Quotes of the Day:
"We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others."
- Will Rogers
"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."
- Samuel Johnson
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
- Plato
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 3 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. The Russian Dilemma Isn’t So Unfamiliar
3. Ukrainian Guerillas: Fighting Russians in Temporarily Occupied Territories
4. Special forces adjust artillery to a reconnaissance report resulting in Russian equipment losses
5. Backlash to DHS Disinformation Governance Board grows, fueled in part by misinformation
6. Republicans announce bill to shut down DHS ‘disinformation’ unit
7. Dr. Dave Johnson’s warning on brute force in the Ukraine: “This is What the Russians Do”
8. How Ukrainians Saved Their Capital
9. Will Putin go nuclear to avoid defeat in Ukraine?
10. Opinion | A Message to the Biden Team on Ukraine: Talk Less
11. Spirit of America - Helping Ukraine Win | SOF News
12. Walking a tightrope: Ukraine war puts Japan's energy security on thin ice
13. Nuclear deterrence must work in both directions, not just against the West
14. Blinken to unveil 'no surprises' China strategy pre-Asia push
15. Ukraine says it is 'ready' if Belarus joins Russian war effort
16. Iran’s rulers demanding too much even for Biden
17. FDD | State Department Report Glosses Over Assad’s Narco-Trafficking Wealth
18. Commentary: Andrea Stricker — Team Biden must stop Russia's Iran deal
19. Fires, explosions and false-flag operations: How war is spilling beyond Ukraine’s borders
20. EU targets Russian oil, banks as Moscow's ally Belarus stages army drills
21. When Julia Child worked for a spy agency fighting sharks
22. Reversing Roe Would Harm Military Readiness, Abortion-Rights Advocates Warn
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 3 (PUTIN's WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 3
Kateryna Stepanenko, Karolina Hird, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan
May 3, 6:45 pm ET
Ukrainian officials reported with increasing confidence that the Kremlin will announce mobilization on May 9. Ukraine’s Main Military Intelligence Directorate Chief Kyrylo Budanov said on May 2 that the Kremlin has begun to prepare mobilization processes and personnel ahead of the expected May 9 announcement and has already carried out covert mobilization.[1] Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council said that high-ranking Russian officials are trying to legitimize a prolonged war effort as the Third World War against the West, rather than the "special military operation” against Ukraine, as Russian President Vladimir Putin has hitherto framed Russia’s invasion.[2] ISW has no independent confirmation of Russian preparations for mobilization.
A significant Ukrainian counteroffensive pushed Russian forces roughly 40 km east of Kharkiv City.[3] A senior American defense official reported the Ukrainian operation, which is consistent with social media reports from both Ukrainian and Russian sources that Ukrainian troops took control of Staryi Saltiv on May 2.[4] This Ukrainian counteroffensive is very unlikely to affect Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum, as the Russians have not been relying on GLOCs from Kharkiv to support their operations in Izyum but have been using routes further to the east and well beyond the most recent Ukrainian counteroffensive’s limit of advance. The Ukrainian counteroffensive may, however, unhinge the Russian positions northeast of Kharkiv and could set conditions for a broader operation to drive the Russians from most of their positions around the city. This possibility may pose a dilemma for the Russians—whether to reinforce their positions near Kharkiv to prevent such a broader Ukrainian operation or to risk losing most or all of their positions in artillery range of the city.
Russia’s long-term intentions regarding the status of Mariupol and other occupied areas seem confused. Some anecdotes from Mariupol indicate that Russia may plan to incorporate Mariupol and the surrounding environs into the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), and possibly annex the DNR to the Russian Federation. Other anecdotes suggest that Russia could directly absorb Mariupol into Rostov Oblast. These inconsistencies could simply be artifacts of reporting or confusion on the ground, but they could also indicate actual confusion about Russia’s long-term plans for governing the Ukrainian regions that Moscow’s forces currently occupy. These anecdotes clearly support the assessment that Putin has no intention of ceding occupied territories back to an independent Ukraine and is, at most, considering exactly how he intends to govern regions that Russia has illegally seized.
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces resumed air, artillery, and ground assaults on the Azovstal Steel Plant following the conclusion of the May 2 evacuation efforts.
- Russian forces continued to regroup on the Donetsk-Luhansk axis in likely preparation for a westward advance in the direction of Lyman and Slovyansk.
- The Ukrainian Armed Forces conducted a counteroffensive that likely pushed Russian forces up to 40 km east of Kharkiv City.
- Russian forces conducted limited ground offensives in Zaporizhia Oblast in the vicinity of Huliapole and intensified reconnaissance operations in the vicinity of Odesa amid growing tensions in Transnistria.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
ISW has updated the structure of its discussion of the primary efforts that Russian forces are currently engaging in. The main Russian effort is concentrated in Eastern Ukraine and includes one subordinate main effort and four supporting efforts. The subordinate main effort is the encirclement of Ukrainian troops in the cauldron formed between the Izyum-Slovyansk highway and the Kreminna-Rubizhne-Popasna frontline in Luhansk. The four supporting efforts are: completing the seizure of Mariupol, Kharkiv City, the Southern Axis, and threatening northeastern Ukraine from Russian and Belarusian territory.
ISW has updated its assessment of the five primary efforts Russian forces are engaged in at this time:
- Main effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and four supporting efforts);
- Subordinate main effort—Encirclement of Ukrainian troops in the cauldron between Izyum and the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts
- Supporting effort 1—Mariupol;
- Supporting effort 2—Kharkiv City;
- Supporting effort 3—Southern axis;
- Supporting effort 4—Sumy and northeastern Ukraine.
Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas.)
Russian forces continued to conduct unspecified offensive operations southwestward from Izyum towards Barvinkove on May 3. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that elements of the Airborne Forces (VDV), 1st Tank Army, 20th, 29th, 35th, and 36th Combined Arms Armies, and 68th Army Corps are operating in the Barvinkove direction and suffering continuous losses.[5]
Russian forces continued to fire along the Donetsk-Luhansk frontline and did not make any confirmed ground attacks on May 3.[6] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that elements of the 1st and 2nd Army Corps (forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics), 8th, 58th, and 5th Combined Arms Armies, Pacific Fleet, 2nd and 41st Combined Arms Armies, 90th Tank Division, and unspecified VDV elements are regrouping to advance westward in the direction of Lyman and Slovyansk.[7] Remotely sensed NASA data for fires and heat anomalies observed significant high-temperature anomalies in Lyman between May 2 and 3 over the past 24 hours, indicating Russian indirect fire that was likely in preparation for such an advance.[8] The large number of combined arms armies, divisions, and other organizations identified as contributing troops to this effort suggests that many if not most of the Russian units engaged on this axis are understrength and in ad-hoc organizations. That observation, if true, may help explain the slow and halting pace of the Russian advance.
[Source: NASA‘s Fire Information for Resource Management System over Lyman for May 2 and May 3]
Supporting Effort #1—Mariupol (Russian objective: Capture Mariupol and reduce the Ukrainian defenders.)
Russian forces resumed air, artillery, and ground attacks on the Azovstal Steel Plant on May 3 after the conclusion of preliminary evacuation efforts.[9] Deputy Commander of the Azov Regiment Sviatoslav Palamar stated that Russian forces conducted a ground assault to attempt entry of Azovstal under the cover of airstrikes that killed two civilians inside the plant.[10]
Russian occupying forces continue to set conditions for the administrative occupation of Mariupol. The Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported that private enterprises in Rostov, Russia, received orders to produce official seals and stamps for public institutions in Mariupol that reportedly contain the inscription: “Russia, the Republic of Donbas, Mariupol, the military-civilian administration.”[11] GUR’s report is consistent with Advisor to the Mayor of Mariupol Petro Andryushchenko’s statement that children in the Mangush region near Mariupol are signing their school notebooks with “Rostov Oblast” and indicates continued Russian efforts to further institutionalize control of occupied territories in anticipation of potential annexation to Russia.[12] These reports taken in tandem, however, indicate potential confusion in the Kremlin’s ultimate end goal for the status of Mariupol and other occupied areas. Occupation authorities are likely unclear as to whether the intention is to absorb Mariupol into the existing administration of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), which then may be annexed to Russia, or to directly attach Mariupol to Russia as part of Rostov Oblast. Russia has not formally annexed the DNR, moreover, but rather recognized its independence, putting the formulation “Russia, the Republic of Donbas” at variance with Russia’s current formal stance. These oddities may indicate inconsistencies in the plans or implementation of occupational frameworks that could likely play out in occupied areas beyond Mariupol.
Supporting Effort #2—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Continue to pressure Kharkiv City to fix Ukrainian defenders there and prevent their movement to reinforce defenders on other axes.)
The Ukrainian Armed Forces conducted a large-scale counteroffensive east of Kharkiv City on May 2, which could unhinge Russian positions to the northeast. A US senior defense official reported that Ukrainian forces pushed Russian forces about 40 km east on May 2, and social media reports corroborate that report by showing Ukrainian forces liberating the settlement of Staryi Saltiv.[13] Russian forces reportedly retreated in the direction of Volchansk near the Russian state border.[14] Ukraine’s Advisor to the Internal Affairs Minister Anton Herashchenko said that Ukrainian forces liberated the village of Molodova near Staryi Saltiv on May 3.[15] Ukrainian forces likely liberated more settlements along the T2104 highway based on May 1 reports that fighting occurred in highway adjacent settlements of Khotomlya, Shestakove, Staryi Saltiv, Molodova, and Peremoha.[16] Russian forces maintained artillery positions in Tsyrkuny, approximately 20 km from downtown Kharkiv City.[17] Russian forces will likely seek to retain their remaining settlements in Kharkiv’s vicinity to continue daily artillery fire and pin Ukrainian units in the area but may have to reinforce their positions in this area to do so.
Supporting Effort #3—Southern Axis (Objective: Defend Kherson against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces conducted limited ground offensives in Zaporizhia Oblast on May 3 but confined themselves to shelling elsewhere in southern Ukraine.[18] Zaporizhia Oblast Administration Head Oleksandr Staruch reported that Russian forces launched an assault on the outskirts of Huliapole and on the area east of the settlement but did not seize any new territories.[19] Russian forces shelled the settlement of Zaluznychne around 8 km from Huliapole, likely to break the Ukrainian defenses and secure the northbound T0401 highway.[20]
The Russian Defense Ministry released a video of Bastion coastal defense complexes firing Oniks anti-ship cruise missiles at land targets, claiming that Russian forces struck a Ukrainian logistics center in Odesa Oblast on May 3.[21] The use of the Oniks anti-ship missile in a ground-attack role may suggest that Russian forces are experiencing shortages of the other types of long-range precision-guided munitions necessary to disrupt Ukrainian logistics.[22]
Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command said that Ukrainian forces destroyed a Russian “Forpost” reconnaissance drone in Odesa Oblast on May 3, confirming ongoing Russian reconnaissance in the area amid growing tensions in Transnistria.[23] Ukrainian officials blocked the Kuchurhan-Pervomaisc border checkpoint with Transnistria amid new Transnistrian claims that the proxy republic repelled a terrorist drone attack on May 3, likely in preparation for possible escalations.[24] The Ukrainian General Staff said that Russian officials are taking unspecified measures to prepare for evacuations of Russian military families from Transnistria.[25]
Supporting Effort #4—Sumy and Northeastern Ukraine: (Russian objective: Withdraw combat power in good order for redeployment to eastern Ukraine)
There were no significant activities on this axis in the past 24 hours.
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces will likely continue to merge offensive efforts southward of Izyum with westward advances from Donetsk in order to encircle Ukrainian troops in southern Kharkiv Oblast and Western Donetsk.
- Russia may change the status of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, possibly by merging them into a single “Donbas Republic” and/or by annexing them directly to Russia.
- Russian forces will likely attempt to starve out the remaining defenders of the Azovstal Steel Plant in Mariupol and continue to mount air, artillery, and ground attacks
- Ukrainian counteroffensives around Kharkiv City may unhinge Russian positions northeast of the city, possibly forcing the Russians to choose between reinforcing those positions or abandoning them if the Ukrainians continue to press their counterattack.
- Russian forces may be preparing to conduct renewed offensive operations to capture the entirety of Kherson Oblast in the coming days.
[1] https://nv dot ua/ukr/ukraine/politics/gur-minoboroni-shcho-vidomo-pro-herson-i-donbas-interv-yu-nv-novini-ukrajini-50238690.html
[15] https://www.rbc dot ua/ukr/news/vsu-osvobodili-eshche-odno-selo-harkovom-1651594969.html
[21] ttps://t dot me/mod_russia/15104; https://t dot me/faceofwar/19165
2. The Russian Dilemma Isn’t So Unfamiliar
Tue, 05/03/2022 - 8:58pm
The Russian Dilemma Isn’t So Unfamiliar
by Patrick Hanlon
Since Russia launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine in February, it has become quite fashionable for commentators, despite their lack of warfighting experience, to criticize the Russian military for its apparent ineptitude. I’ll admit too that I fell into this camp that felt the war in Ukraine demonstrated how overrated the Russian military was. While that is true in some regards, it’s an incomplete picture in my opinion.
I can’t help but think the US military would run into many of the same quagmires as the Russians if we were in their shoes. I say this because of my own experience at the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC). If you’ve never been to JRTC, it’s a massive training area in Louisiana where brigade combat teams spend a few weeks fighting a much smaller opposing force comprised of US soldiers pretending to be bad guys.
In Ukraine, we have seen a highly mobile, motivated, well equipped, and indigenous force pick apart a more numerous and supposedly ferocious invader (Russians). I experienced the same thing at JRTC. We, the much larger brigade combat team, crumbled over the course of two weeks at the hands of the highly mobile, motivated, and indigenous defense.
One way the indigenous force can bog down the invasion is to exploit their lack of security in the rear and target their logistical nodes, which is precisely what the Ukrainians are doing. When I was at the JRTC, the enemy preferred not to walk into our textbook engagement areas. Why would they? They instead snuck around and shot our defenseless logisticians in the rear, leaving the infantry in their foxholes. If you kill the logisticians, you can starve the invaders rather than confront them.
Interestingly, Western media has reported extensively on the high number of Russian senior officers killed on the battlefield. Perhaps some of those Russian officers thought themselves invincible, which isn’t hard to imagine. In almost every American military exercise I’ve participated in, and especially at JRTC, the leadership acted immune to the dangers of combat, usually because the exercise controllers weren’t comfortable “killing” off the people who planned it and outranked them. But in Ukraine, the consequence for a commander thinking himself exempt from harm is death by a loitering munition or precision rifle.
At JRTC, we struggled to disperse our forces and made ourselves easy targets for artillery. The same thing is happening in Ukraine. Videos abound across social media of columns of Russian vehicles creating a massive visual and heat signature, followed by successive Ukrainian strikes.
Moreover, it’s no surprise that the Russian military rank and file don’t want to be there. At JRTC, the sentiment amongst the rank and file was no different. I remember JRTC just seemed like an exercise for commanders and logisticians. For many a soldier, it was neither fun nor purposeful. The same can probably be said for the Russians, except they are also getting killed. I bet a lot them are also hoping this nightmare ends soon.
In Ukraine and at JRTC, both sides understand each other, thoroughly. The Ukrainians don’t have to send their captured enemy documents back to an exploitation cell and hope for “intelligence” to come back a few days later. The exploitation loop can be instant.
At JRTC, the defenders pass through the invader’s formations and lines effortlessly, wreaking havoc along the way. This is easy to do when you understand the enemy, look like the enemy, and speak the same language.
Notably, In Ukraine and at JRTC, the defenders have both been trained extensively by the US Army. Regardless of the outcome of the Ukrainian War, it’s evident that Foreign internal Defense and Security Force Assistance are important mission sets for countering our adversaries.
Despite the similarities between the Russian experience in Ukraine and the experience of brigade combat teams at JRTC, there are important differences. All these social media videos of the Russian’s flying around during the day, and often getting shot down, leads me to believe they are not as proficient or comfortable operating at night as we thought. And the widespread allegations of rape, murder, and other violations of armed conflict further reinforce the lack of discipline in the Russian military. Having observed their unprofessional behavior in Syria, I’m not at all surprised by their abhorrent actions in Ukraine.
Overall, before we discount the Russian military for its blunders in Ukraine, we must fully appreciate the nature of the fight. Sending our large maneuver units through the gauntlet at the Joint Readiness Training Center is a good reminder that fighting the home team, especially if they are well armed, determined, and speak your language, is rarely going to be a winning proposition.
About the Author(s)
Patrick Hanlon has studied and served in the national security space for 16 years, to include service in Army Special Forces and Ranger Regiment and as a consultant with Accenture. His views are his own and do not represent the views of any of his employers, past or present.
3. Ukrainian Guerillas: Fighting Russians in Temporarily Occupied Territories
Conclusion:
The Ukrainian Resistance Movement has already distorted Russian plans but could play an even more significant role in future battles by making additional trouble for the occupying forces. According to Kyiv’s current strategy, the Ukrainian military will focus on several directions at the same time—defending controlled territories with regular forces, while the UA SOF, together with RM units, conduct raids in the occupier’s rear zone. Further small tactical steps—though with potentially large operational or even strategic influence on the Russian forces—can also be expected, including attacks on high-priority targets like EW and communication stations, ammunition and fuel supplies, roads, bridges or airfields. In such cases, RM cells could prove essential due to their presumed knowledge of local territories and ability to blend in with the civilian population. Those raids could be combined with efforts to undermine the morale of Russian soldiers, like spreading leaflets or organizing pro-Ukrainian protests. All this should lay the ground for a faster liberation of the temporarily occupied territories but also save manpower and resources for Ukraine. Successful resistance behind the lines could undermine the numerical and firepower advantage of the Russian forces and slow down or even stop possible advances in southern Ukraine.
Ukrainian Guerillas: Fighting Russians in Temporarily Occupied Territories
On April 22, General Rustam Minnekayev, the acting commander of the Central Military District, announced that one of the goals of the second phase of Russia’s “special military operation in Ukraine” is to gain full control of Donbas and Ukraine’s south. According to him, achieving this objective would “ensure a land corridor to Crimea, control over vital objects of Ukraine’s economy,” and grant Russia access to Transnistria, the separatist region of Moldova occupied by Russian “peacekeeping” forces since 1992 (Interfax, April 22; see EDM, April 28).
The pronouncement by Minnekayev seemed to signal yet another shift in Russian rhetoric regarding the goals of President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine, which, after giving up on capturing Kyiv, had ostensibly refocused on taking Donbas. At the same time, the Russian general’s public revelation, whether officially sanctioned or not, seems logical because Russian forces already occupy large parts of southern Ukraine’s Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces, including important cities like Kherson (the only provincial center taken by Russians during the first phase of the current war), Nova Kahovka (the location of the North-Crimean Canal pump station and dam), and Berdyansk (one of the key ports on the Azov Sea and a place where the Ukrainian Navy had planned to build a new base).
Russian occupation of all of southeastern Ukraine directly threatens the Mykolaiv and Odesa provinces further west, which, if also lost, would cut Ukraine off from all access to international waters, striking a significant blow to the Ukrainian economy. As noted by Oleh Nivyevskiy, the vice president of the Kyiv School of Economics, Ukraine used to annually send more than 70 percent of its exports, worth $47 billion, via Black and Azov Sea ports; so the Russian occupation and naval blockade costs the country nearly $170 million per day (Forbes, April 21). Consequently, Kyiv needs to not only prevent new coastal provinces from coming under Russian control but also liberate the rest of its southern territory in order to have any hopes of restarting its international trade–dependent economy.
One tool Ukraine may have to rely on if it hopes to free Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and beyond is the National Resistance system, which was officially launched on January 1, of this year (Liga Zakon, January 4). The associated law was adopted by the Ukrainian parliament and signed by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on July 16, 2021, officially creating a coordinated approach to national resistance (Ukrinform, July 16, 2021).
Ukraine’s National Resistance system consists of three elements: Territorial Defense (locally based conventional defense formations—see EDM, December 1, 2021), a partisan-like Resistance Movement (RM), and military training for all people of Ukraine (Army Inform, January 2). The Resistance Movement is expected to operate in temporarily occupied territories and is coordinated by the Special Operation Forces of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UA SOF). The RM has the following tasks: preparing citizens to resist the aggressor, disrupting enemy activities, and participating in special operations (Defense Express, August 4, 2021). Members of this movement enjoy benefits similar to UA SOF operators, like concealed identities and protection for their close family members. Also, they undergo specialized training under special forces instructors that goes far beyond the basic preparation given to army reservists (Facebook.com/usofcom, August 3, 2021).
Although the RM was still in the process of being set up when Russia’s full-scale re-invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, these guerilla forces’ development continued even amidst the war. And according to UA SOF Command, those efforts have already shown results in the territories Russia has occupied since hostilities exploded (Novinarnia, March 29; see below).
In order to coordinate and support the actions of RM cells operating behind enemy lines and to involve more people in the resistance, the UA SOF launched a special website on March 7, the “Center of National Resistance.” The site provides numerous theoretical and practical articles and informational videos for potential Ukrainian guerilla fighters, including advice on cybersecurity, destroying enemy equipment, psychological operations and tactical medicine. But it also contains information on non-violent resistance for those not ready take up weapons themselves (Sprotyv.mod.gov.ua, accessed April 29). The website additionally allows Ukrainian users to anonymously send intelligence reports on Russian forces, which later are checked and reported to Ukrainian military units.
This approach is allegedly proving its effectiveness. According to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, RM members have captured several Russian military vehicles and soldiers (Sprotyv.mod.gov.ua, April 5). And with the help of coordination and targeting provided by UA SOF, they notably seized a Russian Rtut-BM electronic warfare (EW) station (Sprotyv.mod.gov.ua, March 19). Local guerilla fighters have also contributed to correcting artillery strikes of the regular Armed Forces (Sprotyv.mod.gov.ua, April 17) and cooperated with the UA SOF on eliminating high-priority targets (Sprotyv.mod.gov.ua, April 13). Such support, for example, made it possible for the UA SOF to destroy a vital bridge deep inside the Russian-occupied zone, near the small eastern city of Izyum (Novynarnia, April 14).
Numerous examples also abound of non-violent actions against the Russian occupiers, like spreading leaflets in Kherson and Melitopol (Sprotyv.mod.gov.ua, April 21, 23) or tearing down a Russian flag in the village of Yakimivka (Melitopol district, Zaporizhzhia province) (YouTube, April 21). Local residents have also refused to participate in delivering Russian “humanitarian aid” and shunned collaboration with the occupier, making it harder for Russia to establish a fully operational municipal administration (Sprotyv.mod.gov.ua, April 20).
The Ukrainian Resistance Movement has already distorted Russian plans but could play an even more significant role in future battles by making additional trouble for the occupying forces. According to Kyiv’s current strategy, the Ukrainian military will focus on several directions at the same time—defending controlled territories with regular forces, while the UA SOF, together with RM units, conduct raids in the occupier’s rear zone. Further small tactical steps—though with potentially large operational or even strategic influence on the Russian forces—can also be expected, including attacks on high-priority targets like EW and communication stations, ammunition and fuel supplies, roads, bridges or airfields. In such cases, RM cells could prove essential due to their presumed knowledge of local territories and ability to blend in with the civilian population. Those raids could be combined with efforts to undermine the morale of Russian soldiers, like spreading leaflets or organizing pro-Ukrainian protests. All this should lay the ground for a faster liberation of the temporarily occupied territories but also save manpower and resources for Ukraine. Successful resistance behind the lines could undermine the numerical and firepower advantage of the Russian forces and slow down or even stop possible advances in southern Ukraine.
4. Special forces adjust artillery to a reconnaissance report resulting in Russian equipment losses
Resistance at work.
Special forces adjust artillery to a reconnaissance report resulting in Russian equipment losses
Mon, May 2, 2022, 3:36 PM·1 min read
VALENTYNA ROMANENKO - MONDAY, 2 MAY 2022, 09:36 Ukrainian forces have destroyed Russian equipment and a dugout belonging to Russian occupying troops in the Kharkiv region. Source: Ukrainian Armed Forces Special Operations Forces, command press centre Details: While conducting reconnaissance activities in the Kharkiv region, Ukrainian soldiers discovered a store of Russian equipment, including heavily armoured and lightly armoured vehicles. An hour later, after prioritising objectives to be targeted, Resistance Movement soldiers co-ordinated one of the artillery brigade units and directed artillery fire at Russian targets. As a result of the joint work of the Ukrainian Defence Forces soldiers, the Russian losses amounted to: One T-90 tank destroyed One T-80BVM tank destroyed One light armoured multipurpose vehicle destroyed One light armoured multipurpose vehicle damaged It is also reported that a dugout belonging to Russian troops took a direct hit. Casualties amongst the Russian personnel are being confirmed.
5. Backlash to DHS Disinformation Governance Board grows, fueled in part by misinformation
My critique below.
Backlash to DHS Disinformation Governance Board grows, fueled in part by misinformation
May 3, 2022 | CYBERSCOOP
When Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas first announced a new Disinformation Governance Board in a congressional hearing Wednesday, the news was met with a shrug.
Then, a day later Twitter’s soon-to-be new owner, Elon Musk, tweeted of the board, “This is messed up.” From there it was off to the races, with several on the right likening the new board to George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in the novel “1984,” a dystopian entity responsible for propaganda and historical revisionism in a society in which government surveillance is omnipresent.
Republican legislators sent a letter to Mayorkas Friday, decrying “the complete lack of information about this new initiative and the potential serious consequences of a government entity identifying and responding to “disinformation.”
Mayorkas spent the weekend on cable news trying to combat misinformation about the disinformation board. He emphasized that the board will be advisory and will not have operational authority. Asked about the comparisons to Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, Mayorkas told CNN that “those criticisms are precisely the opposite of what this small working group within the Department of Homeland Security will do.”
But Mayorkas also acknowledged that his team “probably could have done a better job of communicating what it does and does not do.”
It’s a view several disinformation experts agreed with, saying that the vagueness around what the board will do combined with its tone-deaf name raises important questions about whether it is an appropriate tool for DHS to use to fight disinformation.
“If the government intends to expose disinformation, one of the most important counters to that is providing legitimate information,” said David Maxwell, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a retired Army colonel who oversaw psychological operations as a special operations commander. “The announcement, without complete transparency about the organization and its activities and authorities and intent … really undermines their [DHS’s] own credibility and legitimacy.”
A spokesman for DHS declined to comment but sent a fact sheet that noted that “there has been confusion about the working group, its role, and its activities. The reaction to this working group has prompted DHS to assess what steps we should take to build the trust needed for the Department to be effective in this space.”
Those steps include releasing comprehensive quarterly reports about the working group’s activities to Congress, including its oversight committees, and requesting that the bipartisan Homeland Security Advisory Council make recommendations for “how the Department can most effectively and appropriately address disinformation that poses a threat to the homeland, while protecting free speech and other fundamental rights,” the fact sheet said.
Even those who believe disinformation is a problem that DHS should tackle criticized the agency for how it launched the board. Jeff Kosseff, a cybersecurity law professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, said that he understands why many people are alarmed by the board given that the term “governance” implies authority.
Kosseff questioned why DHS gave the board “the most dystopian name possible,” but was quick to add that he is not in the “conspiracy theory camp that this is some backdoor method to censor opposing viewpoints.” He noted that DHS has already been working to combat disinformation for a few years, just not under the umbrella of a “governance board.”
“The announcement, without complete transparency about the organization and its activities and authorities and intent … really undermines their [DHS’s] own credibility and legitimacy.”
David maxwell, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Kosseff said he believes DHS will be forced to rename the board and quickly offer more specifics on how it will function. He said he watched Mayorkas’ weekend interviews and was struck by how vague the mandate for the board remains.
“He used terminology like that they’ll provide best practices to the operators and they won’t have operational authority,” Kosseff said. “We need this in plain language … Who are the operators? What are the best practices? How are these best practices being determined?”
Kosseff said that the agency’s missteps are costly because they will “just fuel endless conspiracy theories about the government trying to censor information and that makes it so much more difficult to actually implement a reasonable and constitutional way to deal with a very real problem.”
The board’s new executive director, Nina Jankowicz, tweeted out news of her appointment with little context. Jankowicz has become a lightning rod in part because she has bemoaned Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter by calling him a “free speech absolutist.” Others on the right have pointed to her labeling of a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop as a “Trump campaign product.”
Herb Lin, a disinformation expert who is a senior research scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, said that even if DHS had handled the rollout and naming of the board with more sophistication, there would still be a right-wing effort to undermine it.
“Let’s say they printed 20 times as much information about it — Jankowicz would still be the subject of personal vilification and hyperbolic invective,” Lin said. “Would I have preferred to have more information [from DHS]? Yes, but I don’t think that would have mattered in the end anyway.”
6. Republicans announce bill to shut down DHS ‘disinformation’ unit
Republicans announce bill to shut down DHS ‘disinformation’ unit
Republicans announced legislation Tuesday to defund the Homeland Security Department’s new disinformation board, calling it an “un-American” attempt to police what people are allowed to say.
Biden administration officials have rejected those characterizations as overheated. They said the board is an in-house working group to coordinate Homeland Security’s online monitoring.
Those assurances have failed to quell the furor among Republicans, who see more nefarious intentions of the administration, and they are taking their case to the public.
“This is communism,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia Republican, told voters, drawing nods of approval as she campaigned in her district this week. “They don’t want you to have it because they don’t want you to be able to say what you think and feel or sort out the truth yourself.”
The Disinformation Governance Board was revealed by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in congressional testimony last week, though it apparently has been operating for several months.
Mr. Mayorkas portrayed the board as an election information watchdog. He said the board will communicate directly with communities, particularly minorities, that his department thinks are being misled.
The department has described a somewhat different vision. It insists the board will help harmonize existing efforts and share best practices internally. Officials said the board’s first targets are disinformation surrounding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and information that smuggling cartels use to recruit migrants making the journey to the U.S.
Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican, introduced a bill Tuesday using Congress’ power of the purse to defund the panel.
“The Biden administration wants a government agency dedicated to cracking down on what its subjects can say, an idea popular with Orwellian governments everywhere,” Mr. Cotton said. “This board is unconstitutional and un-American. My bill puts a stop to it.”
He has enlisted several other Republicans in his effort.
“This government censorship bureau needs to be shut down before it even gets off the ground,” said Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican who has signed on to Mr. Cotton’s bill.
House Republicans announced their companion bill Tuesday afternoon, with more than five dozen lawmakers signed on.
“Following in the steps of Mao and Stalin, Biden’s unconstitutional, dystopian ‘Department of Propaganda’ is trampling on the First Amendment and trying to control what people can and can’t say,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert, the Colorado Republican leading the effort.
Adding to the furor is the board’s director, Nina Jankowicz, who has spread questionable information about hot news topics such as the anti-Trump Steele dossier. She also has expressed skepticism about the idea that more speech is better.
Mr. Mayorkas said last week that he wasn’t familiar with Ms. Jankowicz’s remarks.
In interviews on the Sunday political talk shows, he called Ms. Jankowicz “extremely qualified.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki cited Ms. Jankowicz’s “extensive work addressing disinformation,” particularly in the context of Russian meddling in Ukraine.
Ms. Psaki said Monday that the board will “consider” playing a public role if it feels a pronouncement has to be made about the government’s view on “disinformation-related matters” but the chief focus will be internal organizing.
“The mandate is not to adjudicate what is true or false online or otherwise,” she said. “It will operate in a nonpartisan and apolitical manner.”
Mrs. Greene, campaigning in Georgia, didn’t see it that way.
She warned her supporters that the Biden administration plans to weaponize the effort.
“Now we have the ‘ministry of truth,’ and then there’s a bill, guess what, that we’re probably going to be voting on, maybe next week when I go back to Washington, that could potentially add a prosecution arm to the ministry of truth through the Department of Justice,” she said, drawing gasps from her audience.
The bill in question, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, would create a specific office at the Justice Department responsible for investigating and prosecuting domestic terrorism. It is charged with working with the Civil Rights Division in cases with a hate crimes nexus.
“You see, hate speech can be considered misinformation when you look through four different codes of law that are listed in the bill,” Mrs. Greene said. “That’s scary. That’s really scary.”
The Washington Times has reached out to the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Bradley Schneider, Illinois Democrat, for comment.
The fight over the Homeland Security board adds to an already tense conversation over online voices and censorship. A growing segment of the political left argues that some viewpoints are too offensive to be tolerated on public platforms.
Twitter shuttered Mrs. Greene’s personal account this year for what the company said were repeated violations of its rules on COVID-19 misinformation. Her congressional account remained active.
President Trump was ousted after his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, forcing members of Congress to flee as they tried to count the electoral votes that confirmed his defeat.
• Seth McLaughlin, reporting from Georgia, contributed to this article.
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7. Dr. Dave Johnson’s warning on brute force in the Ukraine: “This is What the Russians Do”
Excerpts:
Victory is What Putin Says It Is
The real question in this war is what do the Russians want to accomplish? They have already gained much. Might the goal all along have been expanding and solidifying their control of the east and south, while weakening Ukraine? Taking Kyiv seemed a plumb ripe to be picked, until it proved not so. Then they moved on.
Finally, all the hand-wringing about what the Russians will try to accomplish to have a great victory for the May celebration misses the central point. Wherever the Russians are on that day, Putin will declare that moment a great victory. He controls the message and a great victory is whatever he says it is.
This, again, is what the Russians have always done and we should it expect it from them now.
Dr. Dave Johnson’s warning on brute force in the Ukraine: “This is What the Russians Do”
Today’s guest post is by Dr. a retired Army colonel and a principal researcher at the RAND corporation. After reading his essay I am coming around to idea that the President’s $33 billion request for aid to the Ukraine may just be a down payment on what could be a costly, savage war of attrition in the months (years?) to come. I fear the suffering of the Ukrainian people is far from over.
Why? Dr. Johnson gives us his candid – and grim – perspective of the conflict. He warns that the popular Western view of Russian military shortcomings may be mistaken, and that the Russian army remains very dangerous. After failing to take Kiev and other cities, he believes they are now executing what he calls plan B. He explains:
“Plan B is to revert to what the Russians have always done when faced with a resolute adversary. They turn to fires delivered by cannons, rockets, missiles, and bombs.”
Russian self-propelled 203mm heavy artillery, “2S7”. Source: Shutterstock
“The Russian Army has, in my view, been correctly described as an artillery army with tanks. They adhere to the maxim that artillery conquers and infantry occupies. My sense is that the Russians also understand their own Army better than we do and use it in a way that compensates for the deficiencies noted by western observers.”
“In short, the Russians rely on firepower.”
So what should we now expect? He tells us “[t]his is now a war of attrition, to which the traditional Russian approach of persistent brute force is highly suited.” Consequently, Dr. Johnson says:
“Unfortunately, I deeply fear that Russian reliance on brute force and the indiscriminate use of fire power will only get worse in Eastern Ukraine as the war continues.”
“Ukraine’s patrons have to understand these realities to understand what support the Ukrainians will require to enable them to persist in what is shaping up to be a grinding war of attrition.”
Dr. Johnson’s essay is a very sobering one. It’s also a timely reminder of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu’s admonition: “There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent.” I, and perhaps others, had been buoyed by Ukrainian success against Russian forces to the point of thinking that perhaps the conflict would be over sooner rather than later.
I still cling to that hope, but I now believe we must face the reality of the likelihood of a conflict that is long and bitter. My sense is that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy understands this, and that is what fuels his relentless calls for heavy weapons, and more of them.
Still, we have to prepare ourselves for terrible scenes ahead. As Dave says:
It has been over 70 years since World War II and the West has forgotten what a high-intensity, large-scale war involves. The Russians have not. In wars for survival—as Putin is framing the war in Ukraine—there are few niceties, what we now view as humanitarian constraints.”
Dave’s essay adheres to the practice of the best analysts: he is telling us what we need to hear versus what we want to hear. You owe it to yourself to read Dave’s full essay.
This is What the Russians Do
David E. Johnson
The Russians are on their heels in the Ukraine war. The Ukrainian wolf, enabled by western intelligence and state-of-the-art weapons, e.g., Javelins, Switchblades, and Phoenix Ghosts, Gepards, et al., are inflicting enormous losses on the bumbling Russian bear. At least this is the story as it is being portrayed in the majority of the media coverage of the war. While this view may be true to some degree, the reporting is skewed by two critical factors.
Why We Believe the Russians Are Losing
First, the Ukrainians control the narrative about the war; reporters largely see what that are shown by their escorts inside Ukrainian territory. Furthermore, the Ukrainians have been exercising incredible operational security. One learns little from reporting about the actual state of the Ukrainian military.
What are the Ukrainian losses? What is the combat effectiveness of their forces? How long can they persist in a war of attrition in which they are vastly outnumbered? These, and a myriad of other questions remain largely obscured, while the flow from Ukrainian and other sources about Russian casualties, equipment losses, and setbacks is continuous.
Second, much of the evaluation by western analysts and pundits who are looked to for explanations of the military aspects of the war are seeing the conflict through western eyes. The military analysts, in particular, see the Russians as inept and unable to operate effectively—not like their own militaries.
These military experts attribute Russian failures to an inability to execute the complexities of combined arms operations and a forced reliance on non-precision weapons. Thus, the Russians are all about brute force, because they are incapable of executing the sophisticated western concepts that substitute precision for mass.
Thus, Russian failings in this regard are not because of their materiel. The Russians have sophisticated weapons and other capabilities. Analysts, almost self-congratulatory in many cases, point to the root cause of Russian difficulties in the Ukraine: despite their high technology kit, they are stymied, because these weapons are in the hands of poorly-trained, unmotivated conscript forces.
Furthermore, this flaw is made fatal by the absence of a competent western-like non-commissioned officer corps and corrupt, risk averse officers who are afraid to exercise initiative.
In essence, the Russian army that is bogged down in Ukraine is a repeat of the Soviet Army that was proven to not be ten-feet tall during their 1980s fiasco in Afghanistan. Here, again, western precision weapons—Stinger man-portable air defense systems, antitank weapons, and a constant flow of munitions—in the hands of U.S. trained and highly motivated Mujahedeen warriors—soundly defeated the Red Army.
This is the endgame that is not paid much attention to by U.S. observers, whose understanding of the Soviet involvement appears to derive largely from the movie Charlie Wilson’s War. On the other hand, the Afghan government the United States supported for some twenty years vanished within hours of the hasty U.S. departure from Kabul in August 2021.
Are the pundits missing something? What if something else is actually happening in Ukraine that we cannot see because of our narrow view of the war? How do we view the war through Russian eyes?
Persistence and Brute Force —A Lesson from the Highlands of Scotland
As I searched for a relevant visual and accessible metaphor to help us understand what might be going on in Ukraine, the movie Rob Roy eventually came to mind. The final fight scene in that film is a window into how western military concepts can interact with Russian brute force tactics. In that fight the foppish, but deadly, nobleman, Archibald Cunningham, is in a duel to the death with Robert “Rob” Roy MacGregor.
The supremely confident Cunningham, clearly a well-trained duelist, circles MacGregor, picking his moments to cut him with rapid, well-placed slashes with his rapier. MacGregor, clearly not trained to the level of Cunningham, is wounded multiple times. He is also clearly exhausted from fending off Cunningham’s nimble attacks with his unwieldy and heavy Scottish claymore. The claymore is clearly not a dueling weapon, more broadsword cleaver than rapier.
Cunningham finally closes in to deal one final fatal thrust. Although bloodied and near exhaustion, MacGregor grabs Cunningham’s blade, immobilizing the rapier. He then summons his remaining strength and cleaves the disbelieving Cunningham nearly in half with a single stroke of his claymore.
Russia is not a hero like the Rob Roy MacGregor portrayed in the movie, but their tactics are similar. Absent the sophistication that can be only practiced by trained, competent, and well-led forces they cannot be a Cunningham. Instead, the Russians are doggedly persistent and capable of wielding deadly brute force. They are not precise, but they are lethal.
Fire Instead of Finesse
My sense is that the Russians are fully aware of their tactical shortfalls. In the immortal words of Dirty Harry Callahan, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Furthermore, rather than a crushing defeat, the Russian’s failure to take Kyiv and decision to change course may not be what it seems. It is certainly not unprecedented. Perhaps the Russians attempted, as they did in Czechoslovakia (1968), Afghanistan (1979), Chechnya (1996,) and Crimea (2014) to execute a rapid coup de main operation with the expectation that the sudden appearance of the Red Army would cause resistance to collapse.
This is what happened in Czechoslovakia, the initial conquest of Afghanistan, and Crimea; it did not work out that way in Chechnya or Ukraine this go. In this current war, as in its past conflicts, Plan B is to revert to what the Russians have always done when faced with a resolute adversary. They turn to fires delivered by cannons, rockets, missiles, and bombs.
The Russian Army has, in my view, been correctly described as an artillery army with tanks. They adhere to the maxim that artillery conquers and infantry occupies. My sense is that the Russians also understand their own Army better than we do and use it in a way that compensates for the deficiencies noted by western observers.
In short, the Russians rely on firepower.
What We Should Expect From the Plodding Bear
If I am correct, then we should expect things to get only worse in Eastern Ukraine as the war continues. This is now a war of attrition, to which the traditional Russian approach of persistent brute force is highly suited.
It is also useful to remember that the Russian army has always been conscript-based without a strong NCO corps (as is, by the way, the highly respected Israeli army). Again, in the eyes of western observers, this why the Russians are incompetent and will lose. Somehow, however, the Russian army has always muddled through against almost all comers. It is not pretty to watch, but they persist and generally prevail in what they set out to do. If he were still alive, it would be interesting to ask Generalfeldmarschall Friedrich Paulus, the commander of the defeated German forces in Stalingrad (and the first field marshal in German history to surrender), his views about the inept Red Army.
120 mm Russian mortar shell
An artillery projectile does not need anything but an elevation and a deflection to go where you want it to go. It does not care that it is not a precision munition or that it was fired by a conscript directed by inept sergeants and corrupt officers who do not exercise initiative. Nor does it care about the nature of the target. It just goes where sent and does its high explosive damage.
What Is Legal and What is Not
I am continually surprised during press engagements I have had over the past weeks (CBS, CSPAN, PBS, BBC, others) when journalists are shocked at the Russian employment of illegal weapons—thermobarics, cluster munitions, white phosphorous, mines, et al.
I first remind the reporters these weapons are legal, in the U.S. arsenal, and that we use them: Against military targets.
I also note that the fascination with special weapons is surprising to me, given that they are a minor instruments compared to the other weapons available to Putin in his symphony of horrors. Putin’s, percussion section, to extend the metaphor, is old fashioned, high explosive; precision in many cases is, “did you hit Mariupol?”
What is illegal is the indiscriminate use of any weapon against civilians. This, unfortunately, is something the Russians have historically and routinely practiced. The United States and its Allies did similar things during World War II with area bombing, aerial “interdiction” of anything that moved, and a practice during that war described to me by my father. He was a young paratrooper and told me that in the later months of the war in Germany, if a town was approached and your unit received fire, you backed off and visited hell on it with air and artillery. Then, the citizens generally surrendered, on occasion after “disabling” the fanatics trying to keep them fighting to the end.
It has been over 70 years since World War II and the West has forgotten what a high-intensity, large-scale war involves. The Russians have not. In wars for survival—as Putin is framing the war in Ukraine—there are few niceties, what we now view as humanitarian constraints.
The Russian Way Is Not Our Way
This is what the Russians do and we should expect this from them in Ukraine. They have demonstrated how they operate historically, at least since the scorched earth policies depicted by Tolstoy in his novel Hadji Murat, set during the irregular warfare in Chechnya and the Caucasus in the 1850s.
Furthermore, the Russian practice of relying on indiscriminate firepower has continued in our times in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, the initial invasion of Eastern Ukraine, and now. We should not be surprised and, more importantly, if we ever face them in combat, we should be prepared for how they operate.
Do Not Trust the Russians
As an aside, the lack of trust by the Ukrainians about Russian promises to provide humanitarian corridors is likely due to them knowing what that meant in Chechnya. In the waning days of the battle for Grozny, rebel leaders were desperate to escape slaughter by the Russians.
A corrupt Russian intelligence appeared, for a price, to offer a safe way out. True or not, the Russians later explained that “Operation Wolf Hunt” was a carefully orchestrated plan to trick the Chechens into a deadly ambush. Olga Oliker describes the Russian account in Russia’s Chechen Wars:
Similarly, one might also ask the surviving citizens of Aleppo about the definition the Russians and their Syrian partners have for precision and protecting civilians. Russian intervention and aid is what kept Assad in power while the West declared “redlines” and called for “no-fly zones.” All this while largely not understanding what enforcing these measures actually entail—direct combat against Russian and Syrian forces.
Once the stakes became apparent, the West backed off and the killing continued; and the West has been taken less seriously ever since. So much for the Responsibility to Protect doctrine proffered by Anne Marie Slaughter and others.
The Russians are ruthless in their pursuit of their objectives and we should expect that from them. Scolding them about “alleged” war crimes and threatening them with post-war legal jeopardy is pointless. I imagine Putin cannot help but be amused at this naiveté.
Ukraine, 2022
Source: Shutterstock
Russian armies have always operated this way, but somehow they managed to win ugly against almost all comers. It is not pretty to watch, but they generally prevail in what they set out to do.
Unfortunately, I deeply fear that Russian reliance on brute force and the indiscriminate use of fire power will only get worse in Eastern Ukraine as the war continues.
Ukraine’s patrons have to understand these realities to understand what support the Ukrainians will require to enable them to persist in what is shaping up to be a grinding war of attrition.
Victory is What Putin Says It Is
The real question in this war is what do the Russians want to accomplish? They have already gained much. Might the goal all along have been expanding and solidifying their control of the east and south, while weakening Ukraine? Taking Kyiv seemed a plumb ripe to be picked, until it proved not so. Then they moved on.
Finally, all the hand-wringing about what the Russians will try to accomplish to have a great victory for the May celebration misses the central point. Wherever the Russians are on that day, Putin will declare that moment a great victory. He controls the message and a great victory is whatever he says it is.
This, again, is what the Russians have always done and we should it expect it from them now.
Notes
Oxford University Press, 1995.
Olga Oliker, Russia’s Chechen Wars 1994-2000: Lessons from Urban Combat, Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2001, pp. 73-73.
About the author
David E. Johnson, Ph.D., is a retired Army colonel. He is a principal researcher at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and an adjunct scholar at the Modern War Institute at West Point. From 2012-2014 he founded and directed the Chief of Staff of the Army Strategic Studies Group for General Raymond T. Odierno.
Disclaimers:
The views expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself, the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, or Duke University (see also here).
Remember what we like to say on Lawfire®: gather the facts, examine the law, evaluate the arguments – and then decide for yourself!
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[1] Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal, New York:
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[2] William T. Sherman, The Memoirs of W.T. Sherman: All Volumes, Oxford: Acheron Press, 2012, p. 464.
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8. How Ukrainians Saved Their Capital
Long but interesting read.
War is always about the human domain.
Excerpts:
Anastasia told me that, according to Yuzik, the Hospitallers would soon be sent east. The Russians, having given up on Kyiv—at least for now—were shifting their focus to the Donbas. Their stated objective was to seize the entirety of the region and then push southwest to the Black Sea, thus creating a land bridge to Crimea. Mariupol, which stood in the way of that projected corridor, was already shattered; the last Ukrainian holdouts, including members of the Azov Battalion, were taking refuge, with their families, in the tunnels beneath a steel plant, which the Russians would soon blockade.
The second phase of the war would involve more heavy weaponry and ordnance than the first—as well as increasingly willful cruelty. In mid-April, Putin awarded an honorary title to the unit thought to be responsible for the depravity in Bucha, in recognition of its “heroism and valor.” The day after Anastasia and I walked to the Dnieper, Russian cluster munitions struck a railway station in Kramatorsk, where hundreds of civilians, mostly women and kids, were awaiting trains out of the Donbas. More than fifty were killed.
On the quay, when I asked Anastasia if she would go east, she said, “I have to think about it. There is a high chance of being killed.” She was returning to Paris for a week or two. She had an academic article to write, and wanted to pursue various ideas for advocacy and fund-raising. In the past month, she had sometimes struggled to readapt to the military culture, routine, and mind-set of the Hospitallers. She’d been one of the few medics who had refused to carry a Kalashnikov. In contrast to August, Yuzik, and Mamont, Anastasia was not fascinated by war or temperamentally suited to it. Like many Ukrainians, she had simply declined to run from it.
After going to Paris, Anastasia went back to Ukraine. When we last spoke, she was visiting her family in Kyiv. The Hospitallers were moving out of St. Michael’s. She planned to join them in the east.
How Ukrainians Saved Their Capital
When Russia attacked Kyiv, Ukrainians dropped everything to protect the city—and to ease one another’s suffering.
May 2, 2022
The original St. Michael’s Monastery, in the historic center of Kyiv, was commissioned around the year 1100 by a Christian prince, who dedicated it to the archangel and patron of soldiers after winning a war. The complex, which included a cathedral famous for its golden dome, was pillaged by the Mongols in 1240 and restored a few centuries later. In 1937, Communist authorities demolished it. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Kyiv City Council had the buildings reconstructed. On March 1st, I accompanied my friend Anastasia Fomitchova to St. Michael’s. Uniformed men with Kalashnikovs patrolled the perimeter and guarded the gate. Anastasia approached a fence, through which we could see the cathedral. She bowed her head; when she lifted it, she was crying. I asked her what she had prayed for. “My country, my city, and my family,” she replied.
This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
I’d met Anastasia several years ago in Paris, through my wife, when they had both belonged to an academic consortium sponsored by the European Research Council. Although Anastasia, a graduate student in political science, had spent most of her life in France, she was born in Kyiv and returned there regularly. When Russian forces launched multiple simultaneous offensives against Ukraine, on February 24th, I called Anastasia to ask after her relatives. One prong of the attack was advancing on the capital, and missiles had already started landing there. Anastasia was preparing to travel to Kyiv, and invited me to go with her.
Two days later, in Paris, at 7:30 A.M., I arrived outside a Métro station near the Place d’Italie, where people were loading boxes of food and other provisions into the luggage compartment of a commercial bus. I spotted Anastasia, wearing a backpack and smoking a cigarette. She told me that she’d been returning home on this bus, which was owned by a Ukrainian man and which departed every Sunday, for the past several years. The voyage took more than thirty hours but cost only eighty euros. Normally, the passengers were immigrants visiting friends and family; now they were mostly young men and women going back to fight.
In response to the Russian invasion, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, had declared martial law and ordered a general mobilization, forbidding males between the ages of eighteen and sixty to leave the country. Ukrainians who were abroad, of course, could have chosen to remain so. But every seat on the bus was occupied. The man across the aisle from Anastasia and me, named Petro, was a thirty-three-year-old construction worker who had lived in France for eight years. He was bound for his home town, Ivano-Frankivsk, where Russian missiles had recently targeted the airport. He planned to spend one night with his parents, then report for duty.
As we traversed Luxembourg and Germany, the driver stopped at a gas station every four or five hours, to let us use the rest room and buy food; Petro neither ate nor slept, and his anxiety seemed to increase as we neared Ukraine. He had never fired a weapon. “I don’t know where they’re going to send me,” he told us midway through Poland, his hands trembling. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.” Embarrassed by the tears welling in his eyes, he explained, “Not everyone is ready for this.”
The Russian military, which was superior in numbers and firepower, was widely predicted to prevail. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were already fleeing the country. The mood on the bus was sombre as the passengers reckoned with their decision to join a possibly doomed resistance.
Anastasia informed Petro that she, too, planned to participate in the war. Twenty-eight years old, petite, and blond, with a round, open face and a wide smile, she radiated youthful optimism and earnestness. When she told Petro, “I’m scared, too, but we need to fight,” he seemed reassured that such a person had made the same choice, and by her certainty that it was the right one.
We reached the Polish-Ukrainian border the following afternoon. Throngs of women, children, and elderly people waited to cross in the opposite direction, toting as many of their possessions as they could. The driver was unable to go to Kyiv and deposited us in Lviv, some three hundred and fifty miles to the west. Anastasia and I said goodbye to Petro and went to the railway station. Outside, hundreds of people had converged on stands and tents where young volunteers in neon safety vests served hot soup and tea. More displaced Ukrainians had packed into the main terminal, bundled in heavy coats, sleeping on benches or on the cold tile floor. Suitcases and strollers clogged the passageways. Most people were transiting to points west or south. The only train to Kyiv wasn’t scheduled to depart until midnight, and Anastasia went to buy some groceries for her father and stepmother. There were rumors of a run on the supermarkets in Kyiv, by residents anticipating a long Russian siege. I ducked into a shop to buy cigarettes, and when I came out Anastasia was speaking with two old men who were drinking beer and vodka. They’d just brought their wives and daughters to Lviv from the southern port city of Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, and were returning to sign up with the armed forces there. They were in high spirits and full of bravado.
In the weeks ahead, Russian forces would decimate Mariupol. The indiscriminate bombardment would raze much of the city and kill thousands of civilians. Other residents would starve to death. Corpses would contaminate streams, and stray dogs would feed off dead Ukrainians left to rot in the streets. “Slava Ukraini! ” one of the two old men shouted, a little drunkenly, as we wished them luck and parted ways. I didn’t take down their names, and I don’t know if they survived.
Our train arrived in Kyiv the next morning. We caught a taxi to an apartment that Anastasia had rented before the war for the month of March. It was on Andriyivsky Descent, a steep cobblestone road, lined with cafés, bars, and art galleries, near the Dnieper River. The hill, usually overrun with tourists and street musicians, was as deserted as the rest of the snow-dusted city. Many residents had taken refuge in subway stations, camping on the platforms and in the train cars. Almost everyone else was sheltering in their basements or locked in their homes. The torpid silence was punctuated by the slow whine of air-raid sirens—and by crows. Passing some trees taken over by a strident flock, Anastasia remarked, “I’ve never seen that before.” Her father’s place was within walking distance, and on our way there we encountered a small monument dedicated to the acclaimed Ukrainian baritone Vasyl Slipak.
Anastasia had known him. He had lived in Paris, where he’d performed at the Opéra Bastille and the Palais Garnier. He’d also led a parallel life, as a militant in his home country. In late 2013, President Viktor Yanukovych, ceding to Russian pressure, had scuttled an agreement to form closer ties with the European Union. Enormous protests, which grew into an uprising called the Revolution of Dignity, erupted across Ukraine. At Independence Square, in downtown Kyiv, tens of thousands of demonstrators erected barricades and violently clashed with security forces. By March of 2014, militarized police, often using live ammunition, had killed more than a hundred protesters. The Ukrainian parliament voted to remove Yanukovych, who fled to Russia. Vladimir Putin dismissed the revolution as a Western contrivance and promptly annexed Crimea, a strategic peninsula between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. His troops then entered the Donbas, a region in the southeast of Ukraine, in support of pro-Russian separatists who wanted to secede. Ukraine mounted a counter-offensive, and soon an entrenched front line circumscribed some six thousand square miles on the Russian border. Many young Ukrainians who were galvanized by the revolution, including Slipak, joined volunteer battalions that had originally formed at Independence Square. Over the next seven years, more than two dozen ceasefires were negotiated and violated. The result was few significant territorial gains or losses, and thousands of dead Ukrainians.
Anastasia had met Slipak through activist networks in France. The last time they saw each other, at a protest in Paris in June, 2016, she was on summer vacation from the Sorbonne and he was preparing to return to the Donbas. Two weeks later, a Russian sniper killed him. “His death changed my vision of the war,” Anastasia told me, at the monument on Andriyivsky Descent. “It became concrete, and I understood that I had to go there.” The following month, she accompanied a group carrying donated supplies—rations, power banks, generators—to military units on the front line. At one forward position, she met an ambulance driver who showed her videos of casualty evacuations that he had on his phone. “I was really impressed, and I felt I wasn’t doing enough,” Anastasia said. When she told the driver that she would like to become a medic but had no experience, he gave her the name of an organization that could train her: the Hospitallers.
In 2017, when Anastasia was twenty-three, she attended a one-week course with the Hospitallers at their base, in southern Ukraine. She began deploying to the Donbas for brief rotations when not at school. The inertia and slow-grinding toll of the conflict produced a specific kind of anguish. The first casualty that Anastasia evacuated was a soldier who had nearly severed his arm while trying to kill himself. Mines, mortars, and bullets had killed or wounded others. “Most of them are younger than me,” Anastasia wrote, in a journal entry. She worried that their deaths changed “absolutely nothing.”
In the summer of 2020, after a tour in the Donbas during the pandemic, she recommitted to her studies in France. “I thought I had put the war behind me,” she said. Now she planned to rejoin the Hospitallers. Her first priority, though, was to see her father and to persuade him and his wife to go abroad. As we left the monument to Slipak, we could hear the rumble of ordnance in the suburbs to the north. A forty-mile Russian column, composed of hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles, and approximately fifteen thousand troops, was bearing down on the capital. Most Western analysts believed that Kyiv would be rapidly encircled, blockaded, and subjected to devastating shelling. U.S. intelligence officials estimated that Russian forces could take the city within two or three days. The Ukrainian Ambassador to Germany later told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that Germany’s finance minister had rebuffed his appeals for aid and weapons, and had said to him, “You have only a few hours.”
The mayor of Kyiv would soon announce that half of the city’s three million residents had fled. The remaining population leaned toward the stubborn, the courageous, the hopeful, the deluded, and the poor. Anastasia’s father, Sergey, wasn’t poor. He answered the door in an elegant patterned robe, his rotund midsection straining at the sash. His cheeks flushed with drink, he jovially greeted his daughter as if she were home for the holidays. His demeanor soured after we sat down at the kitchen table and Anastasia began urging him and her stepmother, Irena, to abandon the city.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Sergey said.
Irena, who also wore a robe, assured Anastasia that they could protect themselves: they had an antique hunting rifle and three bullets. On a large television, a news anchor was talking about Putin. Irena shook her head. Like many Ukrainians, she and Sergey were stunned by the Russian President’s decision to invade. In a speech a few days before the incursion, Putin had offered various fanciful justifications: that “modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia” and should never have been recognized as a sovereign state; that the Revolution of Dignity was a “coup d’état” perpetrated wholly by “radical nationalists,” corrupt oligarchs, and neo-Nazis; that the Ukrainian military answered directly to NATO and had committed genocide in the Donbas; and that Ukraine intended to develop nuclear weapons. Irena said that she believed Putin was possessed.
We left the house, and Anastasia asked if we could stop by St. Michael’s, a few blocks away, so that she could pray. She was a devout believer. As soon as we’d arrived at her temporary apartment, she had removed from her backpack a small icon of the Virgin Mary and placed it on the windowsill.
The Orthodox Church of Ukraine vigorously opposed Russian interference in the country and had backed the Revolution of Dignity. St. Michael’s stood at the top of a hill that sloped down to Independence Square, and during the protests the monastery became a sanctuary from the mayhem. Priests and volunteer medics treated wounded protesters and served them food. The dead were brought there to be mourned by their friends. Now a memorial outside the cathedral honored the demonstrators killed during the uprising—and a wall of remembrance featured the photographs of thousands of soldiers and volunteers who had died in the Donbas. At the foot of the wall, flowers had been placed in upright artillery shells.
After Anastasia’s prayer at the fence, we returned to the apartment. She was frustrated with her father and stepmother, but accepted that their minds were made up. She texted one of the medics in the Hospitallers, to find out where they had mustered. The medic responded that they were in St. Michael’s.
The gate was opened for us the following morning. Inside the monastery, everything was in a state of frenetic metamorphosis. Men and women in combat fatigues hurried in all directions; priests in black robes unloaded boxes from trucks and vans; in a lecture hall where seminary students normally underwent theological instruction, a soldier provided basic firearms training to volunteers who had just received Kalashnikovs. Shouted commands rang through hallways adorned with oil paintings of church patriarchs from centuries past.
Anastasia found Yana Zinkevych, the leader of the Hospitallers, in a small office packed with people vying to speak with her. Twenty-six years old, Zinkevych was lavishly tattooed and had a pierced eyebrow and pink-and-blue hair. She was also in a wheelchair. This hadn’t been the case in 2014, when, as a recent high-school graduate, she’d abandoned her plans to become a doctor and joined a unit of volunteer fighters in the Donbas. “There was nobody to treat the wounded,” she later told me. “I understood I had to do something.” She began teaching herself tactical first aid and using it to help injured comrades. One night, while huddled in a bunker under heavy bombardment, a chaplain recounted to her the story of a medieval Catholic military order, the Knights Hospitaller. The next day, Zinkevych resolved to create her own battalion.
She started with six volunteers and a pickup truck; eventually, she acquired a Volkswagen van. Zinkevych led more than two hundred evacuations until, at the end of 2015, she was paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident. A few months later, she learned that she was pregnant. Against the expectations of her physicians, she gave birth, to a daughter, without complications. She went on to train hundreds of Hospitallers who treated thousands of casualties. In 2019, she ran for parliament and was elected as a representative of the European Solidarity Party.
Zinkevych sent Anastasia to an annex of the monastery where she was issued a combat uniform, body armor, gloves, long underwear, thermal socks, a headlamp, a pocketknife, and a sleeping bag. Helmets were not yet on hand. Anastasia went into a bathroom to change, and when she emerged—no longer a civilian, her folded bluejeans under her arm—she marvelled at the speed with which her world was transforming. “It doesn’t feel real,” she told me. “It’s like a dream, or a nightmare.”
Bandages, gauze, saline, syringes, litters, splints, and other medical equipment were piled on a set of stairs. Donated food—sacks of potatoes, jars of pickled vegetables, preserved meat, canned goods—crowded the corridors. The refectory had been converted into sleeping quarters, and dozens of mattresses covered the dining tables. In the kitchen, medics waited in line for bowls of borscht and kasha. I would get to know many of them: an economics professor, a dentist, a cellist, a cryptocurrency trader, a knife-fighting coach, a ballet dancer, numerous students, a filmmaker, a farmer, a therapist, several journalists. Fearing Russian reprisals, they all used code names. I found a free mattress across from Italia, a physician’s assistant and a single mother who had immigrated to Milan two decades ago. When the war started, she took a bus back to Kyiv, leaving behind her twenty-three-year-old daughter. “She supports my being here,” Italia said. Her daughter was now assisting Ukrainian refugees, whose numbers across Europe soon exceeded five million.
Kyiv did not fall. Withering Ukrainian artillery and intrepid ambushes stopped the Russian convoy. Anastasia and Italia were dispatched to a municipal police academy near the airport, where they trained officers in first aid and set up a medical-evacuation point. Reporters were forbidden there, but a Hospitaller I’d befriended—code-named August—invited me to accompany his ambulance to a northwestern suburb called Irpin, where residents were escaping the intensifying combat.
August, a twenty-four-year-old auditor in Kyiv, had long been fascinated by all things military. The HBO series “Band of Brothers,” in which his favorite character was the medic, Eugene Roe, had been especially inspiring. In 2017, August attended the same one-week course as Anastasia; he went on to spend most of his vacations in the Donbas, where he learned how to handle a rifle and fire mortars. He exuded the impatient craving for action typical of young soldiers not yet run down by the realities of war. The English words “FUCK DAY” were scrawled in Sharpie on a magazine in his ammo vest, which was also decorated with a purple ribbon that his former girlfriend, a Hospitaller named Anya, had given him for good luck. A patch on his flak jacket featured the Patagonia logo, altered to read “Donbasonia.”
There were five of us in the ambulance. Heading out of the city, we passed numerous checkpoints under construction. Volunteers shovelled dirt from the roadside into sandbags or felled pine trees with chain saws, stacking the logs behind tank traps that had been made by welding together I-beams. August stared out the window, gripping a Kalashnikov, tense and mesmerized. Another Hospitaller, Orest, sat on a stretcher, absorbed in reading “Little Dorrit,” the Charles Dickens novel, on a tablet. Orest was a thirty-six-year-old arborist, a father of five, and a passionate mountaineer. A week earlier, he told me, he’d been trekking near the Romanian border, far from cell-phone reception, when he picked up a signal on a high ridge and saw the news. He hiked for two days to the nearest village and caught a train back to the capital. He’d been planning to make an expedition to the Arctic, and had decided to buy a bolt-action rifle to protect himself from polar bears; in Kyiv, he bought an AR-15 instead.
“The expedition has been postponed,” Orest deadpanned.
To prevent the Russians from penetrating Kyiv, the Ukrainians had destroyed the main bridge over the fast-moving Irpin River. Several buildings on the south side of the river had been hit by Russian shells, which had also killed some fleeing civilians. To the north, explosions sounded and smoke filled the sky above another nearby suburb, Bucha. Russian forces had stalled there, and waves of residents were now arriving—abandoning their vehicles at the edge of the caved-in bridge, clambering down a high embankment, and crossing the icy currents on a treacherous walkway composed of pallets and scrap lumber. Passenger buses idled, ready to bring displaced Ukrainians to downtown Kyiv. People advanced single file, lugging bags and suitcases; some hugged dogs, cats, or babies to their chests. Elderly men and women with canes and walkers staggered haltingly over the rickety planks.
Many geriatric, ill, and injured civilians could not navigate the walkway at all. August, Orest, and several other Hospitallers began carrying them across on litters and spine boards. For the next six hours, the Hospitallers went back and forth across the rapids, delivering dozens of people to ambulances, for transport to hospitals in Kyiv. Exhausted-looking Ukrainian soldiers returning from the front also used the crossing. At one point, a group of them arrived conducting a prisoner whose head was covered in a black hood. His hands were bound in front of him and his shirt was stained with blood.
The rage and desperation of the people at the bridge suggested harrowing experiences. “I want him to die!” a limping babushka in a floral head scarf cried as August helped her down the embankment. She meant Putin. “He’s a fascist! He’s a bastard! He’s not even a bastard—he’s an animal!” Another woman, who’d left her house in a sweatsuit and slippers, with nothing but a purse, told August, “They’re by the forest. If you need to bomb our houses, do it. Just kill them.”
Most of the civilians were women. A lot of the men from Irpin and Bucha had stayed behind, to look after pets, to protect their homes, to assist neighbors, or simply from a sense of duty. In the afternoon, a pair of male municipal workers brought their families in a car; a young girl with a pink Tinker Bell knapsack carried a stuffed My Little Pony unicorn under her arm. The two men ushered their wives and children to the end of the bridge. “Listen to your mother,” one said while hugging and kissing his kids. “Be good to your mother.” The other man was walking away, hiding his tears, unable to say goodbye. Suddenly, he stopped and called out, “Lova!” His adolescent son turned, and the man hurried back to embrace him.
Late in the day, a van arrived with two old women, one of whom refused to get out. “You have to come,” her friend yelled at her. “Maybe we won’t see each other again! Just come. Come!”
“I want to go home.”
“Please, get out of the car,” a Hospitaller told her.
“Don’t try to convince me,” she replied. “I don’t want to go anywhere but home.”
When the Hospitallers asked whether anyone else was living in her house, she said that she was alone.
“You know who will be in your house?” August said. “The Russians, that’s who. What will you do then?”
The woman was unmoved: “I’m eighty-two years old. I hope you live as long as me.”
Her friend was already gone. More vehicles were pulling up. “Bring her back,” August told the driver. “We have other people to help.”
The van turned again toward the rising smoke plumes.
Most Ukrainians who signed up during the first days of the general mobilization were assigned to the Territorial Defense Forces, a kind of national reserve. It was soon at capacity and turning people away. A middle-aged physiotherapist at St. Michael’s told me that he had waited all night in the lobby of a conscription office before being sent home. He joined the Hospitallers instead. Others banded together in ad-hoc collectives, assembling Molotov cocktails, sewing camouflage nets, building fortifications, and preparing and delivering food. One day in Kyiv, I met a young bar manager who belonged to a network of about two hundred former restaurant workers—cooks, waiters, baristas—who made thousands of meals a day for Army units and for civilians marooned in their homes. The military lacked sufficient body armor, and as the war dragged on the bar manager began paying a metal fabricator, using his personal savings, to cut steel-plate inserts for bulletproof vests.
Some troops were also in urgent need of basic medical equipment. At St. Michael’s, Anastasia spent hours assembling individual first-aid kits for infantry units: pouches containing pressure bandages, tourniquets, trauma shears, emergency blankets, hemostatic gauze, and chest-wound seals. These products had been either sent by European donors or purchased by the Hospitallers. More ambulances were acquired similarly, their stencilled lettering indicating their provenance: “ambulanza,” “ambulancia,” “ambulans.”
Anya, the ex-girlfriend of August’s who had given him the lucky ribbon, was in charge of fund-raising. She’d been studying the violin at the Kyiv Conservatory when the Revolution of Dignity started; a policeman had broken her hand at Independence Square. “I’d spent my whole life, since I was four years old, playing all day,” she told me. The injury had put an end to her musical career. A year later, she’d volunteered to fight in the Donbas.
To raise money, Anya marshalled her contacts in the Ukrainian diaspora and solicited contributions on social media. One day, after helping to acquire five thousand tourniquets from a Swiss manufacturer, she told me, “There are no more tourniquets in Switzerland!”
As the fighting continued on the outskirts of the capital, the Hospitallers set about establishing several “stabilization points.” At these forward positions, wounded soldiers and civilians could receive initial treatment—mainly hemorrhage control and intravenous therapy—before being evacuated to primary-care facilities in Kyiv. In the first week of March, I went with August and Orest to the edge of a neighborhood called Horenka, where the Hospitallers were scouting out a location for a new stabilization point. Horenka, which bordered Bucha to the east, was the scene of fierce Russian shelling—on our way, as we passed Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles, a mortar exploded on the road ahead of us, rocking the ambulance and obliging us to turn back for a while. It was dark when we finally reached our destination, and bright trails streaked across the night sky. Rockets launched by the Ukrainians flashed in the woods. We linked up with a Territorial Defense unit that had occupied an abandoned children’s sanatorium. The volunteers did not look particularly impressive—they were older, and some of them were out of shape—but they told me that they had been preparing for this moment for seven years.
The men belonged to a “civilian sniper club” that had formed in 2015. In anticipation of an expansion of the war in the Donbas, they had gathered on weekends to practice marksmanship, outdoor skills, combat medicine, and even “tactical alpinism.” (A sudden urban assault might require them to rappel from their apartment buildings.) They did not know one another’s names—or any other identifying details. When I expressed surprise at this, an ungainly man in a black turtleneck replied, “It’s easy for me, because I come from the gamer society.”
I recognized these men. Of course, the difference between them and their American analogues—preppers, survivalists, militia members—was that the dreaded scenario they had envisaged was not a lurid fantasy. As the gamer in the turtleneck told me, “We woke up on February 24th and said, ‘O.K., it’s here. It’s happening.’ ”
There were some similar types in the Hospitallers. When we got back to St. Michael’s, a new arrival, with a goatee, wire-framed glasses, and short-cropped hair, was unpacking a vast trove of tactical apparel—some of it still shrink-wrapped and marked with price tags—onto a mattress next to mine. He was from Kyiv but lived in Alberta and was code-named Canada. After doing a tour in the Donbas, in 2016, he’d realized: “It can happen anywhere.” He had a business salvaging and reselling used winter tires, but he devoted much of his time and money to his “project.” In Alberta, he had a dozen guns, a thousand rounds of ammunition, plastic containers stocked with food, and a beloved “patrol truck”—an S.U.V. that he had customized with a sixteen-thousand-pound winch, roll bars, and a rifle rack. He was saving up for portable solar panels; when things fell apart, he planned to strike out for the wilderness with his wife and live off the land.
Had we met in North America, I likely would have seen Canada’s world view as paranoid and apocalyptic. In Ukraine, though, it was harder to dismiss: many analysts were speculating that Russia might deploy a nuclear weapon. Russian soldiers had attacked a nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia, causing a fire. Some of the forces targeting Kyiv had entered the country through the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, churning up contaminated soil and digging trenches in a lethally radioactive forest.
Canada’s wife was also Ukrainian. Her parents and brother lived in Mariupol, which had no electricity, heat, or water, and was running out of food. The day after I met Canada, Russian aircraft bombed a maternity hospital in the city. His in-laws weren’t answering their phones.
The situation in Mariupol was uniquely grim, but the Russians were targeting civilian areas and infrastructure across Ukraine, most notably in Kharkiv, three hundred miles to the east of Kyiv. On March 16th, I went there with a few photographers. Shelling had laid waste to several square blocks downtown. Offices, shops, restaurants, cafés, university buildings, and an iconic pub named after Ernest Hemingway were in ruins, some encased in ice from broken pipes. An enormous crater yawned outside the regional administrative headquarters, a six-story monolith that had partially withstood the blast. A second missile had destroyed a kitchen in the basement, killing several women. The top of a skull lay nearby. Firefighters with shovels were still digging through the rubble, searching for bodies. A Territorial Defense soldier, code-named I.T., said that twenty-four corpses had already been retrieved. I.T., who had been inside the building during the strike, told me, “I should be dead.” He’d worked as a computer engineer in Kharkiv before the war, and he shared Anastasia’s astonishment at the sudden onset of havoc. “Two weeks ago, I was arguing with my wife, telling her I was bored with my life,” he recalled, with rueful irony. Looking around at the collapsed buildings, the charred husks of vehicles, and the mountains of wreckage, he seemed unable to process it all. “I feel like I’m in a video game,” he said.
An hour later, a market a few miles east of us was shelled. I went there and found firefighters hosing down a burning complex of outdoor stalls. Nothing that might have been mistaken as a military target was anywhere in sight. I was filming the damage when another mortar landed, a short distance away from me. The blast and shrapnel wounded a woman who, bleeding from her abdomen, was quickly loaded into an ambulance. Such “double-tap” strikes had been common in Syria, where Russia and the Assad regime had systematically targeted first responders to demoralize the population and terrorize it into submission.
The same strategy was clearly being employed in Ukraine. That day, the Russians also bombed a theatre in Mariupol where civilians were sheltering. “CHILDREN” had been painted in Russian, in huge white letters, over the parking lot. Hundreds reportedly died. The next afternoon, in Kharkiv, one of Eastern Europe’s biggest markets was shelled. Thousands of people had worked there before the war. A raging inferno consumed the complex, and tar-black smoke darkened the sky.
The following morning, I was eating breakfast in the lobby of our hotel when a huge explosion shook the building. Its glass façade warped in and out as we all jumped from our chairs. The target had been a government academy for civil-service employees. It wasn’t far, and we arrived there at the same time as a team of rescuers. A whole section of the institution had been reduced to smashed slabs of concrete, bent I-beams, and twisted rebar. A dead man lay next to the building. Another man, caked with dust, was climbing out of a ground-floor window.
Nearby, a firefighter, in a white helmet and flame-retardant coveralls, heard shouts emanating from a narrow crevice. “Can you hear me?” he yelled. “Do you have air to breathe?” Another rescuer pointed a few feet away. “He’s somewhere down here!”
A Territorial Defense soldier who belonged to the same unit as the trapped man managed to reach him on his cell phone. He’d been brushing his teeth, in a bathroom below street level, when the building came down. The soldier gave his phone to the firefighter, who asked the trapped man, “What’s your name? Are you standing or sitting?” He then instructed him, “Go to a load-bearing wall, an exterior wall. Sit next to it and pull your knees to your chest.”
“We have to lift the debris piece by piece,” someone announced. Climbing on top of the rubble, the rescuers took turns with sledgehammers and power saws. A crane was sent for. No sooner had it arrived than a soldier yelled at us to vacate the area—another attack was expected. Everyone started running. Firefighters, searching for cover, struggled to kick down the locked door of a building across the street; a man with a crowbar tried and failed to pry it open. The second strike never came, and eventually the rescuers resumed their work, using the crane to pull away furniture-size chunks of concrete. It was getting late, and we decided to head back toward Kyiv.
On our way, we stopped in a small town whose secondary school had been levelled by a Russian air strike the previous morning. In the yard, a group of teachers surveyed the wreckage. “I heard a plane, and then an explosion,” Yaroslava, an English teacher who’d once been a student at the school, told me. She said that there were no Ukrainian soldiers in the vicinity. Some of the teachers were sifting through a demolished classroom. “We’re saving what we can,” Yaroslava said.
I later learned that the man trapped beneath the government academy had been successfully extracted. A Hospitaller from Kharkiv knew him, and showed me a video on his phone of the man walking away from the rubble, eight hours after being buried alive. In the clip, blood splotches his face and jacket. Someone asks him how he’s feeling. “Better than ever,” he answers. “But I could use a cigarette.”
When I rejoined the Hospitallers at St. Michael’s Monastery, on March 20th, their fleet of ambulances had grown from four to more than a dozen. Each vehicle had been spray-painted dark green, and black tape covered their tail-lights. Anastasia was heading to a stabilization point in an abandoned maternity hospital a few blocks from the sanatorium where I’d met the civilian snipers. The fighting had dramatically escalated across the northern suburbs. The medics being relieved by Anastasia’s team had just treated twenty-two soldiers wounded by shelling. All had survived.
The other four Hospitallers in Anastasia’s ambulance were old friends who ran an N.G.O. called the Veteran Hub. One of them, a former military psychologist code-named Artem, had co-founded the organization, in 2018, to provide counselling and employment assistance for veterans of the Donbas. Mamont, the ambulance’s rifleman, had met Artem while seeking help himself, after a Russian mortar left him with a brain injury and a disabled right hand. (He could still shoot with his left.) For years, the vast majority of Ukrainians had been insulated from the conflict with Russia in the east; much of Artem and Mamont’s work had focussed on helping veterans re-integrate into a society from which they’d come to feel estranged. That would no longer be necessary. Artem, foreseeing a nationwide mental-health crisis, told me, “We’re going to have a lot to do when this is over.” The Veteran Hub had already opened a psychological-support hotline, available for traumatized civilians and relatives of soldiers.
Outside the maternity hospital, there was a statue of a stork, a bundled baby dangling from its beak. An artillery shell had lodged in the pavement; shrapnel had pocked the hospital’s walls and shattered its windows. The ranking Hospitaller was a fifty-two-year-old neurosurgeon code-named Yuzik. A grenade in the Donbas had given him a limp. He walked with a cane and wore a lanyard from which dangled a wooden crucifix and a miniature handgun. Yuzik showed us an examination room that he’d converted into an emergency first-aid station. In a lobby lined with photographs of infants, heart-shaped balloons were still filled with helium; on February 26th, when the Russians first shelled Horenka, six women had given birth in the basement.
During the three days that we stayed at the maternity hospital, the Ukrainians mounted a strenuous counter-offensive across the northern suburbs. Armored vehicles raced up and down the street, and Ukrainian artillery thundered until dawn; in response, Russian ordnance pounded our immediate surroundings. One Russian rocket tore through the tiled roof of a house adjacent to the hospital. Others whistled overhead or crashed into the ground close enough to send even Mamont running down the stairs.
Most civilians had left the area, but not all. The first patients that Anastasia’s team received were adult siblings, a brother and sister, whose house had been hit. The sister had been sheltering in the cellar with her mother, and had suffered only minor injuries; her husband had been in the yard, and was killed. Her brother, who’d also been outside, was bleeding profusely from multiple shrapnel wounds. He cried in agony as Yuzik applied pressure bandages to both of his legs, and another medic gave him an I.V. with the opioid tramadol.
The sister sat on an examination table, waving off the medics who approached her. “I’m O.K.,” she said. “Don’t worry about me.”
“What about Grandma?” Yuzik asked.
“She’s fine—she was with me in the basement. My husband was killed instantly. If I’d been with him, I’d be dead, too.” She recounted all of this with the uncanny detachment of someone in shock. Her husband’s body was buried under debris. “I couldn’t move him,” she said. As Yuzik wrapped a roll of gauze around her ankle, her principal emotion seemed to be embarrassment at people fussing over her.
“You’re very tan,” Yuzik said, trying to distract her.
The woman laughed. “I like the sun,” she told him.
Anastasia helped load the siblings into the ambulance and accompanied them to the hospital. While she was monitoring the brother’s vital signs, she later told me, he became agitated, moaning and writhing. The sister patiently soothed him. “She was so calm,” Anastasia said.
That night, an eighty-four-year-old woman was delivered to the stabilization point with shrapnel wounds to her groin and abdomen. She did not cry out. When a medic commented on her grit, the woman said that she had also survived the Second World War.
The eighty-four-year-old had been injured in a strike on the local fire station, which was across the street from her house, a few blocks from our position. I visited the next morning. The station was still smoking, and the ground was gouged with craters. Vasyl Oksak, the fire chief, watched his men spray water on the collapsed walls and roof. He seemed to accept the attack with placid resignation. The Russians had destroyed almost every public building in his jurisdiction, he said. A few days earlier, the children’s sanatorium where I’d stayed with August and Orest had been hit.
Shortly after I returned to the stabilization point, a group of soldiers pulled up in a civilian S.U.V. One of them had been wounded by artillery. While the Hospitallers treated the casualty, a soldier named Roman Shulyar told me that they all belonged to a Territorial Defense unit deployed in the neighborhood. Shulyar was a mergers-and-acquisitions attorney whose life, until three weeks earlier, had revolved around negotiating corporate contracts. “We’re not professional soldiers, but we are holding our position,” he said. A second patient from the unit was a plumber in his fifties who had begun experiencing heart palpitations and extreme hypertension during the bombardment. As the medics gave the plumber oxygen and treated his wounded comrade—a retired police officer—Shulyar told me, “Not one of us has quit. No one has run away.” In a later phone call, he said, “Once you’ve had that feeling of being a soldier in wartime, you want to repeat it. You want to be useful to your country.”
The Hospitallers I’d met also seemed to be animated by this impulse. However, the groups with which some of them had previously been affiliated had faced criticism, both in Ukraine and abroad. In the Donbas, Mamont had served with the Azov Battalion, and one night at the maternity hospital Yuzik, the neurosurgeon, showed me a tattoo on his chest: a medical cross below the words “RIGHT SECTOR,” in Ukrainian. The Azov Battalion and Right Sector had emerged out of the Revolution of Dignity, from protesters who had spearheaded confrontations with the police at Independence Square. Both organizations had gone on to fight in the east. Some hard-line types, including white supremacists, were drawn to their bellicosity and jingoism; others gravitated to them less because of any ideological affinity than because they were inspired by the groups’ discipline and bravery. After the revolution, the Ukrainian armed forces were in a state of disarray, enfeebled by years of corruption and neglect. For people such as Mamont—as well as Yana Zinkevych, the founder of the Hospitallers, who briefly joined a Right Sector unit when she went to the Donbas after high school—volunteer militias offered an appealing alternative.
The invocation of “nationalist” as a derogatory term with fascistic connotations baffled many Ukrainians, who argued that their nation’s history had been defined by the Russian denial of its right to exist. Whereas American and European nationalism typically implied internal persecution of others—vilifying marginalized segments of the domestic population—Yuzik and Mamont’s foremost concern was resisting an external and vastly more powerful aggressor. Much of the Azov Battalion, including Mamont’s former platoon, was currently defending Mariupol against a Russian onslaught that threatened to annihilate it. One of Mamont’s friends had been killed there; the friend’s father had died while volunteering in Kharkiv. Mamont was exasperated by non-Ukrainians still confused about who the tyrants were.
There was no question that leaders of the Azov Battalion and Right Sector championed a chauvinistic, illiberal ethos. Some had openly espoused anti-Semitism, homophobia, and racism. In 2010, the first Azov commander, Andriy Biletsky, declared his desire to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade,” and in 2015 the founder of Right Sector, Dmytro Yarosh, said that a gay-pride parade in Kyiv “spat on the graves of those who died and defended Ukraine.” Over all, however, such views were more marginal in Ukraine than in Russia—or, for that matter, in the U.S. Yarosh ran for President, in 2014, but received less than one per cent of the vote. In 2019, Right Sector and veterans of the Azov Battalion allied with other far-right groups to field parliamentary candidates and failed to win a single seat. That year, Volodymyr Zelensky, a Russian-speaking Jew whose great-grandparents had died in the Holocaust, was elected President in a landslide.
The director of the maternity hospital where we were staying, Valery Zukin, was also Jewish. Zukin had urged Yuzik and the Hospitallers to make use of his facility. When he visited the site one day, he told me that he was from Donetsk, a major city in the Donbas. His family, along with many Jews, had fled Donetsk in 2014, after Russian-backed separatists took control of it. “The level of anti-Semitism had become unbelievable,” he said. When I mentioned depictions of anti-Russian fighters as neo-Nazis, Zukin replied, “It’s very big bullshit.”
Putin had fixated on the Azov Battalion as an excuse for his pitiless assault on Mariupol, where the group was based. Ever since the Revolution of Dignity, though, Russian propagandists had generated a steady feed of disinformation for those inclined to rationalize Russian belligerence and malign Ukrainian self-defense. During my second week in Kyiv, I visited a tall apartment building that had been struck by two Russian rockets. As tenants and neighbors watched firefighters put out the flames, I spoke with one of the onlookers, Oleksii Prokopov, who was renting a room in a university dormitory next door. Prokopov was from the Donbas city of Luhansk, which, like Donetsk, was governed by pro-Russian separatists. Though he’d left Luhansk in 2014, his brother had stayed. “I don’t communicate with him anymore,” he said. “He’s been watching Russian TV for eight years, and now he believes whatever Russia says.” Sounding more saddened than resentful, Prokopov added, “If you watch these programs every day, then, yes, you will believe.”
His parents, Russians from the Kuban region, near Crimea, had moved across the border to Luhansk after their wedding. They had both died before the Revolution of Dignity, but, Prokopov told me, his mother had recently visited him in a dream. “When I saw her, I was so happy,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Mom, come and sit with me.’ ” Before they had a chance to talk, Prokopov was jolted awake by an explosion somewhere in Kyiv. He opened his eyes to the sound of air-raid sirens. Still, he said, “I continued to speak with her. I was crying. I said, ‘Mom, this is your motherland. How is it possible they are doing this to us?’ ”
Prokopov had also been sleeping during the attack on the apartment tower. He’d woken to window shards falling on his face. Rushing outside, he’d found an elderly woman, half dressed and barefoot, escaping the burning building. As he recounted this, with the same unsettling urgency he had conveyed while describing his interrupted dream, I began to suspect how the two events might be connected.
When I asked Prokopov how he thought his mother would have seen the current crisis—from his perspective or from his brother’s—he avoided answering directly. “She was a good woman,” he said. “She loved art and poetry. She taught me poems about the Second World War—about the Russian heroes and Russian women who took up arms against the German fascists.” He stared wide-eyed at the smoke and flames, as if to reassure himself that it was not a dream. “Now the war is here,” he said. “But it’s not the German fascists. It’s the Russian fascists.”
The Ukrainian counter-offensive that took place while Anastasia and I were at the maternity hospital marked a pivotal turn in the battle of Kyiv. As destructive as the Russian shelling was, there had been more outgoing artillery than incoming. NATO member states, spurred by the unexpected resilience of Ukraine’s resistance, had begun shipping huge numbers of arms to the country. By mid-March, the U.S. was allocating billions of dollars for anti-aircraft and anti-tank systems, radar equipment, helicopters, drones, grenade launchers, artillery rounds, and other matériel. Later, additional aid packages would include such heavy weapons as howitzers, the long-range cannons that U.S. marines had used to level Raqqa, in northern Syria.
The Ukrainian troops, which NATO advisers had been training throughout the conflict in the Donbas, employed this arsenal with exceptional proficiency—and not just in Kyiv. A broader shift was also under way. At the end of March, Russian forces retreated from Trostyanets, a city in the northeast which they had occupied for a month. I visited a few days later. A landscaped public square was now a muddy wasteland littered with obliterated Russian tanks and armored vehicles. Amid the wreckage, a Second World War memorial, featuring a life-size Soviet tank, still sat atop a hulking plinth. A plaque embossed with a hammer and sickle commemorated the Soviet battalion that had captured the nearby train station, severing a German supply line.
According to a group of soldiers I later met in Trostyanets, the Ukrainian Army had all but encircled the city, leaving the Russian forces with only one road out and two choices: “Go or die.” The soldiers estimated that about a hundred and fifty vehicles had departed. When I asked whether the withdrawal had been negotiated, they said that such matters were above their pay grade. However, one soldier remarked, “Apparently, there was a deal. Otherwise, we would never have let them leave like that.”
In the square, two Ukrainian Railways employees were painting over the “Z” markings on a flatbed that belonged to the city’s train station. (The letter, originally used as an identifying marker for Russian convoys, now symbolized support for the invasion in general, and could be seen on T-shirts, billboards, and bumper stickers throughout Russia.) The station was across the square; on my way there, I encountered a middle-aged man walking his bicycle through the mud. He wanted to check on his daughter’s house, which, he’d heard, had been destroyed. The man’s name was Oleksandr, and he told me that, toward the end of the occupation, Russian soldiers had taken refuge in a basement underneath the station. We decided to have a look together.
Several locomotives on the tracks had been blown up, and the platform was covered with mortar shells and wooden ammunition boxes. I turned on my phone’s light and followed Oleksandr down a flight of stairs, into a dank network of rooms cluttered with Russian uniforms, boots, and ration packs. Socks were draped over pipes, playing cards lay on tables, and a shocking number of empty vodka, wine, and whiskey bottles were scattered everywhere. I was taken aback by the evidence of heavy communal drinking—this was the fourth war I had covered and the first time I’d ever seen that—but many residents later told me that one of the first things the Russians did in Trostyanets was plunder its supermarkets for booze.
Oleksandr seemed less aghast at the alcohol than at the presence of Bibles and icons. In a room filled with bandages, bags of saline, and bloody mattresses, he picked up a New Testament and marvelled, “Look at that! It’s horrible! How could they be religious?”
In a narrow corridor outside the room, more than a dozen letters and cards from Russian schoolchildren were taped to the wall. A nine-year-old named Olya had signed a colorful drawing of a bright sun smiling down on two tanks with flowers protruding from their cannons. “For Peace” and “Victory for Russia” were scrawled in the sky, beside a red Soviet flag. “Dear soldier!” another note read. “I really hope that you will be strong and able to defend us, and that the world will be sunny and happy.” In early March, in the Russian city of Kazan, a hospice for terminally ill children had released a picture of its patients standing with their parents and staff in a “Z” formation in the snow. The messages and illustrations in the rooms beneath the train station were nearly identical to one another—obviously copied from a template—and what most disturbed me was not that children had been so cynically exploited but that adults had derived genuine comfort from this rote compliance.
Perhaps it was wrong to think of them as adults. All over Trostyanets, people were emerging from their homes and basements, and everyone I spoke to noted how young the occupiers had seemed. At a cultural center where volunteers were distributing sugar, eggs, diapers, and other basic provisions, residents huddled around power cords connected to diesel generators, charging their phones and reading the news for the first time in weeks. They described the Russian soldiers mainly as volatile looters. When the troops left the city, their vehicles were filled with TVs, carpets, electronics, appliances, and other stolen goods.
The mayor, Yuriy Bova, wanted to show me the city hall. “What was the point of this?” he asked, gesturing at overturned filing cabinets and smashed computers. Menstrual pads were glued to a door below graffiti that read “Slava Rossii!!! ”
Across town, Bova took me to a confectionery plant that had manufactured products for Oreo, Milka, and Nabisco. The Russians who had been stationed there appeared to have subsisted largely on the warehouse stock: discarded chocolate-bar wrappers and cookie boxes were as ubiquitous as expended ammunition casings. Dozens of crates of unused rockets were still stacked near the factory’s assembly line. All the offices had been ransacked. In a conference room whose windows were barricaded with jumbo tins of candy, Russian soldiers had left several messages, in marker, on a white projector screen.
“We are just following orders. Sorry.”
“We don’t need this war.”
“We were sent, please forgive us.”
“Brothers! We love you!”
A few days later, the Russian forces north of Kyiv also retreated. I returned to the capital to see whether they, too, had left anything behind.
Ivana-Franka Street was a quaint dirt lane on the eastern edge of Bucha, across the Irpin River from the maternity hospital where the Hospitallers had been stationed. During the monthlong Russian occupation, the street, which was close to various Ukrainian-held neighborhoods, had become a front line, and now burnt-out Russian tanks and trucks listed among the remains of splintered houses and overturned or pancaked vehicles. The few people who were around wandered amid the debris with dazed expressions, resembling the survivors of a natural catastrophe.
At the end of Ivana-Franka Street, an elderly woman in a down coat and a shawl beckoned to me. I followed her up a steep berm to a set of railroad tracks. They ran parallel to an open culvert where, at the bottom, two male bodies were tangled together, half buried under weeds and trash that had collected during recent rains. The woman said that the victims were brothers, adding, “Everybody loved them. We don’t know why they were killed.”
The brothers, Yuri and Victor, had been in their sixties and had lived in adjacent houses. Locals had referred to them as Uncle Yuri and Uncle Victor. While Bucha was occupied, Yuri had worn a white cloth around his sleeve, to signal neutrality, and baked bread for hungry neighbors. Both men had been shot in the head. Empty beer bottles lay in the grass.
“Him I don’t know,” the woman said, pointing at a form slumped on the roadside. The man was overweight and middle-aged, dressed in civilian clothes, with receding gray hair and a neatly trimmed white beard. So much blood had seeped from the bullet hole in his temple that a patch of crimson earth extended past his feet.
A Ukrainian soldier approached me to say that he’d found another victim. I followed him into the basement of a yellow house, where a rail-thin teen-ager was crumpled on the floor. Blood had leaked from his mouth and nose. The soldier crouched and felt under his skull. “He was shot in the back of the head,” he said.
Outside a small two-story home, Russian soldiers had constructed a makeshift checkpoint from pallets, cinder blocks, and empty ammunition boxes. In the back yard, three more men had been executed. One, shot through the ear, lay on his back against a fence. Another, beside a woodpile, wore a sheepskin-and-leather jacket that was speckled with unmelted snow. He, too, was on his back; a T-shirt covered his face. The third man was prone. Half of his head had been blown off, and his brain had spilled into the dirt.
I hadn’t been there long when two women in their mid-thirties appeared in the yard. There was something immediately incongruous about them. Unlike everyone else in Bucha, they were clean. Their clothes were unrumpled and stylish, their white sneakers immaculate; they wore makeup and jewelry. A police officer accompanied them. One of the women, in a polka-dot sweater and black jeans, crouched beside the man with the T-shirt on his face. Her name was Iryna Havryliuk, and the man was her husband. The corpse by the fence was her brother.
Later, Havryliuk told me that, when Russian troops descended on Bucha, she, her mother, and her brother’s son had fled to Kyiv. The soldiers were shooting at any moving cars, so the family ran for two miles, amid deafening exchanges between tanks and artillery, until they arrived in Irpin, which the Ukrainians still controlled. Someone there gave them a ride to the destroyed bridge, where they joined the mass of displaced civilians whom August and Orest had helped traverse the river. A bus on the far bank took them to the railway station in Kyiv, and they caught a train to Zakarpattia, in western Ukraine, where they were put up by friends.
Havryliuk’s husband, Sergey, a forty-seven-year-old private security guard, had remained in Bucha, refusing to abandon their two dogs and six cats. Her brother, Roman, stayed with him. After the Russians sabotaged Bucha’s power plant and began confiscating people’s phones, Havryliuk lost contact with the two. She had learned only yesterday that they were dead.
Havryliuk confirmed Sergey and Roman’s identities, and the officer took photographs. Then Havryliuk lifted the T-shirt over Sergey’s face. His mouth was ajar. A bullet had pierced his right eye, leaving a gaping hole.
“Maybe it’s not a good idea to do that,” the officer said.
Havryliuk returned the shirt.
The other woman was her best friend, Olena Halaka. As they left the back yard, Havryliuk told Halaka, “My hands are trembling.” Her tone was calm, almost subdued, much like that of the woman at the maternity hospital who’d said, “My husband was killed instantly.” Following a path to the front door, which had been left open, Havryliuk stopped at a wheelbarrow and raised her palm to her brow. The wheelbarrow contained one of her dogs, a pit bull named Valik, also shot dead.
She and Halaka continued inside; seeing a bloodstain on the floor, Havryliuk said, “This is where they shot Valik.” She went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, entered the pantry, and rummaged through cupboards and cabinets. It was not clear what she was looking for. Russian forces were said to have rigged some houses with booby traps, and Halaka, a member of the Kyiv Police, was worried about explosives. “Stop fucking running around, you’re scaring me,” she told Havryliuk.
Havryliuk wasn’t listening. In the living room, she began removing dresses and shirts from an armoire and placing them in a plastic bag. Recognizing her friend’s need to apply herself to a practical task, Halaka set aside her security concerns and helped her.
“Do you want Sergey’s clothes?” she asked.
“Let me think,” Havryliuk said. Then: “Yes, take them.”
Empty shoeboxes were heaped in a pile. “They stole my shoes,” Havryliuk said. Her lingerie, perfume, and jewelry were also missing. Finding a box of chocolates that she’d stashed away for a special occasion, she gave it to Halaka. “Here, for your kids,” she said.
Halaka eyed the box. “Do you think it’s poisoned?”
The two women climbed a staircase to the bedroom, surprising a small bird that had become trapped inside. It fluttered wildly, banging into the walls and hopping across the floor. Halaka opened a window, and, for several dreamlike seconds, Havryliuk chased the bird around until it flew away. She then lowered herself to her knees and withdrew an old leather-bound book from underneath the bed. It was a collection of poetry by the nineteenth-century writer Taras Shevchenko. Widely considered the progenitor of modern Ukrainian literature, Shevchenko had contributed as much as anyone to the development of a Ukrainian national identity, distinct from Russia’s. “My Testament,” one of the poems in the book, had become a kind of anthem for protesters during the Revolution of Dignity. It begins, “When I am dead, bury me / In my beloved Ukraine.”
“What’s this?” Halaka asked, holding up a zippered pouch.
“Ah,” Havryliuk said. “His coins.”
She was smiling. She opened the pouch to reveal a cache of foreign currency that people had given Sergey from their travels to Cyprus, Singapore, the U.S., Indonesia. He’d been a collector. A dozen miniature beach chairs were arranged on a shelf, and Havryliuk explained that it was an installation Sergey had made for his defunct cell phones, each of which had occupied a chair. The Russians had taken the phones.
As Havryliuk gathered items from other rooms, a woman in a long coat and glasses stopped by to express her condolences. She’d been in Bucha for the length of the occupation and looked frail and underfed. Havryliuk filled her arms with whatever she could find—soap, shampoo, beauty products, clothes.
“What size are you?” she asked, foisting on the woman three pairs of shoes that had been left behind.
The woman demurred. “What about you?”
“We’re moving to Zakarpattia.”
“You’re not coming back?”
“Not anytime soon.”
“Are you going to cremate Sergey and Roman?”
“I don’t know.” Noticing a pencil jar on its side, Havryliuk stood it upright.
A while later, a neighbor named Nadejda Cherednichenko arrived. Her vest and hooded sweatshirt were tattered, her hands cut and blistered, her nails filled with dirt. After embracing Havryliuk, she told her that her son, a twenty-seven-year-old electrician named Volodymyr, had been detained in early March. After three weeks, Cherednichenko had approached two Russian soldiers patrolling outside of her house. She recalled to Havryliuk, “I said to them, ‘I’m asking you as a mother. Is my son alive?’ ” One of the soldiers had responded, “You don’t have a son anymore.”
A neighbor had taken Cherednichenko to a basement where Volodymyr had been shot through the ear. All five fingers on his left hand had been wrenched backward.
Havryliuk listened in silence as Cherednichenko recounted all this, occasionally nodding. Although she had no words for her friend, her own loss seemed to have made her someone in whom Cherednichenko could confide. Cherednichenko later showed me her garden, where she had buried Volodymyr. It is traditional for Ukrainians to leave some of the deceased’s preferred food on a grave, but during the occupation the residents of Bucha barely had enough sustenance to survive. Volodymyr had loved caffeine, and Cherednichenko had found a small packet of instant coffee to place on the otherwise unmarked mound of dirt.
After Cherednichenko left, Havryliuk went into the front yard. The fence had been knocked over, and when she moved some of the lumber she found her other dog crushed underneath.
Havryliuk put her face into her hands. Her shoulders quaked. For the first time since returning home, she allowed herself to weep.
Down the road from Havryliuk’s place, charred corpses lay beside a garbage pile. Locals said that Russians in a tank had dumped them and lit them on fire. (Later, police would tape off the scene and place yellow markers identifying six victims.) One appeared to be a woman, another a child—though they were so severely mutilated that it was hard to say for sure. Orphaned cats and dogs sniffed around the burned and severed legs and torsos.
Such atrocities were not limited to Ivana-Franka Street. According to the chief regional prosecutor, more than six hundred bodies were found in the district. Researchers with Human Rights Watch reported “extensive evidence of summary executions, other unlawful killings, enforced disappearances, and torture.” At least one man was decapitated. The office of the attorney general released photographs of men who had been bound and executed in “a torture chamber” in the basement of a children’s sanatorium. Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine’s human-rights commissioner, told the BBC that two dozen women and girls, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, “were systematically raped” while being held captive in another Bucha basement. Nine had become pregnant. A Times contributor photographed the corpse of a woman shot in the head in a potato cellar, naked apart from a fur coat.
When the Russians first invaded Bucha, a team of volunteers risked their lives collecting bodies and delivering them to the local morgue. After ten days, with the morgue at capacity and lacking refrigeration, residents dug a mass grave behind a local Orthodox church. As corpses piled up, a tractor covered them with earth. When the first grave was full, a second was excavated, and then a third. I visited the church the day after I met Iryna Havryliuk. Bulky black bags were still heaped in the third pit, and limbs protruded from the mud. The priest, Father Andrii Halavin, was in the nave, repairing windows shattered by projectiles. “It’s not just here,” he told me. “People are buried all over Bucha.”
He wanted to show me a park. On the way, we passed a street where Ukrainian drones had wiped out a convoy from the first Russian unit to enter the neighborhood. The turrets, engines, cannons, and tracks of dismembered tanks were strewn across a four-hundred-yard stretch of road. The destruction was extraordinary. Several residents told me that the conduct of later waves of Russian soldiers had been much worse, perhaps out of vengeance for the first.
A van next to the park was riddled with bullet holes. The Russian word for “children” had been painted on its hood. White sheets hung from its side mirrors. “They were trying to leave,” Father Halavin said of the passengers. He didn’t know their identities; nor had whoever buried them. The only marker on a plot of fresh soil in the grass was a license plate that had been removed from the van’s rear bumper.
Curiously, the park was littered with horse manure. Father Halavin explained that a stable had been bombed. The horses that survived had run wild through the suburb, crazed by the incessant shelling. When I asked where they were now, Halavin shrugged.
Whatever had happened to the horses, stray pets were everywhere, each attesting to an absent master. On a small street across the tracks from Ivana-Franka, an old woman lay face down in her doorway; a trembling dog stood at her shoulder, barking over and over. When I opened a can of tuna, the dog ravenously devoured it. I went inside and found a second woman, also elderly, lying dead on the kitchen floor. Neighbors later told me that they had been sisters, both in their seventies. Their names were Nina and Lyudmyla. In the only bedroom, two narrow mattresses were pushed together and covered by a single blanket. Their little house teemed with hardcover books. Russian translations of French classics filled half a dozen shelves: Voltaire, Camus, Maupassant. In a stack on an armoire, I noticed the same collection of Shevchenko’s poetry that Iryna Havryliuk had retrieved from under her and Sergey’s bed.
I thought of the old woman on the bridge who’d refused to cross the Irpin River. It wasn’t clear how Nina and Lyudmyla had died—but the outcome seemed inevitable. A Russian tank had plowed through the yard across the street. A sniper had occupied the attic of a house next door. Amid such brute lethality, what chance did the sisters have?
Another elderly woman, who lived alone in Bucha, had recounted begging for her life when Russian soldiers burst into her house one day. “I never would have imagined that, at seventy, I would have to get on my knees before a nineteen-year-old bastard,” she’d told me. Echoing the residents of Trostyanets, she and others described the occupiers less as fearsome, battle-hardened butchers than as capriciously homicidal youth. At a high school not far from Ivana-Franka Street, crushed beer cans surrounded former artillery positions. The principal’s office had been trashed. A Russian soldier had used a rubber stamp to painstakingly imprint the outline of a phallus on the wall.
Anastasia, Artem, and Mamont had been stationed at a stabilization point near Irpin. One day, after the Russian retreat, Anastasia went with Yuzik, the neurosurgeon with the cane and the miniature-handgun necklace, to distribute food, water, and medicine in Bucha. They met an elderly woman who had been wounded in a blast several days earlier. Shrapnel had cut a large gash in her arm. “We had to argue with her to let us dress it,” Anastasia said. “She kept saying that we shouldn’t waste our time.”
On April 6th, another Hospitaller called me to say that he was en route to the church in Bucha with the mass graves. “I can’t say why,” he told me. I was already in the area and got to the church a few minutes before several ambulances and vans arrived. One of the priests from St. Michael’s was there. His name was Ivan Sydor, and at the monastery I had interviewed him about the night of December 11, 2013—three weeks after President Viktor Yanukovych, acquiescing to Russia, had cancelled the E.U. agreement. Father Sydor had been a seminary student at the time. At around 1 A.M., he began receiving panicked calls. Hundreds of security forces had stormed the protesters encamped at Independence Square. Until then, the demonstrations had largely been tolerated. Now the government had resolved to quash them.
“They were asking me to ring the bells,” Father Sydor had recalled. The tower at St. Michael’s contained dozens of cast-bronze bells linked to a keyboard of wooden batons—a carillon—and Father Sydor served as the bell ringer. Typically, the carillon was played for brief interludes in advance of morning services and prayers. But there was also a form of bell ringing called nabat, which heralded grave danger and was extremely rare. The last known instance of nabat at St. Michael’s had been in 1240, when the Mongols laid siege to Kyiv.
After securing approval from the abbot, Father Sydor and five other priests-in-training had climbed the tower and taken turns pounding the batons of the carillon with their fists. They did not stop until 5 A.M. Then they descended the tower and walked down the hill to Independence Square. The protesters were still there; the battered security forces were leaving.
“We had won,” he told me.
In Bucha, Father Sydor stood beside an older man with a long graying beard, a black clerical robe, and a tall cylindrical headdress. I recognized him as Metropolitan Epiphanius, the head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Photographs of Epiphanius, often with foreign dignitaries, were hung throughout St. Michael’s, and I’d seen him address a group of journalists in the cathedral. When a reporter had asked whether he had a message for Putin, Epiphanius had said, “I don’t want to address this person—he’s the Antichrist. When you see our destroyed cities, you realize that only the Devil is capable of such things, or someone in league with the Devil.”
While Father Halavin greeted Sydor and Epiphanius, a medic helped Yana Zinkevych, the leader of the Hospitallers, into her wheelchair. Everyone then proceeded to the pit. Standing at the edge, the three clergymen intoned a dirge, in a low, melodious chant. Walking the length of the trench, Epiphanius sprinkled holy water, from a silver basin, over the heaped-up corpses.
It was a private ceremony, and only a handful of medics attended. August—the “Band of Brothers” fan—was among them. A month earlier, I’d run into August at St. Michael’s while he was putting on his ammo vest and flak jacket. Grinning broadly and emanating excitement, he’d told me, “I’m going to the war!” That person was no more. He looked sombre and exhausted. Older, too.
“How are you?” I said, when the ritual had ended.
“Angry,” August answered.
He and Orest, the arborist, had spent the past two weeks fifty miles east of Kyiv, in Nova Basan—another town from which Russian forces had withdrawn. Civilians had been executed there, too: “They were just left in the street. Many old people—grandmothers and grandfathers.” When the Russians left Nova Basan, August said, they took several young girls with them. He had met with their families, who had no idea what had happened to them or if they were alive.
As if in consolation, he took out his phone and showed me a photograph of himself standing over a dead soldier. “Good Russian,” August said. But the joke failed to amuse even him, and he quickly put the phone away.
Hundreds of bodies were collected in Bucha and brought to the local cemetery. From there, they were to be transported to Kyiv, where medical professionals would attempt to identify them, using DNA samples.
The day before the ceremony, I’d gone back to Ivana-Franka Street. The burnt corpses were gone. All that remained was a patch of scorched earth.
A white van was parked outside Iryna Havryliuk’s house. On the dusty rear doors, someone had used his finger to write “200”—a military code for fatalities, which I had learned from the Hospitallers (“300” signified injuries). The van belonged to the team that had collected bodies throughout the occupation, bringing them first to the morgue and then to the church. The volunteers were all large, sturdy men who looked accustomed to heavy lifting. One of them, Sergey Matiuk, had been a professional soccer player in Ukraine. He had a shaved head and broad shoulders; a pin attached to his colorful windbreaker was emblazoned with the Bucha town crest above the words “I LOVE MY CITY,” in Ukrainian. He estimated that he and his colleagues had picked up about three hundred corpses, at least a hundred of which had had their hands tied behind their backs. “A lot of them were tortured,” he said.
One of the volunteers had known Iryna Havryliuk’s husband, and as he and Matiuk bent over to lift Sergey’s body the volunteer said, “They even took his gold tooth.”
Matiuk, focussed on the task at hand, said, “Let’s go.”
Havryliuk was at the house, but she avoided the back yard. While the volunteers carried body bags to the van, one at a time, she roamed the property, searching for her missing cats. At one point, she froze and looked down at her hands.
“Everything is dirty,” she muttered.
The van was half filled with other bodies, and Matiuk had to climb into the back in order to haul Sergey and Roman onto the pile. Then they proceeded to the yellow house, and carried the teen-ager out of the basement. From there, they brought their cargo to the local cemetery.
I stopped by the cemetery the following afternoon. Dozens of bagged corpses were laid out in rows and stacked in piles beside a brick shed that Matiuk and his team used as their office. Matiuk was wearing the same colorful windbreaker and pin. An antique knife with a jewel-embedded handle was sheathed on his hip; he’d found it at an abandoned Russian checkpoint and had kept it as a trophy. He said that the bodies were to be transported to Kyiv, where medical professionals would attempt to identify them, using DNA samples. In the coming days, more than a hundred and ten corpses would be exhumed from behind the church.
“I’m very tired,” Matiuk said. “We haven’t slept.”
“Since the Russians left?”
“Since they came.”
I asked what he planned to do after the war, and Matiuk said that he’d accepted a job with the cemetery, as a gravedigger.
“My place is here,” he said.
Anastasia completed her rotation with Artem and Mamont the next day, April 7th, and I met her at the apartment she had rented on Andriyivsky Descent. We walked down the cobblestone road, past the monument to the opera singer Vasyl Slipak, and continued to the banks of the Dnieper. Restaurants, shops, and cafés were reopening. The afternoon was warm and sunny—the first good weather since I’d arrived in Ukraine—and several joggers passed us on the quay. An island in the river had a sand beach, and Anastasia smiled as she recalled concerts that she’d attended there. “In the summer, it’s amazing here,” she said.
Anastasia told me that, according to Yuzik, the Hospitallers would soon be sent east. The Russians, having given up on Kyiv—at least for now—were shifting their focus to the Donbas. Their stated objective was to seize the entirety of the region and then push southwest to the Black Sea, thus creating a land bridge to Crimea. Mariupol, which stood in the way of that projected corridor, was already shattered; the last Ukrainian holdouts, including members of the Azov Battalion, were taking refuge, with their families, in the tunnels beneath a steel plant, which the Russians would soon blockade.
The second phase of the war would involve more heavy weaponry and ordnance than the first—as well as increasingly willful cruelty. In mid-April, Putin awarded an honorary title to the unit thought to be responsible for the depravity in Bucha, in recognition of its “heroism and valor.” The day after Anastasia and I walked to the Dnieper, Russian cluster munitions struck a railway station in Kramatorsk, where hundreds of civilians, mostly women and kids, were awaiting trains out of the Donbas. More than fifty were killed.
On the quay, when I asked Anastasia if she would go east, she said, “I have to think about it. There is a high chance of being killed.” She was returning to Paris for a week or two. She had an academic article to write, and wanted to pursue various ideas for advocacy and fund-raising. In the past month, she had sometimes struggled to readapt to the military culture, routine, and mind-set of the Hospitallers. She’d been one of the few medics who had refused to carry a Kalashnikov. In contrast to August, Yuzik, and Mamont, Anastasia was not fascinated by war or temperamentally suited to it. Like many Ukrainians, she had simply declined to run from it.
After going to Paris, Anastasia went back to Ukraine. When we last spoke, she was visiting her family in Kyiv. The Hospitallers were moving out of St. Michael’s. She planned to join them in the east.
9. Will Putin go nuclear to avoid defeat in Ukraine?
Can we show Putin how the use of tactical nuclear weapons will lead to Putin's defeat?
Excerpts:
A Russian use of low-yield nuclear weapons that quickly leads to Kyiv’s acceptance of terms dictated by Moscow would be the worst of all outcomes in Ukraine—at least apart from a broader war leading to global thermonuclear war. Moscow would change the international security order for the worse, dramatically escalating the threat of a war with NATO and worsening the continent’s security outlook, while fundamentally shifting the perception of the utility of nuclear weapons. A key norm in the rules-based order would collapse, along with non-proliferation. Instead, Western liberal democracies would have to reconcile with states that saw nuclear weapons as highly desirable capabilities for deterrence, for coercion and for use.
In the Indo-Pacific, we’d need to consider the prospect that China might alter or abandon its no-first-use nuclear policy and place greater emphasis on developing tactical and substrategic nuclear forces for coercion and possible use in a future Taiwan crisis.
Russia’s explicit and implicit nuclear posturing sets a dangerous precedent of threats to coerce, in which any response may lead to uncontrolled escalation to nuclear war. In effect, Moscow has demonstrated a failure of Western deterrence below the threshold of strategic nuclear war and, at the same time, has achieved escalation dominance at the tactical nuclear level. It’s a lesson that won’t be lost on other states.
Will Putin go nuclear to avoid defeat in Ukraine? | The Strategist
It’s been more than 75 years since nuclear bombs were detonated over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, bringing World War II to an end with a Japan’s unconditional surrender. Since then, somehow, the world has avoided further use of nuclear weapons in anger, even during grave crises such as the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1983 Able Archer incident.
In 2022 the world faces a new nuclear threat, with the risk that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine could turn into a wider war between NATO and Moscow that escalates past the nuclear threshold or, alternatively, Russia’s use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. CIA Director William Burns said on 14 April: ‘Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they’ve faced so far, militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons.’
A Russian defeat at the conventional military level would increase the likelihood of Putin going nuclear, perhaps as part of a strategy of ‘escalate to de-escalate’ in which a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon is detonated in Ukraine. Such a move would either seek to turn the tide of battle or serve as a warning shot to Kyiv and NATO to accept Russia’s terms for ending the war.
It’s also possible that Russia could decide to escalate at a conventional level by extending its attacks beyond Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has accused NATO of engaging in a proxy war and said that weapons shipments are legitimate targets. And Russia is already making implied threats of extending the war to the disputed Transnistria region of Moldova. That would dramatically increase the threat to Romania, a NATO member, and destabilise the Moldovan state, many of whose residents are ethnically Romanian.
Perhaps most worryingly, Putin recently doubled down on the nuclear rhetoric with an implicit threat:
If someone intends to intervene in the ongoing events from the outside and create strategic threats for Russia that are unacceptable to us, they should know that our retaliatory strikes will be lightning-fast. We have all the tools for this, things no one else can boast of having now. And we will not boast—we will use them if necessary. And I want everyone to know that.
With the West expanding its assistance to Ukraine, the possibility that Putin could interpret it as intervention generates another pathway to escalation.
It’s not clear how NATO would respond to the use of a low-yield nuclear weapon in Ukraine—or, for that matter, large-scale use of chemical weapons against Ukrainian targets. The chemical weapons scenario is perhaps more likely, given that norms of non-use of chemical weapons have already been eroded by Syria’s large-scale use of a range of them against its own people in 2014. Use of such weapons by Russia might simply attract intensified sanctions and political condemnation. Tactical nuclear use would be a different matter altogether.
Use of a nuclear weapon—even a low-yield tactical weapon—would represent a fundamental shift in global security. It would shatter the norm of non-use of nuclear weapons, and absent an effective response by NATO, would usher in a new era in which states would perceive such weapons as credible options for warfighting, not just for deterrence.
Other nuclear-armed states might move to prioritise low-yield tactical nuclear weapons, and non-nuclear states that had nuclear ambitions, such as Iran, might decide that participating in non-proliferation and arms control is no longer a priority. Negotiations on restoring the nuclear deal with Iran could become a casualty of nuclear escalation in Ukraine and North Korea is already well into developing a range of new tactical nuclear forces.
Of course, not responding—or responding weakly, such as with intensified economic sanctions and political condemnation—isn’t the only option open to NATO in the event Russia uses a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. Direct military intervention at a conventional level, to strike at Russian nuclear-capable delivery systems, would be one option; another would be deployment of NATO forces on the ground to directly support Ukrainian forces in battle.
But any direct military intervention by NATO, even below the nuclear threshold, would almost inevitably lead to a wider NATO–Russia war, and with it, the near certainty of nuclear escalation. It’s that spectre of nuclear war—as opposed to a single detonation—that constrains NATO’s responses, even in the face of Russian atrocities in Bucha and Kramatorsk. In particular, the prospect of such a war escalating to strategic nuclear exchanges and devastating the planet will be in the minds of NATO decisionmakers.
So, there’s a risk now emerging that in the face of military defeat at the conventional level, Russia will use nuclear weapons and plunge the world into a new and uncertain future. It’s a future in which low-yield nuclear weapons become usable in conflicts, certainly in terms of implicit and explicit coercive threats against military intervention—as China might do in a Taiwan crisis. In the worst case, a different perception of the operational utility of low-yield tactical nuclear weapons emerges in comparison to strategic nuclear forces. The nuclear genie is out of the bottle, and the question is whether it can ever be put back in.
A Russian use of low-yield nuclear weapons that quickly leads to Kyiv’s acceptance of terms dictated by Moscow would be the worst of all outcomes in Ukraine—at least apart from a broader war leading to global thermonuclear war. Moscow would change the international security order for the worse, dramatically escalating the threat of a war with NATO and worsening the continent’s security outlook, while fundamentally shifting the perception of the utility of nuclear weapons. A key norm in the rules-based order would collapse, along with non-proliferation. Instead, Western liberal democracies would have to reconcile with states that saw nuclear weapons as highly desirable capabilities for deterrence, for coercion and for use.
In the Indo-Pacific, we’d need to consider the prospect that China might alter or abandon its no-first-use nuclear policy and place greater emphasis on developing tactical and substrategic nuclear forces for coercion and possible use in a future Taiwan crisis.
Russia’s explicit and implicit nuclear posturing sets a dangerous precedent of threats to coerce, in which any response may lead to uncontrolled escalation to nuclear war. In effect, Moscow has demonstrated a failure of Western deterrence below the threshold of strategic nuclear war and, at the same time, has achieved escalation dominance at the tactical nuclear level. It’s a lesson that won’t be lost on other states.
10. Opinion | A Message to the Biden Team on Ukraine: Talk Less
Friedman makes some good points. But it is not as simple as he seems to describe things. Politics is war by other means and it is fought in the information space. While "shutting up" and "letting the score speak for itself" sounds enticing I just do ont think it is practical. That said we do have to conduct very sophisticated and well orchestrated messaging.
Excerpts:
The Biden team has done so well so far with its limited goals. It should stay there.
“The war in Ukraine gave the administration an opportunity to demonstrate the U.S.’s unique assets in the world today: Its ability to forge and hold a global alliance of countries to confront an act of authoritarian aggression; and second, the capacity to wield an economic super weapon in response that only the dominance of the dollar in the global economy makes possible,” explained Nader Mousavizadeh, founder and C.E.O. of Macro Advisory Partners, a geostrategic consulting firm.
If the U.S. can continue to effectively deploy those two assets, he added, “it will vastly improve our long-term power and standing in the world and send a very powerful deterrent message to both Russia and China.”
In foreign affairs, success breeds authority and credibility, and credibility and authority breed more success. Just restoring Ukraine’s sovereignty, and frustrating Putin’s military there, would be a huge achievement with lasting dividends. Al Shaver knew what he was talking about: When you lose, say little. When you win, say less. Everyone can see the score.
Opinion | A Message to the Biden Team on Ukraine: Talk Less
Thomas L. Friedman
A Message to the Biden Team on Ukraine: Talk Less
May 3, 2022, 7:00 p.m. ET
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, left, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in Poland last week.Credit...Pool photo by Alex Brandon
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Growing up in Minnesota I was a huge fan of the local N.H.L. team at the time, the North Stars, and they had a sportscaster, Al Shaver, who gave me my first lesson in politics and military strategy. He ended his shows with this sign-off: “When you lose, say little. When you win, say less. Goodnight and good sports.”
President Biden and his team would do well to embrace Shaver’s wisdom.
Last week, in Poland, standing near the border with Ukraine, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin got my attention — and certainly Vladimir Putin’s — when he declared that America’s war aim in Ukraine is no longer just helping Ukraine restore its sovereignty, but is also to produce a “weakened” Russia.
“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” he said. “So, it has already lost a lot of military capability. And a lot of its troops, quite frankly. And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”
Please tell me that this statement was a result of a National Security Council meeting led by the president. And that they decided, after carefully weighing all the second- and third-order consequences, that it is in our interest and within our power to so badly degrade Russia’s military that it will not be able to project power again — soon? ever? not clear — and that we can do that without risking a nuclear response from a humiliated Putin.
Have no doubts: I hope that this war ends with Russia’s military sharply degraded and Putin out of power. I’d just never say so publicly if I were in leadership, because it buys you nothing and can potentially cost you a lot.
Loose lips sink ships — and they also lay the groundwork for overreach in warfare, mission creep, a disconnect between ends and means and huge unintended consequences.
There has been way too much of this from the Biden team, and the messes have required too much mopping up. For instance, a short time after Austin’s statement, a National Security Council spokesperson said, according to CNN, that the secretary’s comments reflected U.S. goals, namely “to make this invasion a strategic failure for Russia.”
Nice try — but that was a contrived cleanup effort. Forcing Russia to withdraw from Ukraine is not the same as declaring that we want to see it weakened so badly that it can never do this again anywhere — that’s an ill-defined war aim. How do you know when that is achieved? And is it an ongoing process — do we keep degrading Russia?
In March in a speech in Poland, Biden said that Putin, “a dictator, bent on rebuilding an empire, will never erase a people’s love for liberty,” and then the president added, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
In the wake of that statement, the White House contended that Biden “was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change,” but rather was making the point that Putin “cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region.”
Another cleanup word salad that just convinces me that the National Security Council didn’t have a meeting that set limits on where U.S. involvement to assist Ukraine stops and starts. Instead, people are freelancing. That’s not good.
Our goal began simple and should stay simple: Help Ukrainians fight as long as they have the will and help them negotiate when they feel the time is right — so they can restore their sovereignty and we can reaffirm the principle that no country can just devour the country next door. Freelance beyond that and we invite trouble.
How so? For starters, I don’t want America responsible for what happens in Russia if Putin is toppled. Because one of three things will most likely result:
(1) Putin is replaced by someone worse.
(2) Chaos breaks out in Russia, a country with some 6,000 nuclear warheads. As we saw in the Arab Spring, the opposite of autocracy is not always democracy — it’s often disorder.
(3) Putin is replaced by someone better. A better leader in Russia would make the whole world better. I pray for that. But for that person to have legitimacy in a post-Putin Russia, it’s vital that it does not appear that we installed him or her. That needs to be a Russian process.
If we get Door No. 1 or Door No. 2, you wouldn’t want the Russian people or the world holding America responsible for unleashing prolonged instability in Russia. Remember our fear of “loose nukes” in Russia after the fall of communism in the 1990s?
We also don’t want Putin to separate us from our allies — not all of whom would sign on for a war whose goal is not just liberating Ukraine but also ousting Putin. Without naming names, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu recently complained that some NATO allies actually “want the war to continue. They want Russia to become weaker.”
Remember: A lot of countries in the world are neutral in this war because, as much as they might sympathize with Ukrainians, they really don’t like to see America or NATO act like a bully — even toward Putin. If this is going to be a long war, and Ukraine is able to recover all or most of its territory, it is vital that this be perceived as Putin vs. the world, not Putin vs. America.
And let’s be careful not to raise Ukrainian expectations too high. Small countries that suddenly get the backing of big powers can get intoxicated. Many things have changed about Ukraine since the end of the Cold War — except one: its geography. It is still, and it will always be, a relatively small nation on Russia’s border. It is going to have to make some hard compromises before this conflict is over. Let’s not make it even harder for it by adding unrealistic goals.
At the same time, be careful about falling in love with a country you could not find on a map with 10 tries a year ago. Ukraine has a history of political corruption and thuggish oligarchs, but it was making progress toward democratic reforms before the Russian invasion. It has not become Denmark in the last three months, although, God bless them, a lot of young people there are really trying, and I want to support them.
But I saw a play in 1982 that I cannot get out of my head. Israelis fell in love with the Christian Phalangists in Lebanon, with whom they teamed up to drive Yasir Arafat’s P.L.O. out of Beirut. Together they were going to remake the Levant but overreached. This led to all kinds of unintended consequences — the Phalangist leader got assassinated; Israel got stuck in the mud in Lebanon; and a pro-Iranian Shiite militia emerged in south Lebanon to resist the Israelis. It was called “Hezbollah.” It now dominates Lebanonese politics.
The Biden team has done so well so far with its limited goals. It should stay there.
“The war in Ukraine gave the administration an opportunity to demonstrate the U.S.’s unique assets in the world today: Its ability to forge and hold a global alliance of countries to confront an act of authoritarian aggression; and second, the capacity to wield an economic super weapon in response that only the dominance of the dollar in the global economy makes possible,” explained Nader Mousavizadeh, founder and C.E.O. of Macro Advisory Partners, a geostrategic consulting firm.
If the U.S. can continue to effectively deploy those two assets, he added, “it will vastly improve our long-term power and standing in the world and send a very powerful deterrent message to both Russia and China.”
In foreign affairs, success breeds authority and credibility, and credibility and authority breed more success. Just restoring Ukraine’s sovereignty, and frustrating Putin’s military there, would be a huge achievement with lasting dividends. Al Shaver knew what he was talking about: When you lose, say little. When you win, say less. Everyone can see the score.
11. Spirit of America - Helping Ukraine Win | SOF News
Spirit of America is doing great work to help further US national security objectives by providing support to Ukraine. Thanks to John Friberg and SOF News for highlighting their great work. (truth in advertising, I am a member of the board of advisors).
Spirit of America - Helping Ukraine Win | SOF News
sof.news · by John Friberg · May 3, 2022
The editor of SOF News had the opportunity to speak with the founder and CEO of Spirit of America about the organization’s efforts to assist the Ukrainian military and people of Ukraine. Jim Hake provided an enlightening look at the work being done by Spirit of America to ensure Ukrainian solders have the proper protective gear to keep them safe on the battlefield.
Assisting Ukraine Since 2014. Spirit of America has been providing help to Ukraine since the Russian invasion of 2014 when that country invaded and then occupied Crimea and some areas in eastern Ukraine along the Russian border. That early assistance provided eight years ago consisted of equipment that would protect Ukrainian soldiers such as Individual First Aid Kits or IFAKs. Another example of assistance provided after 2014 was, in collaboration with the U.S. embassy country team, the standup of an organization to counter Russian propaganda. This included the provision of a transmitter, equipment for a radio studio, and more. The Ukrainian-run station, initially known as ‘Army FM‘, was up and running within three months. The station is still running today.
Photo: These Ukrainian soldiers had just returned from fighting in the Donbas region. They immediately loaded IFACs provided by Spirit of America onto their trucks and took them back to Donbas for their fellow soldiers on the front line. Photo by Colleen Denny, April 10, 2022.
Staff Supporting Ukraine. The number of Spirit of America employees in Ukraine and neighboring countries is minimal usually 2 to 4 people. The nature of the assistance the organization provides is the provision of material and equipment – much of the coordination done by the organization’s staff in Arlington, Virginia. After being flown to Europe, to a location outside Ukraine, the material and equipment is immediately received by the Ukrainian military and well-established Ukrainian partner organizations that have worked with Spirit of America for several years. The organization does not have staff involved in the fighting or providing training.
Photo: Body armor in Virginia being prepared for shipment to Ukraine. Photo by Lauren Pauer, Spirit of America, April 6, 2022.
Supplies Sent. As of April 27, 2022, Spirit of America has sent three fully-loaded cargo planes to Europe with protective equipment. The material is quickly transloaded onto trucks and moved into Ukraine and to the troops on the frontlines. The cost of the aircraft as well as the equipment flown to Europe is paid by donations made by Americans to Spirit of America. The equipment includes first aid kits, helmets, body armor, communications radios, and more. All equipment goes to members of the Ukrainian military as well as the Ukrainian civilians and former Ukrainian soldiers who have joined the Territorial Defense Forces. Spirit of America does not provide equipment to the International Legion of Ukraine.
“Need Driven” Operations. Spirit of America is a unique organization with an operational model different from many volunteer and humanitarian organizations. It collaborates directly with the U.S. Department of Defense to determine where it can assist. This usually involves filling ‘gaps’ where the DoD can’t satisfy a need. Many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are well established believe they know what assistance has to be provided and have an organizational structure and process set up to provide the services – something Jim Hake calls “supply driven”. Spirit of America reaches out to embassy personnel or military leaders and asks what they need – something Jim refers to as “need driven”.
A life-saving helmet provided by Spirit of America saved the life of a Ukrainian solder involved in a firefight in Mykolaiv. Photo by Colleen Denny, April 2022.
History of Spirit of America. The organization has been busy around the world for a few decades. It has been active in the Philippines, Africa, Middle East, Europe, and in many conflict zones. It first began operations in 2003 and become formally established in 2004. One of the first efforts was assisting the 1st Marine Division in Anbar Province, Iraq in 2003. Working with Marine Civil Affairs personnel Spirit of America provided schools supplies and ‘relationship building’ material to the Marines that could be distributed to the Iraqi people. It also assisted in the establishment of an Iraqi-run TV station in Anbar Province which helped counter the anti-US narrative advanced by other media outlets in the region.
Afghan Evac. The defeat of the Afghan security forces and Taliban capture of Kabul led to the non-combatant evacuation operation (NEO) at the Kabul airport in August 2021. Many Afghans flew on transport planes to US bases in the Middle East and Europe. Other countries and private volunteer organizations assisted in the evacuation of Afghans as well. Spirit of America provided assistance to Afghan refugees in Qatar, Albania, and other locations around the world.
How to Help Spirit of America? The organization does not have a need for personnel to serve as paid staff or as unpaid volunteers in Ukraine. It is tightly aligned with the Ukrainian military and partner organizations. Bringing in volunteers would disrupt those long-standing relationships. The best way to assist Spirit of America in its work is to donate money to the organization so it can purchase more life saving protective equipment and charter aircraft to send to Europe and subsequent ground transport to the Ukrainian soldiers.
“100% Promise”. A donation to Spirit of America for the Ukrainian effort goes entirely for the gear and other assistance provided to the Ukrainian military. The operations and administrative costs of Spirit of America are covered by other financial mechanisms.
Board of Advisors – a Distinguished Group. Spirit of America has a number of well-known people on its Board of Advisors, many from the SOF community. Some very recognizable names from across a wide spectrum of the defense and diplomatic community include Ambassador Rick Barton, Colonel Stu Bradin, General Phil Breedlove, Lt. General Charles Cleveland, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, General Joseph Dunford, Hon. Joseph Felter, Michele Flournoy, Maj. General Marcus Hicks, Colonel Dave Maxwell, General James Mattis, General Jack Keane, Dr. John Nagl, Admiral Eric Olson, Dr. Kori Schake, and many other notable people.
How Long? The war in Ukraine may last a long time – perhaps years. Jim Hake says that Spirit of America will continue to assist Ukraine:
“For as long as it takes. For as long as Ukraine needs help. As long as Ukraine is a friend of America.”
Jim Hake, April 27, 2022.
The Future? What is Spirt of America trying to accomplish in Ukraine? Jim says that the organization is providing material and equipment “on a scale that matters.” The people of Spirit of America want to save Ukrainian lives and help Ukraine win its war against Russia.
You can help Spirit of America achieve its goals:
**********
Top photo: Pallets of life saving equipment are loaded onto a cargo plane in the US to be sent to Ukraine. Photo by Nick Davis, freelance photographer, March 16, 2022. All photos and images provided by and used with permission of Spirit of America.
sof.news · by John Friberg · May 3, 2022
12. Walking a tightrope: Ukraine war puts Japan's energy security on thin ice
Detailed charts and data at this link.
Walking a tightrope: Ukraine war puts Japan's energy security on thin ice
As Western sanctions on Russia pile up, Tokyo weighs pulling out of Sakhalin projects
RURIKA IMAHASHI, Nikkei staff writer
MAY 4, 2022 06:00 JST
TOKYO -- Sakhalin-2, an oil and gas project in Russia's Far East, was once an expression of faith in Russia's global future. Launched at the beginning of the century, it was then the largest foreign investment deal in the Russian Federation, uniting global oil majors and Japanese conglomerates like Shell and Mitsui & Co. They brought the latest technology to what was one of the world's greatest oil and gas development challenges. On the barren volcanic island of Sakhalin, 40 km from Japan's northern coast, the project combined offshore oil platforms with Russia's first liquefied natural gas plant.
Today, however, the project has come to symbolize the end of that optimistic era. Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has spurred sanctions on Russian energy across the globe. For resource-poor Japan, which depends on the project for much-needed gas, the dilemma is particularly acute. Amid rising criticism of Russia over recent civilian killings in Ukraine, how long will Japan be able to maintain its decision to continue participating in the project? Policymakers admit staying could damage the country's international reputation.
Shell on Feb. 28 announced its intention to exit Sakhalin-2. Exxon Mobil on the following day announced that it was beginning the process to discontinue operations and exit Sakhalin-1 -- a sister project in which Japan also has a stake. As of April, the two Western oil majors were still operating the facilities, according to people with knowledge of the projects, with hurdles remaining over who will take over the interest after they leave.
Following the Western companies' announcements, Japan was thrust into the global spotlight. The Sakhalin plants have become a key test for Tokyo, which is under pressure to follow the U.S. and Europe in sacrificing energy security to partake in a principled stand against Russia. Japan imports around 90% of its energy needs, and Russia is the archipelago's fifth-biggest source of LNG.
For around a month, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida avoided clarifying the issue, saying the decision "requires a careful examination of the situation in terms of stable energy supply and security," and stressing that it is "one of the national interests that should be protected to the maximum extent possible."
The Sakhalin-2 plant, pictured in 2019, lies on Russia's volcanic island of Sakhalin, 40 km from Japan's Hokkaido. Shell plans to exit the project while Japanese participants intend to remain. © Sakhalin Energy/Jiji
Japan's caution contrasts with the approach taken by many Western European countries, also uniquely dependent on Russian hydrocarbons but apparently more willing to sacrifice them in an effort to punish Russia's aggression. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, for example, suspended the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project with Russia on Feb. 22, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Germany has since announced bold plans to import liquefied natural gas and expand renewable energy.
In the meantime, Kishida has tried to keep up with the West on other sanctions. So far, Japan has blocked Russian banks from the SWIFT global payment system and frozen assets held by Russia's central bank, as well as assets of Russian officials, Putin's two daughters, and oligarchs held in Japan. It also has halted imports of Russian vodka and exports of luxury cars and goods.
"The Japan-Russia relationship has turned into a deep freeze now as Kishida has ended [former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo] Abe's approach toward Russia, moving swiftly with tough economic sanctions against Russia," said David Boling, director for Japan and Asian Trade at Eurasia Group. "Russia probably didn't expect its relations with Japan to change so dramatically, so quickly," he added.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on March 31 announced that Japan will not be pulling out of Russian energy projects, after delaying the decision for weeks. (Photo by Uichiro Kasai)
But during a Diet session on March 31, Kishida for the first time publicly declared Japan's decision not to leave energy projects in Russia. "The [Sakhalin-2] project, in which Japan has an interest, is extremely important from an energy security perspective, as it contributes to the stable supply of long-term, low-cost liquefied natural gas," Kishida said.
Diverging futures
Japan's stake in Sakhalin is a legacy of optimism about Russia in Japan: "Vladimir, you and I are looking at the same future," former Prime Minister Abe told President Putin in 2019, during the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Russia.
Under Abe's administration, which lasted seven years and eight months, through September 2020, Japan held to a very active engagement policy toward Russia.
During his two stints as Prime Minister (2006-07 and 2012-20), Abe held a total of 27 summits with Putin. "Japan is a partner in which you can place trust," he told his counterpart in Vladivostok in 2019. "I would repeat that the only way you treat Japan is to have faith in us."
Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Vladivostok, Russia, on September 5, 2019. © Kremlin/Reuters
Geographically, the countries are so close that Russia is visible from Japan's northern Hokkaido coast. It only takes an hour to fly from Hokkaido to Russia's Sakhalin, and two hours to Vladivostok.
But the status of the Northern Territories, a group of islands seized by the Soviet Union in 1945 that Japan still claims, has long been a sticking point. Russia has for many years used the islands as bait to coax economic cooperation out of Japan. Abe's ultimate aim was a peace treaty with Russia.
For Russia, developing ties with neighbor Japan was part of its "great pivot to the East" policy, through which Russia hopes to cultivate a rapport with rapidly growing Asia-Pacific countries and accelerate the economic development of its Far East and Siberia.
Putin wrote in an article in 2012 that further development of these areas will "enable our country to become more involved in the dynamic integration processes in the 'new Asia.'"
A key sector for the countries' relationship has been energy. Abe in 2016 formulated an eight-point plan to promote economic cooperation between Tokyo and Moscow. It emphasizes cooperation in the development of oil, gas and other energy sources.
The Sinchi power plant, Fukushima Prefecture. Many of Japan's thermal plants are outdated. (Photo by Kai Fujii)
Until Russia invaded Ukraine in February, energy sector ties between the countries had been solid. As a result of the relationship, several projects took shape, including the Sakhalin-1 and Sakhalin-2 ventures.
The final investment decision for Russia and Japan's most recent joint venture, the Arctic LNG 2 project, came in 2019, from Japanese trading house Mitsui & Co. and from state-affiliated Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corp. The project, expected to commence production in 2023, has a capacity of 19.8 million tons of LNG per year.
Ken Koyama, senior managing director of the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan (IEEJ), said Japan Inc. has tried to overcome its energy vulnerability and secure stable energy supplies by having a direct stake in overseas energy projects. "These [projects] are a handful of success stories of such attempts," Koyama said.
The joint energy projects had been thought a win-win. Russia could draw foreign direct investment into the Far East and promote the frontier's economy and infrastructure. Japan, meanwhile, could secure an energy source close by while diversifying risk away from the Middle East, on which Japan depends for around 90% of its oil imports.
Uniquely dependent
Japan has been struggling to change its fossil fuel-reliant energy mix and dependence on old thermal power plants, especially since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdowns. Due to safety concerns, the country's 36 nuclear reactors that were either operable or under construction were shut down following the disaster, and over half remain mothballed.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on March 11, 2022. The plant suffered three meltdowns exactly 11 years earlier. Only 10 of Japan's 36 operable reactors have gone back online since the disaster. (Photo by Konosuke Urata)
Japan hopes to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, but being a seismically active archipelago limits its energy options. In 2020, fossil fuels made up more than 75% of Japan's energy mix, with 19.8% coming from renewables and 3.9% from reactors.
The country's energy self-sufficiency of 11% is the lowest in the Group of Seven. Japan depends on imports for 99.7% of its oil, 97.8% of its gas and 99.6% of its coal. These percentages have hardly changed for decades.
Currently, Russia accounts for 4% of Japan's oil imports, 9% of its natural gas purchases and 11% of its coal imports. For a country that imports almost 90% of its total energy needs, these figures matter.
There are four Russian energy projects in which the Japanese government or Japanese companies have a stake. In the Sakhalin-1 oil project, Japan's Sakhalin Oil and Gas Development Co. (Sodeco) has a 30% stake.
Sodeco is a consortium formed by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Japanese trading houses Itochu and Marubeni, Inpex, and state-backed oil producer Japan Petroleum Exploration (Japex). Japan receives around 12% of the oil produced from Sakhalin-1 and relies on the project for 1% of its oil imports.
In Sakhalin-2, Japan's Mitsui has a 12.5% stake and Mitsubishi Corp. has a 10% stake. Japan receives approximately 60% of the gas Sakhalin-2 produces and relies on the project for around 10% of its LNG imports.
On top of the Sakhalin projects, Japan Arctic LNG, jointly owned by Mitsui and Jogmec, has a 10% stake in the Arctic LNG 2 project, located in the arctic terrain of the Gydan Peninsula on Russia's Siberian coast.
Furthermore, Japan South Sakha Oil Co. has a 49% stake in an oil project located in Irkutsk Oblast, Eastern Siberia. The remaining stake is held by Irkutsk Oil Co., one of Russia's largest independent oil companies.
Proximity counts
Kishida's announcement that Japan would not be boycotting Russian fuel came as rising energy prices and power shortages were becoming increasingly imminent threats.
Ten days before Kishida's Diet speech, Japan's government issued a power crunch alert for the Tokyo metropolitan area; electricity capacity had been undermined by a strong earthquake in mid-March. With some thermal power plants in the area remaining off the grid, the government and the power company could only ask people not to turn on heaters and otherwise lighten their electricity use.
Greater Tokyo was put under a power alert in late March after a strong earthquake hit the country's northeast coast a few days earlier. Some metro areas experienced a blackout. (Photo by Konosuke Urata)
Besides power supply concerns, business lobbies have also been calling for Japan to remain in the Russian projects.
Masakazu Tokura, chairman of the Japan Business Federation, or Keidanren, on March 7 warned that LNG procurement costs could quadruple or quintuple if Japan was to procure LNG in the spot market. All major Japanese trading houses are members of the lobby. Tokura later welcomed Kishida's decision on March 31, saying it "makes sense" and that it is "not a realistic judgment to stop energy imports from Russia at the moment."
Yuriy Humber, president of Yuri Group, a research and consulting company, said that if Japan exits the Russian projects and relinquishes existing long-term LNG supply contracts, that would force the country to procure LNG from the outside spot market, sending global LNG prices soaring. This could serve a blow to developing countries. "Japanese companies staying in these energy investments is a general benefit, not just for Japan, for the global energy markets," Humber said.
For Japan, LNG from Sakhalin is linked to oil prices and is cheaper than on the gas spot market, which is subject to huge fluctuations. Fluctuations are less likely to roil the oil market, which has more supply and demand than the LNG market.
Proximity also counts. Tankers from Sakhalin arrive in Japan in just a couple of days. From the Middle East, the voyage is two weeks. From the U.S., it's four.
Among the companies most exposed to Russian energy is Hiroshima Gas, a utility in Hiroshima Prefecture, Kishida's political base. The company procures half of the LNG from Sakhalin-2. President Kensuke Matsufuji in early April told reporters the utility will keep procuring LNG from Sakhalin "in terms of energy security."
The mood among Japan's public is mixed. In the latest Nikkei opinion poll, 78% of respondents said they favor reducing the nation's reliance on Russian energy, even if that means shouldering higher energy prices. Only 14% said Japan should not cut energy imports from Russia.
A female Tokyoite in her 20s who did not want to be named admitted it is a "difficult issue to make a conclusion on," given the potential impact on companies' reputations. "Unlike Uniqlo and other consumer businesses, I doubt customers of trading houses would stop deals with [Japanese companies invested in the projects] just because they stay in Sakhalin," she added.
The China card
Japan's business community and its political leadership share another big concern: If Japan exits Russia's energy projects, will China fill the gap?
"If these economic sanctions ... do not work and don't lead to any pain [for Russia] because some other country swoops in to grab everything we left on the table through our withdrawal, then the measures become quite pointless," a government official told Nikkei Asia.
An industry source said that if Japan leaves Sakhalin-2, any third party taking over the interest could sell LNG in the spot market at a high price, which would lead to a rise in the revenue of stakeholders, including Russian companies.
Akio Mimura, chairman of the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, echoed these concerns. He said that if Japan leaves the projects Russia's LNG "will probably go to China. It won't bother Russia, but Japanese users will be in trouble."
Mimura's fears are not unfounded. In late April, The Telegraph reported that Shell was in talks with Chinese companies to sell its stake in a major Russian gas project. Shell declined Nikkei's request for comments on the matter.
Japan has bitter memories from 2010, when it divested from Iran's Azadegan oil field, one of the world's largest reserves, in which top Japanese oil and gas explorer Inpex in 2004 acquired a 75% stake.
Japan ultimately exited the project amid a deepening conflict between Iran and the West, which involved U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil. Japan initially sold its stake to the National Iranian Oil Co., but the rights were ultimately purchased by the China National Petroleum Corp.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi pose for photos in Tunxi, eastern China's Anhui Province, on March 30, 2022. Yi reportedly talked of determination to strengthen bilateral ties. © Xinhua/AP
Japan's fear is that if it leaves the Russian projects, the new stakeholders, potentially China, might refuse to sell energy to Japanese buyers, instead prioritizing domestic buyers when they renew the contract.
Kaho Yu, senior Asia analyst at risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft, told Nikkei that importing Russian gas is part of Beijing's long-term strategy to diversify sources and boost energy security.
"With more imports from Russia, China will be in a better position to bargain with other major suppliers such as the U.S., Australia, Qatar and Central Asia," Kaho said, adding that Russia's increasing export reliance on China will also allow Beijing to shift its energy cooperation with Moscow in its favor.
Sanctions and growing criticism from the West have already brought Russia closer to China. In late March, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, that Moscow and Beijing "are more determined to develop bilateral ties."
On April 6, while the West condemned Russia for alleged civilian killings in Bucha, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian said the reports of civilian deaths "are deeply disturbing," avoiding directly criticizing Russia's actions.
A Ukrainian serviceman stands amid destroyed Russian tanks in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on April 6, 2022. China has not directly condemned Russia's alleged attacks on civilians in Ukraine. © AP
But experts say China's moves to take over the Russian projects are not risk-free, as they would bring Beijing under the spotlight of the U.S. and European Union authorities, putting it at risk of facing secondary sanctions from the West. For Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is jockeying to secure a third term at a National Congress later this year, such attention would be unwelcome.
"China will think about diplomacy and economy separately," said Ichiro Korogi, an expert in Chinese politics at Japan's Kanda University of International Studies. "The [Chinese] Communist Party can exist solely due to the presence of a good economy. Beijing will make a decision based on a calm assessment of gain and loss."
Rethinking the once unthinkable
As the war in Ukraine rages on, the West is tightening its sanctions on Russia. A ban on Russian coal imports by many Western countries is proof that the international community's stance is changing and the energy sector is no longer immune to becoming a sanction target. Recent media reports say the EU is also preparing sanctions against Russian oil imports.
Nobumasa Akiyama, an energy security expert and professor at Tokyo's Hitotsubashi University, told Nikkei that international pressure on Japan is likely to increase if the West steps to completely divest from Russian energy. That would make it difficult for Kishida to maintain his current position on Russian energy imports.
On March 3, Tadashi Maeda, governor of the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, said the government-owned lender has no choice but to review businesses with Russian partners. "There is no way we will continue to run businesses in the same way as before," Maeda said, referring to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "Japan cannot act as if nothing happened because of its own energy situation."
JBIC in December had announced a plan to finance the Arctic LNG 2 project.
For Japan, finding alternatives to Russian energy is becoming increasingly difficult. A government official told Nikkei that long-term LNG contracts are sold out globally, except for contracts for 2026 or later, as the world scrambles for non-Russian LNG.
One potential alternative to Russian hydrocarbons, restarting nuclear reactors, is becoming a hot topic.
The surging cost of living may have nudged some to change their views on nuclear power. In a Nikkei survey from March, 53% of respondents answered that Japan should accelerate the restarting of nuclear power plants, while 38% said it should not, marking the first time since 2011 that the majority favored a return to nuclear power. In a September poll, 44% supported accelerating the process, while 46% were against doing so.
Business lobbies are also calling for more reactors to come back online. Tokura of Keidanren on March 22 told reporters it is high time for Japan to seriously think about utilizing existing nuclear power plants.
But Koichi Nakano, a professor of political science at Japan's Sophia University, said it will require careful examination to determine whether the change in public opinion toward reactors is sustainable.
Kishida's ruling Liberal Democratic Party will face an upper house election in July. "Having the election focus on nuclear power is risky," Nakano said, "and he does not want to make it a campaign issue."
Some experts say the Ukraine war has revealed a new threat to nuclear energy. Shortly after invading Ukraine in February, Russian forces took over the site of Chernobyl, the now-shutdown power plant that was home to the worst nuclear disaster in history, in 1986.
"At least so far ... there is no sort of a gentlemen's agreement that nuclear facilities could be immune from military attacks," said Koichiro Tanaka, a professor at Keio University in Tokyo.
Ukrainian servicemen patrol the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, on April 5, 2022. Chernobyl is now back under Ukrainian control after Russian forces took over in late February. © AP
Japan's already high reliance on the Middle East for fossil fuel is a source of vulnerability, too. Nearly 90% of the oil that Japan imports comes from the Middle East. Any disruptions to the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz or Strait of Malacca would devastate the country's economy and security.
"It is also extremely important to promote the maximum introduction of renewable energy and the use of nuclear power to diversify energy sources, in order to stabilize the energy market and ensure a stable and low-cost energy supply," Kishida told reporters on April 26.
For now, renewable energy is a double-edged sword that could propel Japan's energy sufficiency but may also destabilize the energy supply. As renewable energy is subject to weather conditions, it can be difficult to balance supply and demand.
Kishida's government aims to make fossil fuels account for around 41% of the country's energy mix by 2030. Nuclear power would account for 20% to 22%, while renewable energy would make up 36% to 38%.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's plan is for renewables to account for around 37% of Japan's energy mix by 2030. Experts say the target is too ambitious. (Photo by Shinya Sawai)
In 2020, nuclear power accounted for 3.9% of Japan's energy mix, and renewables 19.8%. The goal is "unrealistic" given Japan's current high reliance on fossil fuels, said Sophia University's Nakano.
As part of the government's push for renewables, Kishida aims to pour 2 trillion yen ($15.4 billion) into developing a high-capacity power grid system that would enable sending renewable energy to urban areas.
However, renewables face a long road ahead before they become a major power source in Japan. Koyama at the IEEJ pointed out that fossil fuels will continue to play a significant role in electricity generation for a long time before society completely shifts to renewable sources. "The stable fossil fuel market is of great importance," he said. "It is essential that countries keep investing in fossil fuels."
In the meantime, barrels of oil from Russia are coming under increasing scrutiny; they're also being labeled as blood energy. "We don't understand how you can make money out of blood," said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a recent interview with BBC.
"These controversial issues, along with the very real challenge of balancing Japan's energy requirements here on the ground," Keio University's Tanaka said, "will be a major task for the Kishida government, or any government in the future."
13. Nuclear deterrence must work in both directions, not just against the West
Excerpts:
The West no longer can afford to allow the aggressive nuclear powers to threaten nuclear Armageddon and leave the burden of restraint entirely on Western shoulders. When NATO members assumed their Article 5 obligations to each other, they accepted that the United States, United Kingdom and France would be providing a nuclear umbrella to non-nuclear NATO states — just as Washington offers extended nuclear deterrence to its other non-nuclear allies in Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines and Thailand.
It’s bad enough that nuclear warfare hangs like the Sword of Damocles over civilization; it should not also be allowed to serve as a protective shield for aggressive nuclear powers to pursue their evil ends.
Biden should declare three “red lines” of his own: (1) no use of nuclear weapons, (2) no use of chemical or biological weapons, and (3) immediate safe passage to Ukrainian lines for all civilians and soldiers trapped in Mariupol. If either of the first two occurs or if the third does not, the U.S. will remove its self-imposed restraints in Ukraine and push NATO for immediate Ukraine membership.
Nuclear deterrence must work in both directions, not just against the West
BY JOSEPH BOSCO, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 05/03/22 10:00 AM ET
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
Talk of nuclear weapons and their use has significantly ramped up since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his all-out invasion of Ukraine. Putin himself began the latest rhetorical escalation, even before sending his forces across the Ukrainian border for the third time in eight years, saying that any outside country that interfered in the war would face “consequences that they have never seen in their history.”
He enhanced the credibility of his threat with overt action, putting his nuclear forces on alert, while warning the U.S. and NATO countries not to come to Ukraine’s defense. President Biden took the threats seriously. When asked by reporters whether the United States would directly intervene, with a no-fly zone or otherwise, to help Ukraine, he declared emphatically that it would not, since “that’s called World War III.” Washington would not even support Poland’s offer to send MiGs to Ukraine.
Putin made further nuclear references as the United States and other NATO countries flowed defensive arms into Ukraine. As a former communist power, Putin’s Russia is following a well-honed practice of other nuclear-armed communist states to enhance their positions in times of stress and to achieve strategic objectives.
The paradigm Cold War case was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and his predecessors had failed repeatedly to get Washington to withdraw NATO missiles deployed in Turkey and Italy. The Soviets also objected strongly when President Kennedy tried to overthrow Cuba’s communist dictator Fidel Castro in the CIA’s botched Bay of Pigs operation in 1961.
Moscow then stationed nuclear-capable missiles on the Caribbean island 90 miles off U.S. shores. Kennedy threatened retaliation against the Soviet Union if those weapons were ever used against the U.S. and imposed a naval blockade (a “quarantine”) around Cuba.
As the world came closer than it ever had to all-out nuclear war, the crisis ended not quite the way U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk described it: “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and the other guy just blinked.” In fact, both sides blinked: The Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba in exchange for the withdrawal of NATO’s weapons in Turkey and Italy. In addition, Washington gave an unprecedented security guarantee to the Castro regime.
The frightening episode taught the world, particularly the five nuclear powers at the time — the U.S., the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union (later Russia) and China — that, as President Reagan later put it, “a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.”
But two of the nuclear powers, the Soviet Union and China, later joined by North Korea, learned a second lesson: The threat to use nuclear weapons can be a useful safeguard against retaliation for conventional aggression, as well as a source of leverage to seek otherwise unattainable strategic advantages.
Putin’s “no-limits strategic partner,” the People’s Republic of China, is well-steeped in wielding nuclear threats for those purposes. When Washington sent a carrier battle group through the Taiwan Strait after China fired missiles toward Taiwan in 1995, a leading Chinese general warned the United States, “You care more about Los Angeles than Taiwan.”
The chilling impact of the threat was felt a few months later, first when Chinese officials asked their U.S. counterparts how Washington would react if China attacked Taiwan. The U.S. response was, “We don’t know, and you don’t know; it would depend on the circumstances.” There was no firm declaration that America would defend Taiwan and no mention of the legal or moral commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act and other documents governing the U.S.-China-Taiwan relationships.
The second effect of Beijing’s nuclear warning occurred when Taiwan held its first direct presidential election and China again fired missiles across the Taiwan Strait. But as two U.S. carriers steamed toward the Strait, China’s warning of “a sea of fire” turned the ships away. A Clinton administration official called it “our own Cuban Missile Crisis; we had stared into the abyss.” In 2005, China’s nuclear threat against a U.S. defense of Taiwan was expanded to target “hundreds of U.S. cities.”
China has not limited its nuclear threats to the United States. When Japan began to acknowledge publicly in 2021 that its own national security is linked to Taiwan’s and that it has an interest in helping to protect it, the People’s Liberation Army circulated an article warning Tokyo in no uncertain terms of the dire consequences. “We will use nuclear bombs first. We will use nuclear bombs continuously …[w]hen we liberate Taiwan, if Japan dares to intervene by force.”
The other communist state that learned the benefits of nuclear coercion is North Korea, whose nuclear program was facilitated by both Soviet and Chinese technology. Its provocative missile and weapons testing, and its fiery rhetoric threatening apocalyptic consequences for countries standing in its way, proved a highly useful distraction of international attention from the expansionist courses that Russia and China have pursued over the past few decades.
The psychology of nuclear deterrence has shifted significantly as Russia, China and North Korea brandish their nuclear weapons and willingness to use them while the West’s nuclear powers caution restraint and responsibility. French President Emmanuel Macron even counseled caution on collective Western economic cooperation against China because it could lead to the “highest possible” level of conflict. To avoid that risk, he told the European Parliament on Jan. 19, the European Union should avoid aligning with the United States and instead should play the role of a “balancing power.”
The West no longer can afford to allow the aggressive nuclear powers to threaten nuclear Armageddon and leave the burden of restraint entirely on Western shoulders. When NATO members assumed their Article 5 obligations to each other, they accepted that the United States, United Kingdom and France would be providing a nuclear umbrella to non-nuclear NATO states — just as Washington offers extended nuclear deterrence to its other non-nuclear allies in Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines and Thailand.
It’s bad enough that nuclear warfare hangs like the Sword of Damocles over civilization; it should not also be allowed to serve as a protective shield for aggressive nuclear powers to pursue their evil ends.
Biden should declare three “red lines” of his own: (1) no use of nuclear weapons, (2) no use of chemical or biological weapons, and (3) immediate safe passage to Ukrainian lines for all civilians and soldiers trapped in Mariupol. If either of the first two occurs or if the third does not, the U.S. will remove its self-imposed restraints in Ukraine and push NATO for immediate Ukraine membership.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.
14. Blinken to unveil 'no surprises' China strategy pre-Asia push
Ugh.. "Trump plus?"
Rather than base strategy on personalities lets base it on sound assumptions, a realistic risk assessment, and coherency among ends, ways, and means. I would hope there would be overlap among administrations if our national security professionals are doing their jobs and I would hope we would not throw out ways and means just because they were part of a previous administration. Let's not assess and judge a strategy based on those who are responsible for it but on how it protects our national interests vis a vis our competitors and adversaries.
Blinken to unveil 'no surprises' China strategy pre-Asia push
Biden strategy is “Trump-plus, with sophistication,” one expert said.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken will underscore the administration’s existing policy toward China modeled on that inherited from the Trump administration, according to multiple sources. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
05/02/2022 04:51 PM EDT
Secretary of State Antony Blinken will reveal within days a summary of President Joe Biden’s long-delayed strategy “to win the 21st Century” against a rising China.
But don’t expect anything bold.
Multiple sources say that Blinken will underscore the administration’s existing policy toward China modeled on that inherited from the Trump administration. The speech will render a topline overview of the strategy rather than details on its mechanics, which along with the complete text of the document itself won’t be made public.
But the speech will provide needed clarity to government agencies, foreign governments and the ruling Chinese Communist Party that the administration’s China-focused policy and regulatory moves align with a cohesive blueprint — with specific foreign policy objectives.
The administration’s challenge is to ensure buy-in for the strategy — which hinges on building and reinforcing alliances and partnerships in Asia and beyond — to counter U.S. perceptions of China’s growing diplomatic, economic and military influence undermining Biden’s conception of a “rules-based international order.”
“I don’t think that you’re going to hear anything in the Tony Blinken speech that hasn’t been said before and I don’t think that the goal is to come out and say something different because we have observed what the administration has done over the last 15 months,” said Bonnie Glaser, Asia program director at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. “I think the main emphasis is how we’re going to do this alongside our partners … and how we’re going to integrate our economic statecraft and technological capabilities with our diplomatic and military-slash-defense toolboxes to advance a set of objectives vis-à-vis China.”
The China strategy is the lynchpin of a growing portfolio of administration policy documents that frame the terms of U.S. relations with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ruling Chinese Communist Party. One of the key premises of those documents, articulated in the Indo-Pacific Strategy released in February is that the U.S. seeks “not to change the PRC but to shape the strategic environment in which it operates, building a balance of influence in the world that is maximally favorable to the United States, our allies and partners, and the interests and values we share.”
A pending third document, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, which Biden announced in October, will form the regional economic plank of the administration’s efforts to counter China through trade, “supply chain resiliency” and other measures. The administration will likely release a more detailed blueprint of the framework prior to the May 12-13 U.S.-ASEAN Summit to boost regional buy-in for the plan.
“The China Strategy is basically ‘Trump-plus with sophistication’ but with partners and allies,” said a China expert familiar with the strategy’s contents who asked for anonymity in order to speak freely. The expert expressed concern that the strategy “has been sitting on Biden’s desk since November” although Blinken described the bilateral relationship in January 2020 as “arguably the most important … that we have in the world.”
Blinken’s distillation of Biden’s approach to China will notably exclude the concept of “engagement” pursued by multiple administrations since President Richard Nixon’s pioneering diplomatic outreach to Beijing in 1972. “Our relationship with China will be competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be,” Blinken said in March 2021.
Biden outlined his overarching vision in his first speech to Congress a year ago. “We’re in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century,” he said to a standing ovation.
The China strategy’s delayed release has fueled perceptions that the Biden administration’s China policy is rudderless without a clearly enunciated policy document.
“I can give you 100 reasons why it should have been out a year ago,” Glaser said. ”I understand why people believe that there isn’t a China strategy and so I think it’s just important to get it out there and I wish that they could release some part of it publicly and not just have a speech, but my understanding is that they’ve opted not to do that.”
GOP lawmakers are also impatient for the strategy’s details.
“I’m eager to know if the Biden administration’s new China strategy will codify ‘cooperation’ with the CCP on issues such as climate and health, which the president recommended in his interim National Security Strategy,” said Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas). “There’s no evidence that the CCP is willing or capable of cooperation, and this self-delusion undermines our national security and hinders progress towards a truly competitive strategy that treats the CCP like the adversary it is.”
A national security expert briefed on the strategy’s contents on the basis of confidentiality confirmed that Blinken’s upcoming speech contains no bombshells.
“The strategy document contains no surprises or serious deviations from Blinken’s previous comments on U.S.-China relations … [and] has, from the White House’s perspective, already been road-tested and ‘blessed’ by the inter-Agency,” the expert told POLITICO. “No one will refer to it as ‘bold,’ that is for sure [and] it leans heavy on emphasizing values [of] democracy vs. autocracy and much less on promoting American interests, such as establishing a robust trade regime to undercut China’s geo-economic power.”
The U.S. business community also wants a China strategy that will address the key underlying problems in the worsening bilateral trade relationship. “The [Biden] trade agenda is ‘competing where we should’ and we are not doing that — we are not talking with the Chinese about fair competition in their own market,” said Craig Allen, U.S.-China Business Council president. “We really do need a strategy that suggests positive alternatives to perpetual confrontation and antagonism. … We have just a real poverty in the dialogue between the two sides and somebody needs to breathe some life into that.”
Beijing is pessimistic about improving bilateral ties if the China strategy maintains current policy. “The US is going to great lengths to engage in intense, zero-sum competition with China, it keeps provoking China on issues concerning our core interests, and it is taking a string of actions to piece together small blocs to suppress China,” said Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington. “We must replace the ‘competitive-collaborative-adversarial’ trichotomy with the three principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation … to put China-US relations back on the right path of healthy and stable development.”
Observers agree that’s unlikely.
“I think [China has] concluded that the United States is implacably hostile toward China and seeks to contain its rise. … If the United States said something that was positive about wanting to engage China and cooperate with China, they would simply conclude that they didn’t believe it,” Glaser said. “There’s very little hope that this speech is going to change anything in the U.S.-China relationship, but that’s not the purpose of the speech.”
15. Ukraine says it is 'ready' if Belarus joins Russian war effort
It would surely create a dilemma if Belarus attacked from the north while the focus is in the east of Ukraine. Ukraine is correct to anticipate this.
Ukraine says it is 'ready' if Belarus joins Russian war effort
KYIV, May 4 (Reuters) - Kyiv will be ready if Belarus's armed forces join Russia's war effort in Ukraine, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian State Border Service said on Wednesday.
Belarus, a close ally of Russia, said its military had begun large-scale drills on Wednesday to test their combat readiness and that they posed no threat to its neighbours. read more
"We do not rule out that the Russian Federation could at some point use the territory of Belarus, the Armed Forces of the Republic of Belarus, against Ukraine," said Andriy Demchenko, spokesperson for Ukraine's State Border Service.
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"Therefore, we are ready," he said, adding that the border with Belarus had been strengthened since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. read more
Russia launched the invasion after holding joint drills with Belarus which had allowed it to move more forces closer to the border with Ukraine.
Areas of Ukraine adjacent to Belarus came under Russian assault in the initial stage of the invasion but Russian attacks are now focused on Ukraine's eastern and southeastern regions.
Demchenko said Ukraine had also reinforced its border with the Russia-backed region of Transdniestria, where tensions have been rising since local authorities said it was subject to a series of attacks. read more
Ukrainian officials have expressed concern about the situation in Transdniestria, and condemned what it said were Russian attempts to drag the region into Russia's war against Ukraine. Moscow has also voiced concern and said it is following events in Transdniestria closely.
Kent Logsdon, the U.S. ambassador to Moldova, said on Wednesday Russia's invasion of Ukraine and what he described as its attempts to redraw the map of Europe at gunpoint were a cause of great concern around the world.
But he told a conference in Moldova that Washington had no evidence that Moscow wanted to extend the war to Moldova and said Russian President Vladimir Putin would lose the war, Moldovan media reported.
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Reporting by Natalia Zinets, additional reporting by Alexander Tanas in Chisinau, Editing by Timothy Heritage
16. Iran’s rulers demanding too much even for Biden
Excerpts:
What happens next? The logic by which Iran’s rulers make their decisions is difficult to fathom.
As for Mr. Biden, he could go wobbly. But it’s also possible he’ll decide to consider other means to prevent the Islamic Republic from becoming a nuclear-armed terrorist sponsor. If so, Israel and its Arab allies (now there’s a phrase I never expected to write) will be pleased to offer suggestions.
Iran’s rulers demanding too much even for Biden
OPINION:
For months, the smart money has been betting that a nuclear deal between President Biden and Iran’s rulers was a sure thing.
Mr. Biden had promised that any new agreement that would be “longer and stronger” than the deal President Obama concluded in 2015 and from which President Trump withdrew in 2018. But Iran’s rulers refused to go along.
They demanded concession after concession, knowing that Mr. Biden’s envoys would claim they’d prevented the Islamic Republic from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability — even if that claim was in stark contrast with reality.
If Iran’s rulers kept their end of the bargain — unlikely if history is any guide — the doors of the nuclear weapons club would still open to them soon enough. The deal would be an echo of the Agreed Framework of 1994 which then-President Clinton proudly proclaimed would prevent North Korea from becoming nuclear-armed.
Now for the good news: Tehran’s most recent demand has brought the negotiations to a screeching halt.
The clerical regime is insisting the U.S. lift its designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Mr. Biden has not capitulated.
Perhaps that’s because he knows that more than 600 Americans have been killed by weapons that, according to a U.S. Army study, were developed under IRGC auspices specifically to kill Americans, smuggled into Iraq, and given to Shiite militias whom the IRGC trained in their use.
He certainly knows that the IRGC is responsible for attacks against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Syria, and Lebanon and that it supports Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthis.
Most of those pushing for a weaker and shorter version of President Barack Obama’s deal don’t dispute that the IRGC is a terrorist organization. But they argue that the designation is merely “symbolic” and therefore unimportant. This should surprise the State Department which maintains an FTO list of over 70 terrorist groups, including al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The Obama administration added 25 organizations to the list.
Last week, a delegation of Gold Star families, relatives of American military personnel killed or wounded by Iranian weapons, came to Washington to urge Mr. Biden not to remove the FTO designation.
The visit follows up on a letter sent recently to Mr. Biden by over 900 wounded veterans and Gold Star family members opposing the lifting of the IRGC’s terrorist designation.
A letter sent earlier this year by more than a thousand vets and family members urged Mr. Biden not to release billions of dollars in frozen Iranian funds. That money should be used to compensate parents and spouses of those killed or wounded by the Islamic Republic and its agents. If transferred to Tehran’s rulers, the money will instead underwrite more terrorism and aggression.
As this controversy plays out, the IRGC is not laying low. On Saturday, the Israeli Prime Minister’s office released a statement saying: “In recent months, attempts made by the Iranian regime to assassinate a U.S. General in Germany, a journalist in France and an Israeli diplomat in Turkey were foiled … These terror attacks were ordered, approved and funded by the senior leadership of the Iranian regime and were intended to be executed by the IRGC.”
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has acknowledged that Tehran poses “an ongoing threat against American officials present and past.”
During a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing earlier in the week, Sen. Ted Cruz asked Mr. Blinken: “Is it true that American negotiators made specific requests for a commitment that the IRGC will stop trying to murder former American officials and is it true that they said no?”
He added: “If they are actively refusing, saying, ‘No, we’re going to keep trying to murder your former secretary of state,’ the idea that our negotiators are sitting in Vienna saying, ‘Okay, that’s great, so how many more billions can we give you?’ – that doesn’t make any sense.”
Unmentioned was the fact that Iran’s theocrats, in addition to targeting former and current U.S. government officials, have threatened several Iran experts at think tanks, including the one where I hang my hat.
Those with longer memories will recall that, in 2011, the FBI foiled a plot to bomb Cafe Milano, a posh Georgetown restaurant, while Adel al-Jubeir, then the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., was taking his supper. Diners at tables near him would have been collateral damage.
That plot, along with many others, is believed to have been orchestrated by Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force whose specialty is running terrorist and paramilitary operations around the world. President Obama vowed serious consequences but never delivered them.
In January 2020, however, Soleimani was the target of an airstrike in Baghdad ordered by President Donald Trump, who explained in a tweet that the general had “killed or badly wounded thousands of Americans over an extended period of time and was plotting to kill many more.” Iran’s rulers pledged “severe revenge.” Subsequent attacks on Americans in Iraq and elsewhere appear not to have satisfied that desire.
Several Democrats have now joined Republicans in opposing the lifting of the FTO designation. Sen. Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Fox News on Sunday: “I want the administration to understand that no deal is better than a bad deal.”
What happens next? The logic by which Iran’s rulers make their decisions is difficult to fathom.
As for Mr. Biden, he could go wobbly. But it’s also possible he’ll decide to consider other means to prevent the Islamic Republic from becoming a nuclear-armed terrorist sponsor. If so, Israel and its Arab allies (now there’s a phrase I never expected to write) will be pleased to offer suggestions.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times.
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17. FDD | State Department Report Glosses Over Assad’s Narco-Trafficking Wealth
Conclusion:
If the White House wants to show it recognizes the gravity of the situation, it should pledge to produce a strategy of its own this year rather than waiting for Congress to work through the annual authorization cycle. Violence from the captagon trade is now spilling over Syria’s southern border into Jordan, a key U.S. ally, as well as enriching Hezbollah. The drug does not just bankroll the Damascus regime’s atrocities; it is a transnational security threat the Biden administration cannot afford to ignore.
FDD | State Department Report Glosses Over Assad’s Narco-Trafficking Wealth
fdd.org · by David Adesnik Senior Fellow and Director of Research · May 3, 2022
In a congressionally mandated report issued last week, the State Department made a single passing reference to drug trafficking as a source of wealth for the family of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. The report’s errors and omissions reflect the Biden administration’s lack of interest in the robust enforcement of sanctions on the Assad regime, especially those authorized by the bipartisan Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019.
Since taking office, the Biden administration has sanctioned only two sets of Syrian regime targets, none of them economically significant. In contrast, the previous administration issued new sets of designations each month for seven consecutive months after the law went into effect in June 2020. Congress made the application of Caesar Act sanctions mandatory, so the slow pace of designations suggests the Biden administration is refusing to shoulder its legal responsibilities.
To spur the Biden administration’s enforcement of the Caesar Act and related sanctions, Congress included a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for the current fiscal year that requires the secretary of state to submit a public report “on the estimated net worth and known sources of income of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his family members.” The provision specified that the report should address income “from corrupt or illicit activities.”
Yet rather than using this as an opportunity to reinvigorate the enforcement of sanctions against the Assad regime and its financiers, the Biden administration downplayed the problem by issuing a report that barely covers the information available in the public domain. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the report’s cursory treatment of narcotics production and trafficking networks in Syria and Lebanon, whose growth has been explosive.
News media have reported widely on the direct involvement of senior Assad regime figures in the trafficking of captagon, an amphetamine, especially after Italian authorities confiscated 84 million pills in a single bust in July 2020. A New York Times investigation found that “much of the production and distribution is overseen by the Fourth Armored Division of the Syrian Army, an elite unit commanded by Maher al-Assad, the president’s younger brother.”
In 2020, global captagon seizures had an estimated retail (or “street”) value of nearly $3.5 billion. The estimated figure for 2021 is over $5.7 billion, or several times greater than the value of Syria’s legitimate exports. With Syria’s domestic economy in ruins, narco-trafficking is likely the most important source of income for the regime.
Despite the wealth of information available on this subject, the State Department’s report addressed it in just a single sentence: “The Fourth Armored Division is widely reported to be involved in Syrian drug smuggling operations, including smuggling of the amphetamine captagon as well as other illicit substances.” Nor does the report refer to the critical role that Lebanese Hezbollah plays in the Assad regime’s drug enterprise.
Representatives French Hill (R-AR) and Brendan Boyle (D-MA) have introduced a bill that would require the administration to provide Congress with “a written strategy to disrupt and dismantle narcotics production and trafficking” linked to the Assad regime. The House included a similar requirement in its version of the NDAA last year, but the Senate removed it for unclear reasons.
If the White House wants to show it recognizes the gravity of the situation, it should pledge to produce a strategy of its own this year rather than waiting for Congress to work through the annual authorization cycle. Violence from the captagon trade is now spilling over Syria’s southern border into Jordan, a key U.S. ally, as well as enriching Hezbollah. The drug does not just bankroll the Damascus regime’s atrocities; it is a transnational security threat the Biden administration cannot afford to ignore.
David Adesnik is research director and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he also contributes to FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP). For more analysis from David and CEFP, please subscribe HERE. Follow David on Twitter @adesnik. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CEFP. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by David Adesnik Senior Fellow and Director of Research · May 3, 2022
18. Commentary: Andrea Stricker — Team Biden must stop Russia's Iran deal
Excerpts:
Given the situation in Ukraine, Team Biden must change this policy. The Kremlin must not financially benefit from a restored Iran deal while Washington and its allies are attempting to pressure Moscow to halt its unprovoked invasion.
A wiser policy is for Washington to restore a campaign of economic pressure on Iran and persuade the regime to halt its growing nuclear provocations. Yet if the Biden administration insists on pursuing the plan of action and helping Tehran refine its nuclear capabilities, there is no technical reason that Russia must be the party to perform such work.
America and Europe should be making every effort to close Russia’s revenue streams. President Biden ought to recognize that this means not providing avenues via Iran to fund Putin’s war machine.
Commentary: Andrea Stricker — Team Biden must stop Russia's Iran deal
Team Biden is attempting to resurrect the nuclear deal with Iran, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that President Barack Obama concluded in 2015 and that President Donald Trump abandoned in 2018. That agreement will expire within the next decade and will allow Iran to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels, thereby reducing the regime’s breakout time — that is, the amount of time it takes to develop enough fissile material for one nuclear weapon — to near zero.
Under the 2015 accord, the Obama administration permitted Russia the lead in carrying out several plan of action nuclear projects in Iran related to Tehran’s “civil” nuclear program. Russia’s state-run nuclear agency, Rosatom, and its subsidiaries seek to resume such work in Iran, including a $10 billion project to complete two new units of Tehran’s nuclear power plant at Bushehr. Moscow could also recoup a $500 million debt for past work on the plant.
Four Rosatom entities — Rusatom Energy International, Atomstroyexport, TVEL Fuel Co., and Techsnabexport — stand to gain from supplying fuel to Bushehr and another small Iranian research reactor, removing used reactor fuel, overseeing operations, and carrying out new construction. TVEL Fuel Co. may also resume work at Iran’s underground uranium enrichment plant at Fordow, originally built by Tehran to make weapons-grade fuel for nuclear bombs.
Washington may also acquiesce to Russia’s Novosibersk Chemical Concentrates Plant — another Rosatom subsidiary — as well as TVEL Fuel Co. purchasing Tehran’s enriched uranium stockpile in exchange for a third-party nation’s natural uranium. Allowing Iran to import natural uranium ensures that Tehran can resume enrichment to higher levels and violate the nuclear accord at a time of its choosing.
In May 2019, as part of its maximum pressure campaign against Iran, the Trump administration announced it had ended special “waivers” from U.S. sanctions that permitted Russia’s Iran-related projects to move forward. Washington prohibited both the Russian Bushehr expansion project and the purchase of natural uranium. The Trump administration stated that any expansion of Bushehr beyond an existing unit and any transfers of enriched uranium out of Iran in exchange for natural uranium would be “exposed to sanctions.”
When Tehran quickly resumed — and then expanded — uranium enrichment at the Fordow plant in November 2019, the Trump administration also swiftly terminated the waiver for Russia’s work at Fordow. The Trump administration ended another sanctions waiver for Iran’s small reactor in May 2020, citing Iran’s continuing “nuclear brinkmanship” and Tehran’s “expanding proliferation activities.”
When the Trump administration announced that Russian entities would face sanctions for continued Iran nuclear work, those entities reportedly halted their efforts. Yet in February, as part of its Iran deal diplomacy, the Biden administration unilaterally restored the sanctions waivers.
Last month, Russia abruptly forced a pause in the Iran nuclear talks, underway for more than a year, and demanded that the Biden administration provide Moscow with “written guarantees” that it won’t sanction Russian nuclear projects in Iran — projects that come with an anticipated price tag reaching into the billions.
Around March 15, the State Department reportedly provided the Kremlin with such guarantees. A week later, a State Department representative acknowledged that the Biden administration would “be willing to entertain” exempting Moscow’s work in Iran from U.S. sanctions over Ukraine.
Given the situation in Ukraine, Team Biden must change this policy. The Kremlin must not financially benefit from a restored Iran deal while Washington and its allies are attempting to pressure Moscow to halt its unprovoked invasion.
A wiser policy is for Washington to restore a campaign of economic pressure on Iran and persuade the regime to halt its growing nuclear provocations. Yet if the Biden administration insists on pursuing the plan of action and helping Tehran refine its nuclear capabilities, there is no technical reason that Russia must be the party to perform such work.
America and Europe should be making every effort to close Russia’s revenue streams. President Biden ought to recognize that this means not providing avenues via Iran to fund Putin’s war machine.
Andrea Stricker is a research fellow on nonproliferation issues at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.
19. Fires, explosions and false-flag operations: How war is spilling beyond Ukraine’s borders
Beware the shadow wars.
Excerpts:
All this makes Russia’s intentions pretty baffling. “If the purpose is just to annoy the West and frighten Moldova, well, the West is already pretty annoyed and the Moldovans are already pretty frightened,” said International Crisis Group’s Oliker, who added that among analysts, “there is a general consistency of people not knowing what it is going on.”
Then again, just because Russia has no real ability to make a move toward Transnistria and has no good reason for doing so, that doesn’t mean it’s not still part of the Kremlin’s long-term plans. This isn’t a war that’s been distinguished by rational thinking.
Fires, explosions and false-flag operations: How war is spilling beyond Ukraine’s borders
So-called “shadow wars” in Russia and Moldova have many worried about the spread of conflict.
Global Security Reporter
May 4, 2022
Russia accuses Western powers of waging a “proxy war” via Ukraine. President Joe Biden refers to the conflict as not just a war between Russia and Ukraine but an attack on the “free world.” And some of Ukraine’s supporters say we’re already in World War III. Given the number of countries now involved in the war and the rhetoric they’re employing, it’s almost surprising that the violence — at least in terms of open fighting between militaries — has been largely confined inside the country’s borders.
More than two months into the war, that may be changing. We still haven’t seen the direct NATO vs. Russia combat that many fear, but increasingly, the violence is spilling beyond Ukraine’s frontiers.
Recent attacks on Russian soil and in Transnistria, a semi-autonomous region of Moldova, have been shrouded in murkiness and confusion, making it hard to predict where they might lead. But taken together, these very different incidents suggest the war is spreading outside Ukraine.
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Russia’s war comes home
On April 1, fire engulfed a fuel depot in the Russian city of Belgorod, just a little over 20 miles from the Ukrainian border. Videos appeared to show two helicopters firing on the facility with rockets, and Russian officials quickly blamed Ukraine for the attack, which would have been the first Ukrainian strike on Russian soil since the war began. Ukrainian officials at first denied responsibility, though President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would later neither confirm nor deny Ukrainian involvement.
Over the past month, the incidents have multiplied: explosions at military and industrial sites in Kursk and Voronezh, and an apparent missile strike in Bryansk. All three are Russian cities near the Ukrainian border. Russia also shot down a Ukrainian drone some 70 miles inside Russian territory.
There have also been a number of mysterious fires at sites near Moscow, well outside the range of Ukrainian drones and missiles: a military research institute in Tver, a chemical plant in Kineshma, an aerospace college in Korolyov.
Most recently, on Monday morning, the governor of Belgorod reported two new explosions, just a day after a fire at a ministry of defense facility of the region. All in all, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has tallied at least a dozen such incidents in Russia over the last month.
The Ukrainian government has been coy about the spate of fires and explosions; they haven’t claimed responsibility, but they haven’t denied it either. Zelenskyy’s Senior Advisor Mykhailo Podolyak described them as “karma” for the Russian invasion. But if it’s not Ukrainian military action, the only other likely explanations are sabotage carried out by Ukrainian agents or sympathetic Russians.
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As the Washington Post notes, accidental fires are hardly unheard of at Russian industrial facilities, but it’s hard to believe there would have been so many accidents at facilities linked to the Russian war effort in such a short period of time. Russia has been known to mount “false flag” attacks in the past, but it’s equally hard to see what it would gain from such actions at this point.
Olga Oliker, program director for Europe and Central Asia at the International Crisis Group, told Grid that by not acknowledging its strikes, Ukraine may be trying to “maintain plausible deniability” or to “keep the Russians off kilter.”
In any event, if there was concern at the start of the war about a spillover beyond Ukrainian territory, Ukraine’s Western backers don’t seem to have much of a problem with Ukrainian strikes inside Russia. U.K. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said in a BBC interview last week that Ukraine had the right under international law to “go after the supply lines of the Russian army.” But Wallace said in the same interview that it was unlikely British weapons were being used to attack Russia; and NATO countries are likely eager to avoid anything that looks even slightly like a Western-aided attack on Russian soil. The U.S. and other countries are providing Ukraine with intelligence cooperation; it’s unclear whether they have provided specific information regarding Russian targets.
There’s some irony in this situation: For years, the Kremlin has employed so-called gray zone tactics in Ukraine, sending troops and private contractors into the country while claiming that it’s doing nothing of the sort and that the Russians fighting in Ukraine are simply patriotic volunteers helping the separatists in the Donbas. Now that Russia is openly invading Ukraine, the shadow war may be coming home to Russia.
Transnistria: Rumblings on the Western front?
Last week saw three apparent terrorist attacks in Transnistria, the semi-autonomous, Russian-backed enclave in Moldova, which sits on Ukraine’s Western border and hosts a small number of Russian troops. The attacks targeted a military base, two Soviet-era radio towers and the headquarters of the Transnistrian government’s state security service.
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Ukrainian officials and Western analysts quickly accused Russia of carrying out false-flag attacks, provocations that would ultimately be used to justify Russian intervention in the region. (For what it’s worth, the Ukrainians had been warning about precisely this scenario in Transnistria since January — weeks before the invasion of Ukraine.) Authorities in Transnistria, meanwhile, said that Ukrainian “nationalists” had crossed the border to carry out the attacks. The government of Moldova said they were the result of infighting between rival political factions in Transnistria. In any event, the attacks have heightened alarm in a place where tensions were already running high.
So, what is Transnistria? The territory, formally known as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (PMR), is a thin strip of land separated from the rest of Moldova, a former Soviet state, by the Dniester River with a population of roughly 400,000. Generally speaking, during the Soviet era, Transnistria was more heavily industrialized and closer politically and culturally to Moscow, while “right-bank” Moldova was more rural and culturally influenced by neighboring Romania. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, when Moldova became independent, the two sides fought a short war, in which the Transnistrians were backed by Russia. A ceasefire signed in 1992 established the region’s de facto independence, though it is not formally recognized by any other country, including Russia.
Transnistria is often thought of as a kind of post-Soviet time capsule, where busts of Lenin still adorn town squares. And the breakaway state remains heavily dependent on Russia, which provides it with free gas and pays its elderly citizens their “Putin pension” in exchange for hosting Russian troops.
But Transnistria is actually far less isolated than other post-Soviet breakaway regions and has been drawing closer to Europe in recent years. About 70 percent of the region’s trade is now with the EU, and many Transnistrians have acquired Moldovan passports since the country’s citizens got the right to travel to the EU without a visa. The last time Transnistria made global headlines was in 2021, when local soccer team FC Sheriff Tiraspol beat global powerhouse Real Madrid in the Champions League.
There’s been speculation since the beginning of the conflict as to what role Transnistria might play in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war plans. Infamously, at the beginning of March, Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko was photographed briefing his security council in front of a (mostly accurate, as it turned out) map of Russia’s military offensive, which included an arrow that appeared to show troops moving into Transnistria. Even as it has scaled back its war aims elsewhere, Russia does not appear to have given up on the Transnistrian dream entirely: Just before last week’s explosions, a senior Russian general, Rustam Minnekayev, was quoted saying that the goals of the new stage of Russia’s special operation included taking full control of southern Ukraine which would “give the Russian army access to Transnistria where facts of oppression of the Russian-speaking population have also been observed.”
Oleksandr Gorgan, a deputy commander in the Ukrainian army, told Grid it is “a big priority for us to make sure that Russians cannot use Transnistria for their invasion of Ukraine.” And the U.S. Institute for the Study of War has speculated that “Putin might recognize the self-styled Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic in Transnistria as he recognized the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. The PMR could then ask for additional Russian protection, and Putin could attempt to send some additional forces or capabilities to Transnistria.”
There are a couple of problems with this scenario. First, just as was the case with eastern Ukraine, it’s far from clear that Transnistrians want to be “liberated.” There has reportedly been an uptick in applications for Moldovan passports since the war started. Keith Harrington, a Ph.D. student and analyst who writes on Transnistrian affairs, told Grid that the enclave’s de facto authorities have been treading carefully during the conflict, torn between their dependence on Moscow and growing ties to Europe. “It’s quite surprising to see how neutral they’ve been,” Harrington said. He notes that officials have purposely avoided using Russia’s preferred term “special military operation,” but also avoided calling it a war. “They call it a ‘situation,’” he said.
Second, it’s far from clear how Russian troops would even get there. Lukashenko’s map seemed to envision a march to Transnistria from Odessa on Ukraine’s southern coast. In the early days of the war, it looked very possible that city would fall to the Russians. Now, when Russia’s depleted forces have their hands full in the eastern Donbas region, it seems highly unlikely they’ll make a serious move on the cities of Odessa and Mykolaiv — which stand between the bulk of Russian forces and the Moldovan border — any time soon, much less build any sort of “land bridge” to Transnistria. “They’d probably all die if they tried,” Sam Cranny-Evans, a military analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, told the Moscow Times.
Could Russia launch an offensive from Transnistria to threaten Western Ukraine? There have been reports of Transnistria putting together around 10,000 soldiers from its local militia, but Harrington said, “They’re not very well trained. They’re in terrible physical shape. They don’t want to fight and probably aren’t interested in going to die for Ukraine.” The three Russian battalions left over from the 1990s probably won’t be much help either: They number only about 1,500 troops, only a few hundred of whom are actually Russians. “They’re not a viable fighting force that’s going to change the course of the war in Western Ukraine at all,” said Harrington. Since there’s no way to reach Transnistria from Russia without crossing Ukrainian territory or airspace, it wouldn’t be easy to reinforce them.
All this makes Russia’s intentions pretty baffling. “If the purpose is just to annoy the West and frighten Moldova, well, the West is already pretty annoyed and the Moldovans are already pretty frightened,” said International Crisis Group’s Oliker, who added that among analysts, “there is a general consistency of people not knowing what it is going on.”
Then again, just because Russia has no real ability to make a move toward Transnistria and has no good reason for doing so, that doesn’t mean it’s not still part of the Kremlin’s long-term plans. This isn’t a war that’s been distinguished by rational thinking.
Thanks to Alicia Benjamin for copy editing this article.
20. EU targets Russian oil, banks as Moscow's ally Belarus stages army drills
Excerpts;
Ukraine remains defiant despite the unrelenting assault.
"Russia struggles to advance and suffers terrible losses. Thus the desperate missile terror across Ukraine. But we are not afraid and the world should not be afraid either," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Twitter.
"More sanctions on Russia. More heavy weapons for Ukraine. Russia's missile terrorism must be punished."
EU targets Russian oil, banks as Moscow's ally Belarus stages army drills
KYIV/BRUSSELS, May 4 (Reuters) - The EU proposed its toughest sanctions yet against Russia on Wednesday, including a phased oil embargo, as Ukraine came under further heavy Russian bombardment and nervously monitored large-scale army drills in neighbouring Belarus, a close Moscow ally.
Nearly 10 weeks into a war that has killed thousands, uprooted millions and flattened cities and towns in eastern and southern Ukraine, Russia also stepped up attacks on targets in western Ukraine, partly to disrupt Western arms deliveries.
A new convoy of buses began evacuating more civilians from the devastated southeastern port city of Mariupol, which has seen the heaviest fighting of the war so far and where Moscow said remaining Ukrainian forces remained tightly blockaded.
Piling pressure on Russia's already battered $1.8 trillion economy, the European Commission proposed phasing out supplies of Russian crude oil within six months and refined products by the end of 2022. The price of Brent crude jumped 3% to more than $108 a barrel after the news.
The plan, if agreed by EU governments, would be a watershed for the world's largest trading bloc, which remains dependent on Russian energy and must find alternative supplies. Hungary and Slovakia want to be exempted from the ban for now, sources said.
"(President Vladimir) Putin must pay a price, a high price, for his brutal aggression," Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen told the European Parliament in Strasbourg, to applause from lawmakers. read more
She also announced sanctions targeting Russia's largest bank Sberbank, two other lenders, three state broadcasters as well as army officers and other individuals accused of war crimes.
The EU has yet to target Russian natural gas, used to heat homes and generate electricity across the bloc.
The Kremlin said Russia was looking at various options in response to the EU plans, adding that the sanctions would greatly increase costs for European citizens.
On the war front, Russia's Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said his military would consider NATO transport carrying weapons in Ukraine, which is not a member of the alliance, as targets to be destroyed, RIA news agency reported. NATO says individual member states are sending military supplies but not troops.
"The United States and its NATO allies are continuing to pump weapons into Ukraine," Shoigu told a conference of defence ministry officials.
His comments came after the ministry said it had disabled six railway stations in Ukraine used to supply Ukrainian forces with Western-made arms in the country's east. Reuters could not verify the claim and there was no immediate reaction from Kyiv.
The ministry also said it had hit 40 Ukrainian military targets, including four depots storing ammunition and artillery weapons. read more
Russia published what it said was video footage of two Kalibr cruise missiles being launched from the Black Sea and said they had hit unspecified ground targets in Ukraine.
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Models of oil barrels are seen in front of the displayed sign "stop", EU and Russia flag colours in this illustration taken March 8, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/
Announcing the surprise military drills, Belarus's defence ministry said they posed no threat to its neighbours, but Ukraine's border service said it could not exclude the possibility that Belarusian forces might join Russia's assault.
"Therefore, we are ready," spokesman Andriy Demchenko said.
Some Russian forces entered Ukraine via Belarus when the invasion began on Feb. 24 but Belarusian troops have not so far been involved in what Moscow calls a "special military operation" to disarm Ukraine and defend it from fascists.
Kyiv and its Western backers say the fascism claim is an absurd pretext for Moscow to wage an unprovoked war of aggression that has driven five million Ukrainians to flee abroad.
The Kremlin on Wednesday dismissed speculation that Putin would declare war on Ukraine and decree a national mobilisation on May 9, when Russia commemorates the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two. Putin is due to deliver a speech and oversee a military parade on Moscow's Red Square.
The convoy leaving Mariupol, organised by the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, was heading for the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said. It was not expected to arrive on Wednesday.
He did not say how many buses were in the convoy or whether any more civilians had been evacuated from the vast Azovstal steel works, where the city's last defenders are holding out against Russian forces that have occupied Mariupol.
The first evacuees from Azovstal arrived by bus in Zaporizhzhia on Tuesday after cowering for weeks in bunkers beneath the sprawling Soviet-era steel works. read more
Ukraine's general staff said the Russian assault on Azovstal was continuing.
Russia now controls Mariupol, once a city of 400,000 but largely reduced to smoking rubble after weeks of siege and shelling. The city is key to Moscow's efforts to cut Ukraine off from the Black Sea - vital for its grain and metals exports - and connect Russian-controlled territory in the south and east.
Moscow has deployed 22 battalion tactical groups near the eastern Ukrainian town of Izium in a possible drive to capture the cities of Kramatorsk and Severodonetsk in Donbas, British intelligence said. Reuters could not immediately verify the report.
The cities are in the eastern Donbas region - Russia's main target along with Ukraine's southern coastline since Moscow failed to take Kyiv, the capital, in the weeks after it invaded.
The mayor of the western city of Lviv said Russian missile strikes had also hit there late on Tuesday, damaging electricity and water networks. The city lies near the Polish border across which flow Western arms supplies for Ukraine's military.
Ukraine remains defiant despite the unrelenting assault.
"Russia struggles to advance and suffers terrible losses. Thus the desperate missile terror across Ukraine. But we are not afraid and the world should not be afraid either," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Twitter.
"More sanctions on Russia. More heavy weapons for Ukraine. Russia's missile terrorism must be punished."
Additional reporting by Pavel Polityuk and Tom Balmforth in Kyiv, Alessandra Prentice in Zaporizhzhia; Writing by Gareth Jones; Editing by Philippa Fletcher
21. When Julia Child worked for a spy agency fighting sharks
When Julia Child worked for a spy agency fighting sharks
In the hit HBO Max comedy series “Julia,” gourmet Julia Child is depicted cooking up her iconic show “The French Chef” for public television in 1962. However, long before she changed American cuisine, the garrulous gastronome was serving up recipes for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA, during World War II.
Her first creation wasn’t food, but shark repellent.
After the United States entered World War II in 1941, the 29-year-old Child (then unmarried and known by her birth name, Julia McWilliams) wanted to serve her country. However, at 6-foot-2, she was deemed too tall for the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) in the Navy and Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in the Army.
Child eventually joined the newly formed OSS, the U.S. spy agency, during the war years in Washington. She worked as a junior research assistant in the Secret Intelligence Branch, typing thousands of names of government officials on index cards. She soon tired of that assignment and wrangled a similar position working directly for William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the OSS director and founder.
Her abilities were eventually noticed, and she was given a more important job working for Capt. Harold J. Coolidge in the Special Projects Division of the Emergency Sea Rescue Equipment (ERE) Section, tasked with developing ideas to keep sailors and downed airmen safe in the water.
By 1943, shark attacks had become a major concern for the military. Though they were rare — only 20 had occurred in the first three years of the war — the media had become focused on these bloody events. Families were worried about what would happen to their loved ones struggling for survival in the water.
The Army and Navy turned to the OSS for assistance in finding a way to protect personnel by keeping sharks at bay. Scientists had been searching for years for a method or chemical that repelled the man-eaters, but nothing they tried seemed to work.
Tasked with finding a solution were Coolidge, a scientist from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, and division co-director Henry Field, curator of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Coolidge asked Child and other researchers to come up with something that would keep sharks away.
At the time, Child had yet to make her first coq au vin — or any French dish. She would not acquire her legendary culinary skills until after World War II and her marriage to Paul Child, who also served in the OSS. The couple later moved to Paris, where he served in the U.S. Foreign Service. It was there, in 1951, that she began studying at the Cordon Bleu cooking school.
But that was all in the future. In 1943, Child and her co-workers needed to cook up something that sharks found distasteful. They tested more than 100 substances, including common poisons, as well as extracts from decayed shark meat, organic acids and various chemical compositions.
After a year of research, they hit upon an idea that showed promise: “cakes” of copper acetate, mixed with black dye. The concoction was said to smell like dead sharks to other sharks. Field testing showed that it was 60 percent effective as a shark repellent.
Though the military remained skeptical about its abilities, the recipe was released in limited quantities in World War II. Cakes were attached to life vests for sailors and provided to airmen to rub on themselves in the water. If nothing else, they could feel like they had a chance when floating in the ocean.
Labeled as Shark Chaser, the OSS recipe was also used to coat mines at sea to prevent curious sharks from nibbling them. During the war, the toothy fish were known to accidentally set off the explosives intended for German U-boats and Japanese vessels.
There were even reports that NASA used the recipe for the space program, though those accounts are unverified. “I understand the shark repellent we developed is being used today for downed space equipment — strapped around it so the sharks won’t attack when it lands in the ocean,” Child told fellow OSS officer Betty McIntosh for McIntosh’s book “Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS.”
Child’s time in D.C. helped her develop her creativity and confidence. “I must say we had lots of fun,” Child told McIntosh.
For her wartime service, Child was awarded the Emblem of Meritorious Civilian Service. She was recognized for her “resourcefulness, industry and sound judgment.”
“Her drive and inherent cheerfulness, despite long hours of tedious work, served as a spur to greater efforts for those working with her,” her citation stated. “Morale in her section could not have been higher. Her achievements reflect great credit upon herself and the Armed Forces of the United States.”
22. Reversing Roe Would Harm Military Readiness, Abortion-Rights Advocates Warn
I do not want to get involved in this constitutional, individual liberty controversy but this article identifies a national security issue. I am seeing a lot of social media commentary from military members discussing the fall out from the potential Supreme Court ruling.
Reversing Roe Would Harm Military Readiness, Abortion-Rights Advocates Warn
“If a woman is considering enlisting, I would highly encourage her to rethink that choice,” said one veteran.
When Rachel VanLandingham was a lieutenant in the Air Force, she accompanied a female officer to a substandard medical facility in Seoul to get a “back-alley abortion.” Abortions were illegal in South Korea at the time, and her commander would not grant her two weeks off to get a legal abortion in the United States.
If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade—as is suggested by a draft decision revealed by Politico on Monday that was confirmed by Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday—some two dozen states are expected to quickly enact laws that put safe, legal abortions out of reach of many more U.S. troops.
“It was just shocking to me that this is what we were doing to service members. No one cared….It was abhorrent,” said VanLandingham, a former Air Force judge advocate who is now a professor at Southwestern Law School. “This isn’t occurring just in South Korea now. This is going to occur in Texas.”
Though the justices could change their minds and the draft before a final decision is released next month, advocates worry that making abortion illegal so widely and quickly could reduce military readiness; they are are calling on Congress and the Pentagon to ensure troops’ reproductive rights are protected.
Women in the military seeking an abortion already face more restrictions than their civilian counterparts. Abortions cannot be performed at military medical facilities and the cost of the procedures in private facilities aren’t covered by troops’ Tricare health insurance becasue of the Hyde Amendment of 1976, which prohibits the use of federal dollars for abortion unless the life of the mother is at risk, said Sean Timmons, the managing partner of law firm Tully Rinckey’s Houston office.
The repeal of Roe v. Wade is likely to make it more difficult for women in the military to find access to the procedure safely and legally, Timmons said. For example, a service member in Texas still has legal access to an abortion up to six weeks into her pregnancy, even if in practice new restrictions have forced many clinics to close. If the Supreme Court’s draft decision becomes final, troops will need to get a leave of duty approved, travel to another state, and potentially incur other expenses, such as a hotel stay. The increased burden could prompt women to “take matters into their own hands” and either seek out unsafe abortions or try to terminate the pregnancy on their own, Timmons said.
If each state has the freedom to ban or allow abortions, the reproductive rights of women in the military would depend on where the Defense Department stations them, a decision in which they have little say, VanLandingham said. If a woman from California, where abortion is expected to remain legal, joins the military and is stationed in Georgia, her access to reproductive healthcare will be limited by her decision to join the military.
“They did not choose to live in that state. They chose to volunteer to sacrifice themselves for their country, but they didn't volunteer to sacrifice their reproductive rights,” VanLandingham said. “It’s something that men in the military don’t have to sacrifice, why should women?”
More than half of states, including many in the South, are poised to ban abortion if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, while others already have laws on the books that will immediately go into effect based on the court’s ruling. Those states, including Texas, Georgia, and Florida, are also home to hundreds of thousands of troops on some of the nation’s largest military installations.
Advocates said there are steps Congress can take to protect the reproductive rights of service members, but there’s little reason for optimism given lawmakers’ known stances that have so far made action on abortion impossible. Just as active-duty troops pay state income taxes or register their car in their state of legal residence, not the state where they are stationed, VanLandingham said Congress could pass a law saying a female service members’ access to abortion can not be worse than what it would have been in her home state.
Others called on the Pentagon to take action to protect its female service members, as well as the wives and children of men who serve. Erin Kirk-Cuomo, who served in the Marines before co-founding Not In My Marine Corps, said the Defense Department should consider a round of Base Realignment and Closure, or BRAC, to close military facilities in states that are not protecting the rights of troops, a politically unpopular move on Capitol Hill that would certainly catch the attention of lawmakers looking to keep the bases in their districts open.
Kirk-Cuomo also encouraged women and their allies to protest the court’s decision by not joining the military, especially since a woman’s access to end a pregnancy would be limited at the same time that cases of sexual assault in the military are on the rise.
“Along with sexual assault comes more unwanted pregnancies,” she said. “When you have the highest rates of sexual assault our country has seen in the military, it’s going to impact the readiness of the force.”
“I would not want to enlist in a military that isn’t protecting me in the service from being assaulted and also won’t protect me after the fact,” she continued. “If a woman is considering enlisting, I would highly encourage her to rethink that choice.”
VanLandingham said it’s too soon to know how enlistments will be impacted if the Supreme Court’s decision is final, but how the military tries to support service members will also matter. The Air Force, for example, has offered support to service members in states that have recently passed laws restricting LGBTQ rights, including medical aid, legal help, or relocating families if needed.
That’s not a practical solution for women in states that ban abortion, but the military could take steps to assist female troops seeking an abortion.
“You can’t have an all male base in Texas…but they can give some indication that the military cares and understands that women could face this dilemma,” VanLandingham said. “They can express that we will try to help you, and will give you the leave when you ask for it.”
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
