’s maximum pressure sanctions campaign reduced Iran’s hard currency reserves from more than $100 billion to roughly $12 billion, if not far lower. The regime was running on fumes when Biden took office. This constricted the regime’s ability to fund its terrorist proxies, and caused Tehran to think twice about engaging in other provocations, including on the nuclear front.
Today, the Biden administration is signaling its intent to allow the Guards to resume business as usual. As a result, the IRGC will be the primary beneficiaries of the estimated $131 billion that will flow to the regime under the proposed new nuclear deal. Such a move will backfire. Never has flooding an enemy’s military with cash moderated its ideology or bought peace. It is particularly preposterous to expect peace from a regime built upon the idea of rejecting America’s global leadership.
Tehran’s leaders have openly vowed to maintain hostility toward the west. Not only that. The regime’s proxies are eagerly awaiting the financial benefits of the West’s failed nuclear diplomacy. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other terrorist groups will expand their arsenal of increasingly sophisticated weapons. They will unleash them separately or, worse, in concert. This will put American allies like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Israel in the crosshairs. The regional turmoil that America is set to unleash as a result will only exacerbate the current challenges to the U.S.-led world order.
Israel unquestionably understands this. The government of Naftali Bennett, following in the footsteps of the Benjamin Netanyahu government, is engaged in a full-on asymmetric battle to weaken Iran’s capabilities. The “War Between Wars” continues to flare up in Syria, cyberspace, and Iran itself. The regime has failed to land a solid blow in response. But it may only be a matter of time before it does.
As the region braces for greater instability, the Biden White House has demonstrated a desperate obsequiousness to rejoin the framework of the 2015 nuclear deal that defies logic. There apparently is no Iranian demand so outrageous as to solicit a “no” from Robert Malley, the U.S. envoy to the nuclear negotiations. While feigning a commitment to nuclear restraints that begin to unravel in 2025, the regime is planning a massive expansion of its military machine.
The White House may believe its own spin, but no Middle Eastern state does. They understand what awaits because they have already seen it. The 2015 nuclear deal led to an uptick in regional violence by Iran’s terrorist proxies. But now the global landscape has changed. The dangers are greater. America is taking a grave risk. Rather than ending “endless wars,” new fronts may be on the verge of opening.
Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. A former Pentagon official, he teaches classes on terrorism for the FBI and on security, politics, religion and history for U.S. and NATO military units. He has a Ph.D. in history from Yale University.
Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is senior vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies (@FDD); follow him on Twitter @JSchanzer
The Hill · by Michael Rubin and Jonathan Schanzer, opinion contributors · March 28, 2022
16. Generation Jihad Ep. 67 — Meanwhile in Africa
Generation Jihad Ep. 67 — Meanwhile in Africa | FDD's Long War Journal
Host Bill Roggio is joined by two Long War Journal regulars, Caleb Weiss and Andrew Tobin, to give listeners an update on what’s happening on the ground in Africa from the Sahel — including that more than 400 Malians have been slaughtered in under one month — to “elections” and Shabaab attacks in Somalia.
Take a look around the globe today and you’ll see jihadists fighting everywhere from West Africa to Southeast Asia. They aren’t the dominant force in all of those areas, or even most of them. But jihadism has mushroomed into a worldwide movement, with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS and other groups waging guerrilla warfare and launching terrorist attacks on a regular basis.
Each week Generation Jihad brings you a new story focusing on jihadism around the globe. These stories will focus not only on Sunni jihadism, but also Shiite extremist groups. We will also host guests who can provide their own unique perspectives on current events.
Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.
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17. Ukraine War Offers Opportunity To Bring Turkey and its Defense Industry into NATO Fold
Conclusion:
The high stakes should give the Biden administration and other Western leaders urgency to implement a concerted transatlantic strategy involving not only incentives and disincentives to encourage Turkey’s pivot away from Russia and toward NATO, but also the provision of greater economic and military aid to Ukraine.
Ukraine War Offers Opportunity To Bring Turkey and its Defense Industry into NATO Fold – InsideSources
Posted to Politics March 28, 2022 by Aykan Erdemir, Ryan Brobst
Turkish weaponry is helping Ukrainian troops fight off Russia’s invasion of their homeland. TB-2 drones are confirmed to have struck Russian targets. Yet Turkey’s Deputy Foreign Minister Yavuz Selim Kiran underscored that Ankara did not provide those drones to Kyiv as military aid, saying, “They are products Ukraine purchased from a private company.” That is indicative of the delicate balancing act Ankara has pursued between Russia and NATO in the Ukraine War, which provides an opportunity for the U.S. to alter that dynamic and bring Turkey and its defense industry back into the NATO fold.
As we show in our recent Foundation for Defense of Democracies report, Engines of Influence: Turkey’s Defense Industry Under Erdogan, Turkey’s drift away from NATO and pivot towards Russia under the rule of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was most apparent in Turkey’s arms purchases and sales. Turkey’s arms imports fell by 59 percent in 2016-2020 in comparison to 2011-2015, with an 81 percent drop in imports from the U.S. accounting for a large portion of the decline. At the same time, Turkey purchased the highly advanced S-400 air-defense system from Russia, which led Washington to impose sanctions against Turkey and suspend its participation in the F-35 joint-strike fighter program.
The indiscriminate use of Turkish drones and subsequent civilian casualties in conflicts like Syria, Libya, Ethiopia, and Nagorno-Karabakh, led to Western embargoes on drone components. That prompted Turkey to seek out a new partner – Ukraine. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and targeting of Ukrainian defense production enterprises risk leaving Turkey without its leading defense partner for manufacturing its drone engines.
Thus far, there have been some signs that the Erdogan government, increasingly concerned about the Kremlin’s irredentism, is reconsidering its relations with Russia and tilting back towards NATO. Turkey supplied Ukraine with additional TB-2 drones in the first week of the war, likely infuriating Moscow, and voted in the United Nations to condemn Russia. Since Turkey has a significant trade and energy dependence on Russia, Erdogan still feels the need to pursue a balancing act, most evident in Ankara’s abstention in the Council of Europe’s February 25 vote to suspend Russia. Similarly, the Erdogan government chose to shut the Turkish straits not only to Russian warships but also to NATO warships under the 1936 Montreux Convention, eliciting Moscow’s commendation.
In the past week, there has been discussion of an arrangement in which Ankara would provide the S-400 system to Ukraine in return for access to U.S. Patriot missile batteries and reinstatement to the F-35 program. As a testimony to Russia’s enduring sway over Turkey, Erdogan ruled out any such deal on March 25. Hence, bilateral efforts should focus on the provision of additional Turkish weapons to Ukraine, such as the Kargu-2 loitering munition and TRLG-230 multiple rocket launcher.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has thrown a wrench into Erdogan’s NATO-skeptic foreign and security policy, making cooperation with Russia significantly less attractive. On the one hand, the Ukraine war is a historic opportunity to return Turkey into the NATO fold and to strengthen efforts to assist Ukrainians in defending their homeland. On the other hand, if the Kremlin succeeds in installing a puppet regime in Kyiv, the existing Turkish-Russian defense cooperation might extend to cooperation with Ukrainian defense industries under Russian tutelage, an undesirable outcome.
The high stakes should give the Biden administration and other Western leaders urgency to implement a concerted transatlantic strategy involving not only incentives and disincentives to encourage Turkey’s pivot away from Russia and toward NATO, but also the provision of greater economic and military aid to Ukraine.
18. Marines Head to Lithuania as Russians Relent Around Kyiv
Marines Head to Lithuania as Russians Relent Around Kyiv
After a month of setbacks, Russian officials said Tuesday, March 29, that the true goal of the invasion of Ukraine is not to conquer Kyiv but instead “the liberation of Donbas,” the contested eastern region of the country.
Does that claim match up with Western intelligence?
Not so much, according to officials at the Pentagon and a Ukraine defense expert.
“Nobody should be fooling ourselves by the Kremlin’s now-recent claim that it will suddenly just reduce military attacks near Kyiv, or any reports that it’s going to withdraw all its forces,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters at a Tuesday afternoon briefing. “Has there been some movement by some Russian units away from Kyiv in the last day or so? Yeah, we think so. Small numbers. But we believe that this is a repositioning, not a real withdrawal, and that we all should be prepared to watch for a major offensive against other areas of Ukraine. It does not mean that the threat to Kyiv is over.”
That’s an assessment that a Ukraine defense expert shared with Coffee or Die Magazine Tuesday afternoon. The expert said a “very small” number of Russian troops had moved north from near Kyiv and Chernihiv to the Belarusian city of Homel.
The ultimate goal is likely “a simple regrouping toward [the Joint Forces Operations] area in Donetsk and Luhansk,” the expert said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “We will see soon what is their plan.”
A US Navy EA-18G Growler conducts air-to-air refueling during exercise Northern Edge 17 at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Jacob A. Farbo.
The Russian troop movements come as a command and control unit of about 200 Marines from Marine Air Control Group 28, based at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, has been repositioned to Lithuania after wrapping up Exercise Cold Response 2022 in Norway, Kirby announced. The Norwegian exercise was the same one in which four North Carolina-based Marines were killed in the crash of an MV-22 Osprey on March 18.
In addition, about 10 Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornets from Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, South Carolina, and “a couple of Marine Corps C-130s” are moving to Eastern Europe with an additional 200 personnel, Kirby said. He did not specify exactly where.
The announcement comes a day after the Pentagon said it would deploy six E/A-18G Growlers from Naval Air Station Whidbey Island to Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany.
But inside Ukraine, signs of a shifting Russian strategy — focusing less on the capital and center of Ukraine and more on eastern regions closer to the Russian border — come as representatives from Ukraine and Russia held peace talks in Istanbul, with both sides proffering concessions that The New York Times reported “could be the first steps toward a draft peace agreement.”
Russia said it would “sharply reduce attacks near Kyiv […] and on Chernihiv,” The New York Times reported, while Ukraine for the first time “proposed negotiations on the status of Crimea, to be conducted over 15 years.”
Six @USNavy EA-18G Growler aircraft from @NASWhidbeyIslan arrived at Spangdahlem AB yesterday to enhance @NATO's collective defense posture within the European theater.
Earlier Tuesday, Russian Defense Minister and General of the Army Sergei Shoigu claimed the Russian plans from the beginning of the invasion were to concentrate on the eastern part of Ukraine. That area has seen simmering, low-level warfare since Russian forces invaded in 2014.
“In general, the main objectives of the first phase of the operation have been achieved,” Shoigu told Russia’s armed forces leadership in a teleconference, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense. “The combat capabilities of the Ukrainian Armed Forces have been significantly reduced, which allows us to focus our main attention and main efforts on achieving the main goal — the liberation of Donbas.”
Kirby and the Ukrainians were not having any of that on Tuesday afternoon.
“The posture of Russian forces around Kyiv, along much of the Black and the Azov Sea coasts, and in central and northeastern Ukraine indicates the geographic scale of this ambition,” Kirby said. “They’ve been attacking Ukraine as we have been talking about now for several weeks on multiple lines of access.”
The Russian Ministry of Defense’s recent talking points “may be an effort to move the goalposts, moderating Russia’s immediate goals,” Kirby said.
But “it’s too early to judge what additional actions in Kremlin may take,” Kirby added. “No amount of spin can mask what the world has witnessed over the past month, and that’s the courage and the military prowess of Ukraine’s armed forces and its people, which are proving to be more than what Russia bargained for, in its unprovoked and unjustified invasion.”
Ukrainian forces claimed to have destroyed a mine-resistant Russian Typhoon fighting vehicle. Photo courtesy of The Kyiv Independent/Twitter.
When asked by Coffee or Die whether Russia was trying to spin having been clobbered by Ukraine, the expert replied, “Your statement is correct.”
Russia’s current actions contradict Shoigu’s statements, Kirby said.
“Russia has failed in its objective of capturing Kyiv,” he said. “It’s failed in its objective of subjugating Ukraine. But they can still inflict massive brutality on the country, including on Kyiv.”
Not only have the Russians failed in their ground objectives regarding Kyiv, but they’ve also been pushed back, Kirby said, particularly around the city’s western suburbs “where the Ukrainians have retaken ground.” Same for the city of Brovary, just to the east, where Russians have been pushed some 50 kilometers away from the city. Russian advances in the south of Ukraine are stalled as well, he said.
Asked whether Russia’s efforts represented a failed military campaign, Kirby hedged a bit.
“I don’t think we’re prepared to slap a bumper sticker on this thing right now,” he said. “There are still people dying. There’re still bombs falling. There’re still missiles flying. And there’s still give and take on the battlefield. So I don’t think we’re ready to call it one way or another, here.”
The only success Russia has achieved, Kirby said, was death and destruction.
“Not only did they not manage to take Kyiv, they’ve not managed to take any population centers, and the Ukrainians have been fighting back very hard,” Kirby said. “So it’s hard to see how they are succeeding in any one place except — except — the death and destruction they’re causing to these population centers and to the civilian population. And I know that’s something we can’t lose sight of.”
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19. Russia Has Fired Hypersonic Missiles Into Ukraine, US General Confirms
Excerpts:
Wolters said Russia has committed at least 70 percent of its total military capability to its unprovoked war on Ukraine, yet failed to topple the government or crush the outnumbered Ukrainian resistance.
On Tuesday, the Kremlin said it would scale back its operations around the capital of Kyiv during peace talks. But Russian forces have been more successful in the east of the country and along the coast between the Donbas and the annexed Crimean peninsula.
King asked Wolters whether Ukraine might “succeed in stalling the Russians or perhaps even pushing them back?”
The general replied, “Senator, I certainly believe that they can succeed in stalling the Russians.”
Russia Has Fired Hypersonic Missiles Into Ukraine, US General Confirms
The stunt, likely meant to intimidate Ukraine and allies, has not had the effect Moscow intended.
Russia has fired “multiple” hypersonic missiles at military targets in Ukraine, the top U.S. commander in Europe said on Tuesday, bringing some clarity to conflicting reports and claims.
On March 19, the Russian ministry of defense claimed that it had launched a Kinzhal, or Dagger, missile to strike a Ukrainian ammunition dump about 100 kilometers from the Romanian border.
The launch, most likely from a MiG-31 warplane, was the first reported combat use of one of the new classes of high-speed, highly maneuverable missiles commonly referred to as hypersonics. But the ministry’s purported video footage of the launch didn’t even show the correct date, leading to confusion about what had actually happened.
Ten days later, U.S. Air Force Gen. Tod Wolters told lawmakers that the Russian military has, in fact, launched hypersonic weapons into Ukraine.
“There have been multiple launches. Most of them have been directed at military targets,” based on a preliminary assessment of intelligence, Wolters, who leads U.S. European Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Hypersonic missiles are designed to thwart the world’s most sophisticated air defenses, so it’s unclear why Russia is using them against the Ukrainian military, which doesn’t have the sort of defenses that would merit the use of an advanced, experimental and very expensive weapon.
“I think it was to demonstrate the capability and attempt to put fear in the hearts of the enemy. And I don't think they were successful,” said Wolters.
In the meantime, the U.S. and its allies are accelerating their deliveries of air defenses and other weapons and gear to Ukraine.
“We've seen cases—for example, with a large armored brigade combat team—that we've been able to transact that in weeks as opposed to months,” Wolters said.
When Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said the Ukrainians couldn’t wait weeks, Wolters said smaller deliveries were arriving within days.
“We have cases with smaller force elements where it would take 20 to 30 days. In many of those cases, we're down to single-digit days and less,” the general said.
“This is pretty anecdotal, but the feedback we're getting is: if you have a lot of anti-tank munitions, you can slow down a tank. So even their new armor has some chinks in their armor, so to speak, with respect to multiple projectiles being launched,” he said.
Wolters said Russia has committed at least 70 percent of its total military capability to its unprovoked war on Ukraine, yet failed to topple the government or crush the outnumbered Ukrainian resistance.
On Tuesday, the Kremlin said it would scale back its operations around the capital of Kyiv during peace talks. But Russian forces have been more successful in the east of the country and along the coast between the Donbas and the annexed Crimean peninsula.
King asked Wolters whether Ukraine might “succeed in stalling the Russians or perhaps even pushing them back?”
The general replied, “Senator, I certainly believe that they can succeed in stalling the Russians.”
20. True or False? The Fight Against Disinformation
Excerpts:
For state and nonstate actors operating in gray zone operations, disinformation campaigns offer a cost-effective, low-skill approach to sow discord and chaos without the responsibility of conventional military hardware, personnel, or formidable infrastructure. Information warfare can degrade people’s will to defend their state, creating a favorable environment for possible military intervention. Democratic norms and freedom of speech on social media combined with expanding study and work-from-home situations offer a broad attack surface for actors to seed disruptive practices.
Unfortunately, as the COVID-19 pandemic endures and the dependency on digital networks continues to increase, the aperture and creativity of our adversaries will likely keep pace or exceed the tactics commonly adopted from advertising. Russian and Chinese malign influence campaigns may be expected to evolve as marketing techniques evolve. Tomorrow’s disinformation may not look like today. Fortunately, just as tactics can be borrowed from industry and marketing so can countermeasures like inoculation theory and greater regulation.
True or False? The Fight Against Disinformation - Modern War Institute
Recently, on Saturday Night Live, actor James Austin Johnson played President Joseph Biden in one of the show’s famous cold opens and pondered the problem of Russian disinformation in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. The political satire is lighthearted—and even includes a TikTok dance—but comedic performance belies the gravity of Russian adversarial tactics in the information environment and the emerging threat of disinformation as an element of modern conflict.
Spreading disinformation is an asymmetric tactic that is easy to do, low cost, highly transmittable, and challenging to attribute—all while remaining squarely below the threshold of armed conflict, making any military escalation unlikely. Some tactics and procedures might appear novel. However, familiarity with marketing techniques provides a perspective on the possible effectiveness and why an adversary might be embracing new approaches in the information operations space.
Adversarial disinformation campaigns are like a low-grade fever that erodes collective national will unless more robust mitigation measures are implemented. There is no figurative vaccine that will offer protection in the case of mis- and disinformation. However, lessons from the study of marketing around inoculation theory and a collection of efforts from education to greater industry regulation of technology companies offer hope of resiliency against evolving adversarial information operations.
Tactics and Strategy: How Marketing Tactics Translate to Disinformation Tactics
With the average American spending over 1,300 hours a year on social media in 2021, advertising embraced influencer marketing. Brands are expected to invest over $15 billion worldwide on influencer marketing this year alone. Influencer advertising allows for more human-centered engagement via appealing, entertaining, niche content. Influencer advertising is not reserved just for celebrities and mega-influencers but rather nano-, micro-, and macro-influencers, individuals with less than one million organic followers—including those with under one thousand followers. These categories of influencers potentially have deeper connections with their followers, appear more relatable, and, as a result, can be persuasive. They can have followings centered in expertise such as travel or cuisine and can be distributors of information leveraging in-group bias—the phenomenon of increased trust when interacting with someone from our social group versus an outsider.
Unfortunately, the transactional tactics that work well for large brands are quickly co-opted by our adversaries. Recently, independent Russian and associated Chinese organizations attempted to recruit and pay social media influencers. Unlike celebrities with media teams or journalists who adhere to professional standards, influencers with smaller digital media footprints are more susceptible to exploitative partnerships. Allegedly, Russian firms tried to solicit influencers to spread divisive content about vaccines. China partnered with Western influencers, sponsoring their travel to China to generate favorable reviews of the country and way of life. China even hired a US media firm prior to the 2022 Olympics to employ influencers to share Chinese history, culture, modern life, and diplomatic content to shape perceptions. The influencers tergiversate, avoiding sensitive topics like human rights violations and handling the COVID-19 pandemic, ultimately spreading confusion and misleading information by not providing a wholly accurate description of situations. Influencers are also a vehicle to access platforms—like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter—that might be inclined to censor messages directly from Russia or China.
Effective marketing campaigns are often multipronged with numerous digital touchpoints to create trust and accelerate adoption in the customer journey. Likewise in the information operations space, adversaries create multiple touchpoints via fake accounts known as “sock puppets” to increase exposure. Unfortunately, sock puppets can be deceptively real, as in the case of the “Jenna Abrams” account on Twitter. Created by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian government-funded troll farm, the account amassed over seventy thousand Twitter followers and was quoted by major news outlets for her conservative, xenophobic beliefs. The humanization of “Jenna Abrams” was a well-crafted, deliberate approach to amplify a loud, divisive voice. Recently, Russian campaigns used artificial intelligence to create realistic and original human faces to spread disinformation about the Ukraine government during the invasion. Strategically, Russian disinformation campaigns do not offer a concise narrative. Rather, Russian disinformation campaigns have included high volumes of content from multiple channels that flooded the ecosystem with persistent messaging, seeding confusion, fear, insecurity, and division around their targets’ political and social values.
Conversely, Chinese disinformation campaigns are more inclined to replicate a trend in marketing known as “comparative advertising.” This is a marketing tactic in which a brand offers a narrative that its offering is superior to a competitor’s offering. For example, a persuasive video released by New China TV with over 2.3 million views showcases a cheeky narrative between cartoon Legos representing China and the United States. The storyline centers around China’s eagerness to help the world navigate the COVID-19 pandemic, contrasting it against a narrative of the US refusal to listen. Part of the appeal of this approach is the aspect of storytelling and evoking emotion and relatability instead of solely presenting facts. Although China, like Russia, uses scale to spread messages, the distinction is that China seeks to positively shape behavior and perceptions of the Chinese Communist Party compared to the American way of life and response to sensitive issues.
Approaches to Countering Disinformation
There is no clear-cut solution to countering mis- and disinformation, but inaction or passivity is not an approach the United States should take. The research of the late Dr. William McGuire, a social psychologist from Yale who coined the term “inoculation theory,” offers inspiration for techniques to help individuals become less susceptible to influence by adversarial disinformation campaigns. Often used in advertising and public relations, inoculation theory is a model for building resistance to persuasion attempts by exposing people to arguments against their beliefs and giving them counterarguments to refute attacks, similar to how a vaccine works in fighting disease. Inoculation messages, like vaccines, expose users to the threat and build up resistance for when they are unsuspectingly exposed. Recently, Google’s Jigsaw and American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab studied inoculation in a controlled setting. They found that exposing individuals to warnings about information resulted in a greater ability to discern the truth.
Inoculation theory is also evidenced in the US approach to “prebunking” instead debunking disinformation surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Instead of countering disinformation after it spreads, NATO forces are trying to shape and control the narrative by releasing information and staying ahead of false Russia claims. For instance, the White House transparently gathered thirty TikTok stars to educate and inform them via a Zoom call on US strategy in dealing with Russia, working with NATO, and assisting Ukraine. This approach parallels what our adversaries are doing. However, the influencers were offered a journalistic-style briefing. Ultimately, the counter to mis- and disinformation is accurate information itself.
Inoculation against mis- and disinformation is already practiced and widely adopted in the European Union. In Finland, a country that shares a border with Russia, anti–fake news is taught to residents, students, journalists, and politicians via media literacy. The Netherlands also launched public awareness campaigns to educate Dutch voters on disinformation and help people recognize it. Public urgency galvanized a movement of “elves” to counter Russian “trolls” in Estonia and Lithuania. Volunteer “elves” try to document and report what they believe is hate speech and pro-Russia propaganda. Digital literacy aimed at spotting disinformation is normalized in Estonia classrooms. Sweden launched the Swedish Psychological Defense Agency in January 2022 with the explicit mission to identify and counter information influence. The agency will work toward helping the public spot disinformation. A similar agency is being developed in France. These efforts are vital to the European Union’s strategy to counter Russian disinformation influence. Due to Russia’s proximity and the presence of Russian citizens in these countries, the European Union endures many Russian disinformation tactics before the United States. The European Union’s progress in countering mis- and disinformation is a vital azimuth to consider when evaluating policy approaches.
Another approach to countering mis- and disinformation was highlighted in the recent Aspen Institute Commission on Information Disorder, detailing the impact civic empowerment, fostered by tools that allow for greater information transparency, could have on the information environment when funded by the major online platforms. One valuable idea to come from the commission’s report was the “amplification flow tool” that would illuminate which influencers and groups shared the same content to help distinguish falsehoods from truths. The commission also recommended holding social media sites more responsible, which aligns with a bipartisan interest in Congress.
In October 2021, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist and whistleblower, offered a behind-the-scenes look at her previous employer’s failure to control misleading information when testifying before Congress. She offered commentary on how Facebook had avoided implementing simple tactics to slow down the process of sharing invalidated information—like asking users if they wanted to share the information—and focused on profitability instead of information accuracy. Her testimony showed opportunities for external audits and safety measures and how government oversight is necessary to improve online safety.
Haugen’s testimony generated bipartisan interest and support for the issue. It could spur federal regulation, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself acknowledged had value, saying, “We’re committed to doing the best work we can, but at some level, the right body to assess the tradeoffs between social equities is our democratically elected Congress.” Regulatory oversight will need to find a balance between consumer privacy and freedoms like how the Federal Trade Commission regulates advertising.
For state and nonstate actors operating in gray zone operations, disinformation campaigns offer a cost-effective, low-skill approach to sow discord and chaos without the responsibility of conventional military hardware, personnel, or formidable infrastructure. Information warfare can degrade people’s will to defend their state, creating a favorable environment for possible military intervention. Democratic norms and freedom of speech on social media combined with expanding study and work-from-home situations offer a broad attack surface for actors to seed disruptive practices.
Unfortunately, as the COVID-19 pandemic endures and the dependency on digital networks continues to increase, the aperture and creativity of our adversaries will likely keep pace or exceed the tactics commonly adopted from advertising. Russian and Chinese malign influence campaigns may be expected to evolve as marketing techniques evolve. Tomorrow’s disinformation may not look like today. Fortunately, just as tactics can be borrowed from industry and marketing so can countermeasures like inoculation theory and greater regulation.
Laura Keenan is a lieutenant colonel in the District of Columbia Army National Guard and is currently assigned as the J55, Division Chief for Policy and Strategy in Cyber National Mission Force.
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, or of any organization the author is affiliated with, including the Army National Guard and US Cyber Command.
21.Biden’s Unbalanced Ukraine Policy
Perhaps Professor Deck should keep in mind Justice Scalia's wise words:
“I attack ideas, I don't attack people - and some very good people have some very bad ideas.” - Antonin Scalia
Just saying.
Excerpts:
On a human level, you feel some sympathy for U.S. officials of any party who face what is really the most severe combination of geopolitical challenges to America’s position since the Cold War. Even as Putin looks to violently dismantle Ukraine, so China, North Korea, and Iran all consider how best to take advantage of this moment at America’s expense. We should pray this administration eventually gets it right. I mean that literally: the danger of deterrence breakdown and conflict on multiple fronts is now very real.
Unfortunately, all these challenges are unnecessarily aggravated by our current commander-in-chief. The problem is brutally simple, however painful it is to say it. Namely: foreign dictators do not fear Biden in the way that they should. Consistent with the twenty-first-century liberal format, he castigates and annoys them without creating intimidating deterrents. He oscillates between wild overstatement and perplexed incoherence. He is not, as was claimed two years ago, a great old foreign policy hand. His judgment, as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates once noted, is frequently wrong. Biden is a career politician and a party machine leader who has held high office in Washington, DC, for nearly half a century without leaving much impression of firm, enduring policy convictions on issues of national interest. As his party has drifted leftward, so has he. His self-appointed task, case by case, is mainly to defer to the wishes of his own liberal domestic coalition. A nice guy? Maybe. Most of his supporters seem to think so. But foreign autocrats licking their chops do not care, and the judgment of history can be pitiless.
Biden’s Unbalanced Ukraine Policy
Biden is an inept foreign policy president, and most Americans know it. If you want to understand the all-too-valid reasons for widespread concern over the current Ukraine crisis, that’s a pretty good place to start.
After President Joe Biden’s off-the-cuff statement last weekend that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power,” White House staff rushed to correct it. The president, they say, has followed a policy toward Ukraine over the last year that is consistent, coherent, balanced, and effective.
Unless dissent is patriotic only when Democrats are out of power, allow me to make a few observations.
First, as historian Robert Service noted in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Biden nudged one step closer toward the impression of NATO membership for Ukraine last fall, via the U.S.-Ukrainian Charter on Strategic Partnership, while simultaneously failing to adequately prepare that country for its own defense. This might be described as a violation of International Politics 101: Never wound a king. John O’Sullivan warned at National Review on February 3that the United States was on track to provoke Putin without deterring him. O’Sullivan was right about that.
The point is not, as some would have it, that the United States is to blame for the Russian attack on Ukraine. That choice was Putin’s alone and must be counteracted. Putin’s actions aren’t simply a reactive measure based on a long-term pattern of NATO expansion. They flow from his more basic resentment at the collapse of Soviet power over thirty years ago. Unless we are supposed to help reconstruct Russia as one of the world’s two leading superpowers—an impossible and inadvisable task—there is little we can do to appease his frustration. But that doesn’t mean we can’t deter him through firm, effective U.S. policies. Unfortunately, Biden failed to do so.
Second, Biden has pursued a progressive agenda on climate change, the environment, and the U.S. oil and gas industry that is not only unwise on its own terms, but catastrophically so given the current crisis. It was Joe Biden who canceled the Keystone Pipeline energy project with Canada, a point of great pride for him, while giving a green light to Germany’s Nord Stream II pipeline with Russia. Think about that for a minute. This administration cracked down on U.S. energy cooperation with Canadians, while giving the okay to German gas imports from Putin’s Russia.
By simultaneously insisting over the past year that the Saudis must be critiqued on Yemen and human rights, Biden has boxed himself in. Now that he needs their oil, the Saudis won’t even take his calls.
Under current conditions, cutting off Russian oil and gas from international markets makes sense. But it makes no sense whatsoever to pursue a punitive approach toward North American oil and gas production while doing so. In fact, it never did. Nor does it make any kind of sense to cozy up to bitter U.S. adversaries in Iran and Venezuela as a way of addressing energy shortages. The obvious answer would be working with allies instead of adversaries to address those shortages—and unleash domestic production. This is long overdue.
Third, the desire on the part of the American public and (sometimes) President Biden to avoid undue escalation with Moscow is understandable. Any sensible approach would factor this in, looking to maintain peace at the great-power nuclear level. What a sensible approach would not do is continually signal to the Russians ahead of time exactly what the U.S. reservation point is on one issue of deterrence and coercive diplomacy after another. And yet this is exactly what Biden has done, again and again, including by Twitter. It’s like playing poker while continually showing your cards to the other players. It’s self-defeating, and naturally, Putin takes full advantage of it.
However, if you are the president of the United States, before announcing that some foreign head of state “cannot remain in power,” reflect on the American experience with international regime change over the past twenty years. Are you serious about such a change in this latest case, and if the answer is yes, how do you propose to do that in relation to a country measuring over six million square miles with thousands of nuclear weapons? Or will your staff have to walk that one back for you?
To be fair, Biden’s national security team has got some things right. The opening package of U.S. economic sanctions, diplomatic initiatives, deployments to eastern NATO, and weapons to Ukraine over the past month are welcome measures. Handheld anti-tank missiles, for example, have had a devastating effect on Russian armor. But supplies are running out. The administration needs to increase weapons shipments, boost U.S. defense spending significantly, completely overhaul U.S. oil and gas policy, and strengthen economic sanctions on Moscow. Some of this, Biden will do. Some of it, obviously not, when it contradicts liberal priorities.
Having said that, there really are limits to how far the United States should ramp up the pressure, even if the president doesn’t need to signal every such limit ahead of time. For instance, the idea has been raised of a no-fly zone enforced by NATO over Ukraine. Intelligent people can and do disagree on the subject, but I believe this would be going too far. Putin’s Russia is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The risk of accidental escalation with a nuclear-armed major power would be unnecessarily high. Better to give the Ukrainians the means to build something like their own no-fly zone against the Russians. NATO should not be asked to enforce it.
This speaks to a point raised by Mac Owens in an excellent piece recently at American Greatness. As Owens says, surely considerations of prudence ought to be central when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. And as he is the first to note, prudence does not necessarily mean avoiding every possible form of conflict or tension with authoritarian aggressors overseas. Rather, prudence means striking the right balance, doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons. In foreign policy, this means avoiding errors of strategic over-extension, as well as errors of under-extension. Liberal internationalists, through their legalistic, sermonizing approach to world affairs and discomfort with hard power, tend to make mistakes in both directions at the very same time.
The Biden administration will have to decide what exactly its desired endgame is in Ukraine. The president openly suggested, speaking in Poland, that the U.S. endgame is the end of the Putin regime; his staff declare it is not. The implications of this confusion could be deadly, and you better believe Putin is listening. He will not go down without a fight. If Biden is serious when he says that Russia’s current leader cannot remain in power, then of course a negotiated settlement is off the table, and there is no path to war termination other than Putin’s exit. If so, what is Biden’s plan to achieve it, short of the larger conflagration he seeks to avoid? I cannot see that he has one. He emotes. He emits. He does not strategize.
One alternative raised in Foreign Affairs by Wess Mitchell, assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia during the first two years of the Trump administration, is that of “fortified neutrality.” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has already indicated he is ready to drop the idea of NATO membership. Fortified neutrality would clarify that Ukraine will not join NATO, but that the country’s independence is guaranteed by all parties—and that it is free to maintain flourishing diplomatic, economic, and political ties to the West. But as Mitchell suggests, this condition cannot and should not be decided without the Ukrainians. Zelenskyy has proven to be an impressive wartime leader, and his people have shown stunning courage and skill in forcefully defending their homeland. That, by the way, is nationalism—love of country, and a readiness to fight for it. Ukraine’s president has earned the right to decide for himself what peace terms he is willing to accept. He must not be pressured by the West into any concessions he finds intolerable. Nor, for that matter, should he be pressured to avoid any settlement he feels is in the best interests of his own country.
On a human level, you feel some sympathy for U.S. officials of any party who face what is really the most severe combination of geopolitical challenges to America’s position since the Cold War. Even as Putin looks to violently dismantle Ukraine, so China, North Korea, and Iran all consider how best to take advantage of this moment at America’s expense. We should pray this administration eventually gets it right. I mean that literally: the danger of deterrence breakdown and conflict on multiple fronts is now very real.
Unfortunately, all these challenges are unnecessarily aggravated by our current commander-in-chief. The problem is brutally simple, however painful it is to say it. Namely: foreign dictators do not fear Biden in the way that they should. Consistent with the twenty-first-century liberal format, he castigates and annoys them without creating intimidating deterrents. He oscillates between wild overstatement and perplexed incoherence. He is not, as was claimed two years ago, a great old foreign policy hand. His judgment, as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates once noted, is frequently wrong. Biden is a career politician and a party machine leader who has held high office in Washington, DC, for nearly half a century without leaving much impression of firm, enduring policy convictions on issues of national interest. As his party has drifted leftward, so has he. His self-appointed task, case by case, is mainly to defer to the wishes of his own liberal domestic coalition. A nice guy? Maybe. Most of his supporters seem to think so. But foreign autocrats licking their chops do not care, and the judgment of history can be pitiless.
Biden is an inept foreign policy president, and most Americans know it. He seems confused and out of his depth. If you want to understand the all-too-valid reasons for widespread concern over the current Ukraine crisis, that’s a pretty good place to start.
Colin Dueck is a Professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and a senior non-resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Image: Reuters.
22. The Rhino of Kyiv
So many Ukrainians know how to conduct strategic communications.
Excerpts:
“When the war’s over,” I said, “I hope you make a film about it.”
Then he corrected me. “We don’t say, ‘When the war is over.’ That’s not the language we use. We say, ‘After the victory.’” He coughed again. “Right now, I’m not thinking about films. I’m not a filmmaker. I’m a soldier until the victory.”
The Rhino of Kyiv
Oleh Sentsov’s latest film is making the festival circuit, while the writer-director serves in Ukraine’s territorial-defense forces.
The Ukrainian writer-director Oleh Sentsov will not be at the Venice Film Festival this year; or the one in Sofia, Bulgaria; or the one in Istanbul; or any of the others where his film Rhino is premiering. When I met Sentsov in Kyiv, it wasn’t as a filmmaker but rather as a soldier. My train from Lviv arrived late, after curfew, and the police informed me that regardless of my press pass, I would have to sleep in the station. Eventually I was able to hitch a ride to my hotel with the Red Cross, but, in the process of trying to avoid a night on the floor of the station, a friend put me in touch with Sentsov, who was nearby and offered to help. This was how I found myself having breakfast with him in a basement restaurant the following morning. I was interested in talking about Rhino, which I hadn’t yet seen. He was far more interested in talking about the war.
Sentsov, like many Ukrainians, was eager to point out that Russia’s current assault on Ukraine is simply an escalation of a war it has waged since 2014, when it annexed Crimea and invaded the Donbas. That year, Russian authorities arrested Sentsov, a native of Crimea, on charges of “suspicion of plotting terrorist acts.” He was sentenced to 20 years and shipped to an Arctic prison. He endured torture and, to protest his conditions, survived a 145-day hunger strike. After five years, the Russians released him in a prisoner swap.
As we sat in the restaurant, Sentsov brought up a map on his phone’s partially shattered screen. He pointed to Hostomel, a suburb of Kyiv near the Dnipro River. The unit in the territorial-defense forces of which he is deputy commander comprises about 75 soldiers. When I asked him his rank—lieutenant, captain, major—he said he didn’t have one. When I asked him his unit’s designation—a platoon, a company, or even a battalion—he said they simply called themselves “a squad.” Rank and formal military terms weren’t something they worried about. “We don’t need organization in that way,” he explained. “What matters is that each person does their part against the orcs.”
Every side in war chooses a derogatory name for its adversary, and the Ukrainians seem to have settled on theirs for the Russians. There is also, in war, a phenomenon in which names of ordinary places assume exalted status when they become synonymous with battlefield victories. As Sentsov traced last month’s fighting north of Kyiv on his phone, a few of the neighborhoods he pointed out—Irpin, Moschun, Horenka—were already becoming part of this lexicon of valor. Sentsov said he was unsurprised by the Russian military’s poor performance. “Some of our volunteers in the territorial defense,” he noted, “served in the Soviet army, in Afghanistan. We know what the Russians are and are not capable of.”
Sentsov had a bad cough. He apologized, attributing it to many weeks spent sleeping in a trench in the cold. “One of the lessons you learn as a soldier,” he said, “is that your first weapon is not a rifle; it’s a spade.” When I asked what else soldiering had taught him, he laughed. “To survive in war, you have to learn many lessons very quickly. But the greatest lesson I’ve learned is that the real face of war, its true face, is one you can’t read about or watch on the news. You must see it with your own eyes.”
Conveying war’s true face sounded like a great challenge for a filmmaker, and soon Sentsov and I were discussing the war films directed by Stanley Kubrick, Oliver Stone, and Francis Ford Coppola, which captured something authentic and enduring. The finest films about war, he noted, were typically made long after the wars they portrayed. “You need time,” he added, “to separate from the events. You should only shoot about things you know well, and you must do so with a calm head—not a calm heart—but a calm head.”
Rhino, Sentsov’s latest, takes its title from the film’s eponymous protagonist, a young Ukrainian gangster whose nickname derives from the bruises and welts, earned in street brawls, that—according to his friends—have become a permanent fixture on his face, like the horn of a rhinoceros. It is a coming-of-age tale, set during the wild and hedonistic post-Communist ’90s, after Ukraine’s independence.
Sentsov insisted it wasn’t a political film. However, in nearly the same breath, he explained that to understand Vladimir Putin, one must understand both the ’80s and ’90s, decades that respectively embody two sides of Putin’s psyche. In the ’80s, Putin served as a KGB officer, a rule-bound instrument of the state. In the ’90s, Putin was, Sentsov claimed, a St. Petersburg gangster, like Rhino. In the film, when Rhino reflects on the trajectory of other gangsters’ careers, he observes, “The sly ones became politicians.”
It’s difficult not to read politics into Rhino’s suffering too, which at times seems analogous to Ukraine’s and, the more I learned of Sentsov’s story, his own. While Sentsov was in custody, he says, Russian authorities tortured him; however, when confronted by Sentsov’s lawyers, the Russians refused to open an investigation into the allegations, suggesting that Sentsov’s wounds were self-inflicted and that he was a sadomasochist. In Rhino, there are gruesome scenes of torture I’d rather not describe. Watching them, I felt as though I were watching Sentsov indict his torturers.
We spent the rest of the morning discussing war’s literature. One of Sentsov’s favorites is “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” by J. D. Salinger, a short story about a traumatized combat veteran of the Second World War. Sentsov noted that, aside from this story, Salinger wrote little about the war, and that his legacy isn’t one of a war writer. I offered a different interpretation of Salinger—who landed on D-Day, fought in the Hürtgen Forest, and helped liberate Dachau. I’ve always maintained that Salinger wrote perhaps the greatest novel of World War II, The Catcher in the Rye, but he did so by handling his subject obliquely. Holden Caulfield’s voice, for which the novel is renowned, is the voice of a war veteran, to whom everyone is “a phony” and who wants to visit the ducks in Central Park to recover an innocence that will never return and perhaps never was. The novel’s last lines—“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody”—are the quintessential sentiment of a combat veteran marked by loss.
Sentsov said he also liked The Catcher in the Rye, but that “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” remained his favorite. He pulled up the map on his phone again, this time showing me not battlefield positions, but rather neighborhoods around downtown Ukraine where I could still see the posters for Rhino, the ones promoters had plastered up in anticipation of its release, before the Russian invasion. He showed me a photograph of himself in a tuxedo standing on a red carpet in front of one of these posters, his date on his arm, the two of them smiling for the cameras. “This was at the Kyiv premier,” he said. When I asked when that was, he stared up at the ceiling, as if assembling a puzzle of memories. “Five, six weeks ago.”
“Do you think you’ll ever make a film about the war?” I asked.
He said he wasn’t sure; he needed distance. He joked that perhaps he’d wind up like Salinger and make a film about the war by making a film about something else entirely.
“When the war’s over,” I said, “I hope you make a film about it.”
Then he corrected me. “We don’t say, ‘When the war is over.’ That’s not the language we use. We say, ‘After the victory.’” He coughed again. “Right now, I’m not thinking about films. I’m not a filmmaker. I’m a soldier until the victory.”
23. Open source intelligence observers gain growing role in how war is viewed
Open source intelligence observers gain growing role in how war is viewed
The Russian Alligator-class landing ship Saratov in the Bosporus in 2020. The use of open source intelligence, which includes publicly available images and data, is resulting in real-time reporting on the war in Ukraine on an increasingly greater scale. (Yoruk Isik)
Citizen intelligence analysts are spotlighting the Russian navy’s role in its war on Ukraine, using publicly available information to report on missile launches, blockades and other actions in the Black and Mediterranean seas.
The information gathered using open-source intelligence, or OSINT, offers a glimpse into Russia’s maritime war activities and sometimes challenges information released by government sources.
Dozens of private citizens are parlaying their prior military experience, specialized knowledge of the Russian navy and online information-mining skills into robust, almost-real-time coverage of Russia’s full-scale invasion, which began Feb. 24.
A map showing Russian naval units in the Black Sea on March 22, 2022. The use of open source intelligence on Twitter and other social media platforms is resulting in real-time reporting on the war in Ukraine that sometimes challenges official narratives. (Twitter/TheShipYard)
OSINT relies on public information such as satellite images, video and photographs, documents, databases, news stories and social media posts about a particular event or topic.
It’s painstaking work — usually unpaid — involving hourslong searches for information, verification of its authenticity and accuracy and then contextualization of events before analysis is posted on social media or a blog.
The work finds its roots in early government efforts by the U.S. and other countries to monitor news and other reports as part of intelligence gathering.
Not everyone has the skill set to parse the meaning of all this information, but those who do now have relatively easy access to satellite images and quality imagery recorded by increasingly sophisticated phones, experts say.
Open source intelligence provided by citizen analysts on Twitter and other social media forums is revealing Russia's full-scale war in Ukraine in minute detail. (Twitter/H I Sutton)
“What I bring here is (professional) knowledge that I try to bring to open source using primary and secondary sources to actually give you an idea of what’s going on,” said James Phillips, a naval historian whose Twitter account, @TheShipYard2, presents detailed maps showing the location of Russian ships and other information.
On Monday, Phillips posted on Twitter a map showing an amphibious assault group in the Sea of Azov near the Ukrainian port city of Berdyansk.
In the early days of the invasion, images and public data gathered by private OSINT analysts painted a different picture of what an unnamed senior Pentagon official said was happening near the port city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov.
The unidentified official indicated that a nighttime amphibious assault potentially involving thousands of Russian troops was underway there. The assertion was tweeted out by several U.S. national security reporters and almost immediately challenged online.
A list of Russia's naval deployment in the Mediterranean Sea compiled using open source intelligence by Frederik Van Lokeren, a former Belgian navy officer. Van Lokeren is among several private citizens using their experience to provide detailed information online about the Russia-Ukraine war. (Twitter/Frederik Van Lokeren)
“I keep stressing: the Russian Navy never trained for night time amphibious assaults,” said Frederik Van Lokeren, a Belgian former navy officer, in a Feb. 26 tweet. “They can not do this as they lack expertise and equipment needed. Why U.S. officials keep claiming otherwise for the second night in a row is beyond understanding.”
Van Lokeren's OSINT analysis found that a Russian amphibious assault group was in the Sea of Azov but he strongly disputed the number of sailors involved, which he estimated at 300 to 400 based on the number and size of the landing ships involved and their capacity.
He also expressed doubt that any naval landing had happened, citing a lack of evidence.
There were ample images in the days that followed of war damage and fighting in Ukraine, but none of a large-scale amphibious assault.
In other cases, OSINT analysts were among the first to break news later addressed through official channels.
On Thursday, several analysts were quick to provide details on how a Russian Alligator-class landing ship in port in Berdyansk had caught fire, potentially as the result of a strike by a Ukrainian missile.
And on March 22, several analysts, including H. I. Sutton, who tweets as @CovertShores, posted video on Twitter showing a Russian ship near Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula firing eight Kalibr cruise missiles into Ukraine.
Others have kept running tallies on the last known locations of Russian navy ships, submarines and other vessels, detailing their actions in the Black and Azov seas and providing supporting information about capabilities and potential strategies.
Russian navy vessels thought to be observing U.S. and NATO maritime activities in the eastern Mediterranean and protecting a Russian port in Tartus, Syria, also are analyzed.
“I haven’t seen a conflict this well-covered (through the OSINT community) in my career,” said Lukas Andriukaitis, associate director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council think tank, in a phone interview. “You can watch the conflict almost evolve live.”
There are signs that Moscow increasingly is aware of the OSINT community’s ability to quickly challenge narratives and document war crimes and other activities. For example, before the war started, Russia took away troops’ cellphones, Andriukaitis said.
The Russian navy also recently started painting over ship numbers and obscuring other identifying information, Phillips and other analysts have noted.
The greatest contribution OSINT analysts have made came in the months leading up to the war, said Ryan Fedasiuk, an adjunct fellow for the Center for a New American Security’s technology and national security program.
A private company publicized satellite images that correctly identified a buildup of nearly 200,000 Russian troops and advanced weaponry along the northern, eastern and southern borders of Ukraine.
Citizen journalists on Twitter also sounded the alarm bell in January that six Russian navy amphibious assault ships left the Baltic and North seas, passing through Gibraltar and into the eastern Mediterranean before entering the Black Sea.
The value of open-source intelligence is in sifting through the noise to identify signals that something is going to happen, he said.
“In the future, governments ought to take that sort of signal much more seriously, even if it isn’t a smoking gun, secretive indication of intent,” Fedasiuk said.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
