Quotes of the Day:

"No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of another."

- Charles Dickens

"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."

- Mark Twain

Those who fear the facts will forever try to discredit the fact-finders."

- Denis Diderot

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 31, 2023

2. Putin is looking for a bigger war, not an off-ramp, in Ukraine

3. China using families as 'hostages' to quash Uyghur dissent abroad

4. Whatever Happened to Al Qaeda?

5. The Ukraine war is about to get worse

6. The Dangers of Detachment: Why Economic Independence Could Make the World More Dangerous

7. FBI Ordered to Find Out Which Agency Disobeyed White House in Secret Deal, Finds Out It Was Itself

8. What’s Missing from the Quad’s ISR Partnership

9. Ukrainian special operations unit shows assault on enemy positions

10. Inside the Wagner Group’s Armed Uprising

11. Space Command to stay in Colorado after Biden rejects move to Alabama

12. Lawmakers urge defense leaders to send Bowe Bergdahl to trial again

13. Sayings and lessons from the outgoing sergeant major of the Army

14. Army Futures Command drafting next operating concept

15. Opinion | Ukraine maps show the price of allies’ hesitation

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 31, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-31-2023

Key Takeaways:

• The Wagner Group may be supplanting the Russian military as the Belarusian military’s key training partner.
• The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) likely succeeded in recruiting an unknown number of Wagner personnel following Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed rebellion, though Prigozhin ordered remaining Wagner fighters to assemble in Belarus by August 5.
• Prigozhin stated that the Wagner Group stopped recruiting in Russia and claimed that the Wagner Group does not need to recruit more personnel and has sufficient reserves.
• Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made largely boilerplate comments framing the Russian state as adequately supporting long-term force-generation efforts and meeting Russian weapons demand through domestic production and international cooperation.
• Imagery posted on July 30 and 31 visually confirms damage to the Chonhar Bridge following a Ukrainian strike on July 29.
• Kremlin-appointed Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova confirmed on July 31 that Russia has transferred 4.8 million Ukrainians, including over 700,000 children, to the Russian Federation since the beginning of the war, very likely violating the Fourth Geneva Convention.
• Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the front on July 31.
• Iran and Belarus are deepening bilateral cooperation over the backdrop of their mutual support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.
• Ukrainian Presidential Administration Chief of Staff Andriy Yermak stated on July 30 that Kyiv and Washington will begin consultations on providing Ukraine “security guarantees” as soon as the week of August 6 – 13.
• Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Svatove-Kreminna and Avdiivka-Donetsk City lines and made claimed gains in Luhansk Oblast.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations near Bakhmut.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in western Donetsk and western Zaporizhia oblasts.
• Russian forces conducted limited counterattacks in western Donetsk and western Zaporizhia oblasts.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin ratified a law on July 31 increasing the fine for mobilized personnel’s or conscripts' failure to arrive at a military registration office after being summoned.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JULY 31, 2023

Jul 31, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 31, 2023

Karolina Hird, George Barros, Grace Mappes, and Mason Clark

July 31, 2023, 5:15pm ET

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cutoff for this product was 12:00pm ET on July 31. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the August 1 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

The Wagner Group may be supplanting the Russian military as the Belarusian military’s key training partner. The Belarusian Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced on July 30 that Wagner personnel conducted company-level training with unspecified elements of multiple Belarusian mechanized brigades.[1] The training included tactical maneuver for dismounted infantry and focused on force concealment from enemy UAVs and coordination between companies, platoons, and squads.[2] The training also reportedly featured Belarusian infantry conducting a combined arms assault with tank and artillery support.[3] The Wagner Group’s new role in Belarusian company-level training is notable. The Belarusian military typically conducts such exercises with Russian trainers and relies on Russian planners for any multi-brigade exercises, which ISW has not yet observed Wagner Group participating in. ISW previously observed Wagner personnel training with a Belarusian airborne brigade that historically trains with the Russian 76th Airborne (VDV) Division and forecasted that the Wagner Group may seek to supplant legacy Russian–Belarusian unit relationships.[4]

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) likely succeeded in recruiting an unknown number of Wagner personnel following Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed rebellion, though Prigozhin reportedly ordered remaining Wagner fighters to assemble in Belarus by August 5. Prigozhin announced on July 30 that “unfortunately a few [Wagner personnel] agreed to transfer from the Wagner Group” and joined other unspecified Russian security services — likely the Russian MoD).[5] Prigozhin thanked former Wagner personnel for their service, stated that neither he nor Wagner’s Council of Commanders banned Wagner personnel from joining different Russian “security structures,” and expressed hope that the departed Wagner members would “keep in touch” so that they can rejoin Wagner should there ever arrive a time when the Wagner Group must reform a force.[6] Prigozhin also reiterated known details about how the Wagner Group will continue to train Belarusian forces and operate in Africa.[7] The Ukrainian Resistance Center also noted on July 31 that Prigozhin ordered all Wagner personnel currently on rest and recuperation to arrive at Wagner’s field camps in Belarus no later than August 5 to attend unspecified events that Prigozhin will personally lead on August 5.[8] Prigozhin stated that most Wagner fighters are on “vacation” as of July 30.[9]

Prigozhin stated that the Wagner Group stopped recruiting in Russia and claimed that the Wagner Group does not need to recruit more personnel and has sufficient reserves. Prigozhin stated on July 30 that Wagner has sufficient personnel and does not plan to conduct another recruitment drive until it needs more fighters.[10] A Wagner recruitment Telegram page announced on July 30 that Wagner is indefinitely suspending regional recruitment centers in Russia due to Wagner having sufficient reserves.[11] The exact reason the Wagner Group suspended recruitment is unclear, however. The Wagner Group was reportedly still recruiting fighters from across Russia as of early July 2023.[12] The Kremlin may have recently banned the Wagner Group from recruiting within Russia, and Prigozhin may simply be attempting to save face by claiming he voluntarily suspended recruitment efforts. ISW cannot independently confirm the Wagner Group’s current strength or depth of reserves.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made largely boilerplate comments framing the Russian state as adequately supporting long-term force-generation efforts and meeting Russian weapons demand through domestic production and international cooperation.[13] Shoigu claimed that over 15,000 students enrolled at Russian military universities for the coming school year, 10 percent of whom have combat experience fighting in Ukraine. Shoigu announced the resumption of instruction at the Donetsk Higher Combined Arms Command School in occupied Donetsk, one of the combined arms academies the Russian military requires officers to attend before commanding at the brigade or regiment level. Shoigu also reiterated positive rhetoric about the Russian defense industrial base (DIB) and actively seeking international military-technical cooperation to support the war effort. Shoigu stated that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) will sign contracts worth over 433 billion rubles (roughly $4.7 billion) with defense enterprises at the Army-2023 international military-technical forum. The claimed overall value of these contracts is at least 13.4 percent less than the over 500 billion ruble (roughly $5.45 billion) value of contracts the MoD signed at the Army-2022 and 2021 forums but a substantial increase over the 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, and 2016 forums, the overall contract values of which were roughly 1.16 trillion rubles ($17.4 billion), 1.03 trillion ($10.9 billion), 130 billion ($1.4 billion), 170 billion ($1.8 billion), and 130 billion, respectively.[14] Shoigu stated that Russia invited the heads of over 108 defense departments to attend the Army-2023 forum.[15]

Imagery posted on July 30 and 31 visually confirms damage to the Chonhar Bridge following a Ukrainian strike on July 29. Satellite imagery posted on July 30 reportedly shows damage to the Chonhar railway bridge.[16] Social media sources additionally circulated an image taken by someone standing on the bridge itself reportedly showing damage to the railway bridge.[17] One source speculated that the pictures taken from the bridge do not match the location of the damage as shown on available satellite imagery, which suggests that the full extent of the damage to the bridge is still unclear.[18] Russian milbloggers maintained their silence on damage to the Chonhar Bridge on July 31, possibly supporting ISW’s previous assessment that the Kremlin may have directed Russian commentators to refrain from covering the strike in an effort to exert greater control of the information space.[19]

Kremlin-appointed Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova confirmed on July 31 that Russia has transferred 4.8 million Ukrainians, including over 700,000 children, to the Russian Federation since the beginning of the war.[20] In a report on the activities “authorized by the President of the Russian Federation for children’s rights” in 2022, Lvova-Belova claimed that Russia has “received” 4.8 million Ukrainians since February 2022 and noted that the vast majority of the 700,000 children who arrived to Russia did not have parental or guardian supervision.[21] The report carefully frames these activities as humanitarian gestures of goodwill. International humanitarian law, however, defines the forced transfer of civilians to the territory of an occupying power as “deportation.” And the circumstances of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the situation in occupied territories are likely sufficiently coercive to mean that most “transfers” of Ukrainian civilians to Russia meet the threshold of forced deportation, which is prohibited under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, regardless of Russia’s claimed motive.[22] ISW continues to assess that Russian authorities are conducting a large-scale campaign to deport Ukrainians to the Russian Federation.[23]

Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the front on July 31. Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued attacking northwest and southwest of Bakhmut, in the western Donetsk–eastern Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast.[24] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that over the past week, Ukrainian forces liberated an additional 2 square kilometers of territory in the Bakhmut area and 12.6 square kilometers in the Berdyansk (western Donetsk–eastern Zaporizhia Oblast border area) and Melitopol (western Zaporizhia Oblast) directions.[25]

Iran and Belarus are deepening bilateral cooperation over the backdrop of their mutual support for Russia’s war in Ukraine. Belarusian Defense Minister Lieutenant General Viktor Khrenin arrived in Iran on July 31 and met with his counterpart, Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Ashtiani, to sign a Memorandum of Understanding and a bilateral military cooperation plan for 2023.[26] Ashtiani is primarily responsible for negotiating military acquisitions and sales in his role as Iranian Defense Minister, so Khrenin and Ashtiani likely discussed arms deals during their meeting. Belarus may have also been seeking to secure an agreement on Iranian production of Shahed drones on the territory of Belarus following initial reports that Iran was seeking to convert a plant in Belarus’ Gomel Oblast into a Shahed production plant.[27]

Ukrainian Presidential Administration Chief of Staff Andriy Yermak stated on July 30 that Kyiv and Washington will begin consultations on providing Ukraine “security guarantees” as soon as the week of August 6 – 13. Yermak stated that the security guarantees for Ukraine — including “concrete and long-term commitments that will ensure Ukraine's ability to win now and deter Russian aggression in the future” — will cover the period before Ukraine acquires NATO membership.[28] Yermak described the security guarantees as an “important prerequisite” for Ukraine’s recovery and noted that the security guarantees include financial support for Ukraine and sanctions and punitive measures against Russia.[29]

Key Takeaways:

• The Wagner Group may be supplanting the Russian military as the Belarusian military’s key training partner.
• The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) likely succeeded in recruiting an unknown number of Wagner personnel following Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed rebellion, though Prigozhin ordered remaining Wagner fighters to assemble in Belarus by August 5.
• Prigozhin stated that the Wagner Group stopped recruiting in Russia and claimed that the Wagner Group does not need to recruit more personnel and has sufficient reserves.
• Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made largely boilerplate comments framing the Russian state as adequately supporting long-term force-generation efforts and meeting Russian weapons demand through domestic production and international cooperation.
• Imagery posted on July 30 and 31 visually confirms damage to the Chonhar Bridge following a Ukrainian strike on July 29.
• Kremlin-appointed Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova confirmed on July 31 that Russia has transferred 4.8 million Ukrainians, including over 700,000 children, to the Russian Federation since the beginning of the war, very likely violating the Fourth Geneva Convention.
• Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the front on July 31.
• Iran and Belarus are deepening bilateral cooperation over the backdrop of their mutual support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.
• Ukrainian Presidential Administration Chief of Staff Andriy Yermak stated on July 30 that Kyiv and Washington will begin consultations on providing Ukraine “security guarantees” as soon as the week of August 6 – 13.
• Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Svatove-Kreminna and Avdiivka-Donetsk City lines and made claimed gains in Luhansk Oblast.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations near Bakhmut.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in western Donetsk and western Zaporizhia oblasts.
• Russian forces conducted limited counterattacks in western Donetsk and western Zaporizhia oblasts.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin ratified a law on July 31 increasing the fine for mobilized personnel’s or conscripts' failure to arrive at a military registration office after being summoned.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these 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 the Ukrainian 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 Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian forces continued offensive operations near Svatove on July 31 and made unconfirmed gains. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops conducted unsuccessful offensive operations east of Berestove (20km northwest of Svatove) and near Novoselivske (14km northwest of Svatove).[30] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar stated that Russian forces attempted to advance south of Novoselivske and push Ukrainian troops across the Oskil River, which runs west of Svatove.[31] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces took up more advantageous positions near Kuzemivka (13km northwest of Svatove).[32] One Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced up to the shoreline of the Oksil River, and other milbloggers reported heavy fighting is ongoing near Novoselivske, Novoyehorivka (15km southwest of Svatove), and Nadiia (13km southwest of Svatove).[33]

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted an unsuccessful attack near Novoselivske on July 31.[34]

Russian forces continued offensive operations near Kreminna on July 31 and made unconfirmed gains. The Russian Center Grouping of Forces spokesperson claimed that Russian forces captured eight Ukrainian strongholds on the borders of Raihorodka (35km northwest of Kreminna) and Chervonopopivka (5km northwest of Kreminna).[35] Several Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced in the Serebryanske forest area (southwest of Kreminna) towards Lyman.[36] A Russian milblogger also reported that Russian forces tried to attack towards Bilohorivka (10km south of Kreminna) from the southeast but were unsuccessful.[37]

Russian sources reported that Ukrainian forces conducted several unsuccessful counterattacks west and south of Kreminna on July 31. The Russian MoD claimed that Russian troops repelled attempted Ukrainian attacks near Kreminna itself, Kuzmyne (2km southwest of Kreminna), Bilohorivka, Berestove (30km south of Kreminna), and Spirne (25km south of Kreminna).[38] Russian milbloggers also claimed that Ukrainian troops unsuccessfully counterattacked in the Serebryanske forest area, and one Russian source noted that Ukrainian forces stabilized the line of defense near Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna) after deploying reserves to the area.[39]

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian Objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations near Bakhmut on July 31 and did not make any confirmed or claimed gains. Russian milbloggers reported that Ukrainian forces conducted ground attacks northwest of Bakhmut near Dubovo-Vasylivka (6km northwest) and that heavy battles continue southwest of Bakhmut near Andriivka (9km southwest) and Klishchiivka (6km southwest).[40] Russian sources indicated that elements of the 11st Guards Air Assault (VDV) Brigade and 4th Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Brigade are fighting in the Bakhmut area.[41]

Russian forces did not conduct any claimed or confirmed ground attack in the Bakhmut area on July 31.

Russian forces conducted ground attacks southwest of Donetsk City on July 31 and did not make any claimed or confirmed gains. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops unsuccessfully attacked near Marinka and Pobieda (both on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City).[42] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted assault operations within Marinka but were unsuccessful.[43]

Ukrainian forces did not conduct any claimed or confirmed ground attacks along the Avdiivka–Donetsk City line on July 31.

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

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations along the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area and reportedly made marginal advances on July 31. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and other Russian sources reported that Russian forces, including the 247th Airborne (VDV) Division, repelled Ukrainian ground attacks near Staromayorske (9km south of Velyka Novosilka).[44] Some Russian milbloggers continued to claim that Staromayorske is contested while other milbloggers conceded that Ukrainian forces control the settlement.[45] One milblogger claimed that Russian forces withdrew to positions on the north (left) bank of the Mokryi Yaly River south of Staromayorske to defend against Ukrainian advances further south, and that Ukrainian forces advanced near Pryyutne (15km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[46] Russian milbloggers claimed that fighting is ongoing near the T0518 Urozhaine-Velyka Novosilka highway and that the Donetsk People‘s Republic (DNR) “Kaskad” Operational Tactical Combat Formation is defending near Urozhaine (9km south of Velyka Novosilka).[47] One Russian milblogger expressed concern about Russia’s ability to defend Urozhaine and assessed that Ukrainian forces will capture the settlement within the next three days.[48]

Russian forces continued ground attacks along the Donetsk–Zaporizhia Oblast border area and may have made marginal advances on July 31. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces conducted counterattacks near Staromayorske and recaptured lost positions in the area.[49] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled the Russian attacks, however.[50]

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast and reportedly advanced on July 31. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Ukrainian forces made unspecified advances in the Mala Tokmachka (6km southeast of Orikhiv) and Robotyne (10km south of Orikhiv) directions.[51] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces repelled a limited mechanized Ukrainian attack near Robotyne and a smaller ground attack on the Pyatykhatky-Zherebyanky line (23–26km southwest of Orikhiv).[52]

Russian forces conducted an Iskander-M missile strike against a residential area in Kryvyi Rih, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast on July 31. Ukrainian officials reported that one Russian missile struck a multi-story school building, and a second missile struck a high-rise residential building.[53] Ukrainian officials reported that the strikes killed six civilians, including one child, and injured over 75.[54]

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

Russian President Vladimir Putin ratified a law on July 31 increasing the fine for failure to arrive at a military registration office after being summoned for mobilized personnel or conscripts.[55] The law increases the previous fines, which ranged from 500 to 3,000 rubles ($5 to $32), to a flat 30,000 ruble fine ($327).[56] The law also introduces new fines of 400,000 – 500,000 rubles ($4,360 – $6,540) and 60,000 – 80,000 rubles ($654 – $872) for legal entities and Russian government officials, respectively, which fail to submit military registration lists to recruiters.[57]

Republic of Bashkortostan Governor Radiy Khabirov announced on July 31 that authorities in Bashkortostan are forming another volunteer battalion — the “Almaz Safin Battalion.”[58] Khabirov did not specify the battalion’s planned specialized role or end strength, benefits for its members, or the timeline for its formation. Once formed, the Almaz Safin Battalion will be Bashkortostan’s seventh volunteer battalion.[59]

Russian authorities have reportedly mobilized 55,000 – 60,000 residents in Russian-occupied Crimea since early 2022. Representative of the Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Andriy Chernyak stated on July 30 that Russian authorities have mobilized 55,000 – 60,000 men from occupied Crimea since the beginning of 2022.[60] Chernyak stated that Russian authorities deployed many of these mobilized men to frontlines in Ukraine despite telling them that they would serve in rear areas on the second or third line.[61]

Russian civilians reportedly continue conducting arson attacks against Russian military registration and enlistment offices in Russia and occupied Ukraine. Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reported on July 31 that a Russian pensioner attempted an arson attack against a military registration and enlistment office in Severodvinsk, Arkhangelsk Oblast, on July 29.[62] Russian media aggregator Baza reported that residents in Kazan and occupied Feodosia, Crimea, attempted to set fire to Russian enlistment offices in their respective cities on July 29.[63]

Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Russian authorities continue integrating occupation legal, economic, and infrastructure structures in occupied Ukraine into Russian federal structures. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law regulating the appellate courts of the occupation administrations of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts, Crimea, and the city of Sevastopol.[64] The Kherson Oblast occupation administration reported that the (occupation) Kherson Oblast Industrial Development Fund and Moscow Industry and Entrepreneurship Support Fund signed an agreement on agricultural and industrial integration, further expanding the occupation administration’s connections with Russian federal subjects.[65] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian authorities laid cables to connect communications and internet in occupied Mylove, Luhansk Oblast to Russian communications services.[66]

Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus).

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, as part of ongoing Kremlin efforts to increase their control over Belarus and other Russian actions in Belarus.

See topline text.

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

2. Putin is looking for a bigger war, not an off-ramp, in Ukraine

Conclusion:

Putin has made plenty of fatal mistakes. But as long as he is in charge, Moscow will dedicate its still vast resources to achieving his obsession with destroying and subordinating Ukraine. As western leaders think about policies to support Ukraine into the third year of this ugly war, any long-term strategy must take this reality into account.

Putin is looking for a bigger war, not an off-ramp, in Ukraine

Financial Times · by Alexander Gabuev · July 30, 2023

The writer is the director of Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin

“These amendments are written for a big war and general mobilisation. And the smell of this big war can already be scented,” Andrei Kartapolov, the head of the Duma’s defence committee, said this week as the Russian parliament rushed to adopt a new law. The legislation enabling the Kremlin to send hundreds of thousands more men into combat reveals a sad truth: that far from seeking an off-ramp from his disastrous war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is preparing for an even bigger war.

It is understandable that many in Ukraine and the west want to believe that Russia’s president is cornered. The Ukrainian army is gradually reconquering lands occupied by the Russians and has shown itself capable of striking deep into enemy territory — even into the Kremlin itself. The sanctions pressure on Russia is mounting.

For now, the west remains united in support of Kyiv, and streams of modern weaponry and money sustain the Ukrainian war effort. Finally, the mutiny staged by the Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin and visible conflicts among senior Russian military commanders add to hopes that the Kremlin’s war machine will break down.

Things likely look very different to the Kremlin, which believes that it can afford a long war. The Russian economy is forecast to record modest growth this year, mostly thanks to military factories working around the clock. Critical components such as microchips needed for the defence industry are arriving from China and other sources.

Despite sanctions, the Kremlin’s war chest is still overflowing with cash, thanks to windfall energy profits last year and also to the adaptability of Russian commodities exporters, who have found new customers and who settle payments mostly in yuan. If budgetary pressures were to become more acute, Russia’s central bank could further devalue the rouble, making it easier to pay soldiers, defence industry workers and the internal security forces who keep the Russian elite and public repressed and largely in line with Putin’s disastrous course.

When it comes to the war itself, the Kremlin still seems unperturbed by the Ukrainian counteroffensive. Even if Kyiv makes more advances, the Kremlin may brush them off as temporary. Putin is banking on the fact that the Russian manpower that can potentially be mobilised is three to four times bigger than Ukraine’s, and the only pressing task is to be able to tap into that resource at will: to mobilise many more men, arm them, train them and send them to fight. This is precisely the purpose of the new law, which should help the Kremlin to avoid another official mobilisation.

From now on, the government can quietly send draft notices to as many men as it deems necessary. The upper age limit for performing mandatory service will be increased from 27 to 30, and could be raised again in future. Once an electronic draft notice is issued, Russia’s borders will be immediately closed to its recipient in order to prevent a massive exodus of military-age men like the one Russia witnessed last autumn. The punishments for refusing to serve have also been ramped up. These moves, combined with massive state investment in expanding arms production, should help Putin to build a bigger and better equipped army.

A parallel tactic is the strangulation of Ukraine’s economy. Knowing that the Ukrainian budget is on life support provided by its western allies, the Kremlin wants to deny Kyiv all sources of revenue. Moscow has therefore not only pulled out of the grain deal that had enabled Ukrainian agricultural exports via the Black Sea, it has also launched massive air strikes against Ukrainian ports to destroy any possibility of reviving the agreement. The same logic underpins Russia’s air strikes against civilian infrastructure: they are aimed at making Ukrainian cities uninhabitable and preventing reconstruction efforts.

The Kremlin hopes that the rapid rebuilding of the Russian army and gradual decimation of the Ukrainian economy and armed forces will result in growing western frustration and a decline in material support for Kyiv. To speed up this process and break the west’s will, Moscow is using threats of escalation, including expansion of the conflict towards Nato territory via Belarus with the help of Wagner mercenaries based there.

Putin has made plenty of fatal mistakes. But as long as he is in charge, Moscow will dedicate its still vast resources to achieving his obsession with destroying and subordinating Ukraine. As western leaders think about policies to support Ukraine into the third year of this ugly war, any long-term strategy must take this reality into account.

Financial Times · by Alexander Gabuev · July 30, 2023

3. China using families as 'hostages' to quash Uyghur dissent abroad

Excerpts:

But Alim says he knew this contact with his mother would come at a cost - because the man brokering the call was a Chinese police officer.

When the officer called again, he asked Alim to attend meetings of Uyghur human rights activists, gather intelligence and pass it back to the Chinese state.

"Whenever there was an anti-China protest in London, they would call me and ask who would be attending," says Alim, who shared with the BBC recordings of the phone calls requesting he work as a spy.

China using families as 'hostages' to quash Uyghur dissent abroad

BBC · by Menu

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By Sam Judah

BBC Newsnight and BBC Verify

China is pressuring Uyghurs living abroad to spy on human rights campaigners by threatening families back home, researchers say. Refugees and activists tell the BBC intimidating tactics are tearing communities apart.

"My dearest son," said Alim's mother as she flickered into view. "I didn't think I'd see you before I died."

Alim - not his real name - says he was overcome by the moment. The reunion over a video call was their first contact in six years, since he fled as a refugee to the UK.

But it was bittersweet: someone else was in control of the call. Like all Uyghurs - a mostly Muslim minority from north-western China - Alim's mother lives under intense surveillance and control. They could never call each other directly.

Instead, a middleman phoned Alim and his mother from two separate mobiles. He held the phone screens to face each other, so the pair could see wobbly images of each other - and hear muffled sound from the speakers.

Alim says they barely spoke, and spent most of the call in tears.

He doesn't know if the plain white wall he could see behind his mother was in her house in Xinjiang or an internment camp, where the Chinese government is alleged to have detained more than a million Uyghurs. China has long denied those charges.

But Alim says he knew this contact with his mother would come at a cost - because the man brokering the call was a Chinese police officer.

When the officer called again, he asked Alim to attend meetings of Uyghur human rights activists, gather intelligence and pass it back to the Chinese state.

"Whenever there was an anti-China protest in London, they would call me and ask who would be attending," says Alim, who shared with the BBC recordings of the phone calls requesting he work as a spy.

Alim was offered money, too, so he could try to befriend the leaders of campaign groups - many of them UK citizens - by taking them to restaurants and picking up the bill.

The officer suggested setting up a company as a front, in case suspicions were raised about his newfound wealth. Plenty of businesses had already been set up on behalf of others for that exact purpose, Alim was told.

The implied threat, that his family may come to harm if he refused, has left him in a vicious bind.

"They are using my family as hostages," Alim says. "I am living in a dark moment."

Watch more on BBC Newsnight on BBC Two at 22:30 on Monday 31 July, or catch up afterwards on BBC iPlayer

The tactics employed by governments to police their diasporas abroad are known as transnational repression.

Research suggests this particular kind - controlling access to family members in the home country through video calls, in exchange for compliance overseas - is commonly used by Chinese police.

Dr David Tobin at the University of Sheffield has conducted some of the most comprehensive research on the topic to date, with his colleague Nyrola Elimä. They have interviewed and surveyed more than 200 members of the Uyghur diaspora in several countries. He says all Uyghurs living outside China are victims of transnational repression.

"Family separation is the central tactic," he says. Even where phone calls are technically possible, relatives still living in China won't pick up, according to Dr Tobin. He says there is an assumption that calls will be monitored, and a fear that communicating freely will put them at risk.

Image caption,

Dr David Tobin says all Uyghurs living abroad are victims of transnational repression

This severing of family ties allows Chinese police to step in and offer tightly managed access - over video calls - as an incentive to comply, with the threat of repercussions for the family if they do not.

In the UK, Dr Tobin surveyed or interviewed 48 Uyghurs, from a population of about 400 people. Of those, two-thirds reported having been contacted directly by Chinese police - and pressured to spy, refrain from advocacy work, or stop speaking to the media.

And Uyghurs in the UK are far from the worst affected.

In Turkey, traditionally a safe haven for Uyghurs where 50,000 live in one of the largest communities outside China, 80% of the 148 of respondents reported similar threats from Chinese authorities.

Abdurehim Paraç arrived in Istanbul in 2014, having fled China a year earlier.

"Turkey was completely different to anything we'd experienced. We could travel wherever we wanted. The police didn't bother us," he says. "I couldn't believe such a life was possible."

But in the past few years, the picture has changed for Uyghurs in Turkey. Reports that police based in China have pressured people to spy on each other have filtered through the community, splintering their sense of camaraderie.

Image caption,

Abdurehim Paraç says Turkey was a safe haven for Uyghurs, but China's tactics are driving the community apart

In a video posted on Facebook, a young Uyghur man who appears to have been captured and beaten by his peers, offers a troubled confession - admitting to spying on behalf of Beijing. While the circumstances surrounding the scene are unclear, the footage has been circulated among the Uyghur community, and the man has been widely condemned online.

The accumulation of stories like these is having an effect, Abdurehim says.

"Young people are distancing themselves from Uyghur protests and meetings. They are worried that people there might be spies," he says. "China's plan is working."

Dr Tobin thinks Turkish authorities are aware of what's happening and have been slow to respond. "The more dependent a country is on investment from China, the more likely it is to cooperate or to turn a blind eye," he says.

Turkey is seen as having grown closer to China in recent years, and questions have been raised about its commitment to protecting its Uyghur community.

The Turkish government did not respond to a request for comment.

But China is not only targeting people in countries where it has economic supremacy.

Julie Millsap, a US-born activist who works with the Uyghur Human Rights Project in Washington DC, says China has tried to pressure her through her in-laws.

Image caption,

Julie Millsap, a US-born activist, says her husband's family in China faced police harassment for her work with Uyghurs

Her husband is Han Chinese, part of the country's largest ethnic group, and the two met in China before moving to the US capital in 2020.

After Julie began campaigning on behalf of Uyghurs, local police began dropping in on her extended family in China, saying they "wanted to be friends".

She and her husband received threatening messages from her sister-in-law's phone, suggesting Julie's children may end up "as orphans". "They weren't written in a language style that she used," says Julie, who suspects the police were instructing her to send them.

During a recent video call between her husband, in Washington DC, and his sister, in China, the police happened to stop by, allowing Julie to record the moment, and confront one of the officers directly.

"He stammered and asked us not to misinterpret his intentions," she says. The officer told her police were arranging visits to all local families with US relatives, in light of the "delicate" relationship between the US and China.

Image source, JULIE MILLSAP

Image caption,

Julie Millsap confronted a police officer who dropped in on her sister-in-law in China

Julie recognises that a white American and a Han Chinese family are afforded a degree of safety that Uyghurs are not. "But we're still talking about police harassment, about threats, about a daily reality that is anything but good," she says.

She thinks it is alarming that Chinese authorities feel comfortable targeting foreign citizens and attempting to dictate their work.

The US government is beginning to address the problem formally.

In March, senators introduced the Transnational Repression Policy Act, listing a range of abuses including "coercion by proxy", which covers threats to family members overseas. If passed, the law would see the creation of a dedicated phone line to report threats, and prompt Congress to bring sanctions against perpetrators wherever possible.

Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur rights campaigner based in Norway, thinks the US legislation would be a step in the right direction, but that Western governments should go further. Each time a case is reported to the authorities, questions should be lodged directly with the Chinese government, requesting assurance that family members are safe, he says.

"We are your citizens, your neighbours and your taxpayers. Our governments should take some responsibility," says Mr Ayup.

Dr Tobin recognises the complications inherent in tackling the issue. "Saying 'would you like to speak to your family?' isn't a crime. We know it's a threat. We know it breaks communities, and causes mental health problems and trauma, but it is not a crime on British soil," he says.

The UK Home Office says attempts to intimidate overseas critics are "unacceptable", that an internal review into transnational repression is underway, and all such incidents should be reported to law enforcement.

In a statement, the Chinese Embassy in London called the allegations of transnational repression "totally groundless". The Chinese government "protects Uyghurs and their communication with overseas relatives in accordance with the law", it said.

Alim chose not to report his case to the police, but confessed his predicament to a group of Uyghur rights activists in London.

One of the group's leaders told us the requests were very common, and posed challenges to the integrity of the community - but insisted their advocacy work would continue. In their experience, almost all advances from Chinese police are rejected.

Alim wrestled with the issue before reaching a decision. "I realised that betraying others for the sake of my family would mean selling out my nation, and I couldn't do that.

"If that was the price I had to pay, so be it." He too refused China's offer.

BBC · by Menu

4. Whatever Happened to Al Qaeda?

Excerpts:

Obama, Trump, and Biden all sought to reduce the U.S. military presence in the Middle East and Afghanistan, with the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan being the most dramatic example. Such a shift has reduced the number of nearby U.S. targets and simply made the United States less important to the region (often at the expense of U.S. influence and regional stability), making it hard to push locally focused groups to see the United States as their main enemy. In addition, the civil wars in Mali, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere do not have the emotive power for many Muslims that Iraq did after 2003 or Syria after 2011, reducing the number of foreigners who volunteer to fight in the jihadi ranks.

Afghanistan remains an important question mark. The Taliban appear to value international legitimacy, but their hosting of Zawahiri and general refusal to distance themselves from al Qaeda raise questions about whether the group will allow their territory to again be used to stage international terrorist attacks. Although the United States was able to kill Zawahiri in Afghanistan, the lack of an on-the-ground presence makes it hard to gather intelligence, conduct strikes, and otherwise maintain pressure on groups in the region.

Zawahiri’s death compounded many problems for the jihadi movement. There is no obvious successor, as most members of the founding generation are dead or, like Adel, isolated from the rest of the movement. With no clear leader, it is hard for the core organization to direct its affiliates or even to encourage unaffiliated jihadis to attack the United States: These loose cannons will find inspiration elsewhere or nowhere at all.

Perhaps most importantly, time does not appear to be on al Qaeda’s side. The terrorist world is highly competitive, and as al Qaeda dawdles, new causes and groups arise to compete for money and recruits, while the U.S.-led counterterrorism campaign continues to thin its ranks.

Whatever Happened to Al Qaeda?

The once-powerful organization’s disappearance from headlines and the broader foreign-policy conversation is remarkable.

By Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

Foreign Policy · by Daniel Byman · July 31, 2023

On July 31, 2022, a U.S. drone strike killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri at a Taliban guest house in Kabul. A year later, al Qaeda has still not announced Zawahiri’s successor.

On July 31, 2022, a U.S. drone strike killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri at a Taliban guest house in Kabul. A year later, al Qaeda has still not announced Zawahiri’s successor.

This has made it difficult for the core group to stake a claim to the leadership of the global jihadi movement or even to remain an important player regionally or internationally. Indeed, al Qaeda, the broader set of affiliate groups it claims to lead, and the jihadi movement as a whole have all suffered repeated blows in recent years—reducing the threat to the United States and its allies.

For an organization that once struck fear into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans after Sept. 11, 2001, and sparked a so-called global war on terror that dramatically reoriented U.S. foreign policy for two decades, al Qaeda’s almost complete disappearance from both the daily news headlines and the broader foreign-policy conversation in Washington these days is remarkable.

A quick look at the number of deadly jihadi attacks in the United States since 9/11 suggests the organization’s decline in both capabilities and ideological influence. According to data from the New America Foundation, jihadis have killed 107 Americans on U.S. soil since 9/11, compared with the 130 killed by right-wing terrorists. The last significant jihadi attack was four years ago, when a Saudi Air Force trainee working with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the group’s Yemen branch, killed three sailors at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in 2019. Pensacola was the only post-9/11 attack on U.S. soil that a jihadi group abroad coordinated; the others involved jihadis who were inspired by al Qaeda or its onetime affiliate turned competitor, the Islamic State, but who had little or no contact with the groups themselves.

The core organization that Zawahiri led has not directed an attack on the United States since 9/11, and after a spate of bloody attacks in Europe, has not conducted one there since the London attacks of 2005—almost 20 years ago. In Europe, affiliates such as AQAP have had more success, such as that group’s 2015 attack on the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, but their operations have also decreased in recent years. The Islamic State has conducted more attacks than al Qaeda affiliates, including devastating shootings and suicide bombings in Paris and Brussels in 2015 and 2016 respectively, but a pattern of decline in Europe is clear.

Once-strong affiliates such as AQAP, as well as al Qaeda-linked groups in the Philippines, Syria, and other countries, have suffered numerous leadership losses, internal divisions, and other debilitating problems, making it harder for them to conduct external attacks. Measuring overall support is difficult, but foreign fighters no longer flock to places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, where the Islamic State and al Qaeda were once ascendant and are now far weaker. To be clear, the picture is not all bad for jihadis—in Africa, new jihadi organizations are emerging, and strong groups such as al-Shabab in Somalia are flourishing—but decline is evident in most of the rest of the world.

Part of this weakness is due to the civil war that erupted in 2013 within the jihadi movement between al Qaeda and its upstart offshoot, the Islamic State. In many Muslim countries, most notably Afghanistan, parts of the Sahel, and Syria, al Qaeda and its allies directly waged war against the rival Islamic State organization and its so-called “provinces.” Today in Afghanistan, allies of al Qaeda—the Taliban—are in a bloody fight with the Islamic State’s proxy. In addition to the tangible impact the death toll has had on the capabilities of all involved, this infighting also discredited both movements: Few starry-eyed, would-be holy warriors are eager to sign up to kill other holy warriors.

The movement has also fragmented and localized. Most of the affiliate groups— from Mali to Nigeria to Afghanistan—now focus almost exclusively on the local civil war or insurgency that they are fighting in. You still do not want to be a Western missionary or tourist who stumbles across their path, but this shift in focus reduces the chance of an international terrorist attack. Some jihadi groups, such as those in West Africa, probably could launch a terrorist strike on the West if they put in the effort—they are just focused elsewhere. Their brutality is directed toward their own countries and at their neighbors, with thousands of people—many of them Muslims themselves—dying from terrorist attacks and civil wars involving jihadi groups.

The enduring counterterrorism campaign against al Qaeda and its affiliates, as well as the Islamic State and other parts of the movement, has also taken its toll. U.S. drone strikes have relentlessly decimated the ranks of the senior al Qaeda core, affiliate leaders, and other jihadi figures, even when they try to hide in remote parts of Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Today, the core al Qaeda organization has “far fewer” than 200 fighters, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The anti-Islamic State campaign, too, has proved highly effective. At the height of its so-called caliphate in 2014 and 2015, the group ruled over millions of people and controlled territory in Iraq and Syria the size of Great Britain. But by 2019, the U.S.-led coalition drove the caliphate underground. The group still launches attacks in Iraq and Syria and has thousands of fighters there, but like many al Qaeda affiliates, it appears focused on the civil war it is fighting, not international terrorism.

U.S. training and aid extended to foreign militaries and security forces has made them more capable of and more willing to target local jihadi groups, while an ongoing global intelligence campaign disrupts jihadi cells around the world. Because of this constant manhunt, it is dangerous for jihadi leaders to communicate, making it hard for them to direct affiliate groups and operatives, further decentralizing the movement. As the groups weaken, they have a harder time overcoming more rigorous airport screening and travel controls, while more aggressive FBI efforts make it more likely that plots in the United States will be discovered.

With variations, this broad counterterrorism campaign began under U.S. President George W. Bush after 9/11 and continued in the Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and now Joe Biden administrations, suggesting that it has considerable staying power regardless of which party is in the White House.

It may also explain part of why al Qaeda has not named a new leader. Some senior al Qaeda operatives are hiding in Iran, including Saif al-Adel, whom some say is al Qaeda’s de facto leader. Tehran does not cooperate with U.S. intelligence, and Iran is a no-go zone for the U.S. military, as a strike there would be seen as an act of war. That makes it hard to target operatives there. (Though Israel managed to kill a senior al Qaeda figure in Iran.)

However, the Iranian government also places restrictions on al Qaeda figures in the country, as Tehran hardly needs another reason for the United States and its allies to punish it. In addition, in the highly sectarian world of jihadi politics, al Qaeda’s quiet alliance with Iran is a source of criticism from the Islamic State and other jihadis. Having your de facto leader be a prisoner, or at least muzzled, in a country that many jihadis consider to be worse than the United States is hardly a way to win new followers.

Obama, Trump, and Biden all sought to reduce the U.S. military presence in the Middle East and Afghanistan, with the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan being the most dramatic example. Such a shift has reduced the number of nearby U.S. targets and simply made the United States less important to the region (often at the expense of U.S. influence and regional stability), making it hard to push locally focused groups to see the United States as their main enemy. In addition, the civil wars in Mali, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere do not have the emotive power for many Muslims that Iraq did after 2003 or Syria after 2011, reducing the number of foreigners who volunteer to fight in the jihadi ranks.

Afghanistan remains an important question mark. The Taliban appear to value international legitimacy, but their hosting of Zawahiri and general refusal to distance themselves from al Qaeda raise questions about whether the group will allow their territory to again be used to stage international terrorist attacks. Although the United States was able to kill Zawahiri in Afghanistan, the lack of an on-the-ground presence makes it hard to gather intelligence, conduct strikes, and otherwise maintain pressure on groups in the region.

Zawahiri’s death compounded many problems for the jihadi movement. There is no obvious successor, as most members of the founding generation are dead or, like Adel, isolated from the rest of the movement. With no clear leader, it is hard for the core organization to direct its affiliates or even to encourage unaffiliated jihadis to attack the United States: These loose cannons will find inspiration elsewhere or nowhere at all.

Perhaps most importantly, time does not appear to be on al Qaeda’s side. The terrorist world is highly competitive, and as al Qaeda dawdles, new causes and groups arise to compete for money and recruits, while the U.S.-led counterterrorism campaign continues to thin its ranks.

Foreign Policy · by Daniel Byman · July 31, 2023

5. The Ukraine war is about to get worse

Excerpts:

Moreover, the loss of even a small percentage of supply has the potential to raise prices across the continent, given the tightness of global gas markets. In Germany, for instance, the economy minister has hinted that the country will be forced to significantly wind down its industrial activities if the gas agreement isn’t extended at the end of the year. For a country — and indeed a continent — already struggling with creeping deindustrialisation, the consequences could be devastating.

This is especially worrying if we consider that, barring the same higher-than-average temperatures as last year, this winter Europe will have a natural gas deficit of at least 60 billion cubic meters. In other words, it’s not inconceivable that another gas crisis is around the corner — and it might be even worse than last year’s. As the Ukraine war drags on, even the few safeguards put in place are coming undone. Instead of being diluted by diplomacy, the repercussions of this conflict have merely evolved.

The Ukraine war is about to get worse

Collapsed grain and gas deals spell disaster for Europe

unherd.com · by Thomas Fazi · July 30, 2023

Amid the never-ending coverage of the latest offensive or counteroffensive in Ukraine, it is often unappreciated just how much worse the global economic repercussions from the conflict could have been. Russia is the world’s leading exporter of gas and provided around 50% of the EU’s demand before the war; Ukraine, meanwhile, is a major exporter of grain, alongside Russia itself. The complete disruption of either of these channels would have resulted in catastrophe.

The fact this didn’t happen last year was largely thanks to two crucial agreements secured early in the conflict: the Black Sea Grain Initiative, whereby Russia allowed Ukraine to continue exporting grain via the Black Sea (which is under its control), and a deal that allowed Russian gas to continue flowing to Europe via Ukraine. But the former has just been suspended, and the latter could soon be terminated. The true cost of this war, it seems, is about to greatly increase.

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When the grain deal was brokered last July, António Guterres, the secretary-general of the UN, called it a “beacon of hope” — and rightly so. Reaching an agreement of this kind was a remarkable achievement and a big, if rare, victory for international diplomacy. It contributed to significantly lowering grain prices and avoided a collapse in Ukrainian exports (which only declined by around 30%) — effectively preventing a potential global humanitarian disaster. Over the past year, more than 1,000 ships (containing nearly 33 million metric tons of grain and other foodstuffs) left Ukraine from three Ukrainian ports: Odesa, Chornomorsk and Yuzhny/Pivdennyi.

On July 17, however, Putin pulled out of the deal. Russia’s move didn’t come out of the blue. As Western sanctions increased, the deal had started coming under growing strain, with the Kremlin claiming that the West wasn’t holding up its end of the bargain, which allowed for more Russian agricultural and fertiliser exports. For this to happen, Russia insisted on reconnecting the Russian Agricultural Bank to the Swift international payment system and, among other things, the unblocking of assets and accounts of those Russian companies involved in food and fertiliser exports.

But the most important demand was the resumption of the Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline, which runs from the Russian city of Togliatti to various Black Sea ports in Ukraine, and which prior to the war exported 2.5 million tonnes of ammonia annually. As part of the negotiations over the Black Sea Grain Initiative, Kyiv and Moscow struck a deal to allow the safe passage of ammonia through the pipeline — but the latter was never reopened by Ukraine. Last September, the UN urged Ukraine to resume its transport, in view of ammonia fertiliser’s crucial role in supporting global agricultural productions, but to no avail.

Then, last month, Russia once again demanded once the reopening of the pipeline as a condition for renewing the Black Sea Grain Initiative. Just a few days later, a section of it located in Ukrainian territory was blown up — according to Russia, by Ukrainian saboteurs, in a deliberate effort to sabotage the grain deal. The governor of Ukraine’s Kharkiv Oblast, however, maintains that it was destroyed by Russian shelling. In any case, the fate of the deal was more or less sealed at that point: when Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, announced a month later that “the Black Sea agreements are no longer in effect”, few were surprised. The decision came just a few hours after Ukraine’s strike on the bridge connecting mainland Russia to Crimea, though Moscow denied that there was a connection between the two events.

Predictably, the West has chastised Russia’s decision to pull out of the deal. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said his country regrets Russia’s “continued weaponisation of food”, while the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell claimed that Putin is “using hunger as a weapon”. Elsewhere, Poland’s Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau described it as “nothing less than an act of economic aggression against the states of the Global South, which are most dependent on the Ukrainian grain”, while Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni stated that Russia’s decision is “further proof on who is a friend and who is the enemy of the poorest countries”.

Such strong rhetoric masks a more nuanced picture, however. As Oxfam has claimed, based on data from the UN’s Joint Coordination Centre, less than 3% of the grain from the deal went to the world’s poorest countries, including Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan and Yemen. By contrast, approximately 80% of the grain has been shipped to richer countries, mainly EU countries and China. Putin himself, in conversation with the President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa, claimed that “the deal’s main goal — to supply grain to countries in need, including those on the African continent — has not been implemented”.

Yet despite Putin’s claims of export challenges, Russia enjoyed record levels of wheat shipments over the past year — so clearly this decision has much more to do with the exacerbation of West-Russia relations than it has to do with strictly economic issues. Likewise, it is fair to assume that Putin’s decision to send free grain to six African countries that have strong ties with Moscow has more to do with strengthening global alliances than actual humanitarian concerns. But with no end to the war in sight, and all sides engaged in increasingly brazen military brinkmanship, is anyone really surprised that a deal that hinged entirely on Russia’s goodwill has come undone?

And the price will be paid by Western countries, too. Now that the Black Sea Grain Initiative has been paused, even greater quantities of Ukrainian grain will be transported overland across Europe through so-called “solidarity routes” set up by the EU. Yet problems had already arisen before the initiative collapsed, as cheap Ukrainian grain, much of which was exported by tax-avoiding shell firms, flooded local markets, where they undercut local produce and angered farmers. In response, in April, the governments of Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia introduced unilateral bans on Ukrainian grain until an EU deal was agreed that made it possible to reduce pressure on local markets, while at the same time enabling the transit of Ukrainian goods to traditional markets in non-EU countries. With the suspension of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, however, the pressures are likely to increase.

At the moment, the future of the deal remains unclear. Putin left the door open to reviving it, saying that Russia will comply “as soon as the Russian part (of the deal) is completed”. However, the fact that Russia has launched several attacks on critical grain export infrastructure in the Odesa region suggests that a resumption of the deal appears unlikely anytime soon.

And it appears a similar story of obstruction seems to be playing out with Russian gas exports. Despite the war, Russian gas has continued to flow through Ukraine into Europe — softening the blow of the EU’s intention of decoupling from Russian energy while allowing Ukraine to raise much-needed cash in the form of transit fees. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, however, German Galushchenko, Ukraine’s energy minister, said that Kyiv is unlikely to renew the gas transit deal when Ukraine’s supply contract with Gazprom expires in 2024.

In practice, this would mean the closure of one of the last arteries still carrying Russian gas to Europe, a move which would severely weaken many energy-dependent EU countries. Recent analysis by Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy suggests that deliveries to EU countries “could drop to between 10 and 16 billion cubic meters (45 to 73% of current levels)”, according to a June analysis by Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, leaving Europe with a shortfall that cannot currently be replaced with greater liquefied natural gas imports from the US and Qatar.

Moreover, the loss of even a small percentage of supply has the potential to raise prices across the continent, given the tightness of global gas markets. In Germany, for instance, the economy minister has hinted that the country will be forced to significantly wind down its industrial activities if the gas agreement isn’t extended at the end of the year. For a country — and indeed a continent — already struggling with creeping deindustrialisation, the consequences could be devastating.

This is especially worrying if we consider that, barring the same higher-than-average temperatures as last year, this winter Europe will have a natural gas deficit of at least 60 billion cubic meters. In other words, it’s not inconceivable that another gas crisis is around the corner — and it might be even worse than last year’s. As the Ukraine war drags on, even the few safeguards put in place are coming undone. Instead of being diluted by diplomacy, the repercussions of this conflict have merely evolved.

unherd.com · by Thomas Fazi · July 30, 2023

6. The Dangers of Detachment: Why Economic Independence Could Make the World More Dangerous

Excerpts:

The early years of the 2020s have made it clear that autocracies can be dangerous when they are deeply embedded in the Western order. But they can also be dangerous when they are minimally integrated. It would be unfortunate—and ironic—if economic pressure by the West inadvertently made China and Russia more aggressive competitors over time and diminished the West’s own capacity to shape the international system.

Western policymakers are unlikely to pivot back toward proposing new trade deals or encouraging companies to build supply chains involving China and Russia. But given the facts, the United States and Europe should not abandon interdependence altogether. Instead, they should consider how to establish a more sustainable configuration of interdependence, one in which they and their strategic competitors are invested. The West should proceed cautiously and incrementally, but rigorously, as it works to enhance the resilience of supply chains for vital commodities and critical technologies, reducing its exposure to potential coercion while preserving scientific and technological exchanges that are essential to maintaining the vibrancy of its innovation ecosystems.

Above all else, the West should accept that China and Russia are likely to endure. Recent history may encourage the United States and Europe to pursue obtain a total victory, as the Allied powers achieved over Germany and Japan in World War II and as Washington ultimately did over Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s. But such an outcome is unlikely to happen today. The long-term challenge for the West, then, is to manage the risks that come from both dependence and detachment—and figure out how to live with them.

The Dangers of Detachment

Why Economic Independence Could Make the World More Dangerous

By Ali Wyne

July 31, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Ali Wyne · July 31, 2023

The past three years have conclusively demonstrated the dangers of excessive dependence. No country can any longer doubt the risks of relying too heavily on another for vital commodities, especially a strategic competitor. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed a widespread lack of essential medicines, even among rich countries such as the United States, and the concerning degree to which China dominates the production of basic protective equipment. Then, in 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed how much the EU had come to rely on Moscow’s gas and oil exports. These events have forced Washington and Brussels to consider various ways of reconfiguring commercial ties with Beijing and severing them with Moscow.

It was not supposed to be this way. In the quarter century after the Cold War ended, Western countries largely believed—or at least hoped—that the Soviet Union’s dissolution would inaugurate a new normal of benign relations between democracies and autocracies. Then U.S. Senator Barack Obama articulated this view in 2006, contending that “competition between the great powers” was an antiquated way of viewing international relations. Obama concluded that “the world’s most powerful nations . . . are largely committed to a common set of international rules governing trade, economic policy, and the legal and diplomatic resolution of disputes.” But that assessment no longer holds. The West increasingly, and understandably, regards interdependence not as a stabilizing factor in its relations with China and Russia but as a potential vulnerability.

Yet the West’s efforts to rapidly shift course could bring new challenges. If an earlier era of globalization led to what the political economists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman have called “weaponized interdependence”—in which states that control key information and financial hubs coerce and punish others—the years to come could produce what might be called “weaponized detachment,” in which greater economic independence emboldens states to act more aggressively. In other words, Beijing and Moscow could become less fearful of contesting Western influence and more likely to deepen their partnership, especially if they are able to bolster ties with nonaligned powers and countries across the developing world. Western countries, then, should be careful as they adjust economic relations with their main competitors.

CUTS HURT

For the West, dissolving long-standing commercial bonds will take time. Even after Russia invaded Ukraine, G-7 members decided against imposing a near-outright ban on exports to Russia. And although the EU is no longer directly importing oil from Moscow, the bloc is indirectly doing so by purchasing discounted supplies from countries that have declined to sanction Russia—including China, India, and Turkey. Still, the trend is clear: the West is working to close sanctions loopholes and accelerate its transition to clean energy and fossil fuels that do not come from Russia.

Paring back connectivity with China will be more difficult, and not only because the West has far more extensive economic ties with Beijing than it ever did with Moscow. There is less consensus about how to manage relations with China. Washington regards Beijing—in the words of the 2022 National Security Strategy—as “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” But the view from Brussels is less stark. In a March 2019 document, the European Commission defined China as “a cooperation partner” and “a negotiating partner” while also calling it “an economic competitor” and “a systemic rival.” In order to develop a more coordinated approach, U.S. and European leaders have largely shelved talk of decoupling in favor of “de-risking.” In addition, they increasingly agree that reducing interdependence with China in core areas of frontier technology is both an economic and a security imperative. This concern presently centers on computing, but it is likely to encompass other domains over time, including bioinformatics and clean energy.

Growing Western cohesion is a serious challenge to China and Russia. Following its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow incurred the most sweeping sanctions that have been imposed on a major economic power since World War II. These penalties have already severely limited Moscow’s leverage over the EU: in 2021, Russia provided 45 percent of the bloc’s gas and 27 percent of its oil, but as of the first quarter of 2023, those figures had declined to 17 percent and three percent, respectively. Over time, sanctions will also erode Russia’s defense industrial base by limiting the country’s ability to procure semiconductors.

China, meanwhile, has damaged its standing in the West with its assertive “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy and its unwillingness to condemn Russian aggression in Ukraine. Beijing’s plan to become self-reliant in the production of semiconductors was always ambitious, and it became harder to execute as the West began erecting trade barriers, starting in earnest with the Trump administration’s initiation of a tariff campaign in mid-2018. Multilateral export controls agreed to by Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States have further complicated the task, undercutting China’s ability to master advanced techniques that are essential to building the three-nanometer and five-nanometer chips at the leading edge of innovation.

THE WIDENING GYRE

It is unclear, however, how effective Western economic pressure on Russia and China will ultimately prove to be. For starters, the West’s overall weight in the global economy is diminishing. In 1993, the six Western member countries of the G-7 accounted for 50 percent of gross world product. Today, that figure is 40 percent. Although Russia’s decoupling from the West proceeds apace, Moscow is far from a global pariah. It is deepening its relationships with China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. It maintains significant energy ties and a profitable arms trade with India. In the developing world, Russia has gained traction with its disingenuous claim that higher food and energy prices are the result of Western sanctions, not its own aggression. Should Ukraine’s nascent counteroffensive underwhelm, even transatlantic unity against Moscow could begin to dissipate. And isolating China would be vastly harder, given its centrality to the global economy. China’s gross domestic product is more than nine times as large as Russia’s, and it is projected to contribute 22.6 percent of global growth over the next five years. In addition, it serves as the largest trading partner for more than 120 countries.

China and Russia also increasingly see strategic competition in existential terms and will thus not easily buckle to Western economic pressure. Russian President Vladimir Putin has alleged that the West aims to “transform a local conflict into a phase of global confrontation” and warned that Russia’s “existence” is at stake. Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping has accused the West of engaging in “all-around containment, encirclement, and suppression of China” that “has brought unprecedented severe challenges” to its economic development. He has urged the country’s national security establishment to “be prepared for worst-case and extreme scenarios.”

And as Western pressure continues to increase, these states could be further emboldened. Now that Russia is largely cut off from the West, Moscow may judge that it has little to lose from intensifying its military devastation of Ukraine or launching more aggressive electoral interference campaigns and cyberattacks against NATO member states. Putin is also likely to escalate Russian operations in the developing world; consider, for example, the expanding military and economic foothold of the Wagner paramilitary company across central Africa. Western sanctions may make Russia less powerful, but even a severely weakened Russia will still have significant resources and connections—including the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, prodigious energy reserves, and expanding economic ties with non-Western countries—with which to sow instability.

The West’s residual economic connectivity with China far exceeds that which it maintains with Russia. Reducing ties will accordingly take longer, but given Beijing’s economic pull, doing so may also prove more consequential. China’s quest for greater financial self-reliance has so far been unsuccessful: the yuan accounted for just 2.3 percent of global payments in March, essentially unchanged from two years earlier. If the Chinese government does not embrace more open capital markets, the yuan stands little chance of overtaking the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Nevertheless, Beijing will try to settle more of its bilateral trade in yuan and, as the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, observed in April, “international currency status [for the dollar or the euro] should no longer be taken for granted.”

In the technological realm, China believes that developing a domestic semiconductor supply chain is a foundational imperative, and it is resourcing that effort accordingly. In 2022 alone, the government provided roughly $1.75 billion in subsidies to 190 domestically listed chip companies. In addition, as it devises new ways of evading export controls, Beijing is building new leverage by expanding its role in the production of the less advanced semiconductors that power consumer electronics. The geopolitical research firm Rhodium Group and Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, a think tank, estimate that China could account for 46 percent of global manufacturing capacity for 50- to 180-nanometer chips within a decade.

DIRE STRAITS

Many prominent Western observers—including Harry Harris, the former commander of U.S. Pacific Command, and Ross Babbage, a former senior Australian defense and intelligence official—believe that Chinese leaders may seek to reunify Taiwan with the mainland by 2030. It is a frightening possibility. But the outcome could be even more dangerous for Taiwan if the Chinese government operates on a longer timeframe, because Beijing will likely grow more capable over time of absorbing economic retaliation from the West. Consider what might happen if an invasion comes shortly before 2049, when Xi hopes to have achieved “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” By then, China’s economy will likely be the world’s largest, substantially less dependent on the dollar, and in possession of a more “Western proof” semiconductor supply chain than it has now. Beijing would have less to fear from attacking Taipei than it does now.

Greater Chinese independence from the West could have ramifications that go beyond just Taiwan. For instance, China might feel emboldened to more aggressively press its territorial claims in the East China and South China Seas and encroach further across its disputed border with India. Its increased economic heft and security could make Beijing less hesitant to arm U.S. adversaries, including Russia, if these adversaries attack their neighbors. And the more that China protects itself from Western economic pressure, the more comfortable the global south might feel adopting its technology platforms, strengthening bilateral trade ties, and participating in geoeconomic undertakings including the Belt and Road Initiative. Developing states, after all, would feel more confident both in Beijing’s growth outlook and in their ability to maneuver around whatever secondary sanctions Western countries might impose on them for dealing with China.

These outcomes are far from guaranteed, particularly given that China faces major economic headwinds. It is in demographic decline and experiencing slowing growth, and the world’s advanced industrial democracies are increasingly aligned against it. Beijing has little prospect of achieving hegemony in Asia, let alone overtaking Washington and establishing a new unipolar order. But considering how improbable China’s present influence within the international system would have seemed only 30 years ago, it is premature to assume that the country’s quest for greater financial and technological self-reliance is doomed. Indeed, it is already circumventing export controls aimed at slowing its development of cutting-edge chips by leveraging third countries and using cloud computing services.

PEACE FOR OUR TIME

Interdependence may not seem worth defending, given that it has historically failed to prevent war. But no structural phenomenon can prevent conflict; the decision to initiate hostilities is ultimately a human one. And interdependence can compel potential belligerents to reconsider their plans by making aggression more costly for countries that do decide to engage in it. In addition, as with the West’s interactions with a resurgent China since the late 1970s, interdependence can slow the transformation of suspicion into antagonism. Finally, interdependence can create space for the kind of great-power cooperation that seems increasingly unthinkable today. For example, hope for a trilateral arms control dialogue involving China, Russia, and the United States seemed plausible a decade ago, but it does not right now.

It is concerning, then, that officials in Beijing, Brussels, Moscow, and Washington are all taking a dimmer view of interdependence. In fact, their skepticism alone could make the world more fraught. Drawing on 40 case studies of great-power conflicts between 1790 and 1991, the political scientist Dale Copeland concluded in 2014 that the level of interdependence matters less in explaining the outbreak of hostilities than did expectations about its trajectory. “It does not matter whether past and current levels of commerce have been high if leaders believe they are going to be cut off tomorrow or in the near future,” he wrote. “It is their pessimism about the future that will probably drive these leaders to consider hard-line measures and even war to safeguard the long-term security of the state.”

The early years of the 2020s have made it clear that autocracies can be dangerous when they are deeply embedded in the Western order. But they can also be dangerous when they are minimally integrated. It would be unfortunate—and ironic—if economic pressure by the West inadvertently made China and Russia more aggressive competitors over time and diminished the West’s own capacity to shape the international system.

Western policymakers are unlikely to pivot back toward proposing new trade deals or encouraging companies to build supply chains involving China and Russia. But given the facts, the United States and Europe should not abandon interdependence altogether. Instead, they should consider how to establish a more sustainable configuration of interdependence, one in which they and their strategic competitors are invested. The West should proceed cautiously and incrementally, but rigorously, as it works to enhance the resilience of supply chains for vital commodities and critical technologies, reducing its exposure to potential coercion while preserving scientific and technological exchanges that are essential to maintaining the vibrancy of its innovation ecosystems.

Above all else, the West should accept that China and Russia are likely to endure. Recent history may encourage the United States and Europe to pursue obtain a total victory, as the Allied powers achieved over Germany and Japan in World War II and as Washington ultimately did over Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s. But such an outcome is unlikely to happen today. The long-term challenge for the West, then, is to manage the risks that come from both dependence and detachment—and figure out how to live with them.

• ALI WYNE is Senior Analyst with Eurasia Group’s Global Macro-Geopolitics practice. He is the author of America’s Great-Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition.

Foreign Affairs · by Ali Wyne · July 31, 2023

7. FBI Ordered to Find Out Which Agency Disobeyed White House in Secret Deal, Finds Out It Was Itself

FBI Ordered to Find Out Which Agency Disobeyed White House in Secret Deal, Finds Out It Was Itself

The bureau was ordered to find out which government agency broke with White House policy and engaged a blacklisted spyware vendor. It found...itself.

By

Lucas Ropek

PublishedYesterday

Comments (12)

Gizmodo · August 1, 2023

Photo: xalien (Shutterstock)

Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that an unknown federal agency had breached official White House policy and used secretive methods to conduct a business deal with the NSO Group, a blacklisted spyware vendor known for selling powerful surveillance tools. The agency in question not only brazenly disobeyed the government’s official policy, but had also used a front company to facilitate the deal, suggesting that it knew what was happening was not exactly kosher.

After the Times’ story was published, the FBI was ordered by the Biden administration to investigate. Now, several months later, the bureau’s investigation is complete, and it turns out that the agency that disobeyed the White House and purchased the creepy NSO tool was...the FBI.

Yes, the New York Times now reports that the bureau has admitted that it was the mystery agency at the center of the controversy several months back. However, America’s top law enforcement agency is also trying to explain away its involvement, claiming that it was somehow duped into the deal without any knowledge of what was going on.

For years, the NSO Group has been tied to spying scandals all over the world. In November of 2021, the company was blacklisted by the U.S. government and placed on the Commerce Department’s Entity List, a roster of foreign firms that have been deemed as working contrary to American interests. Being placed on this list effectively ends most investment opportunities involving U.S. businesses or government agencies. The government officially announced that NSO’s blacklisting was part of “the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to... stem the proliferation of digital tools used for repression.”

However, five days after the White House announced this policy change, a secretive federal contractor called Riva Networks finalized a deal with NSO to acquire a geolocation tool known as “Landmark.” The tool was supposed to help federal law enforcement triangulate the locations of specific mobile users. Riva had previously worked with the FBI to acquire a spying cool called “Phantom” that could reportedly hack any phone in the U.S. (At the time of this prior deal, the Times reported that the bureau had been considering using “Phantom” for domestic spying but the FBI claimed it was just doing “counterintelligence” work on foreign surveillance tools.) In the contracts for both deals, the FBI used a cover name for Riva, dubbed “Cleopatra Holdings,” while Riva’s CEO, Robin Gamble, used a pseudonym, going by “William Malone.”

If all this cloak and dagger stuff would seem to suggest that the FBI knew what it was doing, bureau officials are now saying that they were somehow tricked by Riva into the “Landmark” deal and that the tool was used on its behalf without them knowing about it. Indeed, the government claims that the tool was used by the U.S. “unwittingly” and that Riva “misled the bureau,” goading them into believing it was an “in-house” tool rather than NSO’s product. Somewhat comically, the FBI also seems to be claiming that it did not find out that Riva had procured the NSO tool until it read about it in the New York Times back in April. After the agency discovered that Riva was using “the spying tool on its behalf,” the contract with the company was terminated by FBI Director Christopher Wray, U.S. officials recently told the newspaper.

Why was the FBI interested in geolocation at all? According to FBI officials who spoke with the Times, they were looking for “fugitives.” They also claim that the government merely gave Riva phone numbers to chase down and that the contractor did all the actual NSO-aided spying itself. A statement provided to the newspaper reads partially:

“As part of our mission, the FBI is tasked with locating fugitives around the world who are charged in U.S. courts, including for violent crimes and drug trafficking. To accomplish this, the FBI regularly contracts with companies who can provide technological assistance to locate these fugitives who are hiding abroad...The FBI has not employed foreign commercial spyware in these or any other operational endeavors. This geolocation tool did not provide the FBI access to an actual device, phone or computer. We will continue to lawfully utilize authorized tools to protect Americans and bring criminals to justice.”

Even if the FBI’s story is to be believed, it still leaves a whole lot of questions. Why is it that the bureau was so unaware of what was happening with this particular deal? Why would Riva Networks blatantly mislead the government as it is alleged? Is it typical for the FBI to farm out surveillance work to contractors like this? You’d think that America’s top police agency would be a little bit more on top of its own operations than this.

Gizmodo · August 1, 2023

8. What’s Missing from the Quad’s ISR Partnership

Excerpts:

IPMDA’s most significant activity involves disseminating unclassified data collected by commercial satellites to improve the common operating picture of participating nations and bolster information sharing across regional fusion centers, including in India, Singapore, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu. Harnessing the growing power of commercial satellites is wise. However, if IPMDA relies solely on commercial space-based collection, the initiative will fall short of giving Indo-Pacific nations what they need to know about antagonistic Chinese maritime activity and other regional security threats.

To avoid this, the Quad and its partners should furnish IPMDA with a small fleet of unmanned aircraft systems to monitor regional hotspots. This would provide more granular and persistent surveillance of important ISR collection areas than commercial space-based collection alone. First, drones provide full-motion video and other forms of high-resolution imagery continuously, whereas commercial satellites do not produce video and collect imagery only intermittently based on their revisit rates. Second, drones equipped with multiple sensors, such as a camera-and-signals-intelligence pod, can find, fix, and track targets independently by correlating observations across different collection methods in near real-time, something commercial satellites do not do.

In a recent study, we laid out how a fleet of just three drones would strengthen IPMDA’s surveillance of the South China Sea, an area of immense importance for regional security. Seeking to add loitering time in more important areas, we analyzed basing in Guam and the Philippines along with different aircraft endurances (40-hour and 80-hour), determining that Philippines-based, 40-hour endurance aircraft perform best according to most criteria. This finding reaffirms the common-sense notion that better basing enables better ISR collection in the vast Western Pacific. To borrow the saying from real estate, Indo-Pacific ISR aircraft operations are all about location, location, location.

What’s Missing from the Quad’s ISR Partnership

The year-old Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness can’t do the job with satellites alone.

defenseone.com · by Travis Sharp

By TRAVIS SHARP, THOMAS G. MAHNKEN and TIM SADOV

JULY 31, 2023 11:52 AM ET

Fishing boats set sail from Yangjiang in China's Guangdong province, heading for the South China Sea on August 16, 2022. Liu Xiaoming/VCG via Getty Images

The year-old Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness can’t do the job with satellites alone.

|

July 31, 2023 11:52 AM ET

Over the past year, various developments in Washington and the Indo-Pacific region have shown the growing multinational commitment to using existing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities to monitor and discourage antagonistic maritime activities, including by China. Most significantly, in May 2022, the “Quad” nations—the United States, Australia, Japan, and India—announced the creation of the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness, or IPMDA, to monitor illegal fishing, humanitarian crises, maritime security, marine conservation, and related issues in the region.

IPMDA’s most significant activity involves disseminating unclassified data collected by commercial satellites to improve the common operating picture of participating nations and bolster information sharing across regional fusion centers, including in India, Singapore, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu. Harnessing the growing power of commercial satellites is wise. However, if IPMDA relies solely on commercial space-based collection, the initiative will fall short of giving Indo-Pacific nations what they need to know about antagonistic Chinese maritime activity and other regional security threats.

To avoid this, the Quad and its partners should furnish IPMDA with a small fleet of unmanned aircraft systems to monitor regional hotspots. This would provide more granular and persistent surveillance of important ISR collection areas than commercial space-based collection alone. First, drones provide full-motion video and other forms of high-resolution imagery continuously, whereas commercial satellites do not produce video and collect imagery only intermittently based on their revisit rates. Second, drones equipped with multiple sensors, such as a camera-and-signals-intelligence pod, can find, fix, and track targets independently by correlating observations across different collection methods in near real-time, something commercial satellites do not do.

In a recent study, we laid out how a fleet of just three drones would strengthen IPMDA’s surveillance of the South China Sea, an area of immense importance for regional security. Seeking to add loitering time in more important areas, we analyzed basing in Guam and the Philippines along with different aircraft endurances (40-hour and 80-hour), determining that Philippines-based, 40-hour endurance aircraft perform best according to most criteria. This finding reaffirms the common-sense notion that better basing enables better ISR collection in the vast Western Pacific. To borrow the saying from real estate, Indo-Pacific ISR aircraft operations are all about location, location, location.

Our research suggests three insights about integrating drones into IPMDA. First, combining broad collection by commercial satellites with targeted collection by drones should prove more effective than satellites alone and more feasible than drones alone. A contractor-owned, contractor-operated fleet of three drones would cost IPMDA about $50 million per year, an expense that could be split among those Quad members willing to contribute.

Second, IPMDA would improve its surveillance of the South China Sea by operating drones from Vietnam. The failure of the best performing three-aircraft configuration we studied to surveil important areas near Vietnam indicates that Philippines basing is incredibly helpful, but alone insufficient, for maintaining comprehensive maritime domain awareness in the South China Sea. The most promising Vietnamese bases would include Da Nang in central Vietnam and Nha Trang, Cam Ranh, or Phan Rang in south central Vietnam due to their proximity to important ISR collection areas.

Third, IPMDA would improve its surveillance of the South China Sea and adjacent areas by operating long-endurance drones from Japan, Australia, Singapore, or Malaysia. Though such aircraft could be flown from Guam, the route to the South China Sea crosses a lot of open ocean, limiting the opportunity for collateral collection en route. If the Philippines or Vietnam proved unwilling or unable to host drones, then operating them from the four countries above would allow South China Sea-bound aircraft to fly past geopolitically significant areas such as Taiwan and Southeast Asia’s maritime chokepoints. This setup would increase each sortie’s return on investment and deliver valuable collection to countries outside the South China Sea.

IPMDA could begin implementing these concepts right away if the Quad and its partners stood up a small fleet of contractor-owned, contractor-operated UAS. Political support for conducting ISR operations has grown in Washington and the Indo-Pacific region, but the window of opportunity to act may not last long. Policymakers should not delay in taking practical steps to ward off the growing dangers to regional security posed by China and other malicious actors.

Travis Sharp is a senior fellow and the director of defense budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA). Thomas G. Mahnken is president and CEO of CSBA. Tim Sadov is a research assistant at CSBA. This commentary is adapted from their recent CSBA report, “Extending Deterrence by Detection: The Case for Integrating Unmanned Aircraft Systems into the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness.”

9. Ukrainian special operations unit shows assault on enemy positions

Video at the link:

https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/3742320-ukrainian-special-operations-unit-shows-assault-on-enemy-positions.html?utm_source=pocket_saves

Ukrainian special operations unit shows assault on enemy positions

ukrinform.net

video

30.07.2023 18:44

Ukrinform

Fighters with Ukraine's Enei special operations unit have encircled and captured five Russian invaders during an assault on enemy positions.

The National Police of Ukraine released a respective video on Telegram, Ukrinform reports.

"During the assault on enemy positions, fighters with the Enei special operations unit of the 'Liut' ('Rage') assault brigade encircled and captured five invaders," the post reads.

Earlier reports said that the Liut police assault brigade had undergone combat coordination and was preparing for an offensive as part of Ukraine's defense forces.

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10. Inside the Wagner Group’s Armed Uprising

Excerpts:

In Ukraine, Wagner was but one piece of the military effort; elsewhere it represents the majority of the Russian presence. Gabidullin, the former senior adviser of Wagner’s ISIS Hunters, spoke to a number of Wagner fighters in Syria, who told him that the uprising had not affected their operations: “They say that they expect to continue their work, even if certain conditions change.” Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said of Wagner’s missions in the C.A.R. and Mali, “This work, of course, will continue.”

Still, Putin is unlikely to repeat the same mistake twice: allowing a private army led by a hotheaded sadist to take an outsized role in Russia’s security. “How can Putin claim to have total control over the country, and then something like this happens?” the member of the Russian political élite said. “They’ll have to lose their independence and be integrated into the Army.” But putting Wagner on a tighter leash would lead to a very different Wagner, one that, as the U.S. defense official put it, would trade “an increase in control for a reduction of deniability.” That would lessen the danger of such a group, but it would also challenge the fundamental reasons that the Kremlin found it useful in the first place.

By July, a contingent of several thousand Wagner fighters had made it to Belarus, setting up camp near the town of Asipovichy, where the Belarusian Defense Ministry said they would train local reservists. Prigozhin paid a visit, making his first public appearance since the mutiny. He brought the Wagner flag from the base in Molkino, which had been emptied out. “We fought with dignity,” Prigozhin told the assembled troops. “We’ve done a great deal for Russia.” Wagner, he went on, would now prepare for new missions, including a reinvigorated presence in Africa. “Maybe we’ll return to the special military operation at a time when we are sure that we won’t be forced to disgrace ourselves and our experience,” he said. He then introduced Dmitry Utkin—“the one who gave us the name Wagner”—who stepped forward, his face covered in the shadow of early evening. The crowd applauded and whistled; Utkin tipped his cap. “This is not the end,” he said, “but just the beginning of the biggest job in the world, which will be carried out very soon.” He switched to English and yelled, “Welcome to Hell!”

Inside the Wagner Group’s Armed Uprising

How Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private military company went from fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine to staging a mutiny at home.

By Joshua Yaffa

The New Yorker · by Joshua Yaffa · July 31, 2023

On May 20th, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, stood in the center of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, and recorded a video. The city once housed seventy thousand people but was now, after months of relentless shelling, nearly abandoned. Whole blocks were in ruins, charred skeletons of concrete and steel. Smoke hung over the smoldering remains like an early-morning fog. Prigozhin wore combat fatigues and waved a Russian flag. “Today, at twelve noon, Bakhmut was completely taken,” he declared. Armed fighters stood behind him, holding banners with the Wagner motto: “Blood, honor, homeland, courage.”

More than anyone else in Russia, Prigozhin had used the war in Ukraine to raise his own profile. In the wake of the invasion, he transformed Wagner from a niche mercenary outfit of former professional soldiers to the country’s most prominent fighting force, a private army manned by tens of thousands of storm troopers, most of them recruited from Russian prisons. Prigozhin projected an image of himself as ruthless, efficient, practical, and uncompromising. He spoke in rough, often obscene language, and came to embody the so-called “party of war,” those inside Russia who thought that their country had been too measured in what was officially called the “special military operation.” “Stop pulling punches, bring back all our kids from abroad, and work our asses off,” Prigozhin said, the month that Bakhmut fell. “Then we’ll see some results.”

The aura of victory in Bakhmut enhanced Prigozhin’s popularity. He had an almost sixty-per-cent approval rating in a June poll conducted by the Levada Center, Russia’s only independent polling agency; nineteen per cent of those surveyed said they were ready to vote for him for President. His new status seemed to come with a special license to criticize top officials in Moscow. Prigozhin had accused his rivals in the Russian military, Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister, and Valery Gerasimov, the chief of general staff, of withholding artillery ammunition from Wagner. “That’s direct obstruction, plain and simple,” Prigozhin said. “It can be equated with high treason.” In the battle for Bakhmut, he said, “five times more guys died than should have” because of the officials’ indecisive leadership.

Temperamentally, Shoigu was Prigozhin’s opposite: a deft navigator of Kremlin politics, seemingly devoid of strong emotion. For more than a decade, he had used his proximity and loyalty to Vladimir Putin—the two often vacationed together, hunting and fishing in the Siberian forest—to safeguard his position. According to a source in the Russian defense sector, Shoigu, at a meeting last spring, insisted that the Defense Ministry had always provided Wagner troops with whatever they needed, regardless of his personal grievances with Prigozhin. “As minister, I have always distinguished between the leader of this organization and its fighters,” Shoigu said. The message, the source noted, was clear: “We don’t particularly love them, but we have to admit they have a certain effectiveness.”

Throughout his reign, Putin had permitted rival factions to clash and to jockey for his favor. In such a system, no one individual or clan could acquire enough independent standing to challenge his rule. And so, for a time, Putin appeared to welcome Prigozhin’s feud with the Defense Ministry. “At first, Putin saw Prigozhin as a useful instrument to pressure the military,” a Western intelligence official said. “Prigozhin told Putin, We are not doing so great—we are taking heavy casualties. He was a way to point out problems.”

In the end, Shoigu exacted his revenge not with a meme-ready viral video but in the dry language of bureaucratic regulations. In mid-June, the Defense Ministry announced that all members of “volunteer units,” a shrouded reference to Wagner and other private military companies, would be required to sign contracts with the ministry by July 1st. These formations would lose their independence and fall under the Russian military’s unified command. Prigozhin resisted, saying he would refuse the order. A few days later, Putin agreed that the contracts were needed, effectively siding with Shoigu.

Prigozhin remained defiant. “None of Wagner’s fighters is ready to go down the path of shame,” he said. “They will not sign.” But the decision, with Putin’s backing, put him in an impossible spot. “The Defense Ministry’s position was that if Wagner doesn’t agree to the contracts then that’s it—they’re removed from Ukrainian operations,” a former Russian military official told me. If Prigozhin relented and signed, he would lose his autonomy and influence—he would no longer be Shoigu’s rival but his subordinate. The Western intelligence official said that Prigozhin “saw that, if Wagner fell under the control of the Defense Ministry, then it’s the end of Wagner as it previously existed. And maybe, he feared, that would mean the beginning of his personal end.”

With the July 1st deadline looming, Prigozhin stepped up the ferocity of his attacks, declaring that Shoigu and other top military leaders, along with the Russian oligarchy, were “mentally ill scumbags” who had led Russia to disaster in Ukraine. More shocking, Prigozhin questioned the very basis for the war, an outburst that could easily be read as an attack on Putin himself. “There was nothing extraordinary happening on the eve of February 24th,” he said, referring to the date of Russia’s invasion last year. “The Ministry of Defense is trying to deceive the public and the President and spin the story that there were insane levels of aggression from the Ukrainian side and that they were going to attack us, together with the whole NATO bloc.”

That night, Prigozhin announced a “march for justice”—that is, an armed mutiny. “The evil being wrought by the military leadership of this country must be stopped,” he said.

Shortly after midnight on June 24th, the first column of Wagner fighters left Ukraine and passed through the Russian border post at Novoshakhtinsk. A participant in the uprising later told BBC News Russian that border guards put up no resistance, and that traffic police even saluted the convoy. “Most of Wagner’s lower-level personnel didn’t understand what they were getting involved in,” Denis Korotkov, a Russian journalist who has investigated Wagner for years, told me. “Whereas the people on the command level are so indebted to Prigozhin for their positions and wealth that they had no choice but to participate.”

Later that morning, the armed men arrived at the headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District, in the city of Rostov-on-Don, a primary command center for operations in Ukraine. They parked their armored personnel carriers outside the building. Masked men carrying Kalashnikovs secured positions around the perimeter. Prigozhin entered the headquarters and, from the building’s interior courtyard, demanded that Shoigu and Gerasimov be brought to him. “Until they are handed over to us, we will stay here and blockade the city,” he said. Wagner forces, he added, were also headed for Moscow. Outside the city of Voronezh, they shot down Russian military helicopters and a command aircraft, killing at least a dozen servicemen.

It was the most dramatic uprising in Russia since August, 1991, when the leaders of the K.G.B., the Defense Ministry, and the Communist Party put the Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, under house arrest and seized power for themselves. That coup ended after just three days, but it exposed the fissures in the Soviet system and helped lead to its collapse, four months later. Now Putin was facing a rebellion from within his own ranks. “Everyone was stunned,” the former Russian military official said. “It was surreal.”

In a televised address, Putin called Wagner’s actions “treason,” “a subversion from within,” “a stab in the back.” In response, Prigozhin announced that he feared the “moment when blood could be spilled” and called off the insurrection. The reason for his retreat was clear. “Prigozhin assumed his krysha”—Russian slang for mafia-style protection and impunity—“was inviolable, but that was a mistake,” the Western intelligence official said. “He got scared when he realized that Putin could move against him.” The Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, had reportedly brokered a deal between Prigozhin and the government, but, in fact, he was less an independent mediator than a cutout employed by the Kremlin. Wagner forces would join the Defense Ministry, disband, or relocate to Belarus. Charges against Prigozhin would be dropped. Putin would stay above the fray.

The former Russian military official called Prigozhin’s rebellion “an act of desperation” and “pure fantasy.” But it also represented a grave political setback for Putin, who was supposed to be the omnipotent tsar, impossible to frighten or blackmail. “Putin destroyed a whole propaganda narrative he himself had constructed,” a member of the Russian political élite said. “It looked extremely humiliating.” The source in the Russian defense sector agreed. “Of course Putin is weakened,” the source said. “First, he got himself into a war he couldn’t win, and, when he inevitably encountered difficulties, he tried to find a cheap solution by allowing for the creation of an army of criminals—and then that army ended up turning against him.”

“Wagner was a rumor before it was a brand,” Candace Rondeaux, the director of an open-source intelligence program at the think tank New America, told me. Even for experts, identifying the group’s precise origins has been tricky. In the early two-thousands, the Kremlin, as part of an effort to modernize the Russian armed forces, began considering the use of private military companies. Tens of thousands of security contractors were then working in Iraq for the U.S. government, under the command of private firms like Blackwater. The former Russian military official told me, “The idea was that Russia also needs such a structure to operate in places where the official participation of the Russian armed forces is impractical for political reasons.”

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and mounted a covert invasion of the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, under the guise of a separatist uprising. The Kremlin needed to dispatch combat-seasoned troops while maintaining the fiction that it was not intervening militarily. “Things were very messy on the ground,” Ilya Barabanov, a Russian investigative journalist who is working on a book with Korotkov about Wagner, said. “A bunch of armed formations and battalions with unclear allegiances and command structures were running around all over the place.” One of them was a unit called Wagner.

Wagner’s fighters were mostly former members of élite Russian military units. “The selection process was tough,” a senior Ukrainian intelligence official told me. “From thirty candidates, they might take two or three.” But those who made the cut were paid about two hundred thousand rubles a month (approximately five thousand dollars), which was more than ten times what an ordinary member of the Russian Army might earn. They trained at a base in Molkino, in southern Russia, that abuts a facility belonging to the G.R.U., Russia’s military-intelligence directorate.

The name Wagner came from the call sign of its first commander, Dmitry Utkin, a former lieutenant colonel in the G.R.U., who is said to be a fan of the German composer Richard Wagner. For Utkin, the appeal went beyond just admiration for the “Ring” cycle or “Parsifal”; Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer, and Utkin was known to exhibit fascist sympathies. A former Wagner fighter told me that Utkin greeted subordinates by saying “Heil!” and wore a Wehrmacht field cap around the unit’s training grounds. The Dossier Center, an investigative outlet funded by the exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, published internal Wagner documents, which showed that Utkin occasionally signed his name with two lightning bolts—the insignia of the Nazi S.S.

If Utkin was Wagner’s commander in the field, then Prigozhin was its C.E.O., financier, and bureaucratic champion. Prigozhin was born in Soviet Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in 1961, nine years after Putin. As a teen-ager, he took up with a gang of petty thieves who robbed apartments. One night, in 1980, the gang mugged a woman on a dark Leningrad street. Prigozhin was sentenced to thirteen years in prison and served nine. His release coincided with the final stage of the Soviet Union’s slow-motion collapse, and, for his next act, he launched a hot-dog business. He and his associates mixed the mustard in the kitchen of his apartment, while his mother counted the profits—as much as a thousand dollars a month, a significant sum for most Russians at the time.

Prigozhin quickly expanded into supermarkets and a catering business, and, in 1996, he opened the Old Customs House, one of St. Petersburg’s early high-end restaurants. Tony Gear, a British restaurateur who had worked at the Savoy hotel, in London, signed on to run the place. City luminaries, including the mayor at the time, Anatoly Sobchak, who was then Putin’s boss, came to feast on oysters, caviar, foie gras, and crabs from Kamchatka. In the libertine spirit of the Russian nineties, strippers entertained the crowd, until Prigozhin ended the practice. “We don’t need striptease,” Prigozhin said, as Gear recalled in an interview with a Russian outlet. “People come for the food and service.”

Two years later, Prigozhin opened New Island, a restaurant on a boat that sailed up and down the Neva River. After Putin became President, in 2000, he frequently dined there with foreign counterparts, including Jacques Chirac and George W. Bush; in 2003, Putin celebrated his birthday there. “Putin saw how I grew a whole business out of a small stall,” Prigozhin later said. “He saw that I am not above personally serving a plate to people of royal standing, because they are my guests.”

In photographs from the era, Prigozhin is often seen hovering over a table in a dark suit, plucking a cloche from a dinner plate. But he was also known to be a demanding, even abusive, boss. “He created a beautiful image in the front of the house,” a person from the St. Petersburg restaurant scene said. “But he achieved this with frightful methods.” The man had heard accounts of Prigozhin berating and hitting members of his staff, and, in one instance, tying a chef to a radiator in the back of the establishment. (Prigozhin did not respond to a request for comment.)

His company Concord began catering Kremlin events, including the Presidential inauguration of Dmitry Medvedev, in 2008. Its affiliates became the main supplier of meals to public schools in Moscow. But the largest orders came from the Defense Ministry, which, in 2012 alone, awarded Prigozhin’s companies three billion dollars in contracts to feed soldiers at bases around the country. Prigozhin and his family moved into a sprawling compound in St. Petersburg, with an indoor swimming pool and a helicopter pad. They flew on a private jet and owned a yacht. “A typical criminal,” a powerful Russian businessperson said of Prigozhin. “Nothing less, nothing more.”

Prigozhin combined an entrepreneurial spirit with a clear sense of how to serve his patron. He is credited with the creation, in 2013, of the Internet Research Agency, otherwise known as the St. Petersburg troll farm, which employed dozens of tech-savvy young people to spread propaganda, engage in influence operations, and otherwise cause mischief on social networks. (A number of its employees, including Prigozhin, were later indicted by U.S. prosecutors for their role in Russia’s interference in the 2016 Presidential election.)

For a budding oligarch like Prigozhin, the murkiness of the war in the Donbas presented an even greater opportunity for profit and influence. “A bunch of people close to the Kremlin were playing their own games,” Barabanov said. “Trying to get noticed, taking part in one venture or another, so they could say to Putin, ‘Look, we did our part.’ ” Wagner, he went on, “was Prigozhin’s initiative, with the Kremlin’s blessing.”

In the Donbas war, according to Ukrainian intelligence, Wagner fighters participated in the shooting down of an Ilyushin IL-76 transport plane, which killed forty Ukrainian paratroopers and nine crew members; the battle for the Luhansk airport, which pro-Russian units seized after a months-long siege; and the so-called Debaltseve cauldron battle, in the winter of 2015, in which Russian forces moved to encircle and expel the Ukrainian military from a central railway hub in the Donbas. And yet, according to Barabanov, Wagner, compared with many of the other paramilitary units active in the region, was still “rather small in size and importance.”

In 2015, Kyiv and Moscow signed the second part of the ceasefire protocols known as the Minsk agreements. Around this time, the Kremlin became less tolerant of the warring rebel factions running around the separatist territories. A number of their most charismatic and ideologically driven leaders started to turn up dead. In May, 2015, a prominent commander in Luhansk, Alexey Mozgovoy, who led the Prizrak, or “Ghost,” Brigade, was killed, along with half a dozen others, in an ambush on his convoy. Another commander in Luhansk, who led a group known as the Batman Battalion, was gunned down, as was the separatist mayor of Pervomaisk. That December, Pavel Dryomov, the leader of a Cossack militia, was killed when his car exploded on the day of his wedding party.

Publicly, pro-Russian outlets blamed Ukrainian sabotage groups for the violence. But some suspected that the killings were carried out by Wagner. The Russian nationalist historian Evgeny Norin, who was sympathetic to the separatist cause, wrote a column describing Wagner as an “ominous Russian Blackwater, without official status or state recognition, covered by a veil of secrecy, obeying no-one-knows-who and carrying out the most dark and dirty tasks.” Barabanov spoke to a number of separatist fighters and commanders at the time: “They all told me, ‘We know it’s being done by Wagnerovtsy.’ ”

In Ukraine, Wagner maintained a limited involvement, with never more than a few hundred troops deployed at a time. The war in Syria, which Russia entered in September, 2015, to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad, served as the mercenary group’s true coming-out party. “In Syria, Russia used Wagner to reinforce units of local allies and as a main assault force,” Ruslan Pukhov, director of CAST, an independent defense think tank in Moscow, said. “They weren’t supporting the war effort, in other words, but leading it.”

Putin initially sold the campaign to the Russian public as largely cost-free—the fighting would be done from the sky, by the Russian Air Force, he said—but it was clear that a contingent of ground troops would be needed to help capture and hold territory from Assad’s enemies, which, at the time, included ISIS. The head of the Russian parliament’s defense committee, Vladimir Komoyedov, hinted at the plan. “It is likely that groups of Russian volunteers will appear in the ranks of the Syrian Army as combat participants,” he said. “What attracts volunteers apart from ideas? Of course, money.”

According to Ukrainian intelligence, approximately thirteen hundred Wagner fighters were flown to Syria on Russian military transport planes. Strategically, Wagner operated to further Russia’s geopolitical goals; tactically, the group was free to pursue its own spoils, including lucrative petroleum contracts that entities associated with Prigozhin received from the Assad government. “It was to everyone’s advantage and benefit,” Barabanov said. “The Kremlin can boast at home and abroad of destroying ISIS without facing serious losses—at least not officially. The Army can take credit for this great victory and pass it off as its own, and Wagner, or, rather, Prigozhin personally, earns twice—from sending his troops to the fight and from securing oil and energy assets as trophies.”

At the same time, Wagner was making profitable inroads in Africa. In 2017, the President of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, who was under indictment by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, visited Putin at his residence in Sochi, on the Black Sea. They discussed a number of joint projects, including weapons sales and the exchange of “experts” in the defense field. By the end of the year, a contingent of Wagner operatives had landed in Khartoum to train local security forces, and the Sudanese Ministry of Minerals had awarded a gold-mining concession to a Wagner front company called M Invest. Less than two years later, Bashir was ousted in a coup, but companies linked to Prigozhin maintained de-facto control of gold-mining interests in Sudan.

The Central African Republic, a former French colony that has faced a series of civil conflicts since the nineteen-nineties, “served as the main laboratory for Wagner’s expansion,” according to Maxime Audinet, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Research, in Paris. The Wagner deployment to the C.A.R. began in 2018, with a contingent of several hundred mercenaries, who were assigned to help President Faustin-Archange Touadéra fight more than a dozen rebel groups then vying for power. French troops had largely pulled out of the C.A.R. two years earlier. Wagner instructors ran training programs for Touadéra’s soldiers. Soon, a Russian emissary acting in service of Wagner was ensconced in the Presidential palace as one of Touadéra’s top advisers. Roland Marchal, a researcher on African civil wars at Sciences Po, told me, “As Wagner learned in the C.A.R., if you start training troops, you might end up controlling the Presidency.”

In 2019, Russian diplomats and Prigozhin associates helped broker a peace agreement between the government of the C.A.R. and the rebel factions. The next year, that deal collapsed, and rebel groups launched an armed march on the capital, Bangui. Wagner fighters, along with the C.A.R. Army and a contingent of Rwandan soldiers, led a bloody counterassault. Human Rights Watch reported an incident from 2021 in which, at a checkpoint near the town of Bossangoa, Wagner forces stopped a dozen unarmed men. Their bodies were later found, beaten and riddled with bullets, in a ditch by the road. The Times obtained a report prepared for members of the U.N. Security Council which found Wagner forces complicit in numerous cases of “excessive force, indiscriminate killings, occupation of schools and looting on a large scale, including of humanitarian organizations.”

In the words of a senior U.S. intelligence official, the C.A.R. is now a “proxy state.” Wagner commandos guard Touadéra and control the state customs service. Prigozhin-linked entities oversee regular propaganda campaigns, including on Radio Lengo Songo, a station Wagner created. The group also holds sway over much of the timber industry and operates a network of gold and diamond mines. In 2019, the C.A.R. government revoked the license of a Canadian company which gave it the right to mine in Ndassima, an area with gold deposits valued at more than a billion dollars, and transferred it to Midas Ressources, a company with links to Prigozhin. Diamville, a profitable precious-metals trader, is technically registered in the name of the driver of a well-known Prigozhin associate, Dmitry Sytyi, the head of the Russian House cultural center in Bangui. Yet, for all Wagner’s power in the capital, it has been largely disinterested in providing security to the rest of the country. “The truth is, Wagner is rather inefficient,” a French military official told me. “They don’t really bring stability, or even fight rebel groups all that successfully. What they do is protect the government in power and their own economic interests.”

Wagner has fought in the civil war in Libya, where it allied with the Libyan National Army, led by Khalifa Haftar, who reportedly also received the backing of France. In Mozambique, several Wagner fighters were beheaded, prompting the group to quickly pull out of the country. In 2021, the ruling military junta in Mali, which took power in a coup, invited Russia to aid in its fight against jihadist groups. The government in Bamako denies the presence of Wagner mercenaries, but journalists and human-rights agencies have linked the group’s fighters to a number of atrocities in the country, including a massacre in the village of Moura, in March, 2022, in which as many as five hundred people were killed. One thing, however, has remained constant: the principle of “se servir sur la bête,” as Christophe Gomart, the former head of French military intelligence, put it, an expression that means “to serve yourself from the beast,” or, better yet, to get your pound of flesh.

Marat Gabidullin was in his late forties when he joined Wagner, in 2015. He had spent ten years in the Russian Army, but, after leaving the service, he drifted toward alcohol abuse and a life of crime. In the mid-nineties, he spent three years in prison for shooting a small-time gangster in Siberia. After enlisting with Wagner, he was sent to Molkino for a course in assault tactics and urban warfare. “I felt reborn,” he told me recently, “as if I had returned to a familiar world, with understandable values and purpose.” His call sign was Ded, or “Grandpa.”

I met Gabidullin not long ago, at a café in the South of France. He retains the taut, coiled build of a military man. His face is tanned and sinewy, with a trim white beard. On his right hand, he wore a chunky silver ring with a skull, one of Wagner’s emblems, which he’d picked up at a market in Damascus. He recalled his time as a mercenary with a mixture of nostalgia and disappointment. “At first, I saw Wagner as a community that was performing necessary and useful functions for the country,” Gabidullin told me. “And then, after some time, it became more and more authoritarian, and I began to doubt the necessity and usefulness of what we were doing.”

His first tour was in the occupied territory of Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine. The local population was hardly welcoming of the Russia-backed fighters in their midst and often told them that they weren’t needed. “I understood that our propaganda is lying one hundred per cent,” he said. He left after two months. But, when Wagner commanders told him to go to Syria and lead a company of troops fighting ISIS, he thought, Now, this is more my thing.

In March, 2016, Wagner was sent to seize Palmyra, an ancient city in the desert surrounded by palm trees and mountains. The fighting there was vicious. At one point, Gabidullin said, some of his men came upon a badly wounded ISIS fighter. At the time, Gabidullin’s forces were deep in the mountains, with little equipment and no backup. His men shot the injured fighter. “This is the logic of war,” he said.

A few days later, Gabidullin’s unit was ambushed. He managed to fire a few shots before a grenade exploded behind him. Shrapnel tore into his head, back, and limbs. An armored personnel carrier delivered him to Russia’s Humaymim airbase, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, where he lost consciousness. He awoke, a week later, in a hospital bed in St. Petersburg. A Wagner representative handed him a secure telephone. “No. 1 wants to speak to you,” the person said. Prigozhin was on the line. “We’ve taken Palmyra,” he said, and he promised to award Gabidullin the Hero of Russia, the country’s highest military medal. Wagner also paid for a series of surgeries to remove the shrapnel and allowed Gabidullin to rest for several months at home. “Prigozhin is pragmatic,” he told me. “He regards his mercenaries as working instruments—on the one hand, he doesn’t pity them in battle or particularly value their lives, but, on the other, he keeps them in good condition, gives them what they need, offers quality care.”

To celebrate the capture of Palmyra, the Kremlin organized a concert in the city’s Roman-era amphitheatre. For the occasion, they flew the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra and the world-renowned conductor Valery Gergiev in from St. Petersburg to perform Bach and Prokofiev for a crowd of Russian officials, Syrian dignitaries, and foreign journalists. Putin gave a video address that was beamed into the amphitheatre. “Any success in the fight against terrorism must be perceived by all, without exception, as a common victory,” he said. As far as Gabidullin knew, not a single Wagner fighter was invited to attend.

A video appeared online in the summer of 2017 showing Russian-speaking men in military fatigues, their faces covered, beating a Syrian man with a sledgehammer, trying to cut off his head with a knife, and ultimately decapitating him with a shovel. Novaya Gazeta, an independent paper in Moscow, later identified the torturers as Wagner fighters. Gabidullin was back in Russia when the clip surfaced. He didn’t know the perpetrators personally, but he immediately recognized which outfit they belonged to. “Inside Wagner, there was such a policy—to constantly apply methods of maximum intimidation to the enemy,” he said. “I’m not justifying this idea and, in fact, always resented it. So, what, are we going to become like ISIS now?”

And yet, the following year, Gabidullin returned to Syria and was made a senior adviser to the ISIS Hunters, some three hundred Syrian fighters who operated under Wagner leadership. Their primary task was to capture oil and gas fields that had fallen to ISIS. “By seizing the oil fields, you deny ISIS an important cash supply,” Gabidullin said. But Prigozhin had his own motive for such operations. A shell company linked to him signed a contract with the Assad government to receive a quarter of the revenue resulting from the seizures. “The Russian military has to at least take into account the interests of the Russian people,” a U.S. defense official said. “Wagner can act in pursuit of its own bottom line.”

That February, Gabidullin and his men were ordered to Deir Ezzor, in the northeast, where, they were told, they would participate in an assault on a nearby gas plant. The facility, though, was controlled not by ISIS but by an anti-Assad Kurdish militia. Gabidullin recalled a conversation with a Wagner commander, who told him that Prigozhin had got the necessary sign-offs. But one thing bothered Gabidullin about the plan: a group of American Special Forces were known to be aiding the Kurds, and their presence did not seem to be factored into the assault. When Gabidullin asked the commander why, he was told, “No. 1 said everything would be fine.” Gabidullin said of Prigozhin, “He was arrogant, confident in his own genius.”

On the night of February 7th, four hundred Wagner troops, accompanied by Russian T-72 tanks and heavy artillery, began to advance; Gabidullin and fifty Syrian fighters were expected to secure one of the flanks. But, as the tanks moved into firing position, they began to explode. One sped up to the right of Gabidullin, got a shot off, and then blew up. Gabidullin ordered mortar fire in the direction of the plant. A moment later, the mortar launcher and its crew were incinerated. To get a better view, Gabidullin climbed onto the roof of a nearby building. Everything was burning. A tank turret lay on the ground. The vehicles of another Wagner unit had been destroyed. Over the radio, he heard that AC-130 gunships were firing their large-calibre cannons on anything that moved down below. “I thought, What the hell is going on?” Gabidullin said. The Kurds didn’t have their own airpower; the Americans were in the fight. The radio crackled with orders to retreat.

The battle in Deir Ezzor was the most prominent clash between Russian and American fighters since the Vietnam War. Twenty-three members of Gabidullin’s unit were killed. He estimated that eighty more Wagner soldiers died in the attack. (Other estimates have suggested that two hundred Wagner personnel were killed.) Their bodies were repatriated to Russia in the course of several months, flown a few at a time, to avoid attracting too much attention. “We’re just small change,” Gabidullin said. “You can throw us to slaughter and no one will answer for this.”

An adviser to U.S. Special Forces who was familiar with the battle in Deir Ezzor told me that, at the time, the Special Forces felt that they had been ceding territory to Wagner and Syrian troops for months, lest they get drawn into a fight with Russian forces. “They were frustrated,” the adviser told me. Russian and U.S. officials had been relying on a so-called deconfliction line, a direct means of communication that was set up between the two militaries. On the night Wagner launched its assault, U.S. military officers called their Russian counterparts. According to the adviser, the Americans relayed what they saw: a group of armed fighters was approaching the plant—were they Russian? The Russian officer on the other end of the line said they were not. “Maybe they thought it was a bluff,” the adviser said, “and didn’t realize the U.S. would really attack.”

Once U.S. military officials became aware that their troops had killed dozens of Russians, there were obvious concerns about possible escalation. “Nobody completely understood the exact relationship between Wagner and the state, which is, in fact, the point,” the adviser said. “But that meant a lot of people in Washington were holding their breath, thinking, Oh, boy, this could really open up in ways that would not be good.” In the end, the Kremlin barely reacted. U.S. officials carried out a review of the incident. “We checked and double-checked and triple-checked and came to the conclusion this was not a mistake on the part of the Russians,” the adviser said. “It was interesting to see how readily Russia was willing to part with the lives of a lot of highly trained soldiers” and “to understand to what degree the Russia Defense Ministry and Wagner are allies and competing factions at the same time.”

One day last August, a helicopter made a noisy approach to a penal colony in southern Russia, flying over the barracks and landing in a large open field. Guards had gathered more than a thousand inmates, nearly the entire population of the colony, telling them to wait outside for the arrival of someone they described as an important visitor. A prisoner named Alexei, who was in his early thirties, watched as men in green army fatigues, pistols at their hips, entered the yard. They were accompanied by a man in his sixties, with a bald head and heavy jowls, who spoke to the prisoners in a manner that was blunt, profane, and matter-of-fact, as if he, too, had known the inside of the zona, as Russian prisons are called. He suggested that he had arrived with the backing of Putin to make a simple offer. Come fight with me, he said. I need killers. And I can set you free.

The speaker was Prigozhin. He didn’t hide the fact that the men would be headed for the battlefield—and that in war some people die. They would be fighting the “enemies of Russia,” whom he described as mercenaries from the U.S. and Europe. If they survived the fighting for six months, they would be pardoned and free to start a new life, with plenty of money and opportunities for their children. “Think of it as paying down your debt to your motherland in blood,” Prigozhin told the prisoners. “History will remember you.” The helicopter’s rotors were whirring again. Prigozhin was on the move, headed to other prisons. Some of his subordinates stayed behind to set up a recruitment office in the administration building.

Initially, Wagner was not included in Russia’s plans to invade Ukraine. The senior Ukrainian intelligence official said that Kremlin leaders “thought they would quickly capture Kyiv, keep government buildings and infrastructure intact, and simply take over and run the country. For such a supposedly quick mission, you don’t need mercenaries.” But as the Russian advance stalled, in the spring of 2022, the Kremlin withdrew Russian units from around Kyiv and redoubled efforts to take territory in the Donbas.

The Ukrainian military first saw Wagner fighters in the battle for Popasna, an important railway junction in the Luhansk region. “The first thing we noticed was sand-colored jeeps,” an intelligence officer with a Ukrainian brigade said. He presumed that the vehicles had arrived from the Middle East. This new contingent of fighters was markedly more proficient than the Russian forces that Ukrainian units had encountered in the early weeks of the war. Previously, most of the Ukrainian troops who were killed or wounded in Popasna had been struck with shrapnel from artillery shells; now they were taking more casualties from bullet wounds—a sign, the officer said, of Wagner troops’ superior tactical training. “This phase was tough, with no time to make sense of things,” he added.

After Popasna fell to Russia, in early May, Prigozhin promised that Wagner would next take Bakhmut, twenty miles to the west. At the time, the city was seen as a necessary gateway to capturing the whole of the Donbas, one of Putin’s chief aims in the war. The only problem was that Wagner didn’t have enough manpower, in part because of the losses it had suffered in Popasna. According to Western intelligence, Wagner leadership considered recruiting foreign fighters from Syria and sub-Saharan Africa, but this idea was rejected by the Kremlin. In Russia, Wagner was running an aggressive outreach campaign, but, as the senior Ukrainian intelligence official said, “they couldn’t assemble as many people as they needed.” So they turned to prisoners.

Alexei had landed in prison after a fight at a café in his home town, in southern Russia. He was twenty-four, married, with two young children, and was enjoying a night on the town. A scuffle broke out. Alexei pulled a knife, as did the other guy, who ended up dead. Alexei received a twenty-year sentence. He said goodbye to his family, not expecting to see his children again until they were adults. He had served nine years before Prigozhin’s visit to the prison. A few days later, he signed up to join Wagner.

I spoke to Alexei at a detention facility in Kyiv, at a meeting arranged by Ukrainian authorities. He insisted that he had not been pressured or mistreated by his captors. He was eager to tell his story, but it was impossible to verify independently many of the details. (I have chosen not to use his real name.) He told me that his first stop after leaving prison was a military airfield in Rostov-on-Don, where he was given a uniform and combat boots. At a training base in occupied Ukraine, Wagner instructors showed recruits how to load and fire a Kalashnikov rifle, and taught them the basic tactics for storming a trench. Brutality was ever present, encapsulated by a single term: obnuleniye, or “zeroing out,” Wagner slang for execution, the punishment for desertion or retreat in battle. At one point, a fellow prisoner recruit ran away from Alexei’s training base and was picked up by local police in a village nearby. Wagner security brought him to the center of the training grounds, tied him to a wooden pole, and, in front of everyone, shot him in the head. “I realized then that things are serious,” Alexei said.

After a month and a half, Alexei and ten others were brought to the “zero line,” as both Ukrainian and Russian soldiers call the very edge of the front. Their mission was to storm a three-story building, an entrenched position held by Ukrainian machine gunners and snipers. The commander of Alexei’s unit was also an inmate, who had been imprisoned on drug charges in Siberia. If anyone tried to run away, he said, he had orders to shoot him. “They told me, either I kill you or they kill me,” the commander said. “So please don’t get scared. I don’t want to kill any of you.”

The assault started before dawn. As Alexei and the men moved forward, the ground erupted in a wall of fire. Almost instantly, five men were mowed down by a machine gunner. A shell exploded in front of the commander, blowing him to pieces. Snipers fired on those left in the field. Alexei could hear someone yelling about his leg. He turned and saw one of his fellow-fighters writhing, his leg now a bloody stump. Another wave of men, all prisoners, were sent in as reinforcements. More fire, more explosions, more bodies. Wagner commanders sent in a third wave. A number of these fighters were equipped with rocket-propelled grenades, which they fired at the building before entering it. Alexei was among them. Inside, he saw the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers scattered on the ground.

The next day, Wagner commanders ordered Alexei and four others to storm a patch of woodland that shielded a Ukrainian bunker. When they crossed into the trees, two of them fell to the ground, picked off by snipers. Alexei dropped, too, and tried to lie as flat as he could. Bullets and grenades ripped through branches and leaves, sending splinters of wood whistling past. Alexei found himself beside another Wagner recruit, Yevgeny, who had been imprisoned for stealing a car while drunk one night. Their shoulders were touching. A bullet ripped into Yevgeny’s eye, and, for the next half hour, Alexei listened to him moan as he bled to death. Wagner continued to send waves of convict fighters, about ten at a time, a tactic that became known as a myasnoi shturm, or “meat storm.” After six hours, the woods grew quiet. Wagner had taken the bunker. The group’s commanders rewarded their men by letting them wash themselves in a nearby banya.

Alexei’s next orders were to join an assault on a Ukrainian position that had been dug into the top of a hill. He entered a stretch of forest as part of a group of Wagner fighters, looked down, and saw “a carpet of bodies,” he said. A guy next to him took a shot through the head. Tanks were firing, as was artillery, creating a wall of noise. Shrapnel from a 120-millimetre mortar sprayed into Alexei’s back, and he, along with other injured fighters, headed to an evacuation point. But, Alexei said, on the way he became separated from the rest and wandered the woods until he heard voices. They were speaking Russian. As he got closer, they switched to Ukrainian. Alexei saw their uniforms just as they drew their weapons and told him to put up his hands. In their dugout, the Ukrainian soldiers gave Alexei chocolate and cigarettes. He was surprised to see ordinary guys defending their country. He was expecting the foreign mercenaries that Prigozhin and the Wagner instructors had said were the enemy. At the detention center in Kyiv, Alexei told me, “I made a giant mistake.”

Wagner’s tactics made the group a vexing and persistent opponent on the battlefield. The Ukrainian intelligence officer, whose brigade fended off multiple Wagner assaults, described how, in situations in which regular Army units would retreat, Wagner continued its assault: “Part of the group is destroyed, others are wounded, and, instead of evacuating, the rest continue with the storm—this is completely unreasonable.” The threat of zeroing out meant that, “if they move forward, they at least have the chance to live another day,” the officer said. “If they go back, they’re dead for sure.”

Wagner had its own hierarchy. Higher-ranking commanders were situated in bunkers within radio range, often a few miles from the front, issuing orders to assault teams on the ground. Professional mercenaries were given the letter “A” and held back, entering the battle only once Ukrainian defenses had been softened. Recruited prisoners, who made up roughly eighty per cent of Wagner’s manpower, were given the letter “K” and deployed in waves, in intervals of fifteen or twenty minutes. “One group follows the other at a pre-planned distance,” the intelligence officer explained. “Even if you destroy the first, you have very little time to rest. The second is already advancing.” Moreover, the first wave was often used simply to draw fire, in order to identify Ukrainian positions, which were then targeted by artillery. “They are not bound by what is written in tactical manuals or taught in military academies,” the officer said. “Wagner is a private structure, free of any dogmas, and this makes it flexible, able to mutate on the battlefield, and, as a result, unpredictable.”

The commander of a Ukrainian drone squadron told me that, over many hours of observing Wagner from the sky, he had witnessed “not so much a lack of fear but, rather, the total devaluation of life.” In one case, he watched as Wagner fighters in a trench left a dead comrade in place for several days, cleaning their weapons, eating, and sleeping with the body lying just a few feet from them. “I kept waiting for them to bury him, or at least move him, but they just acted like nothing was the matter,” he said. Another Wagner unit took a wounded Ukrainian soldier prisoner, and then placed him on the edge of their trench, to keep Ukrainian forces from firing on them. The commander said that he watched, helpless, as the Ukrainian soldier flailed and lost blood, and finally froze to death.

When confronted by an armed drone, the commander said, “the regular Russian mobiks”—as mobilized recruits are called—“fall into hysterics, scatter in every direction, try to hide.” Radio intercepts pick up their frantic calls to higher-ups: “We are being shelled!” Wagner fighters from Russian prisons, however, often fire wildly into the air, trying to shoot down the drone. In some cases, they do manage to disable it; just as often, they stand in one place until they’re blown to pieces. “This isn’t bravery,” the drone commander said, “but complete craziness.”

Wagner’s use of human-wave attacks led to some limited battlefield successes. In January, Wagner captured Soledar, a small town north of Bakhmut known for its salt mines. “I want to confirm the complete liberation and cleansing of the territory of Soledar from units of the Ukrainian Army,” Prigozhin declared. “The whole city is littered with the corpses of Ukrainian soldiers.”

The place had little strategic import for the larger Russian campaign, but it was the country’s clearest military achievement in more than half a year. At first, the Defense Ministry praised Russian paratroopers for taking Soledar, with no mention of Wagner. Prigozhin alleged that Russian generals were attempting to “steal victory.” The Defense Ministry released a new statement, clarifying that the “direct assault on the residential areas of Soledar” was “successfully carried out thanks to the courageous and selfless actions of the volunteers of Wagner’s assault squads.”

When Russia launched its invasion, Andrey Medvedev assumed that he would be called up to fight. He was twenty-five years old and had spent much of his childhood in an orphanage in the Siberian city of Tomsk. As a teen-age conscript, he spent a year in the airborne infantry, an experience that had soured him on the Russian Army. He had heard about Wagner, which not only paid better but was also supposedly run more efficiently and rationally. “The Defense Ministry will screw you over,” he recalled thinking. “Wagner is run by more reliable people.”

Medvedev had spent years after his service bouncing between odd jobs—security guard, construction worker, driver—and had done a stint in prison. “I didn’t have shit,” he told me. “No home, no family, nothing.” He largely believed the propaganda he saw on television: Nazis in Ukraine were committing atrocities against a population that yearned to be liberated by Russia. He called Wagner’s recruitment hotline, in the summer of 2022. After two weeks at the base in Molkino, he was given his assignment: commander of the 1st Squad of the 4th Platoon of the 7th Assault Detachment.

Medvedev was sent to a position outside of Bakhmut, where he had ten Wagner fighters under his command—recently enlisted mercenaries, not prisoners. In one of their first assaults, he and one other member of his unit made it out unscathed. The rest were badly injured or killed. Afterward, a higher-ranking Wagner commander told him to expect some “fucking great reinforcements.” Medvedev asked whom he meant. “Killers,” the commander said.

Soon, a group of convicts arrived, many of whom appeared old and physically unwell. Medvedev described an episode in which he and his new recruits were pinned in a trench, taking heavy fire from Ukrainian soldiers. “The guys climbed in and just sat there,” he told me. Medvedev yelled at the convict soldiers, “The enemy is about to hop in this trench and start fucking shit up. What are you going to do then?” A handful of Wagner mercenaries with combat experience repelled the attack, but the episode rattled Medvedev. “There were some decent fighters,” he said, “but the majority had no clue what they were doing.” A couple of weeks of training, he said, “were barely enough to learn how to hold a machine gun and walk straight.”

One of the recruits was a convicted murderer in his mid-fifties named Yevgeny Nuzhin. Medvedev described how, at one point, their unit came under heavy fire, and everyone dispersed into the trees. Nuzhin came back without his rifle, having thrown it off in a panic. They found it lying in the shrubs. Later, the unit had to cross a clearing in range of Ukrainian artillery. Rounds were exploding around them, but Nuzhin was so winded that he could barely walk. He had lost his gun again. Medvedev ran up to him in a fury. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he demanded.

“I have high blood pressure,” Nuzhin answered.

Medvedev eventually lost track of how many convict fighters cycled through his unit. “Once we started using prisoners, it was like a conveyor belt,” he said. “A group comes—that’s it, they’re dead.” He stopped remembering their names or call signs. “A new person shows up, survives for five minutes, and he’s killed,” he said. “It was like that day after day.”

Medvedev attended a training exercise on how to defend against new weapons systems that NATO countries were supplying to Ukraine. Prigozhin delivered a motivational speech, telling those in attendance, “We’re the most combat-ready division. Everyone else has shit themselves. We’re the only ones advancing.” Medvedev said that he asked Prigozhin a question: “At what price will we manage to enter Bakhmut? By walking over the corpses of our own men?” Prigozhin replied coolly, asking for his call sign and identification number. When the training was over, Medvedev reported to a Wagner officer, who asked him, “What are you running your mouth for?” He ordered Medvedev locked in a shipping container, saying, “Let him think it over.”

During another visit to a Wagner base, Medvedev came across a crowd of soldiers who were waiting for members of Wagner’s internal security department, whom they called the Chekists, a reference to the early Soviet secret police. The Chekists arrived in pickup trucks transporting two men. As the crowd looked on, they ordered the men to their knees; one of the Wagner security officers launched into a speech about how the men were traitors and cowards who had run away from battle. The Chekists shot them in the head. “I’ve seen people killed,” Medvedev told me. “Fuck, I’ve killed myself—I didn’t flinch. But I despise people who act that way.” I asked him the reason for such violent displays. “It’s obvious it comes from Prigozhin,” he said. “It’s a means of intimidation and control, to devour people and make them think only about their own self-preservation.”

Medvedev noted a video he’d seen of Nuzhin, the recruit with high blood pressure. Nuzhin had been captured by Ukrainian forces, and, as a P.O.W., recorded an interview. “I told myself that when I came I would do whatever it took to surrender,” Nuzhin said into the camera. “Because it’s not Ukraine who attacked Russia. It’s Putin who attacked Ukraine.” Two months later, a new video, titled “Hammer of Revenge,” appeared on a social-media channel associated with Wagner. Nuzhin had reportedly been part of a prisoner exchange with Russia. In the video, he is in a dark cellar, his head taped to a brick wall. “They told me I was to be tried,” Nuzhin says. A man in camouflage steps forward and swings a sledgehammer into his head, crushing his skull. Prigozhin denied that Wagner had anything to do with Nuzhin’s killing, but he made his satisfaction clear. “A dog receives a dog’s death,” he said in a statement. “Nuzhin betrayed his people, betrayed his comrades, betrayed them deliberately.”

After four months, Medvedev showed up at the office of his commander and submitted his resignation. The commander said Medvedev still had to fight six more months, maybe more—Wagner had the right to extend contracts as it saw fit. He ordered his men to throw Medvedev into a pit, where he was told that the Chekists were coming for him next. But, before they arrived, some sympathetic fellow Wagner fighters helped him flee. In December, Medvedev gave an interview to Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian activist based in France, who has published numerous investigations into Wagner and the Russian security services. Medvedev was on the run inside Russia. “I understand that I am in danger because I know their methods,” he told Osechkin. “I know exactly how they treat people like me.”

Shortly after the interview, Medvedev went to Murmansk, a city above the Arctic Circle, near Russia’s border with Norway. A local driver brought him to the border zone. It was mid-January, and mounds of snow rose out of the frozen ground like dunes. He donned a white camouflage jumpsuit, hopped over one fence, then another. Two shots rang out; a guard dog was barking. Medvedev ran across a frozen lake, his feet plunging into the frigid water in places where the ice was brittle. On the Norwegian side, he collapsed on the ground and pulled out a bottle of vodka that he had brought with him. As he walked down an empty road, a police car pulled up. Medvedev tried to explain himself. “Wagner,” he said.

“Wagner?” one of the Norwegian officers asked, incredulously.

Last September, a Ukrainian counter-offensive expelled Russian forces around the city of Kharkiv, cutting off a position from which they were advancing on Bakhmut. Prigozhin criticized the Russian Defense Ministry for the retreat. “Send all these scumbags to the front line with guns and bare feet,” he said.

The new battle lines meant that capturing Bakhmut no longer promised an obvious route for Russia to seize the Donbas. Instead, Bakhmut became a means for both armies to tie up and degrade the other’s forces, so as to exhaust them for future battles. “Our task is not Bakhmut itself,” Prigozhin said last November, “but the destruction of the Ukrainian Army and the reduction of its combat potential.” The operation, he went on, had been dubbed “the Bakhmut meat grinder.”

This was a politically convenient line for Prigozhin to take, given that, nearly a year into Wagner’s efforts to seize Bakhmut, the mercenary force was only advancing a few metres a day. “Bakhmut became a kind of fetish that the Defense Ministry and general staff weren’t particularly eager to throw themselves into,” the Russian defense source told me. “Russian military command came to the conclusion that, if Prigozhin wants to take this city so badly, then let him.”

According to a former Wagner fighter, whom I’m calling Bogdan, the meat grinder was nothing like war as he remembered it. Two decades earlier, he had spent more than a year as a young Army conscript in Chechnya, where Russian forces carried out a brutal counter-insurgency campaign. His life had been a series of tragic events since then. His wife died suddenly, in her mid-twenties, leaving him alone with their two daughters. He became addicted to heroin, then mephedrone, known in Russia as sol, or salt. In 2021, he was convicted of possession with intent to distribute and sentenced to eleven years in prison. By then, he was H.I.V.-positive. When Wagner recruiters showed up at his prison, in the Ural Mountains, he was in an advanced stage of infection. He had nine years left on his sentence, though he’d likely be dead before the end of it. If he went to fight in Ukraine, there was a chance he could finish his tour after six months and see his daughters again.

I met Bogdan earlier this summer, in a prison in Dnipro, a large city in southeastern Ukraine, a hundred and forty miles from Bakhmut. He has a tired, hollow face, and speaks in a falsetto whisper. Bogdan said that the Wagner recruiters told him he’d be responsible for evacuations, bringing the dead and injured off the front lines. They gave him a red bracelet to wear on his wrist, which indicated his H.I.V. infection. In early February, after three weeks of training, he was sent to Bakhmut.

No one there said anything about evacuations. Instead, he was ordered to join a group of twelve soldiers and prepare to storm a Ukrainian position. It was still dark when he and the others set off, entering a patch of forest outside the city. Bogdan could see craters from explosions and bodies lying in the snow. Suddenly, his unit was attacked with grenade launchers. Everyone scattered; Bogdan crawled over the frozen ground, trying to feel for the way he had come, and groped the arms and legs of fallen Wagner fighters. When he heard drones overhead, he went limp and played dead. Even nighttime wasn’t safe, as snipers with thermal scopes hunted whatever moved. “It was like a video game,” he told me.

The next day, he was shot in the arm. He jabbed himself with a painkiller from his first-aid kit, and passed out. He awoke, surrounded by Ukrainian soldiers. “Are you going to kill me?” he asked. “No,” came the reply. “We’re taking you prisoner.”

Wagner was losing between fifty and a hundred fighters a day. News of the high casualty rates had reached Russian inmates, fewer of whom were willing to join. At the same time, the Defense Ministry had begun drawing its own recruits from the prisons, signing up convicts for armed formations called Storm-Z. If the Defense Ministry was keen to limit Wagner’s influence, cutting off its supply of convict fighters was one way of doing it. In February, Prigozhin announced that Wagner was ending its program of recruiting prisoners. Later that month, he shifted the deadline for taking Bakhmut. “Progress is not as fast as we would like,” he said, insisting that Russia’s “monstrous military bureaucracy” was to blame.

Olga Romanova, who runs Russia Behind Bars, a criminal-justice advocacy group, said that she and her staff had been in touch with several hundred prisoners who joined up with Wagner. “I heard the same thing from them, over and over,” she said. “No one is waiting for me on the outside. I have no home, no family. At least here I’m needed.” To Romanova, who has defended the rights of Russian prisoners for fifteen years, Prigozhin’s exploitation of convict soldiers contains a cruel irony. “You could say that Wagner achieved something we’ve never had in Russia—post-penitentiary rehabilitation,” she said. “Only in the most terrible and gruesome way imaginable.”

On May 5th, Prigozhin posted a video of himself standing in a dark field, his flashlight trained on a row of dead bodies. “These are boys from Wagner who died today,” he says. “Their blood is still fresh!” The camera pans across the field, revealing yet more bodies, in soiled camouflage uniforms. “You will eat their guts in Hell,” he says. “Shoigu, Gerasimov, where is the fucking ammunition?”

Prigozhin threatened to pull his forces out of Bakhmut if they didn’t receive more ammunition. Apparently, he got what he wanted, because he soon announced that Wagner would stay. But the rift inside Russia’s war camp was striking. The member of Russia’s political élite said, “How is it that he gets away with saying what others would be imprisoned for in two seconds?” The answer, he went on, was likely that Putin had seen Prigozhin deliver results when the regular Army had stalled: “In wartime, you have to use whatever methods you have, without paying too much attention to side effects.”

By the middle of May, Wagner controlled more than ninety per cent of Bakhmut. But, even as the Ukrainian military was pushed out of the city, it was recapturing territory on the flanks, turning Bakhmut into both a prize and a trap. Prigozhin claimed that Wagner had handed over these areas to the regular Russian Army, and thus it was the Defense Ministry, not Wagner, that was responsible for their loss. “This is not called regrouping,” he said. “This is fleeing.” He warned that “attempts by the Defense Ministry in the information field to sugarcoat the situation” risked leading to a “global tragedy for Russia.” He scolded, “We must stop lying immediately.”

Around that time, I travelled to the Donbas and spent several days in Ukrainian-held towns outside Bakhmut. Soldiers were staying in abandoned houses, and tanks and armored personnel carriers streamed up and down the roads. A Ukrainian commander told me that he and his men had initially been confused by some of Wagner’s tactics: “We saw them running around with sledgehammers, and at first couldn’t figure out what for.” Officers eventually realized that Wagner was demolishing walls, so that its fighters could navigate the city without making themselves visible.

In one battle for an apartment building, the commander told me, Ukrainian forces managed to push back a group of Russian troops and hold a position from which they mounted a counterattack. Then they intercepted an appeal on Russian radio lines, calling for backup from “Psychos”—that is, Wagner storm troopers. The Psychos exhausted the Ukrainian soldiers with their sheer numbers and unwillingness to retreat, even when they were taking losses. “Our guys couldn’t hold on,” the Ukrainian commander said. “They had to pull back.”

One afternoon in mid-May, I drove to an abandoned gas station that served as a staging point for troops. A U.S.-supplied MRAP armored vehicle rumbled past. A piece of heavy artillery, hidden in the trees, fired in the direction of Bakhmut, shaking the ground with each blast. A car full of soldiers drove up. Their commander, a jolly man with a thick orange beard, nodded in the direction of the city, a few miles down the road. “That’s where Hell begins,” he told me. They put on body armor, loaded magazines into their weapons, and sped off.

I was there to meet Anton Lavryniuk, a Ukrainian battalion commander whose soldiers had been fighting Wagner in and around Bakhmut for six months. Combat had been exhausting. “Imagine today you killed twenty people. Yesterday it was twenty. The day before that it was thirty. Every day they come, and get mowed down in whole rows,” he told me. “What’s more, you see these rows of bodies, and no one is trying to pull them out. Today’s assault simply marches over the same ground where yesterday’s bodies are still lying.” In some cases, Lavryniuk saw that individual soldiers in his unit were struggling, psychologically as much as physically, and he sent them to the rear for a few days of rest. “They need to get their brains untwisted,” he said.

Lavryniuk noted that, as Wagner’s losses mounted, the number of storm troopers in each wave had become smaller—as few as six per group. One aspect of the group’s tactics remained constant, though: the practice of “zeroing out.” Lavryniuk and his men intercepted frequent radio traffic on the battlefield in which Wagner commanders gave the order: “Anyone who takes a step back, zero them out.” Lavryniuk told me, “We heard this over and over.”

I had received conflicting accounts about the decrease in Wagner artillery fire. Sources in both Ukraine and Russia noted dips in firing rates last spring, and cited a general rationing of munitions along the front. “Everything is regulated in the Army,” the former Russian military official said. “There are prescribed rates of ammunition consumption that dictate how much artillery you need for this or that operation.” Lavryniuk, for his part, doubted the sincerity of Prigozhin’s complaints about a lack of ammunition: “In many places, the intensity of fire was greater than before.” His men had adopted an ironclad rule. As soon as Wagner forces made contact, they hugged the ground or changed firing position, because an artillery barrage was imminent. “Wagner operates according to scorched-earth tactics,” Lavryniuk said. “They don’t storm a trench or a building until they’ve levelled it completely.”

Two days later, Bakhmut was fully occupied. President Volodymyr Zelensky initially denied that the city had fallen, but within days it was clear that no Ukrainian troops remained. Prigozhin announced that his fighters were withdrawing and would hand over their positions to the regular Russian Army. In another video, he walks among burned-out apartment blocks, giving instructions to his men, and declares that Wagner will leave Bakhmut by June 1st. His soldiers needed to regroup for a new mission.

In hindsight, the capture of Bakhmut was the beginning of the end for Wagner in Ukraine, the moment when, once it had accomplished its stated goal—at an extraordinary cost in men and matériel—its role and influence could only decrease. In the days after Wagner’s aborted mutiny, Prigozhin went largely quiet, releasing just a cryptic audio message. “We started our march because of an injustice,” he said. All that he and his men had wanted, he went on, was to “avoid the destruction of Wagner.” Prigozhin was equally adamant that Wagner’s short-lived insurrection had not been aimed at Putin or the Russian state: “We did not have the goal of overthrowing the existing regime and the legally elected government.”

Three days after the uprising, Konstantin Remchukov, a newspaper editor in Moscow with Kremlin connections, was invited to a meeting with Putin and other media executives. Remchukov described Putin as energized and focussed, and said that he spoke of poring through Wagner’s past contracts with the state. “Putin doesn’t believe there is such a thing as selfless opposition to his rule,” Remchukov said. “He always looks for a material reason.” Putin revealed that same day that the state had paid Wagner nearly a billion dollars during the past year. Dmitry Kiselev, a television propagandist, named an even higher sum—nearly ten billion dollars in state funds for Wagner over its lifetime. “Prigozhin has gone off the rails because of big money,” Kiselev said.

In the wake of the insurrection, Putin appeared to take a measured approach with Wagner. Hundreds of Russian citizens who have criticized the authorities and the war in less vivid terms than Prigozhin have been imprisoned, fined, and removed from their jobs or universities, and none of them sent an armored column on the road to Moscow. But, at least for now, Putin has decided that imprisoning Prigozhin would risk making him a martyr while also undermining Russia’s military effort. “What’s the most important political priority for Putin right now?” Remchukov asked. “Victory in the special military operation.” Wagner may yet prove useful for that goal, and the dismantling of its forces in the middle of a war would be messy, rife with distractions and dangers for the Kremlin. Putin appears to have concluded that the Wagner insurrection wasn’t aimed at him personally—a convenient position, in that it doesn’t force him to take any bold or risky action. “If they aren’t against me,” Remchukov said, paraphrasing Putin, “we can leave them in place for the solving of important problems.”

Indeed, for a person whom Putin had called a traitor in all but name, Prigozhin retained a remarkable level of influence and access. Journalists observed that a private plane linked to him made several flights to Moscow and St. Petersburg. The former Russian military official told me that Prigozhin had spent considerable time in Moscow, advocating for himself and his business empire with high-ranking figures: “He’s going around beating himself on the chest, saying that he’ll continue to fight on behalf of Russia. Let’s see whether he’s allowed to or not.”

Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, confirmed that, on June 29th—five days after Wagner’s failed march on Moscow—Putin met with Prigozhin and dozens of Wagner’s top commanders at the Kremlin. The meeting lasted three hours. “They emphasized that they are staunch supporters and soldiers of the head of state and commander-in-chief—and also said they are prepared to fight for the country going forward,” Peskov said. “Putin heard out the commanders and proposed further employment options and further combat options.”

In Ukraine, Wagner was but one piece of the military effort; elsewhere it represents the majority of the Russian presence. Gabidullin, the former senior adviser of Wagner’s ISIS Hunters, spoke to a number of Wagner fighters in Syria, who told him that the uprising had not affected their operations: “They say that they expect to continue their work, even if certain conditions change.” Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said of Wagner’s missions in the C.A.R. and Mali, “This work, of course, will continue.”

Still, Putin is unlikely to repeat the same mistake twice: allowing a private army led by a hotheaded sadist to take an outsized role in Russia’s security. “How can Putin claim to have total control over the country, and then something like this happens?” the member of the Russian political élite said. “They’ll have to lose their independence and be integrated into the Army.” But putting Wagner on a tighter leash would lead to a very different Wagner, one that, as the U.S. defense official put it, would trade “an increase in control for a reduction of deniability.” That would lessen the danger of such a group, but it would also challenge the fundamental reasons that the Kremlin found it useful in the first place.

By July, a contingent of several thousand Wagner fighters had made it to Belarus, setting up camp near the town of Asipovichy, where the Belarusian Defense Ministry said they would train local reservists. Prigozhin paid a visit, making his first public appearance since the mutiny. He brought the Wagner flag from the base in Molkino, which had been emptied out. “We fought with dignity,” Prigozhin told the assembled troops. “We’ve done a great deal for Russia.” Wagner, he went on, would now prepare for new missions, including a reinvigorated presence in Africa. “Maybe we’ll return to the special military operation at a time when we are sure that we won’t be forced to disgrace ourselves and our experience,” he said. He then introduced Dmitry Utkin—“the one who gave us the name Wagner”—who stepped forward, his face covered in the shadow of early evening. The crowd applauded and whistled; Utkin tipped his cap. “This is not the end,” he said, “but just the beginning of the biggest job in the world, which will be carried out very soon.” He switched to English and yelled, “Welcome to Hell!”

The New Yorker · by Joshua Yaffa · July 31, 2023

11. Space Command to stay in Colorado after Biden rejects move to Alabama

Space Command to stay in Colorado after Biden rejects move to Alabama

militarytimes.com · by Lolita C. Baldor · July 31, 2023

President Joe Biden has decided to keep U.S. Space Command headquarters in Colorado, overturning a last-ditch decision by the Trump administration to move it to Alabama and ending months of politically fueled debate, according to senior U.S. officials.

The officials said Biden was convinced by the head of Space Command, Gen. James Dickinson, who argued that moving his headquarters now would jeopardize military readiness. Dickinson’s view, however, was in contrast to Air Force leadership, who studied the issue at length and determined that relocating to Huntsville, Alabama, was the right move.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the decision ahead of the announcement.

The president, they said, believes that keeping the command in Colorado Springs would avoid a disruption in readiness that the move would cause, particularly as the U.S. races to compete with China in space. And they said Biden firmly believes that maintaining stability will help the military be better able to respond in space over the next decade.

Biden’s decision is sure to enrage Alabama lawmakers and fuel accusations that abortion politics played a role in the choice. The location debate has become entangled in the ongoing battle between Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville and the Defense Department over the move to provide travel for troops seeking reproductive health care. Tuberville opposes the policy and is blocking hundreds of military promotions in protest.

Formally created in August 2019, the command was temporarily based in Colorado, and Air Force and Space Force leaders initially recommended it stay there. In the final days of his presidency Donald Trump decided it should be based in Huntsville.

The change triggered a number of reviews.

Proponents of keeping the command in Colorado have argued that moving it to Huntsville and creating a new headquarters would set back its progress at a time it needs to move quickly to be positioned to match China’s military space rise. And Colorado Springs is also home to the Air Force Academy, which now graduates Space Force guardians, and more than 24 military space missions, including three Space Force bases.

Huntsville, however, scored higher than Colorado Springs in a Government Accountability Office assessment of potential locations and has long been a home to some of earliest missiles used in the nation’s space programs, including the Saturn V rocket. It is home to the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command.

According to officials, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who ordered his own review of the matter, leaned toward Huntsville, while Dickinson was staunchly in favor of staying put. The officials said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin presented both options to Biden.

Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder emphasized in a statement on Monday that Biden’s pick resulted from a “thorough and deliberate evaluation process ... informed by data and analysis.”

Austin, Kendall and Dickinson “all support the President’s decision,” Ryder said.

“Locating Headquarters U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs ultimately ensures peak readiness in the space domain for our nation during a critical period,” Ryder said. “It will also enable the command to most effectively plan, execute and integrate military spacepower into multidomain global operations in order to deter aggression and defend national interests.”

Meanwhile, House Armed Services Committee Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., blasted the reversal in his own statement and vowed to continue a congressional inquiry into the selection process.

“I will continue to hold the Biden administration accountable for their egregious political meddling in our national security,” Rogers said Monday. “This fight is far from over.”

Air Force Times senior reporter Rachel Cohen contributed to this story.

12. Lawmakers urge defense leaders to send Bowe Bergdahl to trial again

Don't make this political. Make it about justice.

Lawmakers urge defense leaders to send Bowe Bergdahl to trial again

militarytimes.com · by Leo Shane III · July 31, 2023

A group of Republican lawmakers is pushing Defense Department leaders to retry Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for desertion after his conviction was thrown out by a federal judge last week.

Five military veterans — Reps. Mike Waltz, R-Fla.; Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas; Jake Ellzey, R-Texas; Ryan Zinke, R-Mont.; and Guy Reschenthaler, R-Pa. — sent a letter to both Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding “an immediate review of options for a new trial” for Bergdahl, calling it a matter of fairness and justice.

Bergdahl pled guilty to desertion in 2017, but his conviction was thrown out in July on a technicality. He’d left his military base in Afghanistan in 2009. He was captured by the Taliban and held captive for nearly five years. Hundreds of troops spent thousands of man hours looking for the missing soldier, and military officials said several were wounded in enemy attacks.

“Bergdahl’s actions endangered and potentially got his comrades killed,” the GOP lawmakers wrote. “This outcome dishonors those who served and died alongside Bergdahl, and by omission condoning such behavior, puts the lives of future American soldiers in peril.”

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Judge vacates Bowe Bergdahl’s desertion conviction

Bowe Bergdahl’s conviction and sentence had been narrowly upheld by military appeals courts before his lawyers took the case to U.S. District Court.

Bergdahl’s conviction carried with it a dishonorable discharge and a $10,000 penalty but no jail time, given the years he spent being tortured by hostile forces.

But on July 25, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton ruled that conviction was invalid because the military judge who presided over the court-martial — Jeffrey Nance — failed to disclose a personal conflict of interest: his application to the executive branch for a job as an immigration judge.

Former President Donald Trump was outspoken in his criticism of Bergdahl both before his election in 2016 and during his time in office. Walton ruled that Nance’s failure to disclose a job application with senior Trump officials created the appearance of impropriety.

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New military justice rules set to go into effect with Biden order

The president will codify reforms establishing independent prosecutors for serious military crimes.

Both Department of Justice and Department of Defense officials have declined to speak publicly on possible next steps in the case. The lawmakers behind the letter said that simply allowing the case to fade away is unacceptable, and asked for a new trial “as expeditiously as possible.”

Bergdahl, now 37, has kept a low profile since his return from Afghanistan. He had testified that he left his post to complain about a toxic leadership climate in his unit. Bergdahl was only freed after the release of five senior Taliban leaders by then President Barack Obama.

About Leo Shane III

Leo covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He has covered Washington, D.C. since 2004, focusing on military personnel and veterans policies. His work has earned numerous honors, including a 2009 Polk award, a 2010 National Headliner Award, the IAVA Leadership in Journalism award and the VFW News Media award.

13. Sayings and lessons from the outgoing sergeant major of the Army

Sayings and lessons from the outgoing sergeant major of the Army

armytimes.com · by Todd South · July 31, 2023

From social media to interviews with reporters to taking the stage at numerous events over his four-year tenure as the service’s top enlisted soldier, Sergeant Major of the Army Michael A. Grinston has offered many quips, aphorisms and no-nonsense advice to soldiers and leaders up and down the chain of command. The Army has even compiled a series of fireside chats on various topics that Grinston has addressed through his tenure for the service’s NCO Journal dubbed “16x16.” As the 16th Sergeant Major of the Army leaves the post in a ceremony on Aug. 4 and then retires soon after, Army Times has compiled a sampling of those Grinstonesque sayings to share that we’re calling, “The Quotable Grinston.”

On every problem the Army faces

“If it was easy, somebody would’ve already done it.”

On improving soldier skills, raising standards

“Oh, it’s coming. Soldiers need to know how to read a map.”

“If you don’t know how to stop a soldier from bleeding, it doesn’t matter if you’re in large-scale combat or counterinsurgency, you don’t know how to do your tasks. At the battalion and below, you need to be an absolute expert in your job. Every soldier in your organization needs to know their job so well that we shouldn’t have to worry about that. [Then] we can worry about the deep fight and long-range hypersonics.”

Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael A. Grinston meets with international sergeant majors at the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., March 15, 2023. (Laura Buchta/Army)

On NCO development

“What we need to do is continuously challenge our NCOs,” Grinston said. “So that’s one of our biggest changes; make our first NCO course rigorous and bring back a little rigor and field time and the tactics.”

On Ukraine

“When Russia invaded Ukraine, your Army knew exactly what we needed to do. You should be proud of what we’ve done.”

On operational tempo

“We’ve never said no. I’ve watched these soldiers, year after year, they’ve said, ‘Yes, I’ll go do that.’”

Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston speaks with Redstone senior leaders about quality of life services on the installation during a visit Aug. 5. (Army)

On finding solutions

“You hear it all the time: ‘Well, I don’t want to make sausage in front of the sergeant major of the Army.’ I want to make sausage. I want to hear ideas … because if the people with the money and authority that can help with policy don’t hear the ideas in the forum, then you may wait too long and it doesn’t get funded or it’s not a policy,”

On being present

“What I ask you all as leaders is, are you there? You don’t have to lead (physical training), you don’t have to be up front, you just have to be present.”

Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael A. Grinston deadlifts during his visit at Camp Herkus, Lithuania, May 3, 2022. (Army)

On mental health

“It’s okay to seek help if you need help. But I do want to caution you that that is not the panacea for all your problems. Maybe seek behavioral health, maybe you can talk to a chaplain. I think when we use all the resources that we have, I think we’re all going to be in a better mental state. We can’t just use only one resource.”

Following the murder of Spc. Vanessa Guillén

“I think that’s the hard part … ‘It wasn’t your actions, it was the actions around you, and somehow that was allowed to fester. And that’s the difficult part because you personally were performing exceptionally well. But those things around you were happening, and either you should have known or you allowed it.’”

On combat

“I think I did my best to bring everybody back. I didn’t, but I think they knew that I truly cared. And when I made them run a billion miles — when you’re in combat, you didn’t fall out.”

On his time as a drill sergeant

“I was mean. There’s no way I could lie to you, if you were to talk to my soldiers … I was not nice, I was not fun. I wouldn’t want me as a drill sergeant.”

Michael Grinston, shown as a Drill Sergeant at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, left, alongside a photo of him as the sergeant major of the Army. (Reddit/Army)

Stopping sexual assault and harassment

“You hear it all the time: ‘Well, I don’t want to make sausage in front of the sergeant major of the Army.’ I want to make sausage. I want to hear ideas … because if the people with the money and authority that can help with policy don’t hear the ideas in the forum, then you may wait too long and it doesn’t get funded or it’s not a policy,”

On suicide

“I think we need to rethink suicide. We want to put people in a box that behavioral health will solve. Maybe we need to look at it that everyone can be susceptible to a suicide thought or event.”

On failure

“I feel that I failed to communicate the importance of being a part of a cohesive team that is highly trained, disciplined and fit. I talk about ‘This is My Squad,’ [and] how to take ownership and treat people with dignity and respect. I failed to get [my message] down to the NCOs on Fort Hood.”

On readiness

“It’s not people first versus readiness; it’s people first that equals readiness in the Army. If I’m more fit, I’m a better [rifleman]; that’s about me as a person. If I’m not fit and I can’t shoot my weapon, I’m not very lethal.”

Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston runs through a shooting scenario with the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS. (Todd South/Military Times)

On race

“Racial identity is something that I have struggled with my entire life. … Sometimes in my life, I felt like it’s in the movie ‘The Green Book’ where the actor gets out of the car and he says, ‘I’m not Black enough for the Black people, and I’m not White enough for the White people.’”

On loss

“I got an award and I don’t even know if I deserve it. I’d give it back in a second if I could get the soldiers back.”

Facing death

“It got to the point that by the time I’d gotten to my second deployment, I’m like, there’s no way,” “There’s no way I could get out the first time, I’m definitely going to die on the second and third. We were in Mahmoudiyah — Triangle of Death. Great.”

Sources: Army Times; Military.com; Army.mil; TaskandPurpose.com

About Todd South

Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.

14. Army Futures Command drafting next operating concept

I will be interested to see how this addresses irregular warfare.

Army Futures Command drafting next operating concept

Defense News · by Jen Judson · July 31, 2023

FORT LIBERTY, North Carolina — The U.S. Army four-star command tasked with modernizing the force is preparing to release this fall a warfighting concept for operations in 2040, according to the AFC commander.

The concept would closely follow last year’s release of the Army’s Multidomain Operations doctrine.

“We are working really hard on the next Army operating concept based on the big evolutions, unprecedented disruption in terms of technology,” Gen. James Rainey told Defense News during a July 27 interview on his way to the Association of the U.S. Army’s Warfighter Summit at Fort Liberty, North Carolina.

This fall, the Army will roll out its “1.0 version of the concept,” Rainey said, “on how the Army is going to fight as part of a joint force in the [20]30 to ‘40 timeframe.” In time, this concept will become doctrine.

The AFC commander previously helped shape the MDO concept as the commander of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command’s Combined Arms Center from 2019 to 2021. That doctrine, the Army’s first new one in 40 years, laid out how the Army operates not just on land but also across air, sea, space and cyberspace.

With MDO complete and a host of new weapons systems expected to come online from now into the early 2030s, Rainey is now thinking about what kinds of formations and capability the Army will need in the 2040 timeframe as well as the associated doctrine.

“I personally believe there’s some big changes to warfare and figuring out that starts with what’s the future operating environment, not just our enemies, but demographics, climate, the economy, urbanization. What’s the future battlefield going to look like,” Rainey said. “How do we need to operate in that to stay the best army in the world, to be able to dominate the land domain as part of the joint force?”

The new concept “could be an evolution of multidomain operations,” Rainey said, or it “could be something new. I won’t tell you the answers yet.”

The concept will cover the competencies the Army will need to operate, he said. “It’ll include a theory of victory. It’ll introduce new imperatives, things we need to be able to do that we can’t do now. … It’ll introduce fundamental changes in the way we organize, train and flight, and really how we man.”

The concept will then drive experimentation in science and technology and research and development, which the Army will need to incorporate into its budget in just a few years to shape the force of 2040, Rainey said.

He said he wants this concept to be “a little broader” than those of the past. At this phase, Rainey said, “I’m not looking for a 40-page glossy with all the answers. I’m looking for a working document that could part of a professional dialogue.”

In addition to the concept work, Rainey said AFC is still focused on delivering the Army’s priority weapons systems to soldiers by 2030 while also looking at how formations should be designed to take on the new capability.

And he is also prioritizing what the Army can deliver more rapidly, in some cases within two years. “The amount of disruption and the character of warfare right now is unprecedented,” Rainey said.

“We need to do a better job of seeing something that’s happening on the battlefield, in technology, out in the Pacific, and turn that into no-kidding capability in a formation,” he added.

Some of the types of capability the Army would like to move more quickly to buy would be loitering munitions, smaller more agile, attritable unmanned aircraft with configurable payloads, ground-based rockets, ground-based missiles and counter-drone systems.

About Jen Judson

Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.

15. Opinion | Ukraine maps show the price of allies’ hesitation

Map/satellite imagery/interactive graphics are at this link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2023/ukraine-war-maps-progress-aid/?utm

Opinion | Ukraine maps show the price of allies’ hesitation

The Washington Post · by Youyou Zhou · July 31, 2023

Last September, Ukraine requested Western tanks from allies to push back against Russia’s invasion. At that time, Russia had not consolidated much of its hold on the territory it had taken. While allies debated whether or not they should send tanks, Russia began to dig in:

Sept. 4, 2022

When Ukraine first requested Western tanks, satellite images show that Russia had only started to build fortifications.

Jan. 25, 2023

By the time Ukraine finally received the tanks, half a year later, hundreds of miles of fortifications were visible from space.

Take the occupied city of Tokmak in Zaporizhzhia Oblast as an example: This is how the city looked in satellite imagery on Oct. 18, 2022.

Over the next two months, Russians set up barriers outside the major roads into the city. By Jan. 26, the entire city was surrounded by fortifications.

The pattern then repeated itself. Ukraine publicly asked for cluster munitions from the United States last winter, shortly after it had liberated the southern city of Kherson. The Biden administration delayed responding to the request. Meanwhile, this is what happened in occupied territory:

Dec. 8, 2022

When Ukraine requested U.S. cluster munitions, most of Russia’s new fortifications were concentrated near the front line.

July 6, 2023

Six months later, when Ukraine finally received the cluster munitions from the United States, Russia had fortified huge swaths of occupied eastern and southern Ukraine, along the border and throughout northern Crimea.

Without fear of Ukrainian-operated Western tanks or long-range missiles, Moscow’s soldiers were able to expand defenses close to the front line and deep within occupied territory.

These positions generally consist of trenches, anti-vehicle barriers and land mines. Michael Newton, who leads the land-mine-clearing operations in Ukraine for the HALO Trust, describes Russia’s mine-laying in occupied Ukrainian territory as taking place on an “industrial level.”

The network of fortifications consists of a primary defensive line and multiple layers of fallback positions. This means that not all of Russia’s trenches are manned, but they provide ready-made fighting positions aimed at stalling a Ukrainian advance.

Here are some illustrative examples:

Russia took the eastern Ukrainian city of Lysychansk in July 2022. New fortifications between the city and a nearby oil refinery underscore its importance to Russian forces.

Dec 19, 2022

Mar 14, 2023

Dec. 19, 2022

March 14, 2023

Dec. 19, 2022

March 14, 2023

Dec. 19, 2022

March 14, 2023

Located by the Black Sea, Berdyansk Airport is a base for Russian helicopters operating over occupied regions in southern Ukraine. Russian forces put up extensive barriers and trenches around it earlier this year.

Jan 8, 2023

Mar 14, 2023

Jan. 8, 2023

March 14, 2023

Closer to the front line, Russian forces constructed layers of fortifications along the 50 kilometers of highway that connect the occupied cities of Polohy and Tokmak.

Nov 14, 2022

May 3, 2023

Nov. 14, 2022

May 3, 2023

Nov. 14, 2022

May 3, 2023

Nov. 14, 2022

May 3, 2023

Even in Crimea, occupied by Russia since 2014, satellite images show new defenses along roads leading into the peninsula.

Oct 18, 2022

Feb 23, 2023

Oct. 18, 2022

Feb. 23, 2023

Oct. 18, 2022

Feb. 23, 2023

Oct. 18, 2022

Feb. 23, 2023

The pattern of delay is still in place. Ukraine has been asking for long-range missiles it would like to use to strike Russian command posts, staging areas and supply depots behind the front lines. The United States is once again dragging its feet.

Whether it is worries about escalation, or worries about supply shortages, the smart bet in Washington is that the long-range missiles, like the tanks and the cluster munitions before them, will ultimately be delivered.

If the last year of the conflict has shown anything, it’s that this kind of vacillation is costly. It not only squanders additional Ukrainian lives, but it also makes a protracted, grinding conflict more likely.

Ukraine’s allies have long recognized the frantic pace at which Russia has been building defenses in occupied territory. But this realization had little bearing on the speed of their own decision-making. That needs to change. Instead of uncomfortably looking on as Ukraine’s counteroffensive devolves into a slow war of attrition, Western leaders should become more proactive.

Ukraine needs our help, not our excuses.

About this story

The satellite images are from Copernicus Sentinel-2. Brady Africk, an open-source intelligence analyst who works for the American Enterprise Institute, analyzed the satellite imagery and provided the fortifications data, which does not include all fortifications in Ukraine; some defenses predate Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The Washington Post · by Youyou Zhou · July 31, 2023

​16​.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com