Quotes of the Day:
“Antisemitism (not merely the hatred of Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship)—one after the other, one more brutally than the other, have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities.”
— The Origins Of Totalitarianism (Harvest Book Book 244) by Hannah Arendt
https://a.co/fybnjVD
"It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it."
- Eleanor Roosevelt
"I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast."
- Viktor E. Frankl
1. UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 18
2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 22 (PUTIN'S WAR)
3. As Russia Stalls in Ukraine, Dissent Brews Over Putin’s Leadership
4. To counter China influence, U.S. names envoy to lead Pacific Island talks
5. How Western Intelligence Mortally Wounded Russia’s War Effort in Ukraine
6. It's a Golden Age for Armchair Generals
7. World War Three?
8. Navalny’s Big ‘Plan’ for Putin’s War Revealed
9. Anatomy of a deal: What would an agreement to end the war in Ukraine look like?
10. A Ukrainian Victory Is the Only Acceptable Endgame
11. Experts say Biden's risk-averse approach to Russian could create greater threat
12. How Europe Got Hooked on Russian Gas Despite Reagan’s Warnings
13. We witnessed Mariupol's agony and fled a Russian hit list
14. Ukraine War Update - March 23, 2022 | SOF News
15. Russian Army’s Fail No Surprise to CIA Official Who Battled It in Afghanistan
16. ‘The Ukrainians Are Listening’: Russia’s Military Radios Are Getting Owned
17. Posting POW footage on social media may constitute human rights violation
18. Russia’s Alleged Use of First Hypersonic Missile in Combat Downplayed by US Military and Allies
19. 'Kyiv Calling:' Ukrainian punk band makes The Clash classic an anti-Russia anthem
20. The death of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction)
21. The Folly of the ‘Pivot to Asia’
22. Biden's Ukraine policy must evolve: Defending freedom requires risks
23. Javelin missiles are helping Ukraine wreak havoc on Russian troops, experts say
24. Ukraine and Russia may use 'unconventional warfare' strategies, former CIA officer says
25. How Russia and Right-Wing Americans Converged on War in Ukraine
26. China, guilty of genocide, must condemn Putin's war crimes and not attack Taiwan
27. Counting the Dead (Putin's War)
28. What Would Clausewitz Say about Putin’s War on Ukraine?
29 Kid Rock says Donald Trump sought his advice on North Korea and Islamic State
1. UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 18
UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 18
Institute for the Study of War, Russia Team
with the Critical Threats Project, AEI
The ISW Russia team has relaunched its Ukraine Conflict Updates as a semi-weekly synthetic product covering key political and rhetorical events related to renewed Russian aggression against Ukraine. This update covers events from March 18—21.
Key Takeaways March 18-21
- The Kremlin is unlikely to withdraw its maximalist political demands of Ukraine in ongoing negotiations, despite the Russian military failing to achieve its objectives.
- The Kremlin staged a 195,000-person rally in Moscow attended by President Putin on March 18 to falsely portray high levels of public support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
- Kremlin bans of Facebook, Instagram, and other major western platforms in Russia are likely intended to coerce these companies to meet Russian censorship standards to retain their market share in Russia.
- Russian officials continue to downplay the impact of new sanctions and proposed retaliatory measures against international companies that have left Russia.
- The Kremlin continued to set conditions for a possible false flag chemical or radiological attack in Ukraine by promoting false claims of threats from United States-funded biolaboratories in Ukraine.
- Eastern European NATO heads of state called for a more proactive NATO military posture and response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the leadup to an emergency NATO summit on March 24.
- China publicly stated it will not provide financial or military assistance to Russia and pledged further humanitarian assistance to Ukraine but blamed the United States for the war in Ukraine.
Key Events March 18—March 21, 5:00 pm EST
Negotiations:
The Kremlin retains its maximalist political demands in ongoing negotiations with Ukraine and is unlikely to soften them despite the Russian military failing to achieve its objectives. Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated Russia’s political demands in a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on March 17.[1] The Kremlin demands that Ukraine become “neutral” by renouncing its NATO membership ambitions, demilitarize by halting all western military aid or weapons sales to Ukraine, and “denazify.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov defined the “denazification” of Ukraine as the abolition of any laws that discriminate against Russian-speaking populations on March 18—the first time a senior Kremlin official has publicly stated the Kremlin’s definition of Ukrainian “denazification.”[2] Putin additionally stated that Ukrainian negotiators must resolve these issues before he will engage in leadership-level negotiations with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the status of Crimea and Donbas.[3] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov accused Ukraine on March 18 of prolonging the negotiations and delaying an agreement with Russia.[4]
Turkish mediation efforts are unlikely to lead to a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for direct negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin on March 19, but Chief Turkish Presidential Advisor Ibrahim Kalin stated that Putin was not ready for such talks.[5] Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu claimed Russia and Ukraine were close to an agreement on “critical issues” on March 20, possibly signaling a ceasefire. However, head Ukrainian negotiator Mikhalo Podolyak said on March 17 that negotiations on “disputed points” could take anywhere from several days to one and a half weeks, and Peskov denied that negotiators are currently considering a ceasefire on March 21.[6]
Ukrainian negotiators and government officials are signaling their willingness to concede on NATO membership aspirations but are highly unlikely to meet Russia’s other demanded concessions. President Zelensky signaled he is willing to consider a Ukrainian neutrality policy in return for other security guarantees from Western states during an interview with CNN on March 20.[7] Zelensky stated on March 20 that Ukraine will not agree to any deal that forces it to surrender territory or sovereignty.[8] Zelensky also said on March 21 that any agreement with Russia would be subject to a country-wide referendum before being adopted.[9] Ukraine is highly unlikely to make any major concessions to Russia due to the current military stalemate and failure of Russia’s initial campaign plans. The Ukrainian population is additionally highly unlikely to support any major concessions to Russia.
Russian Domestic Opposition and Censorship:
Kremlin bans on Facebook, Instagram, and other major western platforms in Russia are likely intended to coerce these companies to meet Russian censorship standards to retain their market share in Russia. A Moscow District Court blocked Facebook and Instagram from operating in Russian territory on March 21 due to its claimed “extremist activities,” citing Facebook’s decision to not block calls for the death of Russian soldiers in Ukraine, though calls for violence against Russian civilians remain violations of Facebook's user guidelines.[10] The Kremlin likely intends for this ban to coerce Facebook and other western companies active in Russia to meet Kremlin information demands and the Russian prosecutor general’s office said that it would not punish individual Russians for using VPNs and other measures to access Facebook and Instagram shortly after the ruling.[11] Over 34 million Russian Instagram users could still use the platform as of March 20 despite the Kremlin’s ban of the site and VPN services.[12] Kremlin-run media also amplified reports from anonymous Russian officials on March 18 that Russian state censoring agency Roskomnadzor could ban YouTube in the “coming days.”[13] Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev said social media companies will need to prove a “good attitude towards Russia and its citizens” to be unbanned.[14] The Kremlin continues to target Russian journalists and teachers who do not follow the Kremlin’s line on the war in Ukraine. St. Petersburg police arrested several Russian journalists covering anti-war protests on March 19.[15] Russian officials have also arrested several teachers who refuse to discuss the war in Ukraine according to state standards.[16]
Kremlin Narratives:
The Kremlin staged a 195,000-person rally in Moscow attended by President Putin and other pro-war protests throughout Russia on March 18 to falsely portray high levels of public support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.[17] Putin celebrated the eighth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea at a Moscow stadium and gave a speech promoting the war in Ukraine.[18] Putin, Kremlin officials, and prominent Russian musical performers advanced the Kremlin’s narrative that the war to “denazify” Ukraine has created historic unity among Russians. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed on March 21 that the rally demonstrated the vast popular support for Putin’s decisions and Russian combat in Ukraine. The Kremlin forced government employees to attend and paid attendees.[19] Social media users reported witnessing advertisements to attend the rally a few days prior to the event. Many participants reportedly left the rally as soon as 30 minutes after entering the stadium.[20] Although the rally was likely successful for TV propaganda, the Kremlin faces continued domestic resistance to the war.
The Kremlin continued to set conditions for a possible false-flag chemical or radiological attack in Ukraine by promoting false claims of threats from US-funded biolaboratories in Ukraine. The Kremlin has proliferated false claims about threats from US-sponsored biolabs in Ukraine since at least 2020.[21] Russian President Vladimir Putin emphasized the “unacceptability” of claimed US military-sponsored biological activities in Ukraine during a conversation with the Luxembourger prime minister on March 19.[22] Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov promoted this narrative in public comments about US-funded biolaboratories in Ukraine on March 18.[23] The Russian Defense Ministry called an ammonia leak at a chemical plant in Sumy, Ukraine, on March 21 a Ukrainian “provocation” despite reports that Russian shelling caused the leak.[24] Russian media also circulated claims about increased radioactivity levels in the Black Sea and misquoted statements by UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace to claim the UK supports Ukraine developing nuclear weapons on March 21.[25] ISW previously assessed that the Kremlin is setting informational conditions to possibly blame Ukraine for a Russian-conducted or Russian-fabricated chemical or radiological false-flag attack against civilians as a pretext for further Russian escalation.[26]
Russian Reactions to Sanctions:
Russian officials downplayed the impact of new sanctions and proposed retaliatory measures against international companies that have left Russia. EU member states, Australia, and Japan banned certain exports to Russia and imposed new sanctions targeting Russian individuals, assets, and companies between March 18-21.[27] Russian President Vladimir Putin emphasized that Russian businesses should not fear sanctions on March 17.[28] Kremlin officials claim that Russia has grown accustomed to sanctions and has a sufficient "margin of safety” to protect the Russian economy from Western sanctions that they claim the West would have imposed anyway to limit Russia’s development.[29] Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev stated on March 19 that sanctions against Russia are “temporary” and claimed that Western citizens will suffer economic consequences from losing access to Russian energy.[30] Evgeny Fedorov, Chairman of the Russia State Duma (Parliament) Committee on Economic Policy and member of the ruling United Russia party, proposed a bill to ban companies that left Russia from resuming operations for ten years on March 18.[31] The Kremlin likely seeks to deter other international companies from halting their operations in Russia.
Belarus:
N/A
Russian Occupation:
Russian forces continue to detain local civil society leaders and civilians in Ukraine and set conditions to govern occupied areas of Ukraine.[32] The Russian military detained local leaders and media personnel in Enerhodar, Melitopol, and a village in Kharkiv Oblast between March 18-21.[33] The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry also accused the Kremlin on March 21 of shipping Mariupol citizens to detention camps.[34]
Drivers of Russian Threat Perceptions:
Eastern European NATO heads of state called for a more proactive NATO military posture and response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the leadup to an emergency NATO summit on March 24.[35]
- Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced on March 18 that Poland will formally propose a NATO peacekeeping mission in Ukraine to protect international aid deliveries to Ukraine at a planned March 24 NATO summit.[36] Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov denounced Poland’s suggestion as “demagogic” on March 19 and claimed that NATO peacekeeping forces would take control of western Ukraine.[37] The Polish ambassador to the United States said the mission is not intended to provoke Russian aggression on March 20.[38] The US ambassador to the United Nations (UN) announced that the US would not participate in any possible NATO mission in Ukraine on March 20.[39]
- Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas argued that NATO should switch from a “deterrence posture” to a “defense posture” during an interview on March 20. Kallas suggested that NATO members should increase their NATO military spending to supplement smaller member-states' defense capabilities.[40]
- Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov announced on March 19 during a joint press conference with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin that Bulgaria is establishing a multinational NATO battlegroup, including a US Stryker company, and will lead military exercises designed to bolster Bulgarian and NATO military readiness.[41]
Foreign Involvement:
China publicly stated it will not provide financial or military assistance to Russia and pledged further humanitarian assistance to Ukraine but blamed the United States for the war in Ukraine.[42]
- US President Joe Biden met virtually with Chinese President Xi Jinping on March 18. Biden emphasized that China would face significant consequences from the West if it accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s request for Chinese support.[43] Xi urged the United States to negotiate with Russia and blamed the United States for the crisis.[44] Russian media framed Xi Jinping’s statements on March 18 as a rejection of the United States and claimed that Xi is growing closer to Russia.[45]
- Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng blamed NATO expansion for the war and emphasized China’s opposition to Western sanctions against Russia on March 19 at a conference in Beijing, China.[46]
- Chinese Ambassador to the United States Qin Gang stated on March 20 that China is not considering sending financial or military assistance to Russia.[47]
- China’s Foreign Ministry announced on March 21 that China will send an additional $1.57 million in humanitarian aid to Ukraine, supplementing roughly $790,000 in aid it sent earlier in March.[48]
Israel rejected Ukraine’s request for military equipment on March 21 and opted to provide humanitarian aid instead.[49] Israel continues to seek to maintain its neutrality between Ukraine and Russia.
[4] https://riafan dot ru/22032556-peskov_obvinil_ukrainu_v_zatyagivanii_podpisaniya_soglasheniya_s_rossiei; https://lenta dot ru/news/2022/03/18/peskovv/
[9] https://www.unian dot net/politics/trebovaniya-rf-k-ukraine-format-kompromissov-s-rossiey-budet-reshat-narod-novosti-ukraina-11753845.html.
[11] https://meduza dot io/news/2022/03/21/rossiyskiy-sud-ob-yavil-meta-materinskuyu-kompaniyu-facebook-i-instagram-ekstremistskoy-organizatsiey.
[13] https://iz dot ru/1307278/2022-03-18/roskomnadzor-mozhet-zablokirovat-youtube-do-kontca-nedeli
[15] https://meduza dot io/news/2022/03/19/politsiya-prishla-k-peterburgskim-zhurnalistam-zaderzhannym-vo-vremya-aktsiy-protiv-voyny
[24] https://iz dot ru/1308113/2022-03-21/v-mo-nazvali-provokatciei-situatciiu-s-utechkoi-ammiaka-na-khimzavode-v-sumakh; https://www.kyivpost dot com/ukraine-politics/russian-artillery-hits-massive-ukrainian-ammonium-plant-releasing-poison-gas.html
[31] https://iz dot ru/1306994/2022-03-18/v-gosdume-predlozhili-zapretit-rabotu-ushedshikh-iz-rossii-kompanii-na-10-let
[45] https://riafan dot ru/22036868-politico_si_tszin_pin_prodolzhaet_sblizhat_sya_s_rossiei_vopreki_peregovoram_s_baidenom_; https://russian.rt dot com/world/news/978826-baiden-kitai-ssha?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS
2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 22 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 22
Mason Clark, George Barros, and Kateryna Stepanenko
March 22, 6:00 pm ET
Russian forces did not make any major advances on March 22 and Ukrainian forces conducted local counterattacks northwest of Kyiv and around Mykolayiv. Russian forces around Kyiv and other major cities are increasingly prioritizing long-range bombardment after the failure of Russian ground offensives but are unlikely to force major cities to surrender in this manner. Russian forces did not conduct any offensive operations toward the northeastern Ukrainian cities of Chernihiv, Sumy, or Kharkiv in the last 24 hours. Russian forces continued to further reduce the Mariupol pocket.
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces are likely moving to a phase of protracted bombardment of Ukrainian cities due to the failure of Russia’s initial campaign to encircle and seize Kyiv and other major cities.
- Ukrainian forces conducted successful localized counterattacks northwest of Kyiv.
- Russian forces in northeastern Ukraine did not conduct any offensive operations in the past 24 hours.
- Ukrainian forces repelled several Russian assaults in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in the past 24 hours.
- Russian forces continue to make slow but steady progress reducing the Mariupol pocket.
- Russia may have failed to appoint an overall commander for its invasion of Ukraine, leading to Russian axes of advance competing for limited supplies and failing to synchronize their operations.
Russian forces are likely moving to a phase of protracted bombardment of Ukrainian cities due to the failure of Russia’s initial campaign to encircle and seize Kyiv and other major cities. Russian forces continue to conduct air and missile strikes against both civilian and military targets across unoccupied Ukraine in the absence of offensive ground operations.[1] The Ukrainian General Staff reported at 6:00 pm local time on March 22 that Russian aircraft conducted over 80 sorties in the past 24 hours.[2] Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby additionally stated on March 21 that Russian forces have increased their long-range bombardment against Ukrainian cities in an attempt to force them to surrender.[3] Russian forces are unlikely to force Ukrainian cities to surrender with bombardment alone.
Russian forces face continuing logistics and reinforcement issues. The Ukrainian General Staff specified for the first time on March 22 that Russian forces—particularly highlighting the 7thAir Assault Division operating around Kherson—are suffering casualties due to a poor medical supply system and lack of medicine.[4]The Ukrainian General Staff additionally stated that Russian forces face growing supply issues, claiming some unspecified units have stockpiles of food and ammunition for no more than three days.[5] Russian forces continue to cobble together ad hoc units of servicemen from several units to replace combat losses.[6]Russia is expanding its methods to generate replacements, including expanding forcible conscription in Donetsk Oblast and forcing Russians with large amounts of debt to sign military contracts in return for exemption from credit obligations.[7]The Ukrainian General Staff reported on March 22 that Russia is increasingly carrying out propaganda aimed at Belarusian servicemen to incentivize Belarusian participation in the war, although ISW cannot independently verify this claim and an unnamed US senior defense official stated on March 21 that the United States has seen no indication that Belarus is preparing to enter the war.[8]
Russian forces are unlikely to successfully resolve their command and control issues in the near term. A senior US defense official stated on March 21 that Russian forces are increasingly using unsecured communications due to lacking sufficient capacity on secured networks.[9] CNN additionally quoted multiple sources on March 21 that the United States has been unable to determine if Russia has appointed an overall commander for the invasion of Ukraine.[10] These sources stated that Russian units from different military districts appear to be competing for resources and are not coordinating their operations.
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 Oblast;
- Supporting effort 2—Mariupol and Donetsk Oblast; and
- Supporting effort 3—Kherson and advances northward and westward.
Main effort—Kyiv axis: Russian operations on the Kyiv axis are aimed at encircling the city from the northwest, west, and east.
Subordinate main effort along the west bank of the Dnipro
Russian forces did not conduct any offensive operations northwest of Kyiv on March 22 and continued to improve their defensive positions and logistical support.[11] Local Ukrainian sources reported Russian forces “entrenched” around Bucha on March 22.[12] Satellite imagery on March 21 additionally depicted fortified Russian artillery positions northwest of Irpin.[13] Ukrainian forces conducted several localized counterattacks on March 22, retaking the towns of Moshcun (northwest of Kyiv) and Makariv (directly west of Kyiv).[14]
Subordinate supporting effort—Chernihiv and Sumy axis
Russian forces conducted an unsuccessful attack toward Brovary late on March 21 but did not conduct any major offensive operations northeast of Kyiv on March 22.[15] The Ukrainian General Staff reported on March 22 that Russian forces deployed an additional BTG of the 90th Tank Division and other unspecified Central Military District (CMD) units to the northeastern axis of advance.[16] Russian forces did not conduct any assaults on Chernihiv or Sumy in the past 24 hours and continued to shell both cities.[17]
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv:
Russian forces did not conduct any offensive operations around Kharkiv and paused attacks to take the city of Izyum, southeast of Kharkiv, on March 22.[18] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russia is deploying additional Naval Infantry from the Baltic and Northern fleets to Kharkiv and Izyum, in addition to attempting to restore the combat potential of previously deployed units.[19] The General Staff additionally reported that Russian engineering units are attempting to repair a railway connection from Valuyki (Belgorod Oblast, in Russia) to Kupyansk (Kharkiv Oblast) to support logistics efforts around Kharkiv.[20]
Supporting Effort #1a—Luhansk Oblast:
Russian forces conducted several unsuccessful attacks in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts in the last 24 hours. The Ukrainian General Staff reported at noon local time on March 22 that Russia and proxy forces concentrated their efforts on capturing Rubizhne, Severodonetsk, Popasna, and Vugledar but were unsuccessful.[21] The Ukrainian General Staff additionally stated Ukrainian forces inflicted heavy losses on a Russian attack on Marinka as of noon local time on March 22.[22]
Supporting Effort #2—Mariupol and Donetsk Oblast:
Russian forces continued to assault Mariupol and shell residential areas of the city in the past 24 hours.[23] Russian forces are continuing to reinforce artillery positions northeast of the city.[24] Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov posted an update on claimed Chechen operations in Mariupol late on March 21.[25] Kadyrov claimed the head of the Chechen branch of Rosgvardia, Adam Delimkhanov, is personally leading Chechen fighters taking the city ”quarter by quarter,” including the Azovstal factory in eastern Mariupol, which Russian forces claimed to have captured on March 10.[26] Kadyrov said Chechen fighters provide reliable cover for their ”brothers in arms” in the conventional Russian military. Social media users have independently confirmed the presence of Chechen units around Mariupol, but have not confirmed the exact role Rosgvardia units are playing in ongoing urban fighting.
Supporting Effort #3—Kherson and advances northward and westwards:
Ukrainian forces likely conducted several local counterattacks against Russian forces around Mykolayiv and north of Kherson on March 22, and Russian forces did not conduct any offensive operations.[27] The Ukrainian General Staff reported at midnight local time on March 21 that Ukrainian counterattacks around Mykolayiv pushed Russian forces out of defensive positions to unspecified “unfavorable borders.”[28]
Ukrainian forces additionally published a map on March 22 reportedly captured from Russian forces in Kherson Oblast on March 10.[29] The map reports Russia had about 10 battalion tactical groups (BTGs) from the 49th Combined Arms Army and 7th Airborne (VDV) Division operation on the Kherson axis in mid-March, in addition to supporting units from the 22nd Army Corps. Russian forces additionally reportedly had most of their command and control assets in the region stationed at the Kherson airport, which was struck by Ukrainian aircraft on March 15.
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces will likely capture Mariupol or force the city to capitulate within the coming weeks.
- Russia will expand its air, missile, and artillery bombardments of Ukrainian cities.
- Russian forces will likely continue efforts to reach Kryvyi Rih and isolate Zaporizhiya.
- Russian forces around Kyiv will continue efforts to push forward into effective artillery range of the center of the city.
- Russian troops will continue efforts to reduce Chernihiv and Sumy.
- Mounting Ukrainian resistance in Russian-occupied territory would divert Russian combat power to rear area security.
[29] https://defence-ua dot com/army_and_war/zsu_zahopili_vkraj_tsikavi_shtabni_mapi_rashistiv_na_pivdennomu_naprjami_stav_zrozumilij_fenomen_chornobajivki-6554.html.
3. As Russia Stalls in Ukraine, Dissent Brews Over Putin’s Leadership
Will Putin be threatened from internal forces"
Excerpts:
Throughout Ukraine, Russian forces have now largely stalled. But analysts caution that the military setbacks will not deter Mr. Putin — who has cast the war at home as an existential one for Russia, and is increasingly signaling to the Russian public to prepare for a long fight.
The question is whether heavy losses and the pain of Western sanctions could force Mr. Putin to accept some kind of compromise to end the war — and whether President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine would be prepared to offer concessions to satisfy him. On Tuesday, Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, played down any hopes of an imminent cease-fire, describing talks with Ukraine as going “much more slowly and less substantively than we would like.”
“The Russian leadership can’t lose,” said Andrei Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, a research organization close to the Russian government. “No matter what, they will need to end this whole story with some kind of victory.”
As Russia Stalls in Ukraine, Dissent Brews Over Putin’s Leadership
A destroyed Russian tank after a battle north of Kyiv this month.Credit...Felipe Dana/Associated Press
Military losses have mounted, progress has slowed, and a blame game has begun among some Russian supporters of the war.
A destroyed Russian tank after a battle north of Kyiv this month.Credit...Felipe Dana/Associated Press
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- March 22, 2022, 5:58 p.m. ET
In January, the head of a group of serving and retired Russian military officers declared that invading Ukraine would be “pointless and extremely dangerous.” It would kill thousands, he said, make Russians and Ukrainians enemies for life, risk a war with NATO and threaten “the existence of Russia itself as a state.”
To many Russians, that seemed like a far-fetched scenario, since few imagined that an invasion of Ukraine was really possible. But two months later, as Russia’s advance stalls in Ukraine, the prophecy looms large. Reached by phone this week, the retired general who authored the declaration, Leonid Ivashov, said he stood by it, though he could not speak freely given Russia’s wartime censorship: “I do not disavow what I said.”
In Russia, the slow going and the heavy toll of President Vladimir V. Putin’s war on Ukraine are setting off questions about his military’s planning capability, his confidence in his top spies and loyal defense minister, and the quality of the intelligence that reaches him. It also shows the pitfalls of Mr. Putin’s top-down governance, in which officials and military officers have little leeway to make their own decisions and adapt to developments in real time.
The failures of Mr. Putin’s campaign are apparent in the striking number of senior military commanders believed to have been killed in the fighting. Ukraine says it has killed at least six Russian generals, while Russia acknowledges one of their deaths, along with that of the deputy commander of its Black Sea fleet. American officials say they cannot confirm the number of Russian troop deaths, but that Russia’s invasion plan appears to have been stymied by bad intelligence.
The lack of progress is so apparent that a blame game has begun among some Russian supporters of the war — even as Russian propaganda claims that the slog is a consequence of the military’s care to avoid harming civilians. Igor Girkin, a former colonel in Russia’s F.S.B. intelligence agency and the former “defense minister” of Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, said in a video interview posted online on Monday that Russia had made a “catastrophically incorrect assessment” of Ukraine’s forces.
Lt. Tetiana Chornovol, the commander of an anti-tank missile unit operating on the outskirts of Kyiv, this month.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
“The enemy was underestimated in every aspect,” Mr. Girkin said.
The Russian forces’ poor performance has also surprised analysts, who predicted at the start of the war that Russia’s massive, technologically advanced military would make short work of Ukraine. Mr. Putin himself seems to have counted on his troops quickly seizing major cities, including the capital, Kyiv, decapitating the government and installing a puppet regime under the Kremlin’s control.
“Take power into your own hands,” Mr. Putin urged Ukrainian soldiers on the second day of the invasion, apparently hoping Ukraine would go down without a fight.
Instead, Ukraine fought back. Nearly a month has passed, and Russian troops appear bogged down in the face of relentless attacks from a much weaker, though far more maneuverable, Ukrainian military.
“There was probably the hope that they wouldn’t resist so intensely,” Yevgeny Buzhinsky, a retired lieutenant general and a regular Russian state television commentator, said of Ukraine’s forces. “They were expected to be more reasonable.”
As if responding to criticism, Mr. Putin has said repeatedly in his public comments about the war that it is going “according to plan.”
Pro-Russian troops driving a tank on the outskirts of separatist-controlled Donetsk this month.Credit...Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters
“We can definitively say that nothing is going to plan,” countered Pavel Luzin, a Russian military analyst. “It has been decades since the Soviet and Russian armies have seen such great losses in such a short period of time.”
Russia last announced its combat losses three weeks ago — 498 deaths as of March 2. American officials now say that a conservative estimate puts the Russian military death toll at 7,000. Russia says it lost a total of 11,000 service members in nearly a decade of fighting in Chechnya.
The failures in Ukraine have started to create fissures within Russian leadership, according to Andrei Soldatov, an author and expert on Russia’s military and security services. The top Russian intelligence official in charge of overseeing the recruitment of spies and diversionary operations in Ukraine has been put under house arrest along with his deputy, Mr. Soldatov said. Even Russia’s defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, who vacations with Mr. Putin and has been spoken of as a potential presidential successor, has suffered a loss of standing, according to Mr. Soldatov’s sources.
“It looks like everybody is on edge,” Mr. Soldatov said.
Mr. Soldatov’s claims could not be independently verified, and some independent experts have challenged them. But Mr. Shoigu has not been shown meeting with Mr. Putin in person since Feb. 27, when he and his top military commander, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, sat at the end of a long table as Mr. Putin, on the opposite end, ordered them to place Russia’s nuclear forces at a higher level of readiness.
“The war has shown that the army fights poorly,” Mr. Luzin, the Russian military analyst, said. “The defense minister is responsible for this.”
Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu, second from left, and his top military commander, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin last month.Credit...Pool photo by Alexei Nikolsky
The battlefield deaths of senior Russian commanders also reflect poorly on the Kremlin’s war planning. Captain Andrei Paliy, the deputy commander of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, died in combat over the port city of Mariupol, Russian officials said on Sunday.
After Maj. Gen. Andrei Sukhovetsky, the deputy commander of the 41st Combined Arms Army, was killed four days into the war, the city of Novorossiysk, where he was previously based, issued a statement remembering him as “a faithful comrade, a valiant warrior, a wise commander and a selfless defender of the Fatherland.”
“Epaulets give no protection to terrorists,” Ukraine’s military intelligence service said in its statement announcing General Sukhovetsky’s death.
There was also Maj. Gen. Oleg Mityayev, among the Russian military’s most seasoned commanders. He had led Russia’s largest foreign military base in Tajikistan and was second in command of Russia’s forces in Syria. When Mr. Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine, General Mityayev was tapped to lead the storied 150th Motorized Rifle Division, whose soldiers helped take the Reichstag building in Berlin precipitating Nazi Germany’s defeat in 1945.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments
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Russia’s shrinking force. The Pentagon said that Russia’s “combat power” in Ukraine has dipped below 90 percent of its original force. The assessment reflects the significant losses that Russian troops have suffered at the hands of Ukrainian soldiers.
Cracking down on dissent. A Russian court sentenced the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, already serving a two-and-a-half-year prison term for violating parole, to an additional nine years on fraud charges. Russia also amended a draconian censorship law to expand the scope of government bodies off-limits to criticism.
According to Kyiv, he lasted less than three weeks in Ukraine. After he was killed in battle, either Russian forces left his body behind, or it was captured by the far-right Azov Battalion, which posted a photo of the bloody corpse on Telegram with the caption, “Glory to Ukraine.”
Russian officials have not confirmed his death — or those of another four generals that Ukraine claims to have killed. But even accounting for the fog of war, experts say that Russia has suffered a damaging death toll among its military leaders on the ground in Ukraine, which could soon erode Russia’s military effectiveness.
A photo from Russian state-owned media showing Major General Andrei Sukhovetsky in Crimea last year.Credit...Sergei Malgavko/TASS, via Alamy
The deaths reflect operational security failures as well as the challenges of the Russian military’s top-heavy command structure in the face of a much nimbler Ukrainian fighting force.
“In modern warfare, you don’t have a lot of generals getting knocked off,” said Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “But this is a very lethal battlefield.”
General Joseph L. Votel, the former commander of U.S. Central Command, said that the deaths could reflect Russia’s challenges on the ground — and reports that some Russian units did not understand the mission at hand and had even abandoned equipment. As a result, he said, military leaders appeared to be operating closer to the front to “supervise and keep their troops in the fight, by personal example or intimidation.”
“Continuing to lose senior leaders is not good,” he said in an email. “Eventually, loss of leadership affects morale, fighting prowess and effectiveness.”
For Russia’s generals, part of the problem is that many of them have spent recent decades fighting a different type of war. In Chechnya at the beginning of the 2000s, Russia succeeded in pacifying a separatist uprising in a small territory by resorting to scorched-earth decimation of entire cities. More recently in Syria, Russia’s operations have been driven by airstrikes against a population that lacks sophisticated weapons or even a regular army.
A satellite image showing a Ukrainian strike against to Russian equipment at an airport in Kherson, Ukraine, last week.Credit...Planet Labs, via Associated Press
Ukraine, while far weaker militarily, has been learning from its eight-year war against Russian-backed separatist forces in the country’s east — a similar war, in miniature, to the one being fought now. Ukraine has its own air force, which remains largely intact, and modern antiaircraft systems. As convoys of Russian armor have lumbered along Ukrainian highways, Ukrainian forces have deployed drones and highly maneuverable infantry units to devastating effect, leaving abandoned and burning vehicles.
Throughout Ukraine, Russian forces have now largely stalled. But analysts caution that the military setbacks will not deter Mr. Putin — who has cast the war at home as an existential one for Russia, and is increasingly signaling to the Russian public to prepare for a long fight.
The question is whether heavy losses and the pain of Western sanctions could force Mr. Putin to accept some kind of compromise to end the war — and whether President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine would be prepared to offer concessions to satisfy him. On Tuesday, Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, played down any hopes of an imminent cease-fire, describing talks with Ukraine as going “much more slowly and less substantively than we would like.”
“The Russian leadership can’t lose,” said Andrei Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, a research organization close to the Russian government. “No matter what, they will need to end this whole story with some kind of victory.”
Anton Troianovski reported from Istanbul, and Michael Schwirtz from Odessa, Ukraine. Oleg Matsnev and Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.
4. To counter China influence, U.S. names envoy to lead Pacific Island talks
A good man for an important job that is under the radar.
Excerpts:
U.S. officials have said they are confident Russia's actions in Ukraine will not divert from U.S. Indo-Pacific goals, but experts note that past geopolitical crises have derailed previous U.S. efforts to refocus on Asia.
"It shows they remain committed to their Indo-Pacific plans despite Ukraine," a source with knowledge of Yun's appointment said.
A 2019 Rand Corp report called the FAS "a power projection superhighway running through the heart of the North Pacific into Asia" and said the compacts provide the U.S. military with sole and unfettered access to the islands' lands, waters and airspace.
But island representatives say financial support has not kept pace with U.S. obligations, particularly given the nuclear legacy in the Marshall Islands, where the U.S. military conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests from 1946 to 1958.
Islanders are still plagued by health and environmental effects, but Washington says all legal claims over the issue were resolved under its previous compact with the country.
To counter China influence, U.S. names envoy to lead Pacific Island talks
By Michael Martina and David Brunnstrom
March 22, 2022
6:40 PM EDT
Last Updated 3 hours ago
WASHINGTON, March 22 (Reuters) - The United States on Tuesday named former senior diplomat Joseph Yun to lead languishing talks with three tiny but strategically important Pacific Island countries, a signal that countering China remains a U.S. priority despite Russia's war in Ukraine.
The State Department confirmed the appointment of Yun, who served as U.S. special envoy for North Korea under former U.S. presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, in response to queries from Reuters.
"In light of the critical nature of these complex negotiations, President Biden is appointing Ambassador Joseph Yun as Special Presidential Envoy for Compact Negotiations," a statement from the department said.
"We are currently engaged in negotiating amendments to certain provisions of the Compacts of Free Association with the FAS, and completing the negotiations is a priority for this Administration," the statement said, referring to the islands collectively called the Freely Associated States.
The COFA negotiations govern U.S. economic assistance for the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), and Palau.
Provisions in the compacts are set to expire in 2023 for the first countries and in 2024 for Palau. Renewal talks began during the Trump administration, but sources familiar with the process say there have been no substantive engagements with U.S. officials since December 2020.
China, meanwhile, has made economic overtures to the Pacific Islands countries focusing on tourism and trade and appears keen to establish a military foothold in the region. read more
The RMI's ambassador to Washington told Reuters in February talks had stalled because of the U.S. failure to appoint a negotiator authorized by President Joe Biden to discuss key issues, including remuneration for the legacy of massive U.S. nuclear testing on the islands, the presence U.S. military bases, and climate-change mitigation. read more
On Tuesday, the ambassador, Gerald Zackios, told Reuters the RMI welcomed Yun’s appointment, “and looks forward to the resumption of these important discussions.”
He said the RMI was keen to discuss key priorities, including economic, nuclear and climate issues and the Kwajalein Atoll, which is home to a U.S. ballistic missile test site.
Yun, who handled highly sensitive negotiations over North Korea's nuclear weapons programs, should help resolve that impasse.
"I look forward to working with our FAS partners to make the relationship even better going forward," he told Reuters, adding that he was "honored" to be given the responsibility.
Since leaving government, Yun has worked as an adviser to the Asia Group, a business consultancy set up by Kurt Campbell, the White House policy coordinator for the Indo-Pacific.
Critics say delays in renewing provisions in the compacts are a significant lapse given China's efforts to make economic inroads in three countries that give the United States an unparalleled military foothold in the region.
The RMI and Palau are also among the few remaining states to formally recognize Taiwan diplomatically rather than Beijing, while the FSM has relations with China and has joined its Belt and Road Initiative, a global scheme through which Beijing has sought to extend its influence with infrastructure and other investments.
U.S. officials have said they are confident Russia's actions in Ukraine will not divert from U.S. Indo-Pacific goals, but experts note that past geopolitical crises have derailed previous U.S. efforts to refocus on Asia.
"It shows they remain committed to their Indo-Pacific plans despite Ukraine," a source with knowledge of Yun's appointment said.
A 2019 Rand Corp report called the FAS "a power projection superhighway running through the heart of the North Pacific into Asia" and said the compacts provide the U.S. military with sole and unfettered access to the islands' lands, waters and airspace.
But island representatives say financial support has not kept pace with U.S. obligations, particularly given the nuclear legacy in the Marshall Islands, where the U.S. military conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests from 1946 to 1958.
Islanders are still plagued by health and environmental effects, but Washington says all legal claims over the issue were resolved under its previous compact with the country.
Reporting by Michael Martina and David Brunnstrom in Washington Editing by Alistair Bell and Matthew Lewis
5. How Western Intelligence Mortally Wounded Russia’s War Effort in Ukraine
Excerpts:
So how do we know that the IC’s preemptive work is having an effect on the war? Count the abandoned vehicles and reports of Russians walking off into the woods, watch videos of Russian troops surrendering and making seemingly un-coerced confessions, note their use of standoff crew served weapons which separate the combatant from the result of their violence, and more recently Russians have been reported to be shooting themselves in order to avoid combat. Morale is low in Russian forces for more reasons than just bad MRE’s and fuel shortages. This isn’t the same army that turned back Hitler at Stalingrad. Even Russian state run media members have put themselves at great personal jeopardy to push back against Putin. Courage is not what is missing from the Russian population, conviction however is another story. That conviction is why macrovictimization is so important.
Russia as an army may still inflict unimaginable pain and suffering on the Ukrainian people, and they certainly have so far sadly. But this particular fool predicts the end state was inevitable as soon as the use of timely western IC was published by our policymakers and effectively removed the myth of macrovictimization from Putin’s information war-effort in both his military and the Russian population at large.
So what does the defeat of Russia look like in Ukraine? That gets a little murkier, but if I had to bet I would argue that Putin will only gain the territory that the vast majority of locals believed in their macrovictimization by Ukraine; so it will likely be limited to Crimea (which has been effectively Russian since 2014), and maybe a portion of the eastern provinces; though even that is not guaranteed. If there is even a small to medium pocket of Ukrainian resistance in Donbas, they will torment their Russian occupiers forever. Because the VIM cuts both ways, and right now there are an awful lot of Ukrainians who will want to fight Putin’s Russia for the rest of their lives, and thanks to our IC they have weakened the resolve of their tormentor while reenforcing the resolve of Ukrainians.
How Western Intelligence Mortally Wounded Russia’s War Effort in Ukraine | Small Wars Journal
How Western Intelligence Mortally Wounded Russia’s War Effort in Ukraine
By Kane Tomlin
Predicting the future is a fool’s errand, but allow me to play the role of fool for a minute. According to the Victim Identity Model (VIM), I believe that the US and Western Intelligence Community (IC) played a pivotal role in the inevitable defeat of Russia in their war with Ukraine. The main hypothesis of the VIM is “that a prerequisite for organized forms of collective violence is a motivated organizational leadership element that convinces his or her followers of their in-group victim status. This vicarious in-group victimization legitimizes the stated retaliatory causes of the group, subsumes individual responsibility to the group, and enables psychologically normal group members to commit violence against their perceived aggressors.”
Here’s a quick infographic that shows each element necessary for a motivated population to commit large scale group violence. If you only have two, you typically don’t see real group violence committed by people who were otherwise not directly affected by a situation. If a robber breaks into my house, then I might be shooting at them, but it’s not likely my whole block is going to come out and help since they weren’t affected by it, that larger scale effect I call macrovictimization.
The IC’s contribution to Russia’s defeat is remarkable because this may be the first time that such a role was so instrumental to the war effort without the US firing a shot. As Dr. Joyner stated earlier at Outside the Beltway, US intelligence has preempted numerous false flag attacks prior to the Russian invasion; noting “[a]t some point, plausible deniability just isn’t plausible,” which is absolutely true. But the significance of this loss of justification by Putin may not be fully appreciated. People need to buy into a macrovictim mindset aka “victimization by proxy” in order to lower our normal inhibitions against out-group violence. Events like Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were highly effective macrovictimization events primarily because they happened to be true attacks on an “innocent US” from our perspective. I use quotes because nuance (like the sanctions of Japan by the US prior to 1941, our involvement in the Middle East prior to 9/11 etc.) is lost in these kind of rallying cries; war tends to be as binary as our elections. However, these events do not necessarily have to be factual to work for the targeted in-group, in this case the Russians, because the mechanism of injury doesn’t matter as much as the effect of the injury itself.
The mechanism of macrovictimization’s lowering of inhibitions against violence only has to be true in the mind of the target in-group. Conversely, if that fails to occur, the in-group population will tend to be reasonably anti-war. Even dictators like Putin need a large enough population ready to engage in out-group violence to man the military and successfully prosecute a war, there is simply not enough leaders in an army to ensure every Soldier shoots to kill by coercion; most of it has to be voluntary. When a population no longer perceives themselves as a righteous victim fighting in self-defense, wars tend to go the way Vietnam or more recently Afghanistan did for the US, which is not to say that properly trained military members will not shoot at all, but rather within the military and population at large people tend to engage in “Irish Democracy”, where they just stop cooperating with the leader’s agenda with enthusiasm. Sabotage, foot dragging, and generally just being bad at their assigned role increases the longer the war progresses. In addition, political pressure to end the war starts to affect the population at large.
There are lots of ways humans in and out group each other, but for the sake of this article I will simply say that our tribal nature is evolutionarily grounded and that the primary in-group motivator is in-group visibility. The fact the Ukraine and Russia are ethnically Slavic is already a step against Putin’s ability to out-group Ukraine. The other variables that affect in-group formation are: geographical proximity, goal alignment, level of abstraction (group size), and level of accentuation (group homogeneousness / uniqueness). These all cut against a Russian military member’s motivation to “other” or out-group Ukrainians without some additional mental gymnastics, like claiming some kind of victim status. Note that while we were at war with both Japan and Germany during World War Two, the US only put one “out-group” of US citizens into internment camps; even horrible things have a scale all their own.
As we see in almost every civil war, out-grouping based solely on a country’s borders isn’t necessarily a requirement for group violence. The big kicker is out-group victimization of a person’s in-group; Shia/Sunni Muslims in the Middle East, and the Hutu/Tutsi Tribes in Rwanda had no trouble out-grouping their kin. So, if macrovictimization is the lynchpin, then the IC has been effective by allowing our policymakers to remove it from Putin’s war arsenal. The IC prevented macrovictimization from ever being born by preempting any false flag attack lie to really rile up the Russian population (both civil and military) and allow Putin to convince them they are in a war of self-defense. Preventing the lies in this case is vastly superior to trying to debunk them after they have been spread because misinformation tends to travel fast.
As Jonathan Swift stated in 1710:
“Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect.”
Swift’s statement is now commonly clichéd into the saying “a lie can travel around the world before the truth gets its pants on”. It’s sadly true, and the source of so much consternation in our modern media misinformation landscape. Debunking false flag operations like the ones Putin was attempting weeks or months after they occurred would have been ineffective; they would have still provided the macrovictimization effect needed to get Russians at large to lower their inhibitions against violence against Ukraine, and they would have remained there for some time due to the closed nature of Russian information distribution.
What the West’s IC did that is so groundbreaking here is that they published their plan before these actions occurred. Finally, the truth was all dressed up and ready to party before the lie had a chance to wake up and take a shower. In this situation, the VIM predicts that the reason Russia never had a chance to become a strong unified in-group that believed they are macrovictims of “Ukrainian Nazi atrocities” is because of how we perceive our out-group threats. In essence Putin outran his coverage here. I like to pick on the IC when they are wrong, so allow me to praise them when they perform masterfully. By rushing their raw intelligence to publication so quickly without jeopardizing methods and sourcing; and without declassification snafu’s, a normally risk-adverse organization got its important work done within the timeline it needed to be effectively released by our policymakers.
So how do we know that the IC’s preemptive work is having an effect on the war? Count the abandoned vehicles and reports of Russians walking off into the woods, watch videos of Russian troops surrendering and making seemingly un-coerced confessions, note their use of standoff crew served weapons which separate the combatant from the result of their violence, and more recently Russians have been reported to be shooting themselves in order to avoid combat. Morale is low in Russian forces for more reasons than just bad MRE’s and fuel shortages. This isn’t the same army that turned back Hitler at Stalingrad. Even Russian state run media members have put themselves at great personal jeopardy to push back against Putin. Courage is not what is missing from the Russian population, conviction however is another story. That conviction is why macrovictimization is so important.
Russia as an army may still inflict unimaginable pain and suffering on the Ukrainian people, and they certainly have so far sadly. But this particular fool predicts the end state was inevitable as soon as the use of timely western IC was published by our policymakers and effectively removed the myth of macrovictimization from Putin’s information war-effort in both his military and the Russian population at large.
So what does the defeat of Russia look like in Ukraine? That gets a little murkier, but if I had to bet I would argue that Putin will only gain the territory that the vast majority of locals believed in their macrovictimization by Ukraine; so it will likely be limited to Crimea (which has been effectively Russian since 2014), and maybe a portion of the eastern provinces; though even that is not guaranteed. If there is even a small to medium pocket of Ukrainian resistance in Donbas, they will torment their Russian occupiers forever. Because the VIM cuts both ways, and right now there are an awful lot of Ukrainians who will want to fight Putin’s Russia for the rest of their lives, and thanks to our IC they have weakened the resolve of their tormentor while reenforcing the resolve of Ukrainians.
Kane Tomlin
Dr. Kane Tomlin is a former US Army Master Diver, Special Programs Director for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and a current executive consultant with the state of Florida. Professor Tomlin teaches Applied Cybersecurity, National Security, Domestic Terrorism, and Emergency Management at Excelsior College in Albany, NY and Tallahassee Community College in Florida. Kane has deployed twice to Iraq (in 06-07-08 and 10-11) and has worked extensively around the globe while a member of the Army’s Engineer Dive Teams. Kane’s research specialty is organized group violence, he has been published by the Army War College, Small Wars Journal, Project Management Institute, and The Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, & Violence. Kane has also served on the Excelsior College Board of Trustees.
6. It's a Golden Age for Armchair Generals
Whew. I am glad they are not going after armchair colonels.
But we should ask which of the three categories do we fall in? And of course there are many more good people out there who do not fall into these three categories.
Excerpts:
As I see it, there are three major categories of armchair generals: the Think Tank Wonk Who Has Been Waiting Their Entire Lives for This, the OpEd Writer Shifting Their Beat to Cover War, and the Extremely Online Shitposting Anon. There are subgroups, variations, and anomalies to be sure, but I believe these three categories cover the bulk of what I’ve seen online since the war started.
...
Lewis also blamed aspects of the internet. He noted that it’s incredibly easy to build an information bubble around yourself that reinforces your preexisting beliefs. He also said that, in the past, a person with mildly contrarian beliefs could share them in public and it was hard to determine their veracity.
“Now, there’s plenty of information and so when you interact with these people and they refuse to accept the enormous amount of information easily available at their fingertips, they cease being charming contractions and start to seem like destructive trolls,” he said. “And I think that’s changed how we look at those people in our community. It’s hard to even believe this person is engaging in good faith because 10 minutes on Wikipedia would solve this problem.”
If you’re reading stuff like this from people like Rod Dreher and it’s making you nervous, just don’t engage. There’s a million clowns on the internet right now posting through a land war in Europe. The scary truth is that, despite a wealth of satellite imagery and constant feedback from the front, it can be hard to tell what’s going on and impossible to know how things will turn out. Pay attention to the journalists on the ground and the people living in the war zone.
It's a Golden Age for Armchair Generals
It’s easier than ever to get clout by being extremely online during a war.
By Matthew Gault
People on the internet have a lot of ideas for how to manage Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Some of them want a no-fly zone, despite the very real possibility that it will lead to apocalyptic nuclear war. Some of them think that regular Ukrainian civilians could disable Russian tanks with paintball guns. And yet others have extremely detailed tips for urban warfare.
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“Stairways are another good killing zone,” ShitstachMcGee, a user who claims to be a former U.S. Marine, wrote on Reddit. “Block stairways with any obstacles you can to slow down invaders. If you throw a grenade downstairs, have your magazine fully topped off and ready. The invaders will most likely run up the stairs to run past the grenade blast.”
I don’t know if ShitstachMcGee is recalling actual military training here or if he’s describing something he recently did in Call of Duty: Warzone, but his 2 cents are weaved into the internet’s information stream seamlessly, which makes it that much harder to parse in this moment of crisis.
Should Ukrainians ambush Russian troops in stairways with grenades? Should NATO impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine? Is the Russian military about to encircle Kyiv, or is it actually running out of fuel and heading for retreat? Will sending MiGs to Ukraine help defend its citizens, or will it escalate the war and lead to many more deaths? I don’t know the answer for sure, but there’s an army of armchair generals online who think they do.
There have always been people that sit at home during a war and think they know more than the people on the ground fighting it, but social media has given them a huge platform from which to proclaim their terrible opinions, and generally muddy the waters of a serious subject.
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There’s more information, both good and bad, than ever before. But the onus to sort through it is on the viewer. This becomes extremely hard during a war. The stakes are literally life and death, and all sides are willing to lie to score propaganda victories. In the unsorted mess of the Twitter timeline, a reply about mud from a guy cosplaying as Eisenhower online can move to the top of your feed as easily as a serious OSINT analyst who spent hours verifying the movements of tank columns in the country using satellite imagery.
The first round of mind numbing armchair general bullshit I saw started a few days after the war began, when ShitstachMcGee offered the people of Ukraine tips on urban warfare in /r/ukraine. Reddit removed the post, but it filtered to Twitter and exploded there.
Over the next few days, threads sprouted online detailing all the different ways Ukranians should defend themselves from Russian aggression in an urban environment. Some seemed helpful, some was complete bullshit, and it was all condescending. Every anonymous account that claimed to be part of a military had something to share.
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Most of the people chiming in at this point were your classic armchair generals: guys who read a lot of history books, former or current military who thought they could help, and extremely online nerds shitposting strange advice. But in the coming days and weeks, the professionals got into the armchair general trade and things became truly dire.
One particularly bizarre piece of advice that keeps recurring is that the civilians of Kyiv use paint guns and water balloons filled with paint to blind the optics of oncoming tanks. It’s advice that completely misunderstood how tanks work and that real life tank operators decried as ludicrous and dangerous.
As I see it, there are three major categories of armchair generals: the Think Tank Wonk Who Has Been Waiting Their Entire Lives for This, the OpEd Writer Shifting Their Beat to Cover War, and the Extremely Online Shitposting Anon. There are subgroups, variations, and anomalies to be sure, but I believe these three categories cover the bulk of what I’ve seen online since the war started.
The first is the most toxic and destructive. Think Tanks predated World War II, but their modern incarnations began with the Rand Corporation gaming out nuclear war against Russia. In Washington D.C., short nondescript office buildings leer out at passersby on Massachusetts Ave. Behind the glass and stone are men and women who spend their days Think Tanking. These are academics who politicians and journalists call to get opinions and knowledge.
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Within the world of think tanks there are literally people who have spent their entire careers studying the possibility of a land war in Europe fought against Russia. For these people, the invasion is the culmination of their life’s work. These are often the folks publicly calling for a no-fly zone or limited no-fly zone and earnestly telling people it won’t be a step into a larger conflict.
According to Emerson T. Brooking, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s (a think tank) Digital Forensics Research Lab, he’s seen what he calls a war fever grow in his fellow think tankers.
“There is a push for aggressive policies like a no-fly zone, but they’re choosing not to represent the full breadth to the public of what those policies entail … they’re swept up in a kind of war fever,” he told me. “Ideas that would once be debated by weighing the pros and cons and trying to get to the heart of the matter are instead thrown out into public spaces, seemingly with the intention of getting as many retweets as possible and what may begin as a proposal for a no-fly zone, pretty soon sees someone minimizing the risk of a nuclear exchange.”
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But Brooking also thinks it’s unfair to say that all of the bad posts are clout chasing. “It’s a reaction to the horror and powerlessness that they feel as western observers and wanting to do something,” he said.
According to Brooking, one of the reasons people from think tanks are so loud online right now is because something typically dry and academic has suddenly become very real and visceral. “There is a difference between debating at a think tank roundtable about nuclear arms policy while eating cardboard sandwiches and seeing the murders of thousands of people in real time and wanting to use all the instruments of American power to try to save lives,” he said. “I think that’s a noble goal, but it creates a real tension when some of the people calling for drastic intervention are the same people who are charged with contextualizing and explaining public policy to the American people.”
The next type of armchair general is the pundit turned war blogger. These are the journalists who typically write about the economy, technology, or cultural issues who have pivoted to covering the war in Ukraine because it’s a trending topic. It’s this desire to chase traffic and be part of the discourse that leads people like Bloomberg opinion writer and economics expert to write sentences that start “Nuclear winter would be very bad, but…”
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“You have all these people picking up a new vocabulary, which at first glance, makes it seem like they’re experts, but they’re basically emulating and copying people whose full time job is following a particular event,” Brooking said. “There is a creep of the language of expertise. You saw this exhaustively during COVID-19.”
The third tier is the anonymous shitposter, the extremely online dad-type who is just trying to keep up with the flood of information and inform his 500 followers about tank movements near Kharkiv. What do they know? Not much, but they’re going to post about it.
Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear policy and nonproliferation expert, professor at Middlebury Institute, and prolific shitposter, has also noticed an uptick in armchair generals online. Because nukes are his focus, he’s seen a lot of people he feels should know better advocating for nuclear war.
For Lewis, he thinks the behavior comes down to three things. “I am really shocked by how little people seem to know about the past,” he said. For some, the stark realities of a nuclear exchange are new information. But millions of people lived through close calls and scares of the past 75 years. There are people in power right now who grew up learning to duck and cover under their school desk as a guard against Armageddon. “There’s a lot of selectivity in what we choose to learn and remember and what lessons we apply.”
Lewis also blamed aspects of the internet. He noted that it’s incredibly easy to build an information bubble around yourself that reinforces your preexisting beliefs. He also said that, in the past, a person with mildly contrarian beliefs could share them in public and it was hard to determine their veracity.
“Now, there’s plenty of information and so when you interact with these people and they refuse to accept the enormous amount of information easily available at their fingertips, they cease being charming contractions and start to seem like destructive trolls,” he said. “And I think that’s changed how we look at those people in our community. It’s hard to even believe this person is engaging in good faith because 10 minutes on Wikipedia would solve this problem.”
If you’re reading stuff like this from people like Rod Dreher and it’s making you nervous, just don’t engage. There’s a million clowns on the internet right now posting through a land war in Europe. The scary truth is that, despite a wealth of satellite imagery and constant feedback from the front, it can be hard to tell what’s going on and impossible to know how things will turn out. Pay attention to the journalists on the ground and the people living in the war zone.
Everything else is just posting.
7. World War Three?
Excerpts:
Most of these questions will have answers that point to a negotiated “peace” that can allow Putin to remain in power, that can partition off Crimea and the eastern territories of the Ukraine and can provide some form of words that allows Putin to save face rather than extract even further suffering in order to save his position, and indeed possibly his very life, as Russia’s leader. This is because such a “peace” does not put an end to the physical problems of the war, but it would allow some degree of normality and confidence, the two critical ingredients for any sort of liberal economic order, to once again begin to operate in a fashion more reminiscent of the pre-war world.
Such a “peace” will be in high demand by the end of the summer months as the degrees of economic instability and scarcity become more pronounced and disruptive to a wider global populous and as the forecasts for the new global harvests come in. Everyone should be hoping hard that there are no droughts, floods or other climatic disasters such as those which occurred last year, otherwise things will get much, much worse by the autumn.
World War Three?
Professor Greg Kennedy, Defence Studies Department, King’s College London
Professor Greg Kennedy, Defence Studies Department, King’s College London
Discussions of the spread of the war in the Ukraine into greater Europe creating a Third World War miss the point of the nature of modern warfare in the post-globalisation age: the war already encompasses the world in terms of the global economic system. Warnings of massive shortages in energy supplies, ranging from oil to natural gas; impending grain and other commodity shortages; critical raw material shortages such as neon and palladium and even aluminium; re-orientation of supply chains for security rather than economic savings – and on the back of a system battered by COVID measures – will all combine to create short and long-term realities that will demand governments take a more martial approach to the norm that has been the liberal global economic system: the world of free and open markets.
The decision to use these economic warfare weapons instead of military power is not guaranteed to produce fewer casualties nor with any certainty whatsoever a shorter war. However, no matter what the peace will look like the ripples in the global economic system will not be easily stopped or re-directed now that they have been put in motion. Shortened and secure supply chains come with a variation of nationalism or the creation of blocs of like-minded states, otherwise there is no security produced.
The forthcoming shortages, particularly in grains and other food stuffs will create significant social unrest and political upheaval as the era of cheap food is finally extinguished. Open markets for key strategic materials, such as food, will be put under pressure to be closed: why would the Canadian or American public want to pay $10 for a loaf of bread just because North American farmers can get an inflated price on the world market instead of restrictions on the export of grains being now part of the national security requirement?
Rationing and supply restrictions are peacetime realities buried in our far distant past, a thing of the dark ages of World War One and Two, perhaps the first half of the Cold War. But for those who have studied the nature of Economic Warfare the future “peace” will challenge governments to deliver stability and prosperity if preparations for that peace do not begin now.
The UK re-orienting itself to a North American energy supply chain makes cultural, social and political sense. However, the associated rise in cost of such security will mean enduring high costs for the short to medium term, as well as possible social/economic changes. COVID revealed how energy savings could be made, so do we impose a work-from-home imperative for national security reasons now in order to keep crippling energy costs from doing even more harm than that imposed on the economy by keeping universities, accounting firms, and other parts of the economy that can work without burning energy in order to free up supply for other areas?
Will fracking and nuclear energy sources now become legitimate if the choice is freezing, paying crippling energy bills, or continuing the status quo? Do we allocate ammonia/phosphate fertilizers to the highest bidder or most needful? So would that be North American markets or India or Brazil with not only their absolute need for such goods but also their inability to replace the missing fertilizers by their own means, which North American markets could do? It is just that the cost to do so would have to be underpinned by guarantees of long-term usage/investment. Do we re-think our agriculture policy and land use to become even marginally more self-sufficient in order to create jobs and food security, and what does this do for new food technologies and debates of GM and other food sources, bearing in mind there is a climate crisis that must be fought at the same time as these questions are being dealt with?
Do we re-think the way BREXIT will work to ensure food and energy security and access to Great Britain’s closest and most logical economic ally is not made less efficient because of petty domestic politics? How will the UK treat China in any “peace” that sees that nation at even greater odds with the United States due to the Chinese support and sustainment of a Putin-led Russia, a not unlikely situation? Where are the strategic red lines in Anglo-American economic relations if the US wishes to escalate its already ongoing economic Cold War with China?
The list of outcomes and effects of the impact of the economic world war we now find ourselves in demands a return to more centralised and unified thinking about the economy not only as a weapon but as a critical vulnerability. Private and public officials and representatives must be woven together into a more coherent and collaborative whole, a fused organisation that can see the economic and fiscal as well as the national security outcomes in a more comprehensive fashion nationally, and then also link inter-nationally with allies and partners, an economic NATO of sorts. Only by recognising that our strategic thinking has to acknowledge we are in an economic third world war can the appropriate actions and solutions be produced in a coherent fashion.
Most of these questions will have answers that point to a negotiated “peace” that can allow Putin to remain in power, that can partition off Crimea and the eastern territories of the Ukraine and can provide some form of words that allows Putin to save face rather than extract even further suffering in order to save his position, and indeed possibly his very life, as Russia’s leader. This is because such a “peace” does not put an end to the physical problems of the war, but it would allow some degree of normality and confidence, the two critical ingredients for any sort of liberal economic order, to once again begin to operate in a fashion more reminiscent of the pre-war world.
Such a “peace” will be in high demand by the end of the summer months as the degrees of economic instability and scarcity become more pronounced and disruptive to a wider global populous and as the forecasts for the new global harvests come in. Everyone should be hoping hard that there are no droughts, floods or other climatic disasters such as those which occurred last year, otherwise things will get much, much worse by the autumn.
8. Navalny’s Big ‘Plan’ for Putin’s War Revealed
Excerpts:
In an exclusive interview, Navalny’s right hand and the most recognized leader in the opposition, Lyubov Sobol, told The Daily Beast that Moscow’s efforts to mute the Navalny movement have failed and that her team has a “plan” for Putin as Russian troops continue to carry out their onslaught in Ukraine.
“We continue to act in the new reality of wartime and we are perfectly aware that Putin wants to keep Navalny behind bars for as long as he continues to rule Russia,” Sobol said in an interview after Navalny’s verdict on Tuesday. “But we also have a plan: we are growing globally, we report from many countries, and more people listen to us. And if before, we collected and exposed evidence of Putin’s corruption—now we tell Russians about the facts of Putin’s war crimes.”
Navalny’s Big ‘Plan’ for Putin’s War Revealed
A 9-year-long sentence in a maximum security prison is not stopping the opposition leader and his team from taking on the Russian leader.
Updated Mar. 22, 2022 5:31PM ET / Published Mar. 22, 2022 5:10PM ET
exclusive
Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The Kremlin has been hard at work trying to silence charismatic opposition leader and top Putin critic Alexei Navalny ever since the politician declared war on Russia’s “crooks and thieves” a decade ago. His team of activists and supporters has lost track of how many days and nights their leader has spent in jail. To them, every accusation against him is purely political. So it came as no surprise when on Tuesday, Navalny was sentenced to nine years in a maximum-security prison on questionable charges of fraud.
In an exclusive interview, Navalny’s right hand and the most recognized leader in the opposition, Lyubov Sobol, told The Daily Beast that Moscow’s efforts to mute the Navalny movement have failed and that her team has a “plan” for Putin as Russian troops continue to carry out their onslaught in Ukraine.
“We continue to act in the new reality of wartime and we are perfectly aware that Putin wants to keep Navalny behind bars for as long as he continues to rule Russia,” Sobol said in an interview after Navalny’s verdict on Tuesday. “But we also have a plan: we are growing globally, we report from many countries, and more people listen to us. And if before, we collected and exposed evidence of Putin’s corruption—now we tell Russians about the facts of Putin’s war crimes.”
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is seen on a screen via a video link during the verdict in his embezzlement and contempt of court trial at the IK-2 prison colony in the town of Pokrov in Vladimir Region on March 22, 2022.
AFP via Getty Images
Sobol, 34, manages the Navalny Live YouTube channel, where she collects and broadcasts video footage and photos of events in Ukraine—of Russian soldiers getting arrested, of civilians dying, fleeing their homes, and sleeping in metro stations.
“While propaganda lied to Russians about the special operation, the audience of our channel has increased by 20 million unique views during the last month, so now we have more than 80 million views every month. People watch us, despite the awful pressure on the free internet in Russia,” Sobol told The Daily Beast. “I address Russian women, mothers, and explain that the war is going to come to every single family with a coffin of their young dead sons.”
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Ukrainian policemen secure the area by a five-story residential building that partially collapsed after shelling in Kyiv on March 18, 2022, as Russian troops try to encircle the Ukrainian capital as part of their slow-moving offensive.
SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images
Tuesday was a difficult day for Sobol and Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation: the penal prison colony in Vladimir region, where Navalny was sentenced, had done everything to block dozens of journalists who arrived in prison to cover the trial. Most reporters and Navalny followers were not allowed access to the courtroom. Besides the fraud charge, he was found guilty of contempt of court for insulting the judge and a witness.
Navalny, his family, and his team were prepared for the long prison sentence. Last month, the only Russian independent television channel, Rain TV, which has been covering Navalny’s struggle for years, said that authorities “intended to keep Navalny in prison forever” and that the opposition leader faced his fate alone. Two weeks later, Russia banned Rain TV, along with the oldest independent radio station, Echo of Moscow, after introducing a new amendment to the State Duma that effectively bars journalists from covering the war in Ukraine in any way that displeases the Kremlin.
A woman is evacuated from a burning apartment building in Kyiv on March 15, 2022, after strikes on residential areas killed at least two people, Ukraine emergency services said as Russian troops intensified their attacks on the Ukrainian capital.
ARIS MESSINIS/AFP via Getty Images
Most of the Navalny foundation’s key team members, including Sobol, director Ivan Zhdanov, and spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh have left Russia after facing a series of threats and criminal investigations against them and their loved ones. “Navalny has never told us to stop telling the truth, it would be naïve to grow silent now,” Sobol told The Daily Beast. “Our plan is to inform Russians at whatever cost.”
Authorities did not bring Navalny to stand trial in Moscow, where the corruption fighter still has thousands of supporters. Instead, he stood trial 69 miles away from the Russian capital, in the Pokrov penal colony #2 in the city of Vladimir.
“We, Russians, want to be a nation of peace,” Navalny said in an address to his supporters from jail last month, when the Russian army launched its first wave of attacks on Ukrainian cities. “But let’s at least not become a nation of frightened and silent people, a nation of cowards who pretend they don’t notice the aggressive war started by our crazy little tsar against Ukraine.”
Navalny’s life might sound like a thriller to many people in the West. Russians see it both as a hopeless political martyr drama and as an example of courage. Ever since 2011, when he emerged as a fearless political figure, police would detain him at almost every political rally, raid his offices, and confiscate the work of his Anti-Corruption Foundation. But that never stopped Navalny from pushing back against the Kremlin, even after the opposition lawyer was poisoned, hospitalized, and dragged to a jail cell.
“He knows that Putin’s plan to quickly break Ukraine has not worked out.”
Putin has never referred to Navalny by name, addressing his opponent only as “a blogger.” Navalny, on the other hand, had choice words aimed at the leader on Tuesday: “You can’t put everyone in prison. Even if you ask for 113 years, you won’t scare me or others like me.” He echoed Soblov’s comments about the Navalny movement “going global.”
Though Navalny's message in court was powerful, he looked thinner than usual in his prison robes on Tuesday.
“Not many on the West understand how hellish the existence is in Russian prisons, where they rape, torture people. But the best news for us, his supporters, is that Navalny is not broken, his spirit is still strong,” Sobol told the Daily Beast. “He knows that Putin’s plan to quickly break Ukraine has not worked out. And the West, that has always made decisions slowly, has made them very fast this time and the entire world demonstrated solidarity against the aggression in Ukraine.”
9. Anatomy of a deal: What would an agreement to end the war in Ukraine look like?
Again, the question is what is the acceptable durable political arrangement that will satisfy the security and political requirements for the parties?
But the next question is if both sides believe this is an existential threat is there a political solution to the conflict?
Excerpts:
It’s hard to say when they might get to that point. Crisis Group’s Oliker told Grid the battlefield situation is unlikely to ever be conclusive. “They’re not looking for conclusive. They’re looking for enough pain.”
In many ways, because of Russia’s authoritarian political system, Putin may have more flexibility than other actors in this conflict. He doesn’t have to sell any deal he makes to skeptical lawmakers or a critical media. He kept Russia’s war aims deliberately vague, and thanks to censorship, much of the Russian public may still not be aware of just how much blood and treasure has been spilled in this “special military operation.” Censorship may also help Putin sell a less-than-ideal settlement to the Russian people. If he so chooses, he could take some concessions on NATO and the Donbas and claim that “denazification” had been accomplished.
As for the Ukrainian side, its surprising battlefield success has given it more leverage in the negotiating room, but also makes it far less likely to take a deal just to stop the bloodshed.
As Jaresko put it, “Both sides are treating this as existential. For Ukraine, it really is.”
Anatomy of a deal: What would an agreement to end the war in Ukraine look like?
Is there hope for diplomacy amid the trauma of war?
Global Security Reporter
March 22, 2022
There’s been a jarring dichotomy in the recent news from Ukraine. On the one hand, stunningly brutal scenes of destruction as Russian forces bombard the city of Mariupol and fight pitched battles with Ukrainian defenders outside Kyiv. On the other hand, relatively upbeat assessments of negotiations over a deal to end the fighting. Talks between Ukrainian and Russian negotiating teams in Belarus have been ongoing since the first days of the invasion, in parallel with shuttle diplomacy conducted by the few remaining governments that still have decent relations with both sides, notably Turkey and Israel.
Hear more from Joshua Keating about this story:
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said last week that there was “hope for reaching a compromise”; Mykhailo Podolyak, Ukraine’s chief negotiator, has said that Russia’s position has “softened significantly” since the start of the war. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Sunday that the two sides are “close to an agreement.” The Financial Times reported last week that a “15-point” draft of a peace plan had been created.
Experts caution against getting too hopeful about the diplomacy. “I think the negotiations are, to a large extent, theater,” Olga Oliker, program director for Russia and Central Asia at the International Crisis Group, told Grid. One sign that the Russian side is not taking the talks entirely seriously is the makeup of its negotiating team. The Russian side is led by Vladimir Medinsky, a former culture minister best known for his ultraconservative views on history and art. The team also includes Leonid Slutsky, a scandal-prone member of parliament from the far-right Liberal Democratic Party.
“These aren’t the people you send to make your final agreement. This is not where the deal is going to be finalized,” Oliker said. She sees the talks, for now, as a useful forum for negotiating limited humanitarian cease-fires and corridors for evacuation, and for both sides to probe each other’s views and float trial balloons in the press.
Natalie Jaresko, a former minister of finance of Ukraine, told Grid that while it’s clear neither side is ready to stop fighting, both sides “have to always be prepared to talk, both for their own people domestically, but also for their allies who would love to see this end. But if you ask me what I expect to come out of the talks, I don’t expect anything to come out.”
Still, positions are shifting, and changes on the front lines are likely impacting positions at the negotiating tables.
The Russian government appears to have entered the conflict confident it could overthrow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy quickly and install a more obedient leader. But U.S. officials now believe that after nearly a month of military setbacks, Moscow has abandoned the goal of regime change and is looking instead to impose its terms on Ukraine’s existing government. The Ukrainian side, meanwhile, has met the invasion with far fiercer and more effective resistance than many expected, and enjoys significant international support. But with every bomb or fresh salvo of artillery, and increasing signs that the Russians are willing to bring their weapons to bear on civilian targets, leaders in Kyiv face a difficult question: How long can or should they hold out, as this stretches into a slow and brutal war of attrition?
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Even if it’s not imminent, a negotiated settlement now appears to be at least one of the more likely, perhaps the most likely, outcomes of this conflict. As Zelenskyy himself put it in an interview with CNN, “Without negotiations, we cannot end this war.”
So what would such a settlement look like? And what are the toughest issues to resolve?
NATO and neutrality
Russia’s demand that Ukraine be barred from eventual membership in NATO was the issue that got the most attention in the lead-up to the war. It may also turn out to be the issue that’s easiest to resolve. Ukraine wasn’t likely to be invited to join NATO any time soon, and Zelenskyy has conceded that the country should probably abandon the goal. For one thing, the exact scenario NATO membership is supposed to prevent — an all-out Russian invasion of the country — has already come to pass, and Ukraine is doing a surprisingly effective job fighting back without the alliance. In place of NATO membership, Ukraine has asked for “security guarantees from a number of countries,” including the members of the U.N. Security Council, Germany and Turkey, though it’s a little unclear for now what those guarantees would look like in practice.
Actually codifying Ukraine’s non-NATO status in a way that satisfies Russia may be trickier. Doing so could require amending Ukraine’s constitution, which includes several references to the goal of NATO membership. Russia says it wants Ukraine to be a “neutral” country, which could mean several different things. According to Medinsky, the Ukrainian side has proposed an “Austrian or Swedish version of a neutral, demilitarized state,” and the Russians have said they would be open to that. Austrian neutrality was a condition demanded by the Soviet Union in 1955 in exchange for the end of the Allies’ joint occupation of the country. Sweden’s neutrality policy dates back to the Napoleonic wars.
On paper, this seems like a decent outcome for Ukraine. Both Sweden and Austria maintain their own militaries, have significant nonmember cooperation with NATO and are members of the European Union, which has its own slightly less ironclad mutual defense guarantee. Zelenskyy has called for Ukraine to be immediately admitted to the EU, but there are several countries ahead of Ukraine on the would-be member list, and the EU has so far declined to fast-track its application.
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The Russians also appear to be demanding that Ukraine refrain from hosting foreign military bases on its territory and for restrictions on the type of military aid it can receive. At various points, Russia has also demanded the “demilitarization” of Ukraine. That’s probably a non-starter now. As Jaresko points out, given the amount of heavy weaponry that’s been flowing into Ukraine over the past few weeks, “Zelenskyy doesn’t have the ability to do that, even if he chooses to.” Some military analysts suggest that Russia, realizing it is unlikely to successfully occupy the country, is now intentionally training its fire on Ukraine’s armaments industry — “demilitarization” in practice if not in writing.
The Russian language and “denazification”
The Russian government has justified its invasion as a campaign to protect Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine (who have shown no signs they were looking for Russia’s protection) and “denazify” the country’s government (a deeply inaccurate and offensive claim, as Grid has reported). Russia may demand some concessions to satisfy these pretexts. The Financial Times, citing sources close to the talks, has suggested a compromise could involve Ukraine banning certain far-right groups or renaming streets currently named for Ukrainians who fought alongside Nazi Germany during World War II. Ukraine could also roll back recently passed laws restricting the use of the Russian language in public settings. (For what it’s worth, these laws were criticized by some international human rights groups, as well as Russia.)
Whatever concessions Ukraine makes in this area are likely to be mostly symbolic: Ukraine is certain to be more unified and far more anti-Russian than it was before the war.
The territories
Even the most optimistic assessments of the talks concede that the status of Crimea and the Donbas region will likely be the most contentious and difficult-to-resolve issues. No matter how badly things go for the Russian military, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which Ukraine retakes control of the Crimean peninsula, which has been under Russian rule since 2014. But Russia is demanding more than control: It wants Ukraine to officially recognize Russia’s annexation of the region and give up its own territorial claim. This would be a very tough pill for Zelenskyy to swallow, and he could face significant domestic backlash if he gave in. There’s also the matter of the international reaction: The vast majority of governments still officially regard Crimea as part of Ukraine and might be reluctant to legitimize Russia’s seizure, a clear violation of the U.N. Charter and the sort of land grab that’s been rare in the last century.
Then there’s the Donbas — in particular, the two oblasts (provinces) of Donetsk and Luhansk, the territories at the heart of the Russia-Ukraine crisis for the last eight years. Since 2014, these have been partially under the control of two Russian-backed separatist “people’s republics.” On Feb. 21, in the days leading up to the full invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin formally recognized the independence of these two regions. Crucially, he also recognized their claim on the entirety of the two oblasts, not just the areas the separatists previously controlled. The city of Mariupol, where some of the fiercest fighting and worst atrocities have taken place in recent days, is the largest city in the previously unoccupied part of Donetsk. One of Russia’s military aims at the moment appears to be to take effective control of these regions, to force its terms on Ukraine at the negotiating table.
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Interestingly, while Zelenskyy has said that “we cannot recognize that Crimea is the territory of Russia,” he indicated just a bit more openness to a deal when it comes to these areas of the Donbas in a March 8 interview with ABC News. “I think that items regarding temporarily occupied territories and pseudo-republics not recognized by anyone but Russia,” he said, “we can discuss and find a compromise on how these territories will live on.” Prior to the invasion, Zelenskyy suggested he was open to holding a referendum on the status of both areas.
Still, he made clear in that same interview that the Ukrainian side is not ready to cave on such a core issue just yet: “The people who elected me are not ready to surrender, we are not ready for ultimatums.”
Sanctions and the international community
Most of the sweeping sanctions imposed on Russia by the U.S. and European countries since the war began came without conditions attached. In other words, it wasn’t specified what Russia would have to do get them lifted. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that in order to lift sanctions, the U.S. would have to see an “irreversible” Russian military pullback, so that “Russia won’t pick up and do exactly what it’s doing in a year or two years or three years.”
The Russian negotiators have indicated they want sanctions relief included as part of any peace deal. This would require the U.S. and NATO countries to be involved in a process they have mostly been watching from the outside so far. When asked last week if the U.S. was involved in the peace talks, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said the U.S. role was to sanction Russia and provide military support to the Ukrainians in order to “strengthen their hand as they participate in these discussions and negotiations.” U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield told CNN that it is “for the Ukrainians themselves to decide” what terms are acceptable to them.
It’s a near certainty that the U.S. and NATO countries are somewhat more engaged in the negotiating process behind the scenes, but when we start seeing more overt involvement, that could be a sign the talks are really getting serious. Samuel Charap, a political scientist at the Rand Corporation, told Grid that absent some major change on the battlefield, “the only way I see the leverage to change Russia’s current approach is the potential involvement of the U.S. and the EU putting sanctions relief on the table. I don’t know how you get Russia to make significant concessions otherwise.”
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Getting to yes
The scenes of carnage in Mariupol, Kyiv and elsewhere can make it hard to take talks all that seriously. But, Charap said, “the fact that there’s fighting is not an indication that there’s not seriousness about the negotiations. It could actually mean the opposite. It’s entirely consistent with how the Russians do conflict: talk and fight at the same time both as a means of improving their position at the negotiating table, and to demonstrate their resolve.”
But while both sides may be willing to talk, it’s clear that there’s still more fighting to be done. Put differently, both sides feel they can improve their negotiating positions by improving their positions in the war zone. Russia has only recently begun to bring cruise missiles and heavy bombardment to urban areas; Ukrainians have felt buoyed by their resistance and the fact that Russia has lost so many soldiers and heavy weapons. Neither side has exhausted its military resources to the point where it’s likely to strike a deal.
It’s hard to say when they might get to that point. Crisis Group’s Oliker told Grid the battlefield situation is unlikely to ever be conclusive. “They’re not looking for conclusive. They’re looking for enough pain.”
In many ways, because of Russia’s authoritarian political system, Putin may have more flexibility than other actors in this conflict. He doesn’t have to sell any deal he makes to skeptical lawmakers or a critical media. He kept Russia’s war aims deliberately vague, and thanks to censorship, much of the Russian public may still not be aware of just how much blood and treasure has been spilled in this “special military operation.” Censorship may also help Putin sell a less-than-ideal settlement to the Russian people. If he so chooses, he could take some concessions on NATO and the Donbas and claim that “denazification” had been accomplished.
As for the Ukrainian side, its surprising battlefield success has given it more leverage in the negotiating room, but also makes it far less likely to take a deal just to stop the bloodshed.
As Jaresko put it, “Both sides are treating this as existential. For Ukraine, it really is.”
10. A Ukrainian Victory Is the Only Acceptable Endgame
Excerpts:
How should the West respond? There is only one rule: We cannot be afraid. Russia wants us to be afraid—so afraid that we are crippled by fear, that we cannot make decisions, that we withdraw altogether, leaving the way open for a Russian conquest of Ukraine, and eventually of Poland or even further into Europe. Putin remembers very well an era when Soviet troops controlled the eastern half of Germany. But the threat to those countries will not decrease if Russia carries out massacres in Ukraine. It will grow.
Instead of fear, we should focus on a Ukrainian victory. Once we understand that this is the goal, then we can think about how to achieve it, whether through temporary boycotts of Russian gas, oil, and coal; military exercises elsewhere in the world that will distract Russian troops; humanitarian airlifts on the scale of 1948 Berlin; or more and better weapons.
The specific tactics will be determined by those who best understand diplomacy and military strategy. But the strategy has to be clear. A month ago, nobody believed this war would matter so much, and I’m sure many people wish it did not. But it does. That’s why every move we make must have a single goal: How does it help Ukraine win?
“It’s not our war” was something we might have been able to say three weeks ago. Not now.
A Ukrainian Victory Is the Only Acceptable Endgame
Ukrainians and the world’s democratic powers must work toward the only acceptable endgame.
The war in Ukraine has reached a turning point. The Russian troops that invaded the country from the north, south, and east are now scarcely moving. They have targeted schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, and a theater sheltering children, but they are not yet in control even of the places they occupy. And no wonder: Few Ukrainians are willing to collaborate with the occupiers. The overwhelming majority, more than 90 percent, believe they will defeat them. The Ukrainian army refuses to surrender, even in cities badly damaged by bombardment.
Russian planners expected the entire war, the conquest of Ukraine, to last no more than six weeks. More than half that time has already passed. There must be an endgame, a moment when the conflict stops. The Ukrainians, and the democratic powers that support Ukraine, must work toward a goal. That goal should not be a truce, or a muddle, or a decision to maintain some kind of Ukrainian resistance over the next decade, or a vow to “bleed Russia dry,” or anything else that will prolong the fighting and the instability. That goal should be a Ukrainian victory.
Before you can achieve something, you have to imagine what it will look like. And in this war, victory can be imagined without difficulty. It means that Ukraine remains a sovereign democracy, with the right to choose its own leaders and make its own treaties. There will be no pro-Russian puppet regime in Kyiv, no need for a prolonged Ukrainian resistance, no continued fighting. The Russian army retreats back over the borders. Maybe those borders could change, or maybe Ukraine could pledge neutrality, but that is for the Ukrainians to decide and not for outsiders to dictate. Maybe international peacekeepers are needed. Whatever happens, Ukraine must have strong reasons to believe that Russian troops will not quickly return.
Imagine, too, the consequences of such a victory. In Washington, most people have long believed that Ukraine is part of a regional conflict, and that Ukraine is a piece of territory that the Russians care more about than we do and always will. But this is no longer true. The Ukrainians, and especially their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, have made their cause a global one by arguing that they fight for a set of universal ideas—for democracy, yes, but also for a form of civic nationalism, based on patriotism and a respect for the rule of law; for a peaceful Europe, where disputes are resolved by institutions and not warfare; for resistance to dictatorship. Zelensky has urged Americans to remember Pearl Harbor. He appealed to the German Parliament with the phrase “Never again”—a mantra used to mean that no Hitler would be allowed to arise again—and told members that, in light of the brutal war in his country, those words are now “worthless.” He called on the European Parliament to “prove that you indeed are Europeans” and admit Ukraine to the European Union.
This language is effective because it evokes the principles that bind together the majority of Europeans, Americans, and many other people around the world, reminding them of how much worse the world was in the bloodier past, and how much worse it could be in the future if those principles no longer matter. The words Zelensky uses also reverberate because they are true. A victory for Ukraine really will be a victory for all who believe in democracy and the rule of law. Citizens of existing democracies and members of the democratic opposition in Russia, Cuba, Belarus, and Hong Kong will all be emboldened. “Their struggle is ours,” a Venezuelan acquaintance told me last week. The institutions protecting the states that embody those ideas, most notably the European Union and NATO, will be strengthened too.
Zelensky’s words resonated further because the Russians have also given this conflict enormous significance. The Russian foreign minister has just declared that this war will change global politics: “This is not about Ukraine at all, but the world order. The current crisis is a fateful, epoch-making moment in modern history. It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like.” Much as Stalin once declared that, when the Second World War ended, “everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach,” President Vladimir Putin had planned for the Russian army to impose Russia’s autocratic, kleptocratic political system on all of Ukraine. Already, the Russian occupation of some eastern-Ukrainian towns resembles the Soviet occupation of Central Europe at the end of World War II. Public officials and civic leaders—mayors and police but also members of parliament, journalists, museum curators—have been arrested and not seen since. Civilians have been terrorized at random. In Mariupol, authorities report that citizens are being forcibly deported to Russia, just as Soviet secret police deported Balts, Poles, and others to Russia after the invasions of 1939 and 1945. In the case of a Russian victory, these tactics would be applied all over Ukraine, creating mass terror, mass violence, and instability for years to come. And, yes, if we accept that outcome, autocrats from Minsk to Caracas to Beijing will take note: Genocide is now allowed.
Precisely because the stakes are so high, the next few weeks will be extremely dangerous. Putin will do what he can to create fear. The extraordinary speech he made last week, describing Russian critics of the war as “scum,” “traitors,” and “gnats,” had exactly that purpose. He spoke of Russia’s need for “self-purification” using a word with the same root as purge, the term that Stalin used when ordering the liquidation of his enemies. Putin is deliberately evoking the worst and bloodiest era of Soviet history to avoid even a hint of domestic opposition. He has just thrown away 30 years of economic gains, 30 years of Russian integration with the outside world, 30 years of investment in order to turn the clock back to the era of his youth—an era that the majority of Russians no longer remember and few wish to see restored. He seems to believe that only elevated levels of fear will prevent them from protesting, once they understand what has happened to their country. He may be right.
Putin and his propagandists are dropping hints about chemical and nuclear weapons for the same reason. They want outsiders, and especially Americans, to fear the consequences of helping Ukraine. The use of hypersonic weaponry; the threats of nuclear war made on Russian television; even the habit, established a few years back, of practicing the use of nuclear weapons during military exercises, sometimes to simulate a hit on Warsaw, sometimes to simulate a bomb exploding in the air—all of that has a purpose. So does the strange, ranting, anti-Polish letter issued by Dimitri Medvedev, the Putin crony who briefly served as president of Russia before Putin decided he wanted the job back again. This screed contained insults, veiled threats, and an old Soviet-era complaint that the Poles were “ungrateful” that the Red Army pushed Hitler out of Poland, and then established a brutal new occupation regime in Hitler’s wake. Among other things, Medvedev was sending a reminder: Poland could be next. The recent Russian strike on a base near the Polish border sent the same message.
How should the West respond? There is only one rule: We cannot be afraid. Russia wants us to be afraid—so afraid that we are crippled by fear, that we cannot make decisions, that we withdraw altogether, leaving the way open for a Russian conquest of Ukraine, and eventually of Poland or even further into Europe. Putin remembers very well an era when Soviet troops controlled the eastern half of Germany. But the threat to those countries will not decrease if Russia carries out massacres in Ukraine. It will grow.
Instead of fear, we should focus on a Ukrainian victory. Once we understand that this is the goal, then we can think about how to achieve it, whether through temporary boycotts of Russian gas, oil, and coal; military exercises elsewhere in the world that will distract Russian troops; humanitarian airlifts on the scale of 1948 Berlin; or more and better weapons.
The specific tactics will be determined by those who best understand diplomacy and military strategy. But the strategy has to be clear. A month ago, nobody believed this war would matter so much, and I’m sure many people wish it did not. But it does. That’s why every move we make must have a single goal: How does it help Ukraine win?
“It’s not our war” was something we might have been able to say three weeks ago. Not now.
11. Experts say Biden's risk-averse approach to Russian could create greater threat
It is a concern. Yes I do not want WWII or escalation to nuclear war. But if we do not show strength to Putin he is likely to escalate because he follows the Lenin dictum: 'You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw.'
Excerpts:
Beyond addressing the immediate crisis, experts say NATO must ensure it is ready to respond to a more aggressive Russia and prepare for the new geopolitical frontier it is forging.
"The war in Ukraine will end at some point will end, but Russia will remain," said Graham. "And what the conflict has demonstrated is that the hopes we had had for integrating Russia into the Euro-Atlantic community are dead."
Pavel says plotting out a strategy not only for ending the conflict -- but for managing exactly how the conflict ends -- will be critical.
"When wars have ended in the past, the new boundaries have been drawn where the force set, through the middle of Germany, through the middle of Berlin," Pavel said. "When the dust settles, where do we want Russian forces to be and where do we want Ukrainian and potentially NATO forces to be?"
Another repercussion may be an onslaught of arms races. Russia's alleged deployment of hypersonic missiles—a technology the U.S. has not yet mastered—is an area of competition, but Pavel says it's not the only one.
"Putin has spent 10, 15 years modernizing the Russian nuclear forces -- a lot of new types of exotic Russian nuclear weapons, pretty significant," he said. "Certainly, the U.S. and some NATO members have nuclear capabilities, but they are aging. They have not been modernized at the pace that we should be doing."
"All of this means that we'll have we'll have a lot more to do, unfortunately, on the security agenda going forward," Pavel added.
Experts say Biden's risk-averse approach to Russian could create greater threat
WARSAW, POLAND -- President Joe Biden's high-stakes summit with other NATO leaders on Thursday will be one of the most scrutinized meetings on the world stage in decades, and could have enormous implications for both the war in Ukraine and the global balance of power.
Despite calls from Ukraine to do more to help stave off Russia's ruthless invasion, Biden has erred on the side of caution -- wary of escalating the conflict by drawing in U.S. forces as part of a more direct NATO response. But after nearly a month of fighting, some foreign policy and national security experts ABC News spoke to say it may be time for the alliance to take on a more direct role.
Patrick Semansky/AP
President Joe Biden walks on the South Lawn of the White House before boarding Marine One, March 18, 2022.
Preparing for 'the worst case'
Since before the fighting broke out, Biden has insisted that American troops would not fight Russian forces inside Ukraine, warning that going head-to-head would lead to "a third world war."
But Barry Pavel, a former National Security Council senior official during the Bush and Obama administration and the senior vice president and director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council, says that's far from inevitable.
"There have been other cases where U.S. and Russian forces have unfortunately come into friction and World War III didn't start," Pavel said, characterizing the strategy as simplistic. "There are hundreds of options that could be done between what NATO is doing now and risking World War III."
The greater threat, warns Pavel, might be in leaving Putin unchecked.
"If he is emboldened by success in Ukraine, then he will be more aggressive in his efforts to nibble and to move into areas of perceived weakness in NATO members," he said. "If he achieves his goal, you'll have Russian forces on the borders of seven NATO members, including nuclear forces in Belarus, and so he'll use that new posture to really heighten European insecurity to a great degree."
And it isn’t Biden’s -- or NATO’s -- choice alone. Moscow could also escalate the conflict by striking a NATO member, either intentionally or accidentally, triggering a sweeping response.
"Article 5 -- in the most basic sense -- is NATO's 'Three Musketeers' provision, which is to say, 'all for one and one for all' -- an attack against any member is an attack against every member of NATO," said Sean Monaghan, a former civil servant in the U.K. Ministry of Defence and a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, calling it "the most important red line in international politics."
"This is a contingency that NATO forces are already preparing for," said Monaghan. "That's what the military does -- prepare for the worst case."
While the response to a Russian strike wouldn’t necessarily need to be eye for an eye, Monaghan says in theory, the alliance would be obligated to provide “an overwhelming response” if any member state was hit.
“The practice, some would say that NATO being collective of 30 nations, that have to reach consensus for any actions to be to be taken, that might hinder a response. But I think in this conflict, NATO has shown itself to be quite a lot more resolute and speedier of action than many people would have predicted,” he added.
Giuseppe Distefano/AP
A U.S. Navy pilot sits in a Boeing EA-18G Growler electronic warfare aircraft on the deck of the USS Harry S. Truman carrier cruising in the Mediterranean Sea, March 17, 2022. The aircraft carrier is operating a joint exercise in the central Mediterranean Sea with French and Italian carriers directly supporting NATO enhanced air policing missions and patrolling the Romanian border with Ukraine.
The next phase for NATO
While the Biden administration has underscored the power of NATO’s overwhelming unity in the face of Russian aggression, when it comes to charting a path forward to counter the Kremlin, cracks within the alliance are beginning to emerge. While the summit will be an opportunity for the powers to get on the same page, it may also cast a spotlight on areas of disagreement.
For instance, Poland plans to propose a peacekeeping mission to Ukraine -- a move the U.S. has effectively ruled out. Article 5 lays plain that an attack on a member merits a response, but will the alliance retaliate if Russia resorts to chemical weapons in Ukraine? And while NATO may not be willing to establish a no-fly zone over the country, Pavel says that doesn't mean there isn’t a debate to be had about what more can be done to help the country defend its own airspace.
"In terms of the weapons pipeline, we should be doing much more. We can't let the Ukrainians fly aircraft in their own defense? Forget these ridiculous restrictions on what equipment we can provide a sovereign country who asks for it to defend themselves against an invading force" he said, referencing the U.S. and other allies' hesitancy to hand over fighter jets to Ukraine for fear of Russian retaliation.
Pavel added that additional anti-aircraft and anti-ship weaponry, as well as enhanced intelligence support and humanitarian aid on the ground, could go a long way in resistance efforts.
Thomas Graham, a former NSC senior director for Russia and a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, says that beyond discussing support for Ukraine, NATO leaders should use the upcoming summit to make sharpen their signaling to the Kremlin.
"NATO leaders want to make sure that they've done everything that they can in order to deter the Russians," he said. "Have we augmented the forces in Eastern Europe to the appropriate levels? And have we convinced the Russians that in fact we are determined to honor the Article Five guarantee and protect every inch of NATO territory?"
Monahan predicts this week's gathering will result in a reversal to a mindset not seen since the days of the Soviet Union.
"We can foresee it as the beginning of a step change, almost a return to NATO's Cold War posture of, if not territorial defense, then a much increased forward presence designed to deter a Russian regime that is clearly willing to resort to war" he said.
Yves Herman/Reuters
A U.S. Marine participates in a military exercise called "Cold Response 2022," a gathering of around 30,000 troops from NATO member countries plus Finland and Sweden, amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in Evenes, Norway, March 22, 2022.
Battle lines of the future
Beyond addressing the immediate crisis, experts say NATO must ensure it is ready to respond to a more aggressive Russia and prepare for the new geopolitical frontier it is forging.
"The war in Ukraine will end at some point will end, but Russia will remain," said Graham. "And what the conflict has demonstrated is that the hopes we had had for integrating Russia into the Euro-Atlantic community are dead."
Pavel says plotting out a strategy not only for ending the conflict -- but for managing exactly how the conflict ends -- will be critical.
"When wars have ended in the past, the new boundaries have been drawn where the force set, through the middle of Germany, through the middle of Berlin," Pavel said. "When the dust settles, where do we want Russian forces to be and where do we want Ukrainian and potentially NATO forces to be?"
Another repercussion may be an onslaught of arms races. Russia's alleged deployment of hypersonic missiles—a technology the U.S. has not yet mastered—is an area of competition, but Pavel says it's not the only one.
"Putin has spent 10, 15 years modernizing the Russian nuclear forces -- a lot of new types of exotic Russian nuclear weapons, pretty significant," he said. "Certainly, the U.S. and some NATO members have nuclear capabilities, but they are aging. They have not been modernized at the pace that we should be doing."
"All of this means that we'll have we'll have a lot more to do, unfortunately, on the security agenda going forward," Pavel added.
12. How Europe Got Hooked on Russian Gas Despite Reagan’s Warnings
Some interesting history.
How Europe Got Hooked on Russian Gas Despite Reagan’s Warnings
A Soviet-era pipeline, opposed by the president but supported by the oil and gas industry, set up the dependency that today helps fund the Russian assault on Ukraine.
President Ronal Reagan imposed sanctions in 1981 in an effort to block a Soviet pipleine project, but he soon ran into stiff opposition from industry.
By
March 23, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
The language in the C.I.A. memo was unequivocal: The 3,500-mile gas pipeline from Siberia to Germany is a direct threat to the future of Western Europe, creating “serious repercussions” from a dangerous reliance on Russian fuel.
The agency wasn’t briefing President Biden today. It was advising President Reagan more than four decades ago.
The memo was prescient. That Soviet-era pipeline, the subject of a bitter fight during the Reagan administration, marked the start of Europe’s heavy dependence on Russian natural gas to heat homes and fuel industry. However, those gas purchases now help fund Vladimir V. Putin’s war machine in Ukraine, despite worldwide condemnation of the attacks and global efforts to punish Russia financially.
In 1981, Reagan imposed sanctions to try to block the pipeline, a major Soviet initiative designed to carry huge amounts of fuel to America’s critical allies in Europe. But he swiftly faced stiff opposition — not just from the Kremlin and European nations eager for a cheap source of gas, but also from a powerful lobby close to home: oil and gas companies that stood to profit from access to Russia’s gargantuan gas reserves.
In a public-relations and lobbying blitz that played out across newspaper opinion pages, congressional committees and a direct appeal to the White House, industry executives and lobbyists fought the sanctions. “Reagan has absolutely no reason to forbid this business,” Wolfgang Oehme, chairman of an Exxon subsidiary with a stake in the pipeline, said at the time.
Those efforts, nearly a half-century ago, show how some of the world’s largest oil and gas companies played a critical role in opening up Russia’s reserves by opposing sanctions and advocating for business interests over national security, human rights or environmental concerns.
Today, Europe’s reliance on Russia’s gas has put European nations in a compromised position: They continue to purchase Russian energy, transferring enormous sums of money to Moscow, which fund a Russian invasion that they denounce.
Reagan’s effort to block the pipeline decades ago, which ultimately failed, also laid the foundations for a huge build-out of natural gas, which is now hindering Europe’s attempts to tackle climate change. Even as natural gas has helped to replace dirtier coal, the pipelines and other gas infrastructure that followed have effectively committed Europe to a reliance on gas that not only continues today, but remains difficult to unravel even in a moment of global unity against Russian aggression.
“The Soviet Union is a superpower that really emerged on the back of its oil and gas exports,” said Agnia Grigas, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an expert on the security and energy issues of Russia and the former Soviet states. “Nothing has changed.”
Pipes that were intended for use in the Nord Stream 2 project, a pipeline that was halted becasue of Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
In the face of opposition both at home and abroad, Reagan in 1982 reversed the sanctions, which had stopped American companies from supplying or participating in the project. The pipeline from Siberia to West Germany opened two years later.
The industry lobbying has continued to this day.
In 2014, when the Obama administration imposed sanctions against Russia following its military seizure of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine, Exxon fought the measures, meeting with White House officials.
The Biden Administration’s Environmental Agenda
President Biden is pushing stronger regulations, but faces a narrow path to achieving his goals in the fight against global warming.
As Russia this year massed troops on the Ukrainian border, the American Petroleum Institute, the powerful industry group, lobbied against tougher sanctions, saying that any measures needed to be “as targeted as possible in order to limit potential harm to the competitiveness of U.S. companies.”
In the wake of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, Shell, BP and Exxon have said they will end their Russian operations.
Casey Norton, a spokesman for Exxon, said the company “does not advocate for or against sanctions” but had communicated with the U.S. government “to provide information about the potential impacts on energy markets and investments.” He said that Exxon was complying with all sanctions, had discontinued its flagship project in Russia and was withholding new investment there.
Bethany Williams, an American Petroleum Institute spokeswoman, said that any interactions by its members with policymakers on sanctions had been limited to “ensuring retaliatory measures are clearly written to reduce any room for uncertainty and ensure maximum compliance.”
John Murphy, senior vice president for international policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said his organization had a longstanding belief that sanctions would very likely fail if they were unilateral. Exxon, the American Petroleum Institute and the Chamber of Commerce all condemned Russia’s invasion. Shell and BP had no comment.
The concerns raised during the Reagan administration four decades ago have been borne out. Before Russia’s attack on Ukraine last month, Germany relied on Russia for 55 percent of its gas, for example, complicating Europe’s response to Russian aggression in Ukraine.
For Ukraine, the consequences have been devastating. “The companies that have been working with the Russian regime were driven only by pure financial interest,” said Oleg Ustenko, a top adviser to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. “They closed their eyes to the morality of it, and now we are paying the consequences.”
Parallels in History
Vladimir V. Putin, then prime minister, and Gazprom chief executive Alexey B. Miller during a 2009 dispute in which Russia shut off supplies to Europe.Credit...Mikhail Metzel/Associated Press
On a frigid Sunday morning in December 1981, millions of Poles woke up to find their country under a state of martial law. Global condemnation of the Polish authorities, and of their backers in the Kremlin, was swift.
Already wary of the Soviets’ plan to build a gas pipeline to Western Europe, the Reagan administration produced a list of economic sanctions that essentially banned American companies from helping to build it. “The fate of a proud and ancient nation hangs in the balance,” Reagan said in his Christmas address.
The measure drew immediate ire from America’s European allies, where the $25 billion pipeline promised a stable source of gas at a time nations were still reeling from the oil shocks of the 1970s. But within the United States, it was the oil and gas lobby that fought back.
The sanctions would “aggravate further our international reputation for commercial reliability,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represented major oil and gas companies and pipeline manufacturers among numerous other industries, warned in a letter to the White House. The pipeline would, in fact, give Western Europe “a degree of leverage over the Soviets rather than vice versa,” Richard Lesher, the group’s president, later told The Washington Post.
Following intense lobbying, the House Foreign Affairs Committee voted to lift the sanctions, despite a letter from Secretary of State George P. Shultz warning that such legislation would “severely cripple” the administration’s ability to deal with the Polish crisis.
That battle four decades ago marked the start of a huge build-out of gas infrastructure in Europe. Today, an extensive network of pipelines stretches from Russia to Europe, supplying about 40 percent of the continent’s gas.
That network has given Moscow leverage over its European neighbors. In 2009, when Russia and Ukraine became embroiled in a diplomatic dispute, Russia shut off its gas supplies, leaving tens of thousands of homes without heat. More than a dozen people froze to death, mainly in Poland, before Russia reopened its pipelines.
An abundant flow of gas from Russia had consequences beyond security, slowing Europe’s efforts to tackle climate change by shifting toward renewables, experts say. The European Union has said it now aims to reduce its gas imports by two-thirds, and quickly ramp up its use of wind, solar and other forms of renewable energy.
“Obviously they could have done that before, but there was no incentive to,” said Margarita Balmaceda, professor of diplomacy and international relations at Seton Hall University and an associate at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Access to Russia’s gas, she said, had “definitely slowed the move toward renewables.”
Ties to Russia Blossom
Mr. Putin and Exxon chairman Rex Tillerson, wearing the Order of Friendship, a Russian state decoration, in St. Petersburg in 2013.Credit...Mikhail Klimentyev/TASS, via Alamy
The fossil fuel companies’ early involvement in the Siberian pipeline was also the start of a courtship of a region with some of the world’s largest reserves of oil, natural gas and other commodities. Following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, successive U.S. administrations also traded their vigilance for an increasingly warm embrace of Moscow, pushing for closer energy ties. (In 2001, President George W. Bush famously said that he had looked Mr. Putin in the eye and got a sense of his soul, comments he later said he regretted.)
Spurred by a thaw in East-West relations, fossil fuel companies pursued joint ventures to develop Russia’s oil and gas fields with Russia’s state-controlled oil and gas giants. BP took a nearly 20 percent stake in Rosneft, the Russian oil giant, that accounted for a third of BP’s oil and gas production and more than half its reserves. Shell teamed with Gazprom, the state-owned gas company, to work on projects including Russia’s first liquefied natural gas plant, and invested in the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline.
Both BP and Shell say they are now exiting those projects.
Exxon, which invested in a gas project near the Pacific island of Sakhalin in the 1990s, in recent years had pursued a heftier stake in Russian oil and gas production, signing a deal with Rosneft for a possible $500 billion investment. A video produced by Rosneft in 2012 portrayed the wide-ranging nature of their planned partnership: joint headquarters in St. Petersburg and Houston, a slice of Exxon’s operations in the Permian Basin in Texas and Gulf of Mexico, and the sharing of fracking and offshore drilling technology.
In 2013, Mr. Putin awarded the Exxon chief executive, Rex Tillerson, the Order of Friendship, one of the highest honors Russia gives to foreign citizens.
The fallout from Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula the following year forced Exxon to stall the deal, but not without a fight. Even after the United States adopted sanctions, Exxon tried to push ahead with the Rosneft deal, signing legal documents with the state-owned company’s chairman, Igor I. Sechin. Exxon was later fined $2 million for actions the Treasury Department said “demonstrated reckless disregard for U.S. sanctions requirements.”
Exxon sued, saying that the U.S. sanctions covered only Mr. Sechin’s personal affairs, not the company he presided over. A Texas judge ruled in favor of Exxon, though the judge called Exxon’s conduct “risky and, perhaps, imprudent.”
Exxon also worked to influence Congress’s attempts to pass sanctions against Russia around that time, its lobbying disclosures show.
Because of reluctance among some members of Congress to oppose those sanctions, “we had to step in front of that and explain to them how that was hurting U.S. businesses,” Keith McCoy, a former Exxon lobbyist said in a 2021 video released as part of a sting operation by the environmental group Greenpeace.
As recently as January 2022, the American Petroleum Institute lobbied to soften sanctions against Russia, saying they should be “as targeted as possible in order to limit potential harm to the competitiveness of U.S. companies.”
At his confirmation hearing to become Secretary of State under former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Tillerson, the Exxon chief executive, stated that he had “never lobbied against sanctions personally” and that “to my knowledge, Exxon never directly lobbied against sanctions.”
Bob Corker, a Republican Senator from Tennessee who was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, interjected, “I think you called me at the time.”
Asked about the call this week, Mr. Corker said the two men regularly discussed policy on the phone.
13. We witnessed Mariupol's agony and fled a Russian hit list
We witnessed Mariupol's agony and fled a Russian hit list
AP · by MSTYSLAV CHERNOV · March 21, 2022
March 21, 2022 GMT
MARIUPOL, Ukraine (AP) — The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in.
We had been documenting the siege of the Ukrainian city by Russian troops for more than two weeks and were the only international journalists left in the city. We were reporting inside the hospital when gunmen began stalking the corridors. Surgeons gave us white scrubs to wear as camouflage.
Suddenly at dawn, a dozen soldiers burst in: “Where are the journalists, for fuck’s sake?”
The walls of the surgery shook from artillery and machine gun fire outside, and it seemed safer to stay inside. But the Ukrainian soldiers were under orders to take us with them.
___
Mstyslav Chernov is a video journalist for The Associated Press. This is his account of the siege of Mariupol, as documented with photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and told to correspondent Lori Hinnant.
___
We ran into the street, abandoning the doctors who had sheltered us, the pregnant women who had been shelled and the people who slept in the hallways because they had nowhere else to go. I felt terrible leaving them all behind.
Nine minutes, maybe 10, an eternity through roads and bombed-out apartment buildings. As shells crashed nearby, we dropped to the ground. Time was measured from one shell to the next, our bodies tense and breath held. Shockwave after shockwave jolted my chest, and my hands went cold.
We reached an entryway, and armored cars whisked us to a darkened basement. Only then did we learn from a policeman we knew why the Ukrainians had risked the lives of soldiers to extract us from the hospital.
“If they catch you, they will get you on camera and they will make you say that everything you filmed is a lie,” he said. “All your efforts and everything you have done in Mariupol will be in vain.”
The officer, who had once begged us to show the world his dying city, now pleaded with us to go. He nudged us toward the thousands of battered cars preparing to leave Mariupol.
It was March 15. We had no idea if we would make it out alive.
Thousands in a humanitarian convoy escape Mariupol, Ukraine, on March 15, 2022. (AP Video/Mstyslav Chernov)
____
I have since covered wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh, trying to show the world the devastation first-hand. But when the Americans and then the Europeans evacuated their embassy staffs from the city of Kyiv this winter, and when I pored over maps of the Russian troop build-up just across from my hometown, my only thought was, “My poor country.”
In the first few days of the war, the Russians bombed the enormous Freedom Square in Kharkiv, where I had hung out until my 20s.
I knew Russian forces would see the eastern port city of Mariupol as a strategic prize because of its location on the Sea of Azov. So on the evening of Feb. 23, I headed there with my long-time colleague Evgeniy Maloletka, a Ukrainian photographer for The Associated Press, in his white Volkswagen van.
On the way, we started worrying about spare tires, and found online a man nearby willing to sell to us in the middle of the night. We explained to him and to a cashier at the all-night grocery store that we were preparing for war. They looked at us like we were crazy.
About a quarter of Mariupol’s 430,000 residents left in those first days, while they still could. But few people believed a war was coming, and by the time most realized their mistake, it was too late.
One bomb at a time, the Russians cut electricity, water, food supplies and finally, crucially, the cell phone, radio and television towers. The few other journalists in the city got out before the last connections were gone and a full blockade settled in.
The absence of information in a blockade accomplishes two goals.
Chaos is the first. People don’t know what’s going on, and they panic. At first I couldn’t understand why Mariupol fell apart so quickly. Now I know it was because of the lack of communication.
Impunity is the second goal. With no information coming out of a city, no pictures of demolished buildings and dying children, the Russian forces could do whatever they wanted. If not for us, there would be nothing.
That’s why we took such risks to be able to send the world what we saw, and that’s what made Russia angry enough to hunt us down.
I have never, ever felt that breaking the silence was so important.
___
A second child died, then a third. Ambulances stopped picking up the wounded because people couldn’t call them without a signal, and they couldn’t navigate the bombed-out streets.
The doctors pleaded with us to film families bringing in their own dead and wounded, and let us use their dwindling generator power for our cameras. No one knows what’s going on in our city, they said.
There was still one place in the city to get a steady connection, outside a looted grocery store on Budivel’nykiv Avenue. Once a day, we drove there and crouched beneath the stairs to upload photos and video to the world. The stairs wouldn’t have done much to protect us, but it felt safer than being out in the open.
The signal vanished by March 3. We tried to send our video from the 7th-floor windows of the hospital. It was from there that we saw the last shreds of the solid middle-class city of Mariupol come apart.
The Port City superstore was being looted, and we headed that way through artillery and machine gunfire. Dozens of people ran and pushed shopping carts loaded with electronics, food, clothes.
A shell exploded on the roof of the store, throwing me to the ground outside. I tensed, awaiting a second hit, and cursed myself a hundred times because my camera wasn’t on to record it.
And there it was, another shell hitting the apartment building next to me with a terrible whoosh. I shrank behind a corner for cover.
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A teenager passed by rolling an office chair loaded with electronics, boxes tumbling off the sides. “My friends were there and the shell hit 10 meters from us,” he told me. “I have no idea what happened to them.”
We raced back to the hospital. Within 20 minutes, the injured came in, some of them scooped into shopping carts.
For several days, the only link we had to the outside world was through a satellite phone. And the only spot where that phone worked was out in the open, right next to a shell crater. I would sit down, make myself small and try to catch the connection.
Everybody was asking, please tell us when the war will be over. I had no answer.
Every single day, there would be a rumor that the Ukrainian army was going to come to break through the siege. But no one came.
___
By this time I had witnessed deaths at the hospital, corpses in the streets, dozens of bodies shoved into a mass grave. I had seen so much death that I was filming almost without taking it in.
On March 9, twin airstrikes shredded the plastic taped over our van’s windows. I saw the fireball just a heartbeat before pain pierced my inner ear, my skin, my face.
We watched smoke rise from a maternity hospital. When we arrived, emergency workers were still pulling bloodied pregnant women from the ruins.
Our batteries were almost out of juice, and we had no connection to send the images. Curfew was minutes away. A police officer overheard us talking about how to get news of the hospital bombing out.
“This will change the course of the war,” he said. He took us to a power source and an internet connection.
We had recorded so many dead people and dead children, an endless line. I didn’t understand why he thought still more deaths could change anything.
I was wrong.
In the dark, we sent the images by lining up three mobile phones with the video file split into three parts to speed the process up. It took hours, well beyond curfew. The shelling continued, but the officers assigned to escort us through the city waited patiently.
Then our link to the world outside Mariupol was again severed.
We went back to an empty hotel basement with an aquarium now filled with dead goldfish. In our isolation, we knew nothing about a growing Russian disinformation campaign to discredit our work.
The Russian Embassy in London put out two tweets calling the AP photos fake and claiming a pregnant woman was an actress. The Russian ambassador held up copies of the photos at a U.N. Security Council meeting and repeated lies about the attack on the maternity hospital.
In the meantime, in Mariupol, we were inundated with people asking us for the latest news from the war. So many people came to me and said, please film me so my family outside the city will know I’m alive.
By this time, no Ukrainian radio or TV signal was working in Mariupol. The only radio you could catch broadcast twisted Russian lies — that Ukrainians were holding Mariupol hostage, shooting at buildings, developing chemical weapons. The propaganda was so strong that some people we talked to believed it despite the evidence of their own eyes.
The message was constantly repeated, in Soviet style: Mariupol is surrounded. Surrender your weapons.
(AP Video/Mstyslav Chernov)
On March 11, in a brief call without details, our editor asked if we could find the women who survived the maternity hospital airstrike to prove their existence. I realized the footage must have been powerful enough to provoke a response from the Russian government.
We went up to the 7th floor to send the video from the tenuous Internet link. From there, I watched as tank after tank rolled up alongside the hospital compound, each marked with the letter Z that had become the Russian emblem for the war.
We were surrounded: Dozens of doctors, hundreds of patients, and us.
___
The Ukrainian soldiers who had been protecting the hospital had vanished. And the path to our van, with our food, water and equipment, was covered by a Russian sniper who had already struck a medic venturing outside.
Hours passed in darkness, as we listened to the explosions outside. That’s when the soldiers came to get us, shouting in Ukrainian.
It didn’t feel like a rescue. It felt like we were just being moved from one danger to another. By this time, nowhere in Mariupol was safe, and there was no relief. You could die at any moment.
I felt amazingly grateful to the soldiers, but also numb. And ashamed that I was leaving.
We crammed into a Hyundai with a family of three and pulled into a 5-kilometer-long traffic jam out of the city. Around 30,000 people made it out of Mariupol that day — so many that Russian soldiers had no time to look closely into cars with windows covered with flapping bits of plastic.
People were nervous. They were fighting, screaming at each other. Every minute there was an airplane or airstrike. The ground shook.
We crossed 15 Russian checkpoints. At each, the mother sitting in the front of our car would pray furiously, loud enough for us to hear.
As we drove through them — the third, the tenth, the 15th, all manned with soldiers with heavy weapons — my hopes that Mariupol was going to survive were fading. I understood that just to reach the city, the Ukrainian army would have to break through so much ground. And it wasn’t going to happen.
At sunset, we came to a bridge destroyed by the Ukrainians to stop the Russian advance. A Red Cross convoy of about 20 cars was stuck there already. We all turned off the road together into fields and back lanes.
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The guards at checkpoint No. 15 spoke Russian in the rough accent of the Caucasus. They ordered the whole convoy to cut the headlights to conceal the arms and equipment parked on the roadside. I could barely make out the white Z painted on the vehicles.
As we pulled up to the sixteenth checkpoint, we heard voices. Ukrainian voices. I felt an overwhelming relief. The mother in the front of the car burst into tears. We were out.
We were the last journalists in Mariupol. Now there are none.
We are still flooded by messages from people wanting to learn the fate of loved ones we photographed and filmed. They write to us desperately and intimately, as though we are not strangers, as though we can help them.
When a Russian airstrike hit a theater where hundreds of people had taken shelter late last week, I could pinpoint exactly where we should go to learn about survivors, to hear firsthand what it was like to be trapped for endless hours beneath piles of rubble. I know that building and the destroyed homes around it. I know people who are trapped underneath it.
And on Sunday, Ukrainian authorities said Russia had bombed an art school with about 400 people in it in Mariupol.
But we can no longer get there.
___
This account was related by Chernov to Associated Press reporter Lori Hinnant, who wrote from Paris. Vasylisa Stepanenko contributed to the report.
___
AP · by MSTYSLAV CHERNOV · March 21, 2022
14. Ukraine War Update - March 23, 2022 | SOF News
Ukraine War Update - March 23, 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.
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Russian Campaign Update. Over 1,100 missiles have been fired into Ukraine. There were no real changes on the ground anywhere in Ukraine over the past few days. There was fighting and shelling in the Kyiv suburbs, Chernihiv, Sumy, and Kherson. Some military experts say that Putin’s invasion hasn’t succeeded yet – but that it still has a chance over time. Russian military expert Michael Kofman says the next two weeks could determine the fate of Ukraine. Kofman points out that wars of attrition generally favor the nation with the greater manpower and material resources; of which Russia has both. (Politico, Mar 21, 2022). The Pentagon stated that Russia’s combat power in Ukraine has been diminished by 10%. Until significant reinforcements arrive the Russians will rely on long-range bombardment of Ukrainian military positions as well as civilian infrastructure. Some military commentators say that Russia is starting to adapt to a prolonged conflict, and that with a military significantly bigger than Ukraine’s, it may prevail. (Task & Purpose, Mar 21, 2022).
“They own the long clock. We are calculating time not in weeks or days – but in lives.”
Senior Ukrainian officer
Ukraine Defense. There have been local counterattacks by Ukraine on Russian positions. The ability of the military to conduct major offensives is limited. They have been successful in holding the Russians at bay in Kyiv. The Russian positions are currently (Mar 22) about 15 km to the northwest and about 30 km to the east. The Ukrainian defense has been stiff – with a great reliance on anti-aircraft and anti-armor missiles. When these supplies are depleted things will get more complicated for Ukraine.
Fight for the Skies. Against the odds, the Ukrainian Air Force continues to work at denying Russia air superiority over Ukraine. It wasn’t wiped out on the ground and in the air in the first few days of the war, as many predicted, the Ukraine Air Force is still flying. The Ukrainian airplanes have been dispersed to smaller airstrips in the western part of the country. Most air operations by the Russians are conducted at night. Read more in “Ukrainian Fighter Pilots Describe Their Desperate Air War Against Russia”, The WarZone, March 22, 2022. One Ukrainian fighter pilot came out of retirement to defend his nation. Read the story of the “Grey Wolf“, one of the most respected pilots in the Ukrainian Air Force. Unfortunately, he was killed when his aircraft was struck by a Russian anti-aircraft missile. The New York Times has an article about how the Ukrainian Air Force is fighting back. (subscription).
Maritime Activities. An amphibious landing force on several ships is still positioned in the Black Sea off the coast of Odessa and could potentially land a substantial element of Russian naval infantry. If a landing takes place, it would likely be a supporting action for a ground assault on Odessa from the Crimea region. Maritime activity in the Black Sea has been quiet, with no shelling of the coastline of Ukraine in the past 24 hours. The Russians have about 21 ships in the Black Sea – about a dozen surface combatants and maybe 9 amphibious shops for landing troop and tanks. The Russian blockade of Ukrainian shipping continues. There are about seven ships in the Sea of Azov, one of them a minesweeper.
Kyiv. The Russians continue to shell the capital city and strengthen their defensive positions. There were a series of small attacks carried out by the Russians and Ukrainians with no significant change of the battlespace. Some small towns in the Kyiv area to the west and north have changed hands. Ukrainian forces have retaken Makariv, located west of Kyiv. It is considered a key objective that hinders the move southward of Russian forces that might try to encircle Kyiv.
Kharkiv. The city has experienced heavy shelling over the past two days (Mar 21 and 22). There are no indications that the Russians can take Kharkiv. The city is not yet encircled and supply routes from the west are still open. At least half of the 1.4 million residents have fled to the west. Many of the city residents are living in basements or in the underground metro. “Life underground: Ukrainian families make new homes in the Kharkiv subway”, The Washington Post, March 21, 2022.
Mariupol. This coastal city is seeing continued bombardment by artillery and long-range missiles. Some missiles have been fired from the Sea of Azov where the Russians have five to six ships. The estimated civilian population ranges from 250,000 to 300,000 people. The supplies of water, food, and other essential items are very low. More than 1,200 citizens were evacuated on Tuesday (Mar 22), most of them on evacuation buses.
Mykolayiv and Odessa. The city remains in Ukrainian hands. The Russians are located to the north and northeast of the city. 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. If Odessa does fall to the Russians, then it could decide the fate of neighboring Moldova.
General Information
Biden Travels to Europe Wednesday. According to statements by the U.S. government, President Biden will be traveling to Europe to speak with European leaders and meet with NATO officials. He will attend an emergency NATO meeting, address the European Council, meet with Group of Seven (G-7) leaders in Brussels. He will then head to Poland on Friday. It is expected that Biden will announce new sanctions on Russia during the European visit.
Refugees, IDPs, and Humanitarian Crisis. As of March 22, over 3,400,000 refugees have left Ukraine according to data provided by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR). The highest amount of refugee traffic into Poland occurred in the first weeks of March – reaching well over 100K a day. The daily amount into Poland now is about 25K. Over 2.5 million have gone to Poland since the invasion began.
Russian and Chemical Weapons. Things are not going Russia’s way in Ukraine. They may decide to step it up and escalate, possibly with the use of chemical weapons. Analysts say that Russia may attack chemical plants in Ukraine. This could be part of a ‘false flag’ operation where the Russians attack a chemical facility, cause a ‘discharge’ of dangerous elements, blame it on the Ukrainians, and then respond with their ‘own’ chemical attack as a retaliation. “Is Russia getting ready to use chemical weapons in Ukraine?”, New Scientist, March 22, 2022.
Prison for Russian Dissident. Aleksey Navalny, a leading opposition leader in Russia, has been sentenced to nine more years in a high security prison. He has long pushed for transparency and accountability from the Putin regime. As an opposition politician and anti-corruption activist he has been persecuted by Putin’s government. In 2020 he almost died as a result of being poisoned by Russian security services. He has been imprisoned since returning to Russia from overseas after receiving medical treatment. “Aleksey Navalny Unjustly Convicted Again”, U.S. Department of State, March 22, 2022.
U.S. ABCTs. At the height of the Cold War the United States had seven armored brigades in Europe, but they were gradually drawn down with the last one inactivated in 2013. There are currently five Armored Brigade Combat Teams deployed overseas; three in Europe, one in the Central Command region, and one in the Pacific. One ABCT has been in Europe as part of the Atlantic Resolve rotation, one is heading to Europe, and one deployed to Europe just after the Ukraine invasion by Russia. The active component has 11 ABCTs while the National Guard has five ABCTs. Read more in “Armor brigade workload may dramatically increase if Ukraine crisis holds”, Army Times, March 22, 2022. And while we are talking about tanks . . . Max Boot says that Russian tanks are taking a beating and asks if they still have a place on the modern battlefield? (The Washington Post, Marc 22, 2022).
Cyber and Information Operations
Russian Comms – Ukraine is Listening. Russia’s encrypted military phones aren’t working. The Russians did not properly plan for communications for a long-term military campaign. Ukraine has been either listening or jamming Russian communications. Apparently Russia’s encrypted cell phones rely on 3G and 4G communications towers. However, the Russians bombed many these towers in the early days of the campaign. So now they are stealing phones from Ukrainian citizens and using them to pass classified traffic in the clear. Ukraine has banned all mobile numbers carrying Russia’s country code. “The Ukrainians Are Listening: Russia’s Military Radios Are Getting Owned”, Foreign Policy, March 22, 2022.
Russia Bans Meta. A Russian court ruled that the firm that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp is an extremist organization and has banned it from operating in Russia. This is a continuation of an anti-press campaign to control the news that Russians consume.
The IO Fight. The Russians are losing the information operations fight internationally. Where they appear to be successful is within the borders of Russia. A clampdown on the media has resulted in the state-driven narrative becoming successful. Most Russians support the war in Ukraine and believe the lies of the Putin regime. Read more in “US, Ukraine quietly try to pierce Putin’s propaganda bubble”, AP News, March 22, 2022.
World Response
Ukraine’s Legionnaires and Lessons of Finland. Ukraine is in a fight for its life. Recruiting foreigners to serve in its armed forces is a logical thing to do. The country should study the successes and missteps of Finland during the 1939 ‘Winter War’ with the Soviet Union. “Lessons from Finland for Ukraine and Its Foreign Legion”, War on the Rocks, March 21, 2022.
West Ignored Eastern Europe – and Now Pays the Price. Edward Lucas discusses the origins of the Ukraine catastrophe – and says it lies in the Western mindscape. “The Blame Game”, Europe’s Edge, March 21, 2022.
Commentary
CIA Officer: Russia’s Failure No Surprise. A former Central Intelligence Officer who worked in the agency’s covert operation against the Red Army in Afghanistan four decades ago is not surprised at the ineffectiveness of the Russian Army. He said that Russia’s troops were plagued by bad maintenance, poor chains of command, low morale, desertions, and alcoholism. The campaign in Ukraine has turned into a long slog and an embarrassment to the Kremlin. “Russian Army’s Fail No Surprise to CIA Official Who Battled it in Afghanistan”, SpyTalk, March 22, 2022.
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.
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15. Russian Army’s Fail No Surprise to CIA Official Who Battled It in Afghanistan
Excerpts:
As Bearden suggested, there are uncanny parallels between the situation the Russians face today in Ukraine and in Afghanistan 40 years ago. Putin himself seems surprised that his army and intelligence services, rotted by decades of cronyism and corruption, have performed so poorly. One reason might be that the Red Army’s epic victories over the mighty German Nazis in World War Two secured it a mythic place in Russian history and culture. Fully six decades after World War Two, its unworthy successors remained beyond reproach, he said.
“You can’t say it’s hollowed out” in Moscow, Bearden said. No Russian can. “I mean, people can't even think about that.”
...
No matter the horrendous death toll, the Ukrainians will survive and reap the reward of other determined, well-backed nationalist insurgents, Bearden says, from Vietnam to Afghanistan (twice).
“Against a foreign occupying army, they win. It's just a rule.”
Ukraine’s resilience in the face of what seemed like overwhelming odds only weeks ago “makes you realize that actually Ukraine in the last 30 years might have become a real country,” Bearden said. “So now they have a foreign occupation on their turf and it's gonna lose.”
But that might not be Putin’s last play, especially if he’s backed into a corner in Ukraine, Bearden and many others warn.
“I don't see him stopping and that's what bothers me so much,” Bearden says, “because I think it potentially plays out with us and NATO.”
Russian Army’s Fail No Surprise to CIA Official Who Battled It in Afghanistan
Milt Bearden ran CIA operation that backed Afghan Mujahideen against Red Army
Jeff Stein
12 hr ago
The Russian military’s poor performance in Ukraine comes as no surprise to the former CIA officer who ran the agency’s covert operation against the Red Army in Afghanistan four decades ago.
Visit Ukraine photo
Russia’s best were plagued by bad maintenance, poor chains of command, low morale, alcoholism and desertions—and of course, the hit-and-run tactics of the CIA-backed Afghan “holy warriors,” whom the U.S. eventually armed with game-changing Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. The Red Air Force had no answer for them. The vaunted Red Army reeled.
“Their equipment sucked,” says Milton Bearden, CIA station chief in Pakistan during the most vigorous chapters of the agency’s proxy war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the mid-to-late 1980s.
The Red Army’s medical kits included glass bottles that might have been holdovers from World War Two, Bearden told SpyTalk, instead of the plastic vials in use by American and other contemporary military services. Kits captured by the Afghan guerrillas “were bags of broken glass and liquid,” he said. “They could get a rocket going, but they couldn't make a ballpoint pen. That little ball bearing at the end of the pen? They couldn’t make those.”
Bearden, a highly decorated officer who retired in 1994 after 30 years and heading the Soviet/East European Division, says his cables back to headquarters increasingly describing Russian forces as a “third world army” were met with disbelief.
“The Soviet analysis people just went up in the air,” he recalled in an interview. “They said, ‘This is bullshit. You guys are making this shit up. It can't be.’” The war ended with the Red Army’s retreat from Afghanistan in 1989.
Bearden’s comments echo reports from Ukraine today, with Russia’s army facing equipment failures, fuel and food shortages and communications breakdowns. Its soldiers have allegedly been looting shops, homes and relief convoys for food because their military rations long ago expired or ran out.
As with Moscow’s late 1980 invasion of Afghanistan, military analysts were giving Russia’s military chances in Ukraine high marks only a few years ago, following its invasions of Georgia and Crimea and operations in Syria (marked by obscene brutality). A 2016 report by the RAND Corp., for example, said it would have little trouble overrunning the Baltic nations of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, all NATO members. But Moscow’s inability to quickly subdue Ukraine has sent analysts back to their blueprints.
Michael Kofman, a ubiquitous U.S. expert on the Russian military, told Politico that he and other experts “generally overestimated the Russian military, which is good. It’s very good.” And he added, “we really underestimated the Ukrainian military.”
“What at first seemed like a certain rout by one of the world’s largest armies has turned into something between a slog and an embarrassment for Moscow,” two top defense experts at Politico wrote on Monday.
"The Russian leadership actually believed the things they've said about the Ukrainians and didn't think they would put up a resistance," Jeffrey Edmonds, director for Russia on the National Security Council in the Obama administration, told NBC News.
Legends in the Fail
As Bearden suggested, there are uncanny parallels between the situation the Russians face today in Ukraine and in Afghanistan 40 years ago. Putin himself seems surprised that his army and intelligence services, rotted by decades of cronyism and corruption, have performed so poorly. One reason might be that the Red Army’s epic victories over the mighty German Nazis in World War Two secured it a mythic place in Russian history and culture. Fully six decades after World War Two, its unworthy successors remained beyond reproach, he said.
“You can’t say it’s hollowed out” in Moscow, Bearden said. No Russian can. “I mean, people can't even think about that.”
Putin poured untold billions into resuscitating Russia’s armed services and intelligence agencies over the past 20 years—mostly for naught, it seems, in Ukraine. Stymied at the gates of Kyiv and elsewhere, the Russian army has resorted to shelling civilians to surrender or death.
No matter the horrendous death toll, the Ukrainians will survive and reap the reward of other determined, well-backed nationalist insurgents, Bearden says, from Vietnam to Afghanistan (twice).
“Against a foreign occupying army, they win. It's just a rule.”
Ukraine’s resilience in the face of what seemed like overwhelming odds only weeks ago “makes you realize that actually Ukraine in the last 30 years might have become a real country,” Bearden said. “So now they have a foreign occupation on their turf and it's gonna lose.”
But that might not be Putin’s last play, especially if he’s backed into a corner in Ukraine, Bearden and many others warn.
“I don't see him stopping and that's what bothers me so much,” Bearden says, “because I think it potentially plays out with us and NATO.”
16. ‘The Ukrainians Are Listening’: Russia’s Military Radios Are Getting Owned
Excerpts:
U.S. officials and experts believe Russia did not prepare adequately for a grinding monthslong ground invasion of Ukraine, expecting to quickly topple Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government in Kyiv, and did not properly prepare communications to extend the length of the country, Europe’s second-largest nation by landmass.
Ukrainian units have exploited Russia’s lack of communications to jam and interfere with tactical messages—in some cases even pinpointing the location of Russian general officers for snipers that have been trained by Western militaries over the past eight years.
Russia’s communications systems are failing at higher-than-expected rates during the nearly monthlong war in Ukraine, U.S. and European officials and experts said, forcing invading troops in the field to rely on open systems that can be readily intercepted by Ukrainian forces.
‘The Ukrainians Are Listening’: Russia’s Military Radios Are Getting Owned
Russia’s encrypted military phones aren’t working. So they’ve resorted to stealing phones from Ukrainians.
By Jack Detsch, Foreign Policy’s Pentagon and national security reporter, and Amy Mackinnon, a national security and intelligence reporter at Foreign Policy.
A view of a damaged TV tower is seen in Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 2. Anastasia Vlasova/Getty Images
Russia’s communications systems are failing at higher-than-expected rates during the nearly monthlong war in Ukraine, U.S. and European officials and experts said, forcing invading troops in the field to rely on open systems that can be readily intercepted by Ukrainian forces.
U.S. officials and experts believe Russia did not prepare adequately for a grinding monthslong ground invasion of Ukraine, expecting to quickly topple Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government in Kyiv, and did not properly prepare communications to extend the length of the country, Europe’s second-largest nation by landmass.
Ukrainian units have exploited Russia’s lack of communications to jam and interfere with tactical messages—in some cases even pinpointing the location of Russian general officers for snipers that have been trained by Western militaries over the past eight years.
Russia’s communications systems are failing at higher-than-expected rates during the nearly monthlong war in Ukraine, U.S. and European officials and experts said, forcing invading troops in the field to rely on open systems that can be readily intercepted by Ukrainian forces.
U.S. officials and experts believe Russia did not prepare adequately for a grinding monthslong ground invasion of Ukraine, expecting to quickly topple Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government in Kyiv, and did not properly prepare communications to extend the length of the country, Europe’s second-largest nation by landmass.
Ukrainian units have exploited Russia’s lack of communications to jam and interfere with tactical messages—in some cases even pinpointing the location of Russian general officers for snipers that have been trained by Western militaries over the past eight years.
“They just weren’t fully prepared for operations of this intensity for this long on so many different multiple lines of attack, and so we do see them having some command-and-control difficulties,” a senior U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity to provide a battlefield update, told reporters on Monday. “We’re seeing them use a lot more unclassified communications because their classified communications capability is … for one reason or another … not as strong as it should be.”
The senior U.S. defense official said Russia has also struggled to integrate air and ground forces and make real-time decisions on the battlefield. And Russia’s problems communicating among units have also been hampered by destructive bombing and shelling. Former U.S. officials and experts told Foreign Policy that Russia’s destructive campaign also took down 3G and 4G mobile communications towers necessary to operate encrypted smartphones near Kharkiv, Ukraine, forcing the invading troops to send out sensitive information in the open.
“They didn’t intend on destroying as much of the communications infrastructure as they have,” said Gavin Wilde, a nonresident fellow at Defense Priorities and an expert on Russia and information warfare who previously served as a director for Russia, Baltic, and Caucasus affairs on the U.S. National Security Council. “I think they’re probably loath to completely destroy so much critical infrastructure because their hope was that they could swoop in and have a more or less intact Ukraine.”
Russia’s communications problems have also been compounded by the lack of an overall field commander for the monthlong fight in Ukraine. On Monday, CNN reported that U.S. officials could not identify a Russian military official in charge of the hundreds of thousands of troops fighting in Ukraine, a force that includes Russian conscripts, Chechen units, and the paramilitary Wagner Group that is mostly fighting in the Donbass region in the east, where the Kremlin hopes to encircle Ukrainian forces.
Russian troops amassed at the border were given little to no warning that they were to be sent to war in neighboring Ukraine, leading to widespread confusion among the ranks and compounding Russian forces’ communications challenges.
“Given 24 hours’ notice, they weren’t able to do things like work out which units they were going to be driving next to and cooperating with and then exchanging encryption keys to their radios so they could use their encrypted communications—the result being they were speaking in clear, trying to use walkie-talkies,” said Jack Watling, a research fellow on land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank. By broadcasting on unencrypted frequencies, everyone from amateur radio enthusiasts to Ukrainian and foreign intelligence agencies have been able to eavesdrop on aspects of Russia’s military communications with ease.
“It’s very clear when you listen in to those conversations that they were under shock, that they didn’t know what was happening,” Watling said.
Failures to communicate have also helped drive up the striking Russian death toll in the conflict, which already outstrips U.S. losses in two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ukraine estimates something on the order of 15,000 Russian casualties; U.S. and Western estimates aren’t much lower.
“There’s this old adage in the military that if you can’t communicate in the field, that all you’re doing is camping,” said Mick Mulroy, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense and CIA paramilitary officer. “It’s not really a military operation if you can’t communicate with people.”
Ukraine’s Security Service, the government’s main counterintelligence arm, has intercepted dozens of calls among Russian soldiers, their higher units, and relatives. In one captured call, a Russian soldier told his mother that his unit had indiscriminately shelled a five-story apartment building and that many troops dreamed of fleeing the battlefield. Other troops admitted on intercepted calls that their units were exaggerating their strength in reports back to the Russian Defense Ministry.
One European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity to speak about recent military intelligence, said the failure of Russia’s encrypted systems has also helped Ukrainian forces drive up the body count among opposing generals. In one striking example, internet sleuths at the investigative outlet Bellingcat discovered Russian reconnaissance officers in the field using unencrypted communications systems to send word of the death of Maj. Gen. Vitaly Gerasimov back home. Gerasimov, believed to be the nephew of Russia’s top military officer, was killed during fighting with Ukrainian forces in Kharkiv in early March.
Ukraine’s stiffer-than-expected resistance to Russia’s invasion has also taken its toll on Russia’s communications system. Ukraine has banned all mobile numbers carrying Russia’s country code, experts told Foreign Policy, forcing Russian troops to take phones from civilians in extreme cases. But that still doesn’t prevent Ukraine from listening in and pinpointing where Russian troops are.
“If you’re using cell phones, the Ukrainians are listening,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, a cybersecurity expert at the Silverado Policy Accelerator. “It’s giving them enormous intelligence capability to understand the plans and locations of units.”
U.S. and European officials have repeatedly indicated that many of the 190,000 Russian troops that deployed to western Russia and Belarus for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion over the past several months were not told that they would be going to war. And experts believe Russia also did little to prepare Russian troops to communicate on the battlefield.
Alperovitch said Russia did not provide troops with enough one-time pads, a provably secure encryption technique that can conceal messages that travel among troops but needs to be loaded into devices beforehand. High-frequency military radios are also difficult to operate across long distances, Alperovitch said, requiring continuous training that the Russian force of mostly conscripted troops does not appear to have.
Russia’s communications challenges are coming as Ukraine is making some progress in pushing back invading forces, U.S. officials said today. A senior U.S. defense official said in a briefing that Ukraine is now “able and willing” to take back territory recently ceded to the Russians, including the eastern Ukrainian town of Izyum south of Kharkiv, close to the Russian border, and in Mykolaiv, on the road to Odesa, where Ukrainian forces have repulsed a Russian onslaught for several days.
“I think there is a big shock, to be honest,” said Mulroy, the former defense official. “Russia thought this would be much easier.”
Jack Detsch is Foreign Policy’s Pentagon and national security reporter. Twitter: @JackDetsch
Amy Mackinnon is a national security and intelligence reporter at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @ak_mack
17. Posting POW footage on social media may constitute human rights violation
Please maintain the moral high ground. Ukraine is conducting effective psychological warfare so it does not need to make use of POW videos. We need to make sure it is Putin and his henchmen who are held accountable for war crimes.
Posting POW footage on social media may constitute human rights violation
It’s been 27 days since President Vladimir Putin launched the Russian invasion into neighboring Ukraine, with journalists and citizens alike taking to social media to share up-to-the-minute accounts of war on the ground across the country.
Some videos that have circulated on places like Twitter and Facebook include Russian troops taken as prisoners of war by Ukrainian forces, explaining that they didn’t know what they were doing and they are ashamed of the role they’ve played in this conflict.
In fact, Ukraine’s top law enforcement agency, the Security Service of Ukraine, shared a compilation of videos of captured Russian soldiers to its Facebook page, one of which in particular showed soldiers explaining that they had not been briefed that they were going into battle but rather performing a training exercise.
“The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the main security arm of the Ukrainian government, has a Telegram account with about 868,000 subscribers where it has posted videos of captured Russian soldiers who appear under duress or are revealing their names, identification numbers, and other personal information, including their parents’ names and home addresses,” Human Rights Watch noted.
Across multiple platforms, the SBU has nearly a million followers, according to the nonprofit. In addition, Ukraine’s Internal Affairs Ministry has a Telegram channel with more than 800,000 followers to which it shares similar content.
The types of being shared media seem to confirm what much of the world believes about the conflict as the international community largely condemns Russia and rallies around Ukraine. But there is no way to independently verify that the Russian troops filmed are not under duress or saying what they feel they need to in order to survive.
Showing videos of POWs, regardless of the content or under what conditions it is obtained, is a violation of international law, experts say.
“Articles 13 and 14 of the third Geneva Convention protect POWs from insult and from becoming the object of public curiosity,” Leila Sadat, special adviser on crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court, told Military Times.
“The idea is that the soldiers fighting for their state are really pawns in someone else’s chess game,” Sadat added. “They are neither the instigators of the war nor responsible for carrying out their mission other than for any kind of intentional crime they commit themselves.”
The articles of the Geneva Convention that cover the rights of POWs require governments to protect them from “insults and public curiosity.”
“Likewise, prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity,” the document reads.
Social media did not exist when the third Geneva Convention was ratified in 1949, but its articles were designed to encompass future conflicts, according to Julia Grignon, associate professor of law at Laval University and a co-director of the clinic of international criminal and humanitarian law.
“They can adapt to the evolution of contemporary conflicts, because the way the provision is drafted is broad,” Grignon told Military Times. “We could interpret the provision in a sense to cover new behaviors during armed conflicts. So today, the fact that public curiosity is Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, whatever the platform is, this is forbidden, there is no exception.”
But it’s not just on Ukrainian official media accounts to avoid sharing these videos.
“Social media platforms should also clarify whether and how videos of POWs that are incompatible with the Geneva Conventions fall under their existing policies and, if necessary, develop new policies to identify and suppress the spread of such content,” Human Rights Watch said in a release.
Journalists and media organizations too must be careful to vet open-source videos, photos and other types of media. According to Sadat, these accounts are worth discussing and referencing but should not be shared directly.
“Media organizations should not distribute, in my view, the videos; they can speak of them but should not ‘play’ them as that is making matters worse,” Sadat said.
Grignon echoed that, adding also that it is imperative for the Ukrainian government to ensure that its troops are educated on the rights of prisoners enumerated by the Geneva Convention and practice them, including shielding them from the media.
“It should be Ukrainian soldiers that respect the Convention,” she said. “They shouldn’t give access to journalists, for example. The way to respect the Convention is that journalists shouldn’t have access to the prisoners of war.”
Sarah Sicard is a Senior Editor with Military Times. She previously served as the Digital Editor of Military Times and the Army Times Editor. Other work can be found at National Defense Magazine, Task & Purpose, and Defense News.
18. Russia’s Alleged Use of First Hypersonic Missile in Combat Downplayed by US Military and Allies
It is not 10 feet tall.
Excerpts:
Dave Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and dean of the nonprofit Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, told Military.com that the alleged use of the hypersonics should cause little concern for Ukraine or the United States.
"A missile is a missile, and the Russians shot nearly one thousand of them at Ukraine," Deptula said. "It is not significant that the missile that he [Putin] launches flies over Mach 5 or not. So, it is a bit peculiar why he's doing this, given these are extraordinarily expensive missiles."
A senior U.S. defense official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity, speculated Russia may even be running low on other missiles, and tapped into their hypersonics for those strikes in Ukraine.
"It could be that they're running low on precision-guided munitions and feel like they need to tap into that resource," the defense official said Monday. "It could be that they're trying to send a message to the west, but also to Ukraine, and trying to gain some leverage at the negotiating table."
Russia’s Alleged Use of First Hypersonic Missile in Combat Downplayed by US Military and Allies
Russia's defense ministry claimed its military used hypersonic missiles against an underground ammunition warehouse as well as a fuel depot during the country's fighting in Ukraine last weekend, reportedly marking the first-ever use of the new type of weapon in combat.
Hypersonic missiles, which can travel five times the speed of sound, making them harder to track, trace and destroy before hitting a target, have inspired worry among U.S. officials and defense industry experts for years as some assess that adversaries like China and Russia outpace America in developing their own hypersonics.
Those warnings have been a constant drumbeat in recent years, part of annual arguments over the defense budget as well as Pentagon officials' cases to reorient the military away from counter-insurgency combat and toward potential competition with major world powers.
Despite those past arguments, senior leaders are downplaying the significance of the alleged Russian missile launches in Ukraine, claiming they can't confirm Russia's claims of their use and saying that even if they had been deployed, they'd likely have little impact and shouldn't be a concern for the U.S. military.
During an appearance on CBS' Sunday talk show "Face the Nation," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the reported use of a hypersonic missile by Russian President Vladimir Putin's military is likely a distraction tactic to grow fear in the international community.
"I would not see it as a game changer," Austin told CBS. "I think the reason he is resorting to using these types of weapons is because he is trying to reestablish some momentum. And again, we've seen him attack towns and cities and civilians outright, (and) we expect to see that continue."
Additionally, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby told reporters Monday that it isn't clear that hypersonic weapons were actually used in Ukraine.
"Look, we've seen the Russian claim that they used a hypersonic missile," Kirby told reporters. "We're not in a position to refute that claim, but we're also not able to independently verify it."
Air Vice-Marshal Michael John Smeath of the United Kingdom's Royal Air Force said if the missiles were launched by Russia, they were likely a Kinzhal, a hypersonic unveiled by Putin in 2018.
Smeath mirrored Austin's sentiments that the missile's alleged use is more likely a move to inspire confidence in Russia's military as it faces a stalled invasion in Ukraine, highlighted by numerous pitfalls that have led to doubts as to whether Russia's force should be regarded as a near-peer to the world's powers.
"Russian claims of having used the developmental Kinzhal is highly likely intended to detract from a lack of progress in Russia's ground campaign," Smeath said in a UK Ministry of Defence press release. "Deployment of Kinzhal is highly unlikely to materially affect the outcome of Russia's campaign in Ukraine."
Tactically, using hypersonic missiles -- some of which have nuclear-carrying capabilities and can be fired from very far distances at sound-shattering speed -- has nearly the same effect on a ground target as conventional bombs, making the use of the prohibitively expensive weapons surprising.
Dave Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and dean of the nonprofit Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, told Military.com that the alleged use of the hypersonics should cause little concern for Ukraine or the United States.
"A missile is a missile, and the Russians shot nearly one thousand of them at Ukraine," Deptula said. "It is not significant that the missile that he [Putin] launches flies over Mach 5 or not. So, it is a bit peculiar why he's doing this, given these are extraordinarily expensive missiles."
A senior U.S. defense official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity, speculated Russia may even be running low on other missiles, and tapped into their hypersonics for those strikes in Ukraine.
"It could be that they're running low on precision-guided munitions and feel like they need to tap into that resource," the defense official said Monday. "It could be that they're trying to send a message to the west, but also to Ukraine, and trying to gain some leverage at the negotiating table."
The Pentagon has worked to address the U.S.'s hypersonic research in recent months, noting that it has been trailing behind adversaries such as Russia and China.
Last month, Austin met with the CEOs of about a dozen defense companies to talk about the U.S. hypersonic efforts ahead of the 2023 budget proposals and as tensions between Russia and Ukraine began mounting.
So far, the U.S. has faced headwinds to developing its own weapon. The Air Force didn't complete three tests last year of the AGM-183, a hypersonic missile being created by Lockheed Martin, and dropped the hopes of fielding a weapon this year.
The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act allocated $2.5 billion for the U.S.'s hypersonic weapon programs and heavily boosted funding for the Navy's research and development.
19. 'Kyiv Calling:' Ukrainian punk band makes The Clash classic an anti-Russia anthem
"We live for resistance." This is the battle cry in the 21st century for all who oppose authoritarian rule, invasions, and occupiers.
I am glad to see this band getting some press.
'Kyiv Calling:' Ukrainian punk band makes The Clash classic an anti-Russia anthem
CNN · by Zoe Sottile, CNN
(CNN)A Ukrainian punk band has released an anti-war spin on The Clash's hit song "London Calling," with the blessing of the English band itself.
The cover, which describes Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion, is called "Kyiv Calling" and calls for global support for Ukraine. "Kyiv calling to the whole world / Come out of neutrality, you boys and girls," sings the band, known as Beton.
"Cause Kyiv is rising," the lyrics continue. "We live by resistance." The lyrics also allude to Russia's powerful use of propaganda to tell its own citizens a warped narrative about the invasion: "And you know what Moscow said? Well, none of it was true."
Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, killing hundreds of people and forcing millions of others to flee the country. As of Sunday, there were more than 3 million refugees, including at least 1.5 million children, according to the International Organization for Migration. Most of them have fled to nearby countries, including Romania, Moldova, and Poland. Millions more are internally displaced within Ukraine.
The title of the original song references World War II. The BBC World Service would use "This is London calling" in its broadcasts during the war. Its lyrics reference the political instability in Britain and across the world at the time of its 1979 release.
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A video for the cover song, posted to Free Ukraine's YouTube channel Saturday, exceeded 200,000 views by Sunday afternoon. The video features the band performing spliced with footage from protests and Russian attacks on the country.
Beton said on Instagram the cover was crafted to "raise money to support our country around the world with the help of punk rock." They were asked to produce the song by the Free Ukraine Resistance Movement and delivered upon the request in just three days. The movement partners with governments and nongovernmental organizations to protect "the territorial integrity of Ukraine," according to its website.
The band has also used its own social media to condemn Russia's invasion and document their resistance. On Instagram, they posted a picture of themselves with the caption: "We're punk-hardcore band Beton from Ukraine. And instead of playing gigs we're volunteering for our army, working on-air all nights long, taking care of refugees and hiding families in shelters. All our hate is for enemy!"
Among the producers who helped record and mix the cover song is Danny Saber, a seasoned audio engineer who has produced works by famous artists such as Madonna and the Rolling Stones.
CNN · by Zoe Sottile, CNN
20. The death of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction)
Excerpts:
MAD had its day. That day passed. Robust deterrence — a capability based on overwhelming military power, clear projection of the will to utilize it, coupled with defense systems that make it much harder for our enemies’ missiles to reach their intended victims — should have been the highest national security priority of American leaders from both parties.
Instead, we took a holiday from history and spent a peace dividend. We ought to be correcting those mistakes without further delay. We’d be mad not to.
The death of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction)
And the urgent need to reestablish deterrence
OPINION:
Central to America’s Cold War strategy was the principle of MAD — Mutually Assured Destruction. The idea was to make nuclear warfare a lose-lose proposition. Whichever side was attacked would retain the capability to counterattack. Both sides would end up devastated if not annihilated.
I studied MAD in graduate school and considered it sane. I had spent time in the Soviet Union and concluded that the men in the Kremlin were evil but rational. They believed that Marxists like themselves were on the right side of history (to coin a phrase) so there was no need for “adventurism.” And the horrors Russia had suffered in World War II were still fresh in their memories.
Now, however, President Vladimir Putin rules the roost. He’s no dialectical materialist. He’s more of a L’etat c’est moi kind of guy. To be fair, he’s not alone in believing that he’s destined to be the redeemer and czar of Russky Mir, Russian World, the idealized vision of a revived pan-Russian or even pan-Slavic empire.
Three days after invading Ukraine he put his nuclear forces on alert — the term he used was “special combat readiness.” He warned the U.S. and other NATO countries that any attempt to prevent him from pillaging and conquering his neighbor would result in consequences “such as you have never seen in your entire history.”
Was he threatening to use chemical or tactical nuclear weapons against Ukrainians? Or cyberattacks against Americans? Or was he saying he won’t play by MAD rules? We can only guess which means he has established what’s known as “strategic ambiguity.”
He dares to be so aggressive now because his many past aggressions and transgressions elicited only feckless responses from the U.S., NATO and the chimera known as “the international community.”
President Biden, from the moment he moved into the White House, has been eager to placate Mr. Putin and reluctant to “provoke” him. Last year, he restricted arms assistance to Ukraine, gave his blessing to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline (while curbing domestic oil and gas production) and agreed to a five-year renewal of the 2010 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty despite Russia’s record of cheating and the fact that the agreement imposes no limits on Mr. Putin’s shorter-range nuclear weapons — the kind he might use against Ukraine or in a future war against NATO.
These policies were consistent with those of former President Barack Obama, who seemed to believe that his magnetic personality coupled with clever diplomacy could alleviate all tensions with Moscow, Tehran and others.
But back to MAD: One president was uncomfortable relying on it even in Soviet times. President Ronald Reagan’s plans for high-tech missile defense were derided by his critics as “Star Wars,” a crazy scheme to “hit a bullet with a bullet.”
Nevertheless, research and development yielded results during his administration and the George H.W. Bush administration that followed. In August 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton bragged that an American “defense umbrella” would protect the U.S. and its allies from nuclear weapons that North Korea possessed and that the Islamic Republic of Iran was attempting to acquire.
I had my doubts. So did Ilan Berman, vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council. We responded by publishing an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal granting that a “defense umbrella” was a marvelous idea but adding that America’s was full of holes.
The George W. Bush administration had worked only on missile-defense systems capable of intercepting a small number of ballistic missiles. There had been no attempt to build a comprehensive architecture, one that would be capable of neutralizing a large salvo of nuclear-tipped missiles.
To build that would require much more research, development and funding. But both the Obama administration and Congress were — at that moment — slashing the Pentagon’s budget for antimissile systems.
In addition, as part of his “reset” with Russia, Mr. Obama relinquished the Bush administration’s plan to deploy ground-based radars and interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic. That system was intended to defend only against missiles from the Islamic Republic of Iran, but Mr. Putin charged that it might protect Americans from his missiles which would violate the MAD doctrine.
On the American left, there were objections to space-based missile defense on the grounds that such systems would “militarize” space. “This is dead wrong,” Mr. Berman and I countered. “A space-based missile defense capability would instead block and destroy weapons that enter the Earth’s orbit on their way to their targets.”
We concluded: “The capability to make Iranian, North Korean, and other foreign missiles useless has already been developed and field-tested. Only America has it, and we should deploy it.” We urged the U.S. government to build, as rapidly as possible, “a comprehensive and impenetrable ‘defense umbrella’ to protect itself and its allies.”
Needless to say, our advice was not taken. Nor did the Trump administration make missile defense a priority.
Over the weekend, Mr. Putin used a hypersonic ballistic missile to destroy an underground arms depot in western Ukraine. It was another threatening message to the U.S. which has not yet fielded its own hypersonic missiles and is very late in developing defenses against them.
MAD had its day. That day passed. Robust deterrence — a capability based on overwhelming military power, clear projection of the will to utilize it, coupled with defense systems that make it much harder for our enemies’ missiles to reach their intended victims — should have been the highest national security priority of American leaders from both parties.
Instead, we took a holiday from history and spent a peace dividend. We ought to be correcting those mistakes without further delay. We’d be mad not to.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a columnist for The Washington Times.
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21. The Folly of the ‘Pivot to Asia’
Strategy is about setting priorities and managing risk as you seek to accomplish the political object. But this essay raises some important questions.
First, is it appropriate and effective to set priorities by broad geographic location/region?
Second, and more importantly are two interrelated questions. Do we consider the US a global power with global interests? And if so are we prepared to accept the global responsibilities being a global power entails?
If China is the so-called "pacing item" as DOD considers it, should we focus on it only in terms of geographic orientation? Or should we take a global approach because China is threatening US interests and the interests of the free world on a global basis?
I think we have to focus on these questions.
Conclusion:
For the foreseeable future, the Far East will have a prominent place in America’s strategic imagination. China’s conversion from a communist laggard to a rich and militarily powerful fascist state has Western leaders in a bind, given that they literally bet the bank on the hope that investment and trade would somehow pacify Beijing’s ambitions. But China’s rise doesn’t mean that Europe matters little or that the Middle East can be ignored. The U.S. isn’t Sweden. When America retreats, everyone suffers.
The Folly of the ‘Pivot to Asia’
China is a rising challenge, but neglecting Europe and the Middle East won’t help America confront it.
WSJ · by Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh
Illustration: Phil Foster
Seldom has a diplomatic phrase been more reckless than the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia.” The U.S. has never been able to disentangle itself from key regions of the world, as the war in Ukraine demonstrates. But the notion that a new “Pacific century” should become the nation’s defining priority surely has emboldened adversaries elsewhere and called into question other alliances, including the most indispensable, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The question that ought to haunt the White House today is whether its ignominious retreat from Afghanistan in the name of ending so-called forever wars, and its stream of press releases insisting that China is the only rival worthy of attention, prompted an impetuous Vladimir Putin to undertake the largest land invasion in Europe since World War II.
In January 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a speech placing Korea outside America’s defense perimeter, thus inviting aggression from North Korea. Often overlooked in that speech is Mr. Acheson’s insistence that “it is a mistake . . . to become obsessed with military invasions” when thinking strategically about Asia and the Pacific. Acheson seemed to assume that the dilemmas of newly independent Asian states came from internal subversion stemming from economic stagnation. To be fair, the Truman administration didn’t shrink from its responsibilities in Europe when war broke out in the Korean Peninsula.
The U.S. has been a global power for a century and has always given some regions and countries priority over others. Early in the Cold War, Europe’s economic rehabilitation and its military defense preoccupied America’s politicians and strategists. In the 1960s, as the Cold War stabilized in Europe, the U.S. turned its gaze toward Asia, where a truculent China and an eastward-looking Soviet Union were both bent on exporting revolution. With 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, the Far East became a priority. And in the aftermath of 9/11, the Middle East took on importance as Washington hunted down terrorists and sought, however haphazardly, to refashion a political culture that had generated so much hate.
Before Barack Obama, no president had insisted that the exigencies of one region mandated ignoring others. The U.S. fought prolonged wars in East Asia, yet Washington didn’t claim that these conflicts meant that it had to pivot from Europe or Latin America. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were beset by Vietnam; they didn’t complain about “forever wars” and the need to leave the Far East. When George W. Bush found himself mired in Iraq, he didn’t proclaim that Europe and Asia no longer mattered. Burden sharing has been an objective of all U.S. presidents. The strategic neglect of Asia-firsters is new.
Joe Biden must be considered the least authentic of China hawks. Much more than Mr. Obama, he has brandished the China threat as cover for isolationism. Even the hasty departure from Afghanistan was in part justified as a means of focusing on China. Leaving Afghanistan would somehow, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told us, make the U.S. stronger vis-à-vis Xi Jinping.
At home Democrats partly justified exorbitant domestic spending as a means of rebuilding an America better able to resist China. Yet Mr. Biden hasn’t taken any serious military measures, or reinitiated a free-trading alliance, to confront Beijing. This disconnect between words and deeds might have been starkest when, soon after his inauguration, Mr. Biden held a summit meeting with Mr. Putin—whom Democrats had denounced throughout Donald Trump’s presidency as a threat to democracy—where he pressed for a “stable and predictable” relationship with Moscow.
Much of the cheap talk about pivoting stems from U.S. frustrations in the Middle East. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan caused the political class to question its assumptions about American power. Yet the Middle East remains. Energy markets are still global. Fracking hasn’t made Persian Gulf oil less important to America’s national security. The perverse interplay between Arab authoritarian states and Islamic radicalism (the former feeds the latter) continues. Iran’s nuclear ambitions, unimpeded by arms-control diplomacy, will soon confront the international community. As Mr. Putin has shown, a revisionist leader, armed with nuclear weapons and nursing grievances, can easily rattle, if not upend, financial markets and cherished assumptions.
For the foreseeable future, the Far East will have a prominent place in America’s strategic imagination. China’s conversion from a communist laggard to a rich and militarily powerful fascist state has Western leaders in a bind, given that they literally bet the bank on the hope that investment and trade would somehow pacify Beijing’s ambitions. But China’s rise doesn’t mean that Europe matters little or that the Middle East can be ignored. The U.S. isn’t Sweden. When America retreats, everyone suffers.
Mr. Gerecht, a former Middle Eastern targets officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mr. Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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WSJ · by Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh
22. Biden's Ukraine policy must evolve: Defending freedom requires risks
There is a difference between effectively managing risk and being risk averse to the detriment of national interests.
Biden's Ukraine policy must evolve: Defending freedom requires risks
The Hill · by Mark Penn, opinion contributor · March 22, 2022
As Russia’s offensive in Ukraine has turned from a military assault to a savage attack on civilians, we must wonder what the purpose of a democratic, free-world order is, if not to crush oppressive aggression like we are seeing from Vladimir Putin.
Many politicians have simply said we face a clear choice: allow Russia to advance — or start World War III. So far, Americans overwhelmingly support economic sanctions but are wary of actions that could lead to a war with Russia. Putin has successfully depicted himself as a crazed figure who will do anything, even destroy civilization, if he is challenged. The result is that we have supplied defensive weapons to Ukraine but stopped at providing jets, even as Putin deploys weapons like hypersonic ballistic missiles against civilian targets.
President Kennedy’s America would never have allowed this aggression to stand. When Russia attempted to put missiles in our hemisphere in 1962, Kennedy acted and said we learned from the 1930s: “Aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” He said we should neither unnecessarily risk the costs of nuclear war nor “shrink from it at any time it needs to be faced.”
Preserving freedom is a risky business, but it is a risk worth taking.
Yet, today, we stand on the preposterous notion that we would defend Ukraine only if it was a NATO country.
For sure, President Biden’s debacle in Afghanistan was the final green light of the American signal that this country has long since abandoned the polices of Kennedy and Clinton.
So far, we have elected to fight real war with an economic war and defensive weapons support, yet the killing of civilians is escalating rather than receding. Without actual military or diplomatic intervention, the end here can only be an even greater loss of life and a crushing of the Ukrainian people. A defensive war is generally a losing effort against an enemy nine times as big. America itself would never have been born had the French not gotten off the sidelines and supported the colonials at the Battle of Yorktown.
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RELATED OP-EDS FROM THE HILL
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In the past, the expansion of Russia to abut so many NATO countries would have been considered an attack on NATO itself, just as Kennedy considered Russian expansion in Cuba a threat to our hemisphere. Russia’s use of Belarus and Ukraine as military bases against the rest of Europe is a major security threat, with the inevitable next step a direct NATO conflict. Nothing in Putin’s rhetoric has suggested that he sees any difference between Ukraine and Latvia, Lithuania, or other neighboring countries in terms of his right to conquer. This is a war of naked aggression without any provocation, and it is a continuation of expansion that was unchecked by President Obama when Putin seized Ukraine’s Crimean region in 2014.
Obama, unfortunately, failed to act when he could have, and we are paying the price for that weakness today. He tried with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to “reset” Russian relations, and mocked then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for warning about the danger of Putin; Obama accused Romney of a 1980s-focused foreign policy — and yet, today, we are haunted by the appeasement polices of the 2010s.
Laughably, the Biden administration still grasps for an Iran nuclear deal that would have no restraints on Iran committing terrorist acts, expanding its territory or vowing to destroy Israel. It is systematically reversing the Trump administration’s policy of forming a coalition based on Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to check Iran’s power. No wonder the Saudis won’t answer Biden’s phone call and Israel’s leader visited Russia: Biden is continuing to cater to our enemies, a proven losing strategy of the Obama years.
It is time for President Biden and our NATO allies to declare not only that Putin is a war criminal, but that Russia is now a rogue state.
They need to supply Ukraine with military jets and begin to set up red lines that prevent further killing of Ukrainians; chemical and nuclear weapons should become tripwires for direct military action to take out Russia’s invasion force.
We recognize Ukraine as an independent nation, and we should honor all requests by its government for military assistance on its land and in its skies. These are not Russian skies or land, so why are we effectively recognizing Russia’s right to be there? That is the fallacy of our position from day one of this war — Ukraine has been implicitly recognized as Russian territory rather than as a sovereign state.
As long as the West runs its economic play, Putin will continue his military advance, secure in believing that he controls the energy purse anyway. This conflict will come to a crossroads in the next ten days: Russia will continue to advance and kill thousands more civilians; China will have to decide how it is going to handle the crisis, and President Zelensky will continue to plead with the West for stronger action.
It is obvious that the U.S. must reverse its energy polices and exploit its own resources to block America’s enemies from controlling America. This was yet another failure to understand the geopolitical consequences of our policies that must be reversed, to put energy independence as a first priority as technology continues to develop to combat climate change.
President Biden, I believe, will have the support of most Americans for an even stronger stand on the Ukraine crisis. But following the current course is likely to produce a slow-motion loss, with hundreds of thousands of casualties.
It will take increased risk and strong presidential leadership to put the fear in Putin that no tyrant will be allowed to unleash unchecked aggression and pay only with his MasterCard. Russia must face a united NATO force, ready to take the next steps, even if it means edging toward a direct confrontation.
As Kennedy said, such risk is the price of freedom.
Mark Penn is a managing partner of the Stagwell Inc., a global organization of digital-first marketing companies, as well as chairman of the Harris Poll and author of “Microtrends Squared.” He served as pollster and adviser to former President Clinton from 1995 to 2000. You can follow him on Twitter @Mark_Penn.
The Hill · by Mark Penn, opinion contributor · March 22, 2022
23. Javelin missiles are helping Ukraine wreak havoc on Russian troops, experts say
Seems like the Javelin has been a game changer like the suitcase Sagger (1973) and TOW but much simpler to operate and more effective though at shorter ranges.
Javelin missiles are helping Ukraine wreak havoc on Russian troops, experts say
The lethal antitank weapons also figured in former President Donald Trump's first impeachment.
NBC News · by Corky Siemaszko · March 22, 2022
The lightweight but lethal weapon has, military experts said, helped the underdog Ukrainians inflict major damage on Moscow’s much-vaunted military and stymie their advance.
Not only has the United States-made weapon become a symbol of resistance, it’s been dubbed “Saint Javelin” in a meme circulating on the web created by Canadian marketer Christian Borys, which shows Mary Magdalene, a saint of the Orthodox church, cradling a Javelin in her arms.
“The Javelin, very specifically that system’s advanced capabilities, have been vital to Ukrainian military survival and ability to hold ground” against the Russians, said John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the nonpartisan Madison Policy Forum in New York City.
March 21, 202201:41
Produced by defense contractors Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, the 46-pound weapon is shoulder-fired and has the “lethality to penetrate any tank or mobile vehicle on the battlefield,” Spencer said.
“It can also shoot down helicopters,” he said.
“The Javelins are the most sophisticated and most effective weapon the Ukrainians have, but not the most numerous,” Cancian said.
The Ukrainians have more Israeli-made NLOS “Spike” antitank missiles in their arsenal as well as German Panzerfaust 3 antitank weapons, Cancian said.
“The short answer is that infantry antitank weapons (of which Javelin is one) seem to be quite effective,” Cancian said in an email to NBC News. “There are lots of social media videos of their use. Further, the Russians seem to be moving very slowly, if not actually stalled, and these weapons must be part of what has given the relatively small and weak Ukrainian forces so much ability to resist.”
Russia has roughly four times as many troops as Ukraine's 130,000-strong army. It also spends about $78 billion on its armed forces annually, compared to the $1.6 billion Ukraine has been able to budget for its military.
But Russia has only a quarter of its forces fighting in Ukraine, with the rest deployed in the Caucasus or defending the border with China. Meanwhile, Ukraine has some 900,000 reserves and is fighting on its home turf.
The FGM-148 Javelin is one of the more than 1,700 antitank weapons that have been rushed by NATO via Poland to Ukraine since Moscow’s forces invaded more than three weeks ago, and the evidence of their effectiveness soon became clear when the Russian tank advance on the capital city, Kyiv, was quickly stopped in its tracks, the experts said.
Manned most often by a team of two soldiers, the Javelin fires a heat-seeking missile with a range of up to 2.5 miles. It has what’s known as a “fire and forget” system, which allows the soldiers to quickly take cover after firing, before the enemy can detect them. It’s called a Javelin because it strikes tanks from the top like a spear, the experts said.
The Javelins can also fire directly at a target, making them a threat against low-flying helicopters, they said.
Also, they said, the Javelin is easy to use, which is a plus because much of the fighting in Ukraine is being done by civilians with very little military training.
The Ukrainians have touted the success of the Javelin by sharing images of their soldiers hefting the weapons along with photos of destroyed Russian tanks.
Kyiv put in its first order for a little over 200 Javelin missiles in 2018, according to various published reports. That same year, Trump signed an agreement to give Ukraine $250 million in military aid.
But it wasn’t until a year later that these weapons helped detonate a scandal that resulted in Trump’s first impeachment.
During a July 25, 2019, phone call with Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, “We are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.”
Trump replied, “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.”
After the phone call with Zelenskyy, in which he was assured by the Ukrainian president that his new prosecutor would look into these matters, Trump released millions of dollars in military aid for Ukraine.
Trump was impeached by the Democratic-led House in December 2019 for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. But he was acquitted by the Senate, which had a Republican majority, of these charges in February 2020.
Utah Sen. Mitt Romney was the only Republican to vote with the Democrats to convict Trump on the abuse of power charge.
NBC News · by Corky Siemaszko · March 22, 2022
24. Ukraine and Russia may use 'unconventional warfare' strategies, former CIA officer says
Just as an aside psychological warfare is part of all warfare.
Ukraine and Russia may use 'unconventional warfare' strategies, former CIA officer says
Ukraine and Russia may use chemical, cyber, and psychological warfare in the ongoing war, former Ambassador Ronald D. Johnson says
foxnews.com · by Lisa Bennatan , William Spruance , Matt Wall | Fox News
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Ukraine and Russia may both use unconventional warfare tactics in the ongoing war, a former CIA officer told Fox News.
Ukraine and its allies may employ cyber-tactics and continue insurgency efforts, while Russia may resort to chemical warfare to accelerate its invasion, according to Ronald D. Johnson, a retired Army colonel and former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador.
"It also involves a lot of other things because sometimes you're talking about a smaller insurgency force that's battling a larger, more powerful occupying force," Johnson, who spent over 20 years in the CIA as a paramilitary operations officer, said. "You’re also talking about psychological operations, you're talking about sabotage and, today, information operations, cyberattacks and even influence campaigns."
Cyber capability will benefit the Ukrainian resistance, according to Johnson.
"Russia can stop incoming cyber communications, but they can only do it temporarily," Johnson said. "I think it's important now when you look at today's world to even consider the power of a single person with a laptop computer and internet connectivity."
(Getty Images/iStock)
Unconventional warfare tactics, including insurgency, make it less likely for Russia to occupy Ukraine long-term, according to Johnson.
Civilians practice moving in groups at a military training exercise conducted by the Prosvita society in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, on Friday, March 11, 2022. (Alexey Furman/Bloomberg via Getty Images) (Alexey Furman/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
"A lot of countries in the free world and even private organizations will look for ways that they can support that insurgency or that resistance," he told Fox News.
Russia's advances have stalled recently. Western intelligence expected Kyiv to fall within 72 hours of the invasion, but the capital city still remains under the Ukrainian government's control.
Putin "sees the threat of an insurgency and a prolonged war that could drain his resources and his people for years to come," Johnson said. He warned that the authoritarian leader may use "unconventional weapons like chemical weapons" to "accelerate the siege process."
White House press secretary Jen Psaki has similarly warned that Russia could use "chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine or to create a false flag operation using them."
The Kremlin has made unfounded claims that Ukraine, with U.S. assistance, is preparing to use chemical or biological weapons against Russian forces.
foxnews.com · by Lisa Bennatan , William Spruance , Matt Wall | Fox News
25. How Russia and Right-Wing Americans Converged on War in Ukraine
Sigh... A pretty simple litmus test: Do you support Putin's War?
How Russia and Right-Wing Americans Converged on War in Ukraine
Some conservatives have echoed the Kremlin’s misleading claims about the war and vice versa, giving each other’s assertions a sheen of credibility.
The Fox News host Tucker Carlson has echoed Russian claims that the invasion of Ukraine was taken in self-defense. He has also criticized Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.Credit...Richard Drew/Associated Press
Sheera Frenkel and Stuart Thompson, who cover tech and misinformation, combed through more than four dozen videos, podcasts and social media posts for this article.
March 23, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
After President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia claimed that action against Ukraine was taken in self-defense, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the conservative commentator Candace Owens repeated the assertion. When Mr. Putin insisted he was trying to “denazify” Ukraine, Joe Oltmann, a far-right podcaster, and Lara Logan, another right-wing commentator, mirrored the idea.
The echoing went the other way, too. Some far-right American news sites, like Infowars, stoked a longtime, unfounded Russian claim that the United States funded biological weapons labs in Ukraine. Russian officials seized on the chatter, with the Kremlin contending it had documentation of bioweapons programs that justified its “special military operation” in Ukraine.
As war has raged, the Kremlin’s talking points and some right-wing discourse in the United States — fueled by those on the far right — have coalesced. On social media, podcasts and television, falsehoods about the invasion of Ukraine have flowed both ways, with Americans amplifying lies from Russians and the Kremlin spreading fabrications that festered in American forums online.
By reinforcing and feeding each other’s messaging, some right-wing Americans have given credibility to Russia’s assertions and vice versa. Together, they have created an alternate reality, recasting the Western bloc of allies as provokers, blunderers and liars, which has bolstered Mr. Putin.
The war initially threw some conservatives — who had insisted no invasion would happen — for a loop. Many criticized Mr. Putin and Russia’s assault on Ukraine. Some have since gone on to urge more support for Ukraine.
But in recent days, several far-right commentators have again gravitated to narratives favorable to Mr. Putin’s cause. The main one has been the bioweapons conspiracy theory, which has provided a way to talk about the war while focusing criticism on President Biden and the U.S. government instead of Mr. Putin and the Kremlin.
Right-wing commentators like Candace Owens have blamed the United States for the war in Ukraine.Credit...Scott McIntyre for The New York Times
“People are asking if the far right in the U.S. is influencing Russia or if Russia is influencing the far right, but the truth is they are influencing each other,” said Thomas Rid, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies Russian information warfare. “They are pushing the same narratives.”
Their intersecting comments could have far-reaching implications, potentially exacerbating polarization in the United States and influencing the midterm elections in November. They could also create a wedge among the right, with those who are pro-Russia at odds with the Republicans who have become vocal champions for the United States to ramp up its military response in Ukraine.
“The question is how much the far-right figures are going to impact the broader media discussion, or push their party,” said Bret Schafer, a senior fellow for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a Washington nonprofit. “It serves them, and Russia, to muddy the waters and confuse Americans.”
Many of their misleading war narratives, which are sometimes indirect and contradictory, have reached millions. While Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other platforms limited the reach of Russian state media online after the war began, a variety of far-right Telegram channels, blogs and podcasts took up the task of spreading the Kremlin’s claims. Inside Russia, state media has in turn reflected what some far-right Americans have said.
Mentions of bioweapons labs related to war in Ukraine, for example, have more than doubled — to more than 1,000 a day — since early March on both Russian- and English-language social media, cable TV, and print and online outlets, according to the media tracking company Zignal Labs.
The unsubstantiated idea began trending in English-language media late last month, according to Zignal’s analysis. Interest faded by early March as images of injured Ukrainians and bombed cities spread across the internet.
Reinforcing the ‘Bioweapon Labs’ Conspiracy Theory<br>
Media mentions related to bioweapons labs in Ukraine spiked at the start of the invasion among English-language media. Days later, Russian-language media joined in.
Note: Moving average of the preceding three days. Media includes news sources, social media, online videos and forums.
Source: Zignal Labs
By The New York Times
But Russia breathed new life into the conspiracy theory on March 6 when its Defense Ministry claimed in a televised address that it had uncovered “traces of a military biological program being implemented in Ukraine, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.”
Mr. Carlson later aired the Russian statement on his show. Fox News declined to comment and pointed to segments where Mr. Carlson has criticized Mr. Putin.
Russia laid much of the groundwork for its convergence with many on the American right years ago. Before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency, an organization that professionalized online disinformation, spread inflammatory content through Facebook and other social platforms to sow divisions among Americans and boost Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee.
After Mr. Trump was elected, he publicly complimented Mr. Putin, once calling him “a genius.” The comments helped seed a favorable view of Mr. Putin’s strongman style of governance among some Americans.
The coronavirus pandemic further aligned some on the far right with Russia’s propaganda machine. Both sought to undercut confidence in vaccines and mask mandates to foment distrust in the federal government and health agencies. Anti-vaccine Facebook groups and Telegram channels became fertile ground for members of the far right and Russian trolls to hunt for conspiracy theories to promote, Mr. Schafer said.
Last month, the coalescing crystallized. As Western intelligence showed that Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine, Mr. Putin declared Ukraine an American colony with a “puppet regime” and denied that he planned an invasion.
In the United States, Mr. Carlson also called Ukraine “an obedient puppet of the Biden State Department.”
On Feb. 16, Russian state-owned media claimed that Ukraine had “fired mortar shells” at a separatist enclave within Ukraine backed by Russia. Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist, quoted the Russian media’s false assertion on his Telegram channel to 256,000 subscribers. Days later, Mr. Kirk also described the heightened situation as a “border dispute.”
A spokesman for Mr. Kirk said it was “patently false” that the podcaster was sympathetic to Russia’s invasion and that he was “rightly questioning” U.S. foreign policy.
On Feb. 24, Mr. Putin delivered a speech justifying an invasion of Ukraine. It was transcribed in full on Infowars. On Twitter, Ms. Owens, the conservative commentator, repeated Mr. Putin’s claim that NATO was expanding eastward toward Russia, blaming the United States for the war. She urged her three million followers to read Mr. Putin’s speech directly to learn what was “actually” going on.
In an email, Ms. Owens said she encouraged “all citizens to read speeches that are given by leaders around the world to better understand their motivations behind actions.” Infowars did not respond to requests for comment.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments
Card 1 of 4
Russia’s shrinking force. The Pentagon said that Russia’s “combat power” in Ukraine has dipped below 90 percent of its original force. The assessment reflects the significant losses that Russian troops have suffered at the hands of Ukrainian soldiers.
Cracking down on dissent. A Russian court sentenced the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, already serving a two-and-a-half-year prison term for violating parole, to an additional nine years on fraud charges. Russia also amended a draconian censorship law to expand the scope of government bodies off-limits to criticism.
Biden’s diplomatic push. President Biden will press allies for even more aggressive economic sanctions against Russia during a series of global summits in Europe this week, seeking to maintain unity of purpose as Russian forces continue to rain destruction on cities in Ukraine.
But the invasion proved highly unpopular among many Americans, leading to a backlash against those who seemed to side with Mr. Putin. After the far-right podcaster Mr. Oltmann said on his Feb. 24 show that he would “stand on the side of Russia,” his co-host, Max McGuire, pushed back.
“Russia’s the bad guy in this situation,” Mr. McGuire said. Mr. Oltmann and Mr. McGuire did not respond to requests for comment.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine recently delivered a virtual address to Congress.Credit... Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times
Others on the right refuted some Kremlin talking points, including that neo-Nazis are rampant in Ukraine and that President Volodymyr Zelensky is a “drug-addled Nazi.” On Feb. 26, the Fox News host Neil Cavuto said those accusations were “incredibly over-the-top crazy criticisms.” (Mr. Zelensky, who is Jewish, signed a law combating antisemitism last fall.)
The lull did not last. American anti-vaccine channels on Telegram soon picked up the bioweapons conspiracy theory, which jumped from private chat groups to far-right podcasts and Infowars.
When Victoria Nuland, an under secretary of state, was questioned in the Senate this month over whether Ukraine had biological weapons, she said laboratories in the country had materials that could be dangerous if they fell into Russian hands. Jack Posobiec, a far-right commentator, insinuated on his March 9 podcast that Ms. Nuland’s answer bolstered the conspiracy theory.
“Everybody needs to come clean about what was going on in those labs, because I guarantee you the Russians are about to put all of it onto the world stage,” said Mr. Posobiec, who did not respond to calls seeking comment.
Russian officials also latched on to Ms. Nuland’s comments. “The nervous reaction confirms that Russia’s allegations are grounded,” the country’s official account for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted on Twitter.
Beyond the bioweapons conspiracy theory, Joseph Jordan, a white nationalist podcaster who goes by the pseudonym Eric Striker, repeated Russia’s claim that a pregnant woman who was injured in the bombing of a Ukrainian maternity hospital had faked her injuries. In his Telegram channel, Mr. Jordan told his 15,000 followers that the hospital photos had been “staged.” He did not respond to a request for comment.
Some Russians have publicly commented on what appears to be common ground with far-right Americans. Last week on the Russian state-backed news program “60 Minutes,” which is not connected to the CBS show of the same name, the host, Olga Skabeeva, addressed the country’s strengthening ties with Mr. Carlson.
“Our acquaintance, the host of Fox News Tucker Carlson, obviously has his own interests,” she said, airing several clips of Mr. Carlson’s show where he suggested the United States had pushed for conflict in Ukraine. “But lately, more and more often, they’re in tune with our own.”
26. China, guilty of genocide, must condemn Putin's war crimes and not attack Taiwan
Excerpts:
The West, led by Washington, must step up its deterrence and dissuasion efforts with both Russia and China. No intelligence agency has reported publicly or leaked even a hint of evidence suggesting that either Putin or Xi is suicidal. Their regimes’ oblique references to a Third World War or the use of nuclear weapons no longer can be allowed to paralyze the West’s ability to meet its moral and strategic obligations to confront their aggression more directly. Otherwise, as with Hitler in the 1930s, there would be no end to Putin’s expansionist demands.
As former Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark has stated, Ukraine’s airspace is sovereign and it has the right to request Western help, such as a no-fly zone, to defend it under the collective self-defense principle of the U.N. Charter. It would then be up to Russia to challenge U.S. planes legally in Ukrainian airspace and incur the risk of war with a united and far more powerful NATO. As a fallback, Clark also favors allowing Poland to provide MiG fighter aircraft to Ukraine to defend itself.
As for China, Washington should do it the favor of finally answering its question during the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait Crisis: What will America do if China attacks Taiwan? This time, rather than saying, “We don’t know, it would depend on the circumstances,” Biden should dispense with strategic ambiguity and affirm in a formal policy declaration what he has said in a couple of offhand remarks: “We will defend Taiwan.” As with Russia and Ukraine, allowing doubts to persist about Western resolve inevitably leads to disastrous miscalculation by freedom’s enemies.
China, guilty of genocide, must condemn Putin's war crimes and not attack Taiwan
The Hill · by Joseph Bosco, opinion contributor · March 22, 2022
Vladimir Putin’s brutal war against the people of Ukraine has reminded the world of unpleasant realities that many had forgotten, including the existence of pure evil.
Russia also has revived history’s lesson that unprovoked aggression is a war crime — the first of the Nuremberg Trial convictions of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi accomplices.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) defines the crime as “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression … which, by its character, gravity and scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations. … ‘Act of aggression’ means the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter.”
Beijing strives to define the Taiwan situation as an “internal” Chinese matter, just as Moscow contends that Ukraine is Russia’s internal business. Yet, like Ukraine, Taiwan clearly meets every test of statehood under international law: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to conduct international relations.
Taiwan is treated as a separate political entity by the World Trade Organization, International Olympic Committee, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, Asian Development Bank, and other international organizations. Thirteen member states of the United Nations have full diplomatic relations with Taiwan as a separate and independent country.
Any use of force against Taiwan would be manifestly “inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations,” whose purpose is “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which … has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” Russia is revisiting that scourge and that sorrow on the brave but vastly outgunned Ukrainian population.
The Taiwan Strait is an international waterway and any military conflict there would constitute a severe threat to Taiwan, as well as to other countries in the region, including China. When China fired missiles across those waters in the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1995-96, the Strait was closed to international shipping and overflights, sending insurance rates soaring and disrupting trade throughout the connected South China Sea. What China threatens to do to Taiwan today would be exponentially more violent and impactful on the people of Taiwan, akin to the carnage Russia is inflicting on Ukraine.
Attacking Taiwan would not be the first time China has committed the war crime of aggression. It did so when it joined North Korea in invading South Korea in 1950. The two communist states were branded as aggressors by the United Nations, but the ICC did not yet exist.
During that same period, China also invaded and subjugated the independent political entities of Tibet and East Turkestan (now Xinjiang Province). Since then, it has committed crimes against humanity in both places, and the Trump and Biden administrations each determined that China is conducting genocide against the Uyghur and Kazak Muslims in Xinjiang.
President Biden spoke to Chinese leader Xi Jinping last week and asked him not to support Putin’s war in Ukraine, warning that China will suffer the same economic and diplomatic consequences Putin has brought upon Russia. But, despite the graphic evidence of massive war crimes being perpetrated by Russian forces on a daily basis, Xi is not inclined to condemn his “no-limits strategic partner.”
On the contrary, Xi seems committed to joining Putin as a no-limits strategic pariah, adding war crimes to the Uyghur genocide already recorded in the crimes-against-humanity section of his resume.
Xi is poised to earn not only secondary sanctions but direct and personal sanctions if he carries out his threats to attack Taiwan. China would incur the colossal costs of such a war that would involve the United States, Japan and other countries that would rally to the defense of another threatened democracy after Ukraine’s tragic ordeal.
All this violence is the inevitable consequence of the ambitions and predations of the two world powers that seek to overturn the liberal, rules-based international order that has benefitted so much of humanity for the past seven decades. Russia and China lead the attack on that system because it was built by the world’s democracies and espouses values and principles that are anathema to their tyrannies.
Putin and Xi declared their nefarious intentions in their joint statement in Beijing at the opening of the 2022 Winter Olympics just before Russia launched its criminal invasion of Ukraine. In a virtual declaration of a Cold War II against the West, Xi made clear that he supported Putin’s rationale for his aggressive policy: “The sides oppose further enlargement of NATO and call on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ideologized Cold War approaches.”
While subsequently struggling not to get on the wrong side of the universal condemnation of Russia’s aggression, Beijing has yet to criticize Putin’s actions, even though it has allowed stories to circulate that it was not forewarned of the invasion.
Putin returned Xi’s favor with this language: “The Russian side reaffirms its support for the One China principle, confirms that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, and opposes any forms of independence of Taiwan.”
The West, led by Washington, must step up its deterrence and dissuasion efforts with both Russia and China. No intelligence agency has reported publicly or leaked even a hint of evidence suggesting that either Putin or Xi is suicidal. Their regimes’ oblique references to a Third World War or the use of nuclear weapons no longer can be allowed to paralyze the West’s ability to meet its moral and strategic obligations to confront their aggression more directly. Otherwise, as with Hitler in the 1930s, there would be no end to Putin’s expansionist demands.
As former Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark has stated, Ukraine’s airspace is sovereign and it has the right to request Western help, such as a no-fly zone, to defend it under the collective self-defense principle of the U.N. Charter. It would then be up to Russia to challenge U.S. planes legally in Ukrainian airspace and incur the risk of war with a united and far more powerful NATO. As a fallback, Clark also favors allowing Poland to provide MiG fighter aircraft to Ukraine to defend itself.
As for China, Washington should do it the favor of finally answering its question during the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait Crisis: What will America do if China attacks Taiwan? This time, rather than saying, “We don’t know, it would depend on the circumstances,” Biden should dispense with strategic ambiguity and affirm in a formal policy declaration what he has said in a couple of offhand remarks: “We will defend Taiwan.” As with Russia and Ukraine, allowing doubts to persist about Western resolve inevitably leads to disastrous miscalculation by freedom’s enemies.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.
The Hill · by Joseph Bosco, opinion contributor · March 22, 2022
27. Counting the Dead (Putin's War)
It seems like the Ukrainian casualty estimates we see in the daily War Bulletin's may be closer to being accurate than many people think. They are of course among the highest reported numbers but it seems like the US , the international community and Russia are catching up to those numbers.
But the bottom line is casualty reporting (civilians and military) is difficult and complex, especially during combat operations.
Counting the Dead
Soldiers carry the Ukrainian flag to a grave site. Three Ukrainian soldiers were killed in the March 13th missile attack by Russia at Yavoriv military training ground. Russian forces reportedly fired more than 30 missiles at the Yavoriv base. Local authorities reported 35 people were killed and 134 injured at the base, which is close to Ukraine's western border with Poland. (Photo by Arman Dzidzovic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
1. Casualties
There are three classes of casualties in Ukraine, each of which have different strategic impacts: Russian military deaths, Ukrainian military deaths, and Ukrainian civilian deaths.
We’ll get to the impacts in a minute, but first let’s try to level set: How many casualties have their been? We don’t know. From the beginning all of these numbers have been a mystery because of:
The fog of war.
The inability of disorganized Russian units or scattered Ukrainian forces to make reliable tallies.
The incentive for both sides to obscure reality as part of the information battle.
So understanding that we’re working in the dark, let’s look at the numbers we’re seeing and what they mean.
How do you even make a guess at the total figure? With millions displaced and massive bombardments of civilian targets, we have no idea who is buried under rubble and who has fled. Maybe Ukrainian authorities are able to count the number of bodies they can see. But that’s about it.
The strategic implications of civilian deaths cut both ways. The more of them there are, the worse it is for Russia in terms of sanctions continuing past any settlement point.
For the Ukrainians, civilian deaths increase the pressure on the West to continue military aid. But also run the risk of hurting morale.
Ukrainian soldiers: First off, the line here is blurry. Many—thousands? tens of thousands?—Ukrainian civilians have taken up arms.
Obviously, the Ukrainians are incentivized to minimize this number and we should not put much stock in it.
But in a way, this is the casualty number that matters least. Because Ukraine has a large supply of potential fighters. It matters in some ways if they have lost 1,000 soldiers or 10,000 soldiers. But in other ways, it doesn’t matter: If they have the will to resist, then those losses can be replenished to a large degree.
These replacements will not be A-level troops. They will be untrained and outside of military age. But a 45-year-old shopkeeper can hide in a pile of rubble and then pop out to fire a Javelin. There’s a reason they call it fire and forget.
Russian soldiers: This category is the big one, the most strategically significant number. From the start, the Ukrainians have claimed large numbers of Russian dead. I don’t trust those numbers. But over time, we keep seeing leaks from other sources. This caught my attention yesterday:
That leak was followed shortly by this claim from Russian state media:
All of these numbers are disputed.
But still.
We have at least a ballpark sense on Russian casualties and it’s not in the 2,000 range.
Some scale: The Russians fought in Afghanistan for a full decade and lost a grand total of 14,000 troops.
Whatever the real number of Russian losses is in Ukraine over the last month—whether it’s 6,000 or 13,000—they are looking at a military catastrophe.
What’s truly murderous about these numbers for Russia is that they’ve lost some very large percentage of their force for almost no strategic gains. If they take Mariupol and/or Kharkiv, then they could try to parlay that success into a settlement which grants them territory.
But with each passing day, the Russians increase the risk of their army disintegrating in the field.
For more on the Ukraine war every day, sign up for Bulwark+.
2. Counterattack?
One of the (many) things Russian generals should be worrying about right now are drones.
Drones are a tremendous equalizer, providing much of the intelligence gathering and attack capacity of a traditional air force, but at a fraction of the cost in both materiel and manpower.
Drones give even a besieged Ukrainian military the ability to launch supported counterattacks. But more significantly, drones make defending supply lines awfully hard for the Russians.
For all the talk with had a couple weeks ago about getting a few dozen Polish MiG-29s over to Ukraine, it strikes me that a steady supply of drones and man-portable anti-tank and SAM units—combined with an aggressive flow of real-time Western intelligence—is the most important support we can give them.
3. Playing Spades
I love this piece on the African-American community and the card game Spades. Because it’s from the Pudding, it’s told in a beautiful, interactive format:
28. What Would Clausewitz Say about Putin’s War on Ukraine?
My thoughts on what Clausewitz would say (WCWS) : War is more than a true chameleon and passion, reason, and chance will always apply and the need for coup d'oeil is as necessary as ever.
Conclusion:
And last, judging from reporting from the field, it appears the Russian military disregarded the basic blocking and tackling of military operations. Reports are legion of Russian units’ stalling out because they are starved of fuel, ammunition, and spare parts. The fact is that no military campaign can win through to victory without lavish if unglamorous support functions. A hoary military joke holds that amateurs talk tactics while professionals talk logistics. And like all good jokes, there is truth to that one.
Clausewitz is chiefly concerned with what happens when armies are in contact on some battleground, but he is also attuned to the importance of supporting forces in the field. His ruminations about culminating points make it clear why the defender enjoys certain advantages, no matter how inferior its forces may appear on paper. The local availability of militarily relevant resources, short lines of communication between base areas and the fighting front, and manifold other homefield advantages bolster the defender’s prospects.
Tactical and operational excellence is important—but no force can excel without fuel and stores.
In short, Carl von Clausewitz would probably reproach Russian commanders for mishandling the Ukraine campaign. May they never learn.
What Would Clausewitz Say about Putin’s War on Ukraine?
WWCS? To glean wisdom on Russia’s war on Ukraine, start by asking a long-dead Prussian soldier. Namely Carl von Clausewitz, who spent a career at arms battling Revolutionary and Napoleonic France—including during a stint in the Imperial Russian army. He took up his pen after the little emperor’s overthrow, recording his insights into the dynamics of warfare in his masterwork, On War.
Were he among the quick today, Clausewitz might tender some caustic words about Moscow’s handling of the campaign in Ukraine. He would reprimand Vladimir Putin & Co. for demanding everything from Ukraine while evidently expecting little more than token resistance; for assuming the Ukrainian Army would fight Russia’s fight when it had every reason not to; for neglecting the operational rhythms of the battlefield; and for ignoring humdrum but all-important aspects of war-making, logistics in particular.
These are deadly sins in martial enterprises.
Think about it. Putin and his lieutenants sought to fabricate a pretext for the invasion, accusing Kiev of waging genocide against ethnic Russians in Ukraine’s eastern provinces. They had to make extreme claims to justify extreme measures. To halt supposed atrocities, Moscow proclaimed that it intended its onslaught to “denazify” the government in Kiev. Invoking the example of Nazi Germany was deliberate. You don’t strike diplomatic compromises with a Nazi regime; you raze it. Russia’s goal, then, was regime change. Moscow meant to destroy the Western-leaning Ukrainian government and replace it with one more to Putin’s liking.
Survival is ample incentive for Ukrainians to fight their hardest—a fact that appears to have escaped Russian battle planners. But why? Clausewitz counsels commanders and their political masters to undertake some educated guesswork about how a foe may react to their actions, and to shape operations and strategies accordingly. Military overseers, he says, must “guess whether the first shock of battle will steel the enemy’s resolve and stiffen his resistance, or whether, like a Bologna flask, it will shatter as soon as its surface is scratched.” A Bologna flask is a special type of glass bottle sometimes used in physics experiments. It is rock-hard on the outside yet exceedingly fragile on the inside. Putin and his advisers apparently expected the Ukrainian government and society to be a Bologna flask that would shatter from within at the first blow.
Instead, in Clausewitz’s words, Ukrainians have comported themselves like “a wounded bull” enraged by the “burning pain” from wounds inflicted on it by an aggressor. So, Russians failed at one of the most elementary functions of strategy-making: understanding the opponent and paying it due respect. If you demand everything from your adversary, you can bet it will put forth its utmost effort to defy and defeat you.
Be pessimistic when taking the enemy’s measure: you will either be right or pleasantly surprised.
Russian leaders also succumbed to the fallacy of “script-writing,” an idea implicit in Clausewitz’s writings. A martial script is an idée fixe, a fixed idea about cause and effect. A commander who engages in script-writing assumes the enemy will react to his or her actions precisely the way the script demands: If I do X, you will do Y, and so on till I reach my goals. It is one thing to write a script in Hollywood, where the actors do what the director says if they want their paychecks. It is quite another to assume that a foe trying to accomplish goals contrary to yours will comply with your script. In warfare, in fact, the foe has every incentive to go off-script in hopes of ruining your production. Wise commanders expect it.
Yet Russian commanders seem to have assumed the Ukrainian Army would come out and wage conventional battles in which it would be lopsidedly outmatched. The defenders refused to play the role Moscow had assigned them. Instead, they waged irregular warfare, harrying the Russian Army and denying it the quick, decisive triumph Putin coveted. Moscow forgot one of the fundamental injunctions from Clausewitz—that war involves a “collision of two living forces,” a contest in which both pugilists try to overthrow each other. Whatever the balance of forces, each contestant stands at least some chance of prevailing.
The enemy is not a potted plant, subservient to Moscow’s will. Russian war planners would have been better off assuming that Ukrainians, whom the Russian offensive had placed on death ground, would display at least as much skill, ingenuity, and, in particular, thirst to win as did Russian forces. Complacency is a strategic vice of the first order. Clausewitz would condemn the Russian leadership for falling prey to it.
Russian commanders likewise appeared oblivious to the ebb-and-flow rhythm typical of military campaigning. Clausewitz discerns a pattern in battlefield operations whereby the attacker opens a sizable military advantage in the early going by virtue of initiative, surprise, and other factors, only to see that advantage start slipping away as the campaign wears on. This is natural. Clausewitz maintains that tactical defense—not offense—constitutes the strongest form of warfare. Accordingly, the defender narrows the attacker’s advantage as the attacker penetrates deeper into hostile territory, is compelled to seize fortified positions, or, as in the case of the Ukraine war, is drawn into draining urban combat.
If the war goes on long enough and the defender plays its hand well, the invader will overshoot what Clausewitz terms the “culminating point of the attack,” the crossover point beyond which the contender formerly on the offensive is now weaker, and stranded deep within the defender’s backcountry to boot. Its logistics will be strained; it will be forced to operate close to the defender’s base areas, where the home team commands the advantage; it could be set upon by a partisan populace; and on and on. This is a danger zone.
Now, it is doubtful Russian forces will exceed their culminating point of the attack in light of the vast material mismatch separating them from the Ukrainian military. But the imbalance of forces might taper to a point in which Moscow can no longer hope to impose a favorable peace on Kiev. In fact, this may already have happened. Its assumption that Ukraine would fold after a few days of combat seems to have blinded Russia to stubborn realities such as these.
And last, judging from reporting from the field, it appears the Russian military disregarded the basic blocking and tackling of military operations. Reports are legion of Russian units’ stalling out because they are starved of fuel, ammunition, and spare parts. The fact is that no military campaign can win through to victory without lavish if unglamorous support functions. A hoary military joke holds that amateurs talk tactics while professionals talk logistics. And like all good jokes, there is truth to that one.
Clausewitz is chiefly concerned with what happens when armies are in contact on some battleground, but he is also attuned to the importance of supporting forces in the field. His ruminations about culminating points make it clear why the defender enjoys certain advantages, no matter how inferior its forces may appear on paper. The local availability of militarily relevant resources, short lines of communication between base areas and the fighting front, and manifold other homefield advantages bolster the defender’s prospects.
Tactical and operational excellence is important—but no force can excel without fuel and stores.
In short, Carl von Clausewitz would probably reproach Russian commanders for mishandling the Ukraine campaign. May they never learn.
29.Kid Rock says Donald Trump sought his advice on North Korea and Islamic State
You just can't make this stuff up. In defense of this report, leaders should be open to ideas from diverse sources. :-)
However, I doubt the former president began this dinner party with the quote from John F.Kennedy:
“I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
Kid Rock says Donald Trump sought his advice on North Korea and Islamic State
Musician, who visited White House in 2017 with Ted Nugent and Sarah Palin, said I’m like, ‘Am I supposed to be in on this shit?’
The rapper Kid Rock said Donald Trump once asked him for advice about US policy on Islamic State and North Korea.
In an interview with the Fox News host Tucker Carlson broadcast on Monday night, the musician also discussed “cancel culture” – claiming to be “uncancelable” – and the coronavirus pandemic.
On the latter, referring to Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, he said: “Fuck Fauci.”
“You speak for many when you say that,” Carlson answered.
Because of his role in the federal response to a pandemic which has killed more than 972,000 in the US, Fauci, 81, has faced threats to his security and that of his family.
Kid Rock has described himself, to the Guardian, as “definitely a Republican on fiscal issues and the military, but I lean to the middle on social issues”.
“I am no fan of abortion,” he said, “but it’s not up to a man to tell a woman what to do. As an ordained minister I don’t look forward to marrying gay people, but I’m not opposed to it.”
He also said he “played Barack Obama’s inauguration [in 2009] even though I didn’t vote for him. I didn’t agree with his policies, but there was an exciting sense of change in the air. That promise hasn’t been fulfilled – the country is more divided than ever.”
In the aftermath of the Trump presidency, such judgments have been borne out. Carlson, Kid Rock’s interlocutor on Monday, has emerged as a particularly divisive primetime presence.
In a friendly interview timed for the release of a new album – Kid Rock wearing a “We the People” cap, Carlson in V-neck sweater and khakis – the subject turned to the musician’s friendship with Trump.
In a famous picture from 2017, the rapper was shown in the Oval Office, behind the Resolute Desk, with Trump, the rock musician Ted Nugent and Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and vice-presidential nominee. Palin said she invited the rightwing rockers “because Jesus was booked”.
“I was there with [Trump] one day when he ended the caliphate,” Kid Rock, 51 and born Robert Ritchie, told Carlson in reference to US efforts against the Islamic State.
“He wanted to put out a tweet … I don’t like to speak out of school. I hope I’m not. But … the tweet was, and I’m paraphrasing, but it’s like, you know, ‘If you ever joined the caliphate, you know, trying to do this, you’re going to be dead.’
“He goes, ‘What do you think?’ [I said] ‘Awesome. I can’t add any better.’ But then it comes out and it’s … reworded and more political, to look politically correct. And just, ‘be afraid’.”
He also said he and Trump were once “looking at maps. I’m like, you know, like, ‘Am I supposed to be in on this shit?’ Like I make dirty records sometimes. I do.
“‘What do you think we should do about North Korea?’ I’m like, ‘What? I don’t think I’m qualified to answer this.’”
In four years in office, Trump both threatened and met with the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un. No progress was made in ending the US standoff with the nuclear-armed dictator.
Some online critics wondered whether Trump really asked Kid Rock what to do about North Korea.
But after Kid Rock’s White House visit with Nugent and Palin in 2017, Nugent told the New York Times the group discussed “‘health, fitness, food, rock’n’roll, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, secure borders, the history of the United States, guns, bullets, bows and arrows, North Korea, Russia and a half-dozen other issues”.
Speaking to Carlson, Kid Rock also praised Trump for speaking “off the cuff”.
“See now, if you watch a Joe Biden interview, and you watch a Trump interview, there’s no comparison. And Trump speaks off the cuff.
“I understand what it’s like, sometimes you get it wrong. But I would way rather hear somebody come from here [the heart] and get it wrong once in a while.”
30.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
