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Quotes of the Day:

"We had said goodbye to life, we didn't think anyone knew we were there."
- Exhausted evacuees from Mariupol steel plant reach safety

"The question of winning the war is far too complicated and far too delicate to be answered by a study of only the powers and resources of the nations in arms." 
- US Army General Staff, Military Intelligence Division, 1918


Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.
- Marcus Aurelius


1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 4 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. Retired US major general: What it will take for the Ukrainians to win
3. Putin Has a Problem: Are Russian Soldiers Breaking Their Own Tanks?
4. U.S. Intelligence Is Helping Ukraine Kill Russian Generals, Officials Say
5. U.S. nuclear commander warns of deterrence ‘crisis’ against Russia and China
6. U.S. to boost defense posture, prepositioned stocks in Indo-Pacific: Austin
7. The War Over Ukrainian Identity
8. The West vs. the Rest
9. The War in Ukraine Calls for a Reset of Biden’s Foreign Policy
10. Finland’s New Frontier
11. U.S. Sent Cyber Team to Lithuania Over Russia Hacking Threat
12. Taiwan's military is training for urban warfare against Chinese troops. Here's the kind of fight they're facing.
13. Special Operations Command Europe kicks off Trojan Footprint 22 with participants from more than 30 nations
14. US, Japan Defense Ministers Pledge To Defend Rules-Based Order
15. Better weather may shift Russia’s fortunes in Ukraine
16. Global NATO Takes Shape Ahead of US-ASEAN Meet
17. Why Hasn’t Russia Unleashed ‘Cybergeddon’ in Its War on Ukraine?
18. How Layered Defense in Ukraine is Shaping Future U.S. Military Operations
19. In new directive, US Army reins in Army Futures Command
20.  US ramps up training of Ukrainian forces



1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 4 (PUTIN'S WAR)



RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 4
May 4, 2022 - Press ISW

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 4
Kateryna Stepanenko, Karolina Hird, and Mason Clark
May 4, 7:15pm ET

Ukrainian defenses have largely stalled Russian advances in Eastern Ukraine. Russian troops conducted a number of unsuccessful attacks in Eastern Ukraine on May 4 and were unable to make any confirmed advances. Russian forces attacking south of Izyum appear increasingly unlikely to successfully encircle Ukrainian forces in the Rubizhne area. Ukrainian forces have so far prevented Russian forces from merging their offensives to the southeast of Izyum and the west of Lyman, Slovyansk, and Kramatorsk, as Russian forces likely intended.
Russian forces reportedly entered the Azovstal Steel Plant – rather than its outskirts – for the first time on May 4. The extent of this Russian advance remains unclear, and Russian forces likely face further costly fighting if they intend to clear the entire facility. The Kremlin likely hopes that the successful capture of Azovstal through a ground assault will cement the Kremlin’s growing effort to claim complete control of Mariupol by May 9, with Russian propagandists recently arriving in the city to set conditions for further claims of a Russian victory. The Kremlin likely intends to claim some sort of victory in Mariupol to present a success to the Russian people, though Russian forces are highly unlikely to halt offensive operations across Ukraine on this date.
Russian forces intensified airstrikes against transportation infrastructure in Western Ukraine on May 4 but remain unable to interdict Western aid shipments to Ukraine. Six Russian cruise missiles hit electrical substations near railway stations in Lviv and Transcarpathia (the southwestern Oblast of Ukraine) on May 4.[1] A senior US defense official reported that Russian aircraft conducted 200 to 300 airstrikes largely targeting transportation infrastructure in the last 24 hours.[2] The US official added that these Russian strikes are likely intended disrupt Ukrainian transportation capabilities and slow down weapon re-supply efforts but have been unable to do so.[3]
Key Takeaways
  • Russian forces engaged in several unsuccessful ground offensives to the south of Izyum and did not significantly advance efforts to encircle Ukrainian troops in the cauldron to the southeast of Izyum and west of the Donetsk-Luhansk frontline.
  • Russian forces reportedly stormed the Azovstal Steel Plant on May 4 and are likely operating inside the plant’s facilities.
  • Russian and Ukrainian sources confirmed that a Ukrainian counteroffensive pushed Russian troops back 40 kilometers from Kharkiv City.
  • Russian forces conducted a number of unsuccessful counteroffensives on the southern axis.

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 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 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 launched several unsuccessful assaults in eastern Ukraine in the last 24 hours but did not advance overall efforts to encircle Ukrainian forces along the frontline around Rubizhne.[4] An unnamed senior US defense official stated that Russian forces are attempting to advance in the Izyum area southeastward towards Lyman, Slovyansk, and Kramatorsk and in an effort to encircle Ukrainian defenses from the south.[5] The official noted that Ukrainian resistance has “stalled” Russian advances in this area and that Russian operations remain uneven.[6]
Ukrainian forces continued to threaten Russian ground lines of communication to Izyum along the E40 highway, destroying a Russian supply convoy in Vesele on May 3.[7] Russian forces heavily shelled Ukrainian positions south and west of Izyum and likely targeted a Ukrainian pontoon bridge across the Siverskyi Donets in Protopoivka.[8] The Russian Defense Ministry claimed that Russian forces destroyed the bridge on May 4, but ISW cannot independently confirm this claim.[9]
The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are attacking south towards Lyman from northeastern Luhansk Oblast alongside the Izyum effort.[10] Russian forces reportedly made unspecified advances in the direction of Shandryholove, about 15 kilometers north of Lyman.[11] Russian forces are unlikely to have seized Yampil (roughly 10 kilometers southeast of Lyman) as of May 4 based on satellite images of large fires in the area following Russian artillery and missile strikes.[12]
Russian forces have likely partially encircled several frontline settlements in Luhansk Oblast. Luhansk Oblast Administration Head Serhiy Haidai reported that Rubizhne and Popasna residents have one more week worth of water and food supplies as of May 4.[13] Drone footage also showed Russian Wagner mercenaries fighting a Ukrainian soldier in Popasna, indicating that Russian forces are continuing grinding block-by-block advances within the city.[14]

Supporting Effort #1—Mariupol (Russian objective: Capture Mariupol and reduce the Ukrainian defenders)
Russian forces reportedly entered the Azovstal Steel Plant for the first time – rather than its outskirts, which they have contested for several weeks – on May 4.[15] Multiple Ukrainian sources stated that Russian troops successfully "broke into” Azovstal and that the Ukrainian government has lost communications with Ukrainian defenders within the plant as a result.[16] ISW cannot confirm the extent of Russian advances within Azovstal at this time but will continue to provide updates as the situation unfolds.
An unnamed senior US defense official estimated that 2 Russian battalion tactical groups (BTGs) ”cobbled together” from various damaged units and unspecified Chechen units, amounting to about 2,000 personnel, remain in Mariupol as of May 4.[17] The 10 damaged BTGs that have previously redeployed from Mariupol are reportedly still undergoing rest and refit and have not been committed to offensive operations in eastern Ukraine.[18] This report is consistent with ISW’s previous assessment that most Russian forces have left Mariupol, leaving smaller elements to finish capturing Azovstal.[19]
Russian forces continue to consolidate their administrative control of Mariupol. The Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported that Russian preparations for a “Victory Day” parade in Mariupol on May 9 are ongoing. These preparations reportedly include forcing residents to clear damaged streets in return for food and preparing materials to portray a Russian “liberation” of Mariupol.[20] The GUR noted that First Deputy Head of the Russian Presidential Administration Sergey Kiriyenko arrived in Mariupol on an unspecified date to oversee preparations in his new position as Kremlin-appointed curator for Donbas issues. Kiriyenko’s activities in Mariupol are consistent with previous assessments that the Kremlin intends to make Mariupol the focal point of a possible Russian declaration of some sort of victory on May 9, though Russian forces will continue offensive operations beyond this date regardless of any Kremlin claims.

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.)
Russian forces continued to reconnoiter and conduct air and artillery strikes on Ukrainian positions in Kharkiv City and surrounding settlements on May 4.[21] Ukrainian forces did not conduct any confirmed counterattacks in the last 24 hours. However, additional Russian and Ukrainian sources notably confirmed the extent of the previously-reported Ukrainian counteroffensive that pushed Russian forces 40 kilometers east of Kharkiv to Staryi Saltiv.[22]

Supporting Effort #3—Southern Axis (Objective: Defend Kherson against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces conducted an unsuccessful ground offensive in the direction of Zaporizhia City and intensified shelling in Kherson Oblast on May 4.[23] The Ukrainian General Staff noted that Russian forces may intend to conduct additional offensives in Zaporizhia and Kryvyi Rih areas while continuing operations in Donbas.[24] Russian forces attempted unsuccessful assaults on Novosilka, Donetsk Oblast, and Orihiv, Zaporizhia Oblast, likely to push towards the N15 highway running from Donetsk to Zaporizhia City.[25] Ukrainian artillery continued to target Russian supply lines running to occupied Zaporizhia Oblast settlements from Donbas, destroying a Russian convoy on May 4.[26]
Russian forces intensified shelling in southwest and northeast Kherson Oblast on May 4.[27] The Kherson Oblast Administration reported that Russian forces are attempting to launch offensives on Knyazivka, Mala Shestirnya, and Novovoznesenske to gain a foothold in Mykolaiv and Dnepropetrovsk Oblasts.[28] Ukraine's Southern Operational Command South reported reestablishing control over four unspecified villages on the Kherson-Mykolaiv Oblast border likely in the Snihurvika area, but ISW cannot confirm Ukrainian claims or the location of the reportedly liberated villages.[29]
The Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) said that Russia seeks to use Transnistria to achieve psychological effects pinning Ukrainian forces to keep them from deploying to Donbas.[30] The GUR noted that there are only 300 able-bodied servicemen in the Russian Special Task Force in Transnistria and that they are equipped with old ammunition. The three Russian missile attacks on Odesa on May 3 were likely part of this psychological campaign in addition to targeting unspecified infrastructure.[31]

Supporting Effort #4—Sumy and Northeastern Ukraine: (Russian objective: Withdraw combat power in good order for redeployment to eastern Ukraine)
The Belarusian Ministry of Defense announced a “sudden test” of the reaction forces of the Belarusian Armed Forces on May 4.[32] The Belarusian MoD stated that the inspection will test the readiness and overall ability of troops to respond to “crisis situations” and will involve simulated land and air threats. The inspection will reportedly entail significant movement of military vehicles and equipment. The readiness test is unlikely to impact the situation on the northeastern axis in Ukraine, and Belarusian forces remain unlikely to enter the war in Ukraine, but ISW will continue to monitor the situation and provide updates as necessary.
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 have apparently decided to seize the Azovstal plant through ground assault and will likely continue operations accordingly.
  • 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 counter-attack.
  • Russian forces may be preparing to conduct renewed offensive operations to capture the entirety of Kherson Oblast in the coming days.

[9] https://t dot me/mod_russia/15152
[13] https://t dot me/luhanskaVTSA/2303
[15] https://twitter.com/Militarylandnet/status/1521825660645355520; https://twitter.com/MarQs__/status/1521830798013440000; https://www dot pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/05/4/7343969/https://t dot me/mariupolnow/9120; https://meduza dot io/news/2022/05/04/vlasti-ukrainy-zayavili-chto-rossiyskie-voennye-popali-na-territoriyu-azovstali; https://military.pravda dot ru/news/1705445-kiev_poterjal_svjaz/
[16] https://twitter.com/Militarylandnet/status/1521825660645355520; https://twitter.com/MarQs__/status/1521830798013440000; https://www dot pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/05/4/7343969/https://t dot me/mariupolnow/9120; https://meduza dot io/news/2022/05/04/vlasti-ukrainy-zayavili-chto-rossiyskie-voennye-popali-na-territoriyu-azovstali; https://military.pravda dot ru/news/1705445-kiev_poterjal_svjaz/
[22] https://twitter.com/GeoConfirmed/status/1521582011286274048; https://t dot me/rian_ru/161649; https://t dot me/epoddubny/10333


2. Retired US major general: What it will take for the Ukrainians to win

Our SF brother, MG Mike Repass.

Retired US major general: What it will take for the Ukrainians to win
CNN · by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His forthcoming paperback is "The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World." View more opinion on CNN.
(CNN)The former commander of the US Special Operations Command in Europe, retired US Army Maj. Gen. Mike Repass, says the international community has to greatly increase its support for Ukraine if the embattled nation is ever going to be able to drive the Russians out.
Repass has advised the Ukrainian military for the past six years on a US government contract. Last month he visited Poland and western Ukraine to get a better feel for the trajectory of the war in Ukraine. I spoke to him Friday and Monday.
He says the Ukrainian supply chain for military equipment is inefficient and that additional military forces are required to drive the Russians out of Ukraine.
To win the war in Ukraine, Repass advocates that the US and its allies build up a Ukrainian strategic force amounting to five brigades of up to 40,000 soldiers capable of mounting offensive operations to force the Russians out of their country.
Disclosure: Repass is on the advisory council of the Global Special Operations Foundation, where I am the chairman of the board. Our conversation was edited for clarity and length.
Read More
BERGEN: What did you learn on your trip?
REPASS: One, that Ukraine still needs a lot of help. Two, NATO is moving too slow. Three, we don't have visibility on what happens to military equipment when it gets into Ukraine.

The military equipment supply business is personalized as opposed to professionalized: The senior leadership establishes the distribution priorities and, from what I could observe, those priorities are not based on an understanding of consumption rates, or of future operations or objective data. It's based on commander of brigade X or sector Y calling and saying, "Hey, I need 27 Javelin missiles." So, it's highly personalized, and that is not how to run wartime logistics. What should be going on is there should be an understanding of what the consumption rates are on important things like fuel, ammunition, batteries.
BERGEN: Is the likely outcome in Ukraine a bloody conflict that just goes on and on and on?
REPASS: The three obvious future scenarios are: Russia has a battlefield decision in their favor, the Ukrainians have a battlefield decision in their favor, or there's a stalemate. Two out of three of those outcomes give Russia a victory.
In the stalemate scenario, Russia would simply claim victory based on facts on the ground and continue its occupation over expanded terrain in Ukraine into the indeterminate future. This would give Russia a less than total victory over Ukraine, but a victory with significantly expanded terrain under Russian control nonetheless.
So, what are we, the West, collectively doing to ensure that two out of those three possibilities don't happen? Everybody is thinking about the immediate fight right now, which means we're running supplies to the Ukrainians. The problem is that the Ukraine's army needs additional capabilities to be able to drive Russia out of Ukraine.
BERGEN: Why?
REPASS: Because they don't have enough combat power to do that, meaning enough equipment, firepower and trained soldiers at the moment.
Russia is always going to have more forces, not necessarily better forces, but more of them. As Stalin once said, "quantity has a quality all its own." Most people recognize that this is going to be a battle of attrition and, at some point in time, it will start to tip in Russia's favor unless additional Ukrainian forces are generated.
I think there's a growing realization among NATO countries and the international community that we're going to have to do something besides resource Ukraine's current fight. So, there are four things that the US and its allies need to do. First, we need to weaken Russia by strengthening Ukrainian capabilities. Second, we need to further deter Russia by increasing our own and NATO's capabilities. Third, is degrading Russia's armed forces and capabilities. Finally, we need to ensure Russia's defeat in Ukraine, and that is done by building a strategic and operational reserve force for Ukraine that can do offensive operations to kick the Russians out of Ukraine and secure its borders.
BERGEN: What does that look like in practice?
REPASS: You need to have the US, French, Poles, UK and the Germans each build a brigade's worth of Ukrainian combat power. Those nations have significant military capacity and could generate forces by equipping Ukrainian units and then training them in their own nations. So, that would be five brigades, in five operational sectors. And you would need probably six to eight months to implement that. These five brigades would have Western equipment fighting in Western ways, an integrated air-land battle approach where you have all the means available to you, to include NATO-interoperable tanks, close-air support and air defense.
BERGEN: Five brigades is not a huge number, right?

REPASS: No, it's not. I think it's doable in the near term. There are up to 8,000 soldiers or so in a brigade, so that's up to 40,000 people in five brigades. I believe the Ukrainians are capable of finding that many soldiers given the current national emergency.
Historically, when a Western military has come up against an army that has been supplied by the Russians, the Russian-backed army has been totally annihilated by an inferior number of forces, as was the case, for instance, during the first Gulf War when the US military destroyed much of Saddam Hussein's army in Kuwait. We know that the Western armaments have a significant qualitative edge over Russian equipment, so numbers and force ratios are skewed when it is Western military equipment up against Russian-made equipment.
BERGEN: Why do the Russians stick to a model that doesn't really work well?
REPASS: They are hidebound in their ways. Specifically, what they tried to do at the beginning of the war in Ukraine was a coup de main, taking out Kyiv with a rapid strike. That didn't work. Russian troops got their asses handed to them. So, they brought all their firepower around to the east and to the south by employing massive artillery fires on the objective or along their avenues of approach. Once they have destroyed almost everything in front of them, then they advance their troops methodically. So, it's not maneuver warfare. It's attrition warfare by fire. It's a fire-based army as opposed to what we have in the West, which is a maneuver-based army.
BERGEN: What do you make of the new Russian commander in Ukraine, Gen. Aleksandr Dvornikov?
REPASS: He is a dyed-in-the-wool, fire-based, attrition warfare guy. He's not a maneuver warfare guy. He's going to do everything that he's done all his life, which is blow up and destroy everything in his path, and then send the troops in. Those troops will forcefully evacuate Ukrainian citizens to ensure there is no potential for a resistance movement in the land bridge from Russia through Donbas to Crimea.
BERGEN: How would you characterize the state of the war in the east and the south right now? Are the Russians, in their own minds, winning?
REPASS: The state of play today is Russia is making methodical advances both in the north and the south. It's trying to fix forces defending in the east and envelop the Ukrainian defenders, then defeat them in the south. The Russians also want to encircle Mykolaiv, reduce the defense and destroy the defenders, and then have a free run at Odesa. They can't get to Odesa until they either envelop or destroy the forces around Mikolaiv.
BERGEN: And Odesa is the prize because?
REPASS: Because that completes the cutoff of Ukraine from the Black Sea, and it's also the gateway to Transnistria and Moldova.
BERGEN: What did you make of the comments by the Russian general about going on to Moldova? Do you take them at face value?
REPASS: I do take it as a serious threat, and I do think they have their eyes on Moldova. If they can take it, they will. To be specific, they talk about going to Transnistria. If they can build a southern land bridge to Transnistria, they will do it. That will put Russia on Moldova's doorstep and Moldova won't be able to effectively defend against a Russian invasion.
BERGEN: Is the Ukraine war widening?

REPASS: It's a fact that Belarus has been a haven for Russia since the start of the war on February 24. It's an article of faith with the Europeans that I've talked to that Belarus is a client state and is controlled and essentially ruled by Moscow. Belarus has not contributed military units to the fight, but they've housed, based and supported Russia forces. They've allowed them to launch operations from their territory -- both ground, air, and precision strike missiles have been launched from there.
Putin's officials have also said that the Baltic have no historical basis and they're illegitimate states -- the same thing they said about Ukraine before the war. The three Baltic states, and Polandfirmly believe that after Ukraine that they're next on Russia's hit list. They see Russia as an existential threat. And there's no evidence that Putin is willing to stop at Ukraine.
BERGEN: What about all this nuclear saber-rattling? Do you think it's just mostly posturing?
REPASS: Yes, I think it's mostly posturing. It would be one thing if Putin said it. To have Foreign Minister Lavrov say it is another thing. I think it's posturing if it comes from Lavrov. On their nuclear doctrine, they will use so-called tactical nuclear weapons if they feel that there's a significant threat to the Russian homeland. Those are the kind of circumstances that Russia has communicated to the West where they would use their nuclear weapons.
BERGEN: So, it's a high threshold.
REPASS: Right.
BERGEN: As a result of the sinking in mid-April of the Moskva, the Russian missile cruiser serving as the Black Sea Fleet flagship, do you think that the Chinese are looking at this and doing a little bit of soul-searching about whether attacking Taiwan would be wise?
REPASS: Yes, I do. Not only the sinking of the Moskva, but also the ability of a well-trained solid opposition to halt an invasion. Russia is getting very heavily degraded by a numerically inferior force, and they don't have a water bridge to cross. They're crossing Ukraine by land, while the Chinese would have to cross 100 miles of water to get to Taiwan. So, they must be thinking that this is going to be a lot harder than expected.
BERGEN: If you're Putin today, how are you feeling?
REPASS: Probably better than the day after the Moskva was sunk. I think he's probably feeling conflicted and confused but realizes that he has to press forward to get a victory here. And he's held captive by a beast of his own creation in that he rarely uses the internet himself. You've never seen him at a computer, and, at least as of late 2020, he reportedly didn't have an iPhone.
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He has no connection to the outside world and all his information is either given to him by his inner circle or by what he reads in the Russia news media, which is, of course, controlled by the state and only puts out state-controlled messages. So he's in a North Korean-like echo chamber and he is not getting accurate information.
BERGEN: Starting a war, that's often the easy part. Wars have their own logic. Unfortunately, this war might go on for a year or even two years.
REPASS: I fear that you're right. This will be a grinding, agonizing war if it lasts more than a year, and I think it's going to last at least two years. But we can't let it get into a stalemate. If it gets into a stalemate, Putin's going to claim success followed by a brutal occupation of the Ukrainian territory that he controls.
CNN · by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst



3. Putin Has a Problem: Are Russian Soldiers Breaking Their Own Tanks?

Excerpts:

“What we are witnessing with Russian tanks is a design flaw,” Sam Bendett, an adviser with the Russia Studies Program at CNA and an adjunct senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security, explained to CNN. “Any successful hit … quickly ignites the ammo causing a massive explosion, and the turret is literally blown off.”
While newer Russian tank designs, notably the T-14 Armata, have the crew in a compartment in the main hull of the tank – in most of the tanks deployed to Ukraine, the commander and gunner are in the turret and would be unlikely to survive should their tank take a hit to the turret.
With that in mind, it is easy to see why some Russians are taking a chance and are immobilizing their own tanks.

Putin Has a Problem: Are Russian Soldiers Breaking Their Own Tanks?
19fortyfive.com · by ByPeter Suciu · May 4, 2022
Ukraine has slowly become a graveyard of Russian tanks and other armored vehicles. Hundreds of tanks have reportedly been destroyed since Moscow launched its unprovoked invasion in late February, and while Ukrainian fighters have successfully used Javelin and NLAW anti-tank missiles to take out the Russian vehicles, there is now evidence circulating online that some of the invaders are breaking their own equipment in order not to have to fight.
According to the newly released audio of a conversation between a Russian soldier and his parents that the Security Service of Ukraine intercepted, the invading forces had suffered so many losses that the soldiers opted to break the only tank that remained intact to avoid going to the front. In a phone call, a seemingly young Russian told his father that his unit had ten tanks at the beginning of the war. After nine were destroyed, the tanker decided to break it on purpose after fearing that they’d be killed if they continued to fight on.
“Well, thank God for that! Take it apart, hand it over for scrap metal, and stay safe,” the soldier’s father responded.
The audio of the conversation has been shared on Facebook and other social media platforms, yet have not been independently confirmed.
Ukraine has been using the intercepted conversations between the Russian troops and their relatives as a propaganda tool, and with good reason. Instead of brave Russian soldiers telling of victories on the battlefield, the conversations reveal conscripts led by “stupid commanders” and that many were scared while others resorted to looting.
Jack-in-the-Box Tanks
It is easy to see why some Russian tankers have become wary of the capabilities of their equipment. Military analysts have suggested that battlefield images show Russian tanks are suffering from a defect that Western militaries have reportedly known about for decades and which is referred to as the “jack-in-the-box” effect.
The problem relates to how the tanks’ ammunition is stored, CNN reported. It is something Moscow should have seen coming, as unlike Western tanks, Russian ones carry multiple shells within the turrets and rely on an autoloader. While that reduces the number of crew members within the vehicle, it makes the turrets highly vulnerable as even an indirect hit can start a chain reaction that causes an entire ammunition store of up to 40 shells to explode.
The resulting shockwave is so great that the turret is literally blown off the tank and can be launched into the air as high as a two-story building. Images of such explosions have also been shared on social media.
“What we are witnessing with Russian tanks is a design flaw,” Sam Bendett, an adviser with the Russia Studies Program at CNA and an adjunct senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security, explained to CNN. “Any successful hit … quickly ignites the ammo causing a massive explosion, and the turret is literally blown off.”
Russian T-90 Tank. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
While newer Russian tank designs, notably the T-14 Armata, have the crew in a compartment in the main hull of the tank – in most of the tanks deployed to Ukraine, the commander and gunner are in the turret and would be unlikely to survive should their tank take a hit to the turret.
With that in mind, it is easy to see why some Russians are taking a chance and are immobilizing their own tanks.
Now a Senior Editor for 1945, Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He regularly writes about military hardware, and is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com. Peter is also a Contributing Writer for Forbes.
19fortyfive.com · by ByPeter Suciu · May 4, 2022


4. U.S. Intelligence Is Helping Ukraine Kill Russian Generals, Officials Say

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Excerpts:
The targeting help is part of a classified effort by the Biden administration to provide real-time battlefield intelligence to Ukraine. That intelligence also includes anticipated Russian troop movements gleaned from recent American assessments of Moscow’s secret battle plan for the fighting in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, the officials said. Officials declined to specify how many generals had been killed as a result of U.S. assistance.
The United States has focused on providing the location and other details about the Russian military’s mobile headquarters, which relocate frequently. Ukrainian officials have combined that geographic information with their own intelligence — including intercepted communications that alert the Ukrainian military to the presence of senior Russian officers — to conduct artillery strikes and other attacks that have killed Russian officers.

U.S. Intelligence Is Helping Ukraine Kill Russian Generals, Officials Say
The New York Times · by Eric Schmitt · May 4, 2022
May 4, 2022, 7:40 p.m. ET

A Russian tank stuck in the mud in Zavorychi, outside the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, in early April.Credit...Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The United States has provided intelligence about Russian units that has allowed Ukrainians to target and kill many of the Russian generals who have died in action in the Ukraine war, according to senior American officials.
Ukrainian officials said they have killed approximately 12 generals on the front lines, a number that has astonished military analysts.
The targeting help is part of a classified effort by the Biden administration to provide real-time battlefield intelligence to Ukraine. That intelligence also includes anticipated Russian troop movements gleaned from recent American assessments of Moscow’s secret battle plan for the fighting in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, the officials said. Officials declined to specify how many generals had been killed as a result of U.S. assistance.
The United States has focused on providing the location and other details about the Russian military’s mobile headquarters, which relocate frequently. Ukrainian officials have combined that geographic information with their own intelligence — including intercepted communications that alert the Ukrainian military to the presence of senior Russian officers — to conduct artillery strikes and other attacks that have killed Russian officers.
The intelligence sharing is part of a stepped-up flow in U.S. assistance that includes heavier weapons and tens of billions in aid, demonstrating how quickly the early American restraints on support for Ukraine have shifted as the war enters a new stage that could play out over months.
U.S. intelligence support to the Ukrainians has had a decisive effect on the battlefield, confirming targets identified by the Ukrainian military and pointing it to new targets. The flow of actionable intelligence on the movement of Russian troops that America has given Ukraine has few precedents.
Since failing to advance on Kyiv, the capital, in the early part of the war, Russia has tried to regroup, with a more concentrated push in eastern Ukraine that so far has moved slowly and unevenly.
Officials interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the classified intelligence being shared with Ukraine.
The administration has sought to keep much of the battlefield intelligence secret, out of fear it will be seen as an escalation and provoke President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia into a wider war. American officials would not describe how they have acquired information on Russian troop headquarters, for fear of endangering their methods of collection. But throughout the war, the U.S. intelligence agencies have used a variety of sources, including classified and commercial satellites, to trace Russian troop movements.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III went so far as to say last month that “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree it cannot do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”
Asked about the intelligence being provided to the Ukrainians, John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said that “we will not speak to the details of that information.” But he acknowledged that the United States provides “Ukraine with information and intelligence that they can use to defend themselves.”
After this article published, Adrienne Watson, a National Security Council spokeswoman, said in a statement that the battlefield intelligence was not provided to the Ukrainians “with the intent to kill Russian generals.”
Not all the strikes have been carried out with American intelligence. A strike over the weekend at a location in eastern Ukraine where Gen. Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, had visited was not aided by American intelligence, according to multiple U.S. officials. The United States prohibits itself from providing intelligence about the most senior Russian leaders, officials said.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s highest-ranking uniformed officer. Ukrainians struck a location where Gen. Gerasimov had visited, acting on their intelligence.Credit...Sergei Guneyev/Sputnik, via Agence France-Presse
But American intelligence was critical in the deaths of other generals, officials acknowledged.
The United States routinely provides information about the movement of Russian troops and equipment, and helps Ukraine confirm the location of critical targets. Other NATO allies also give real-time intelligence to the Ukrainian military.
The Biden administration is also supplying new weaponry that should improve Ukraine’s ability to target senior Russian officers. The smaller version of the Switchblade drone, which is now arriving on the battlefield, can be used to identify and kill individual soldiers, and could take out a general sitting in a vehicle or giving orders on a front line.
American officials have acknowledged publicly that the United States began giving Ukraine actionable intelligence in the run-up to Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24. Ahead of the invasion, for example, U.S. intelligence agencies warned of an impending attack on the Hostomel airport north of Kyiv. That allowed Ukraine to strengthen its defenses. Russian airborne forces were ultimately unable to hold the airfield.
While the information the United States has provided Ukraine has proved valuable, Russian generals have often left themselves exposed to electronic eavesdropping by speaking over unsecure phones and radios, current and former American military officials said.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments
Card 1 of 4
Fears of an expanded war rise. With the Russian military still struggling, Western officials are looking with increased alarm to Russia’s Victory Day holiday on May 9. Anxiety is growing that President Vladimir V. Putin will exploit the celebration of the Soviet triumph over the Nazis to intensify attacks and formally declare war.
Russian oil embargo. The European Union unveiled a plan to halt imports of Russian crude oil in the next six months and refined oil products by the end of the year. If approved as expected, it would be the bloc’s biggest and costliest step yet toward ending its own dependence on Russian fossil fuels.
Support for Moldova. The E.U. promised to provide additional military support for Moldova, the increasingly pressured neighbor of Ukraine. Security fears have grown there during the invasion, swelling after a series of explosions rocked Transnistria, the country’s own breakaway region, where Russia has maintained soldiers since 1992.
On the ground. Moscow continued to demonstrate its destructive power. In the western city of Lviv, strikes on three power substations knocked out electricity in many areas. In the eastern region of Donetsk, 21 people died on May 3, the highest number of casualties in a day since last month.
“It shows poor discipline, lack of experience, arrogance and failure to appreciate Ukrainian capabilities,” said Frederick B. Hodges, the former top U.S. Army commander in Europe who is now with the Center for European Policy Analysis. “It is not hard to geo-locate someone on a phone talking in the clear.”
Russian military tactics have also left senior generals vulnerable. A centralized, top-down command hierarchy gives decision-making authority only to the highest levels — compared to the more decentralized American structure that pushes many battlefield decisions to senior enlisted personnel and junior officers — forcing Russian generals to make risky trips to the front lines to resolve logistical and operational issues.
“When there are problems, the general officers have to go sort it out,” said General Hodges.
Although the administration remains wary of inflaming Mr. Putin to the point that he further escalates his attacks — President Biden has said he will not send American troops to Ukraine or establish a “no-fly zone” there — current and former officials said the White House finds some value in warning Russia that Ukraine has the weight of the United States and NATO behind it.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III went so far as to say last month that “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree it cannot do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”Credit...Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times
Some European officials believe, despite Mr. Putin’s rhetoric that Russia is battling NATO and the West, he has so far been deterred from starting a wider war. American officials are less certain, and have been debating for weeks why Mr. Putin has not done more to escalate the conflict.
Officials said Moscow has its own calculations to weigh, including whether it can handle a bigger war, particularly one that would allow NATO to invoke its mutual defense charter or enter the war more directly.
“Clearly, we want the Russians to know on some level that we are helping the Ukrainians to this extent, and we will continue to do so,” said Evelyn Farkas, the former top Defense Department official for Russia and Ukraine in the Obama administration. “We will give them everything they need to win, and we’re not afraid of Vladimir Putin’s reaction to that. We won’t be self-deterred.”
But intelligence sharing is considered a safe form of help because it is invisible, or, at least, deniable. American intelligence has given secret information to Ukraine in a wide range of areas, from Russian troop movements to targeting data, officials said.
Last month, the United States increased the flow of intelligence to Ukraine about Russian forces in the Donbas and Crimea, as Kyiv’s military forces prepared to defend against a renewed offensive by Moscow in eastern Ukraine, U.S. officials said.
“There’s a significant amount of intelligence flowing to Ukraine from the United States,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate panel on Tuesday. “We have opened up the pipes.”
Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting from Ukraine.
The New York Times · by Eric Schmitt · May 4, 2022


5. U.S. nuclear commander warns of deterrence ‘crisis’ against Russia and China

Can we really expect deterrence theory to work in the current geopolitical conditions?

U.S. nuclear commander warns of deterrence ‘crisis’ against Russia and China
Defense News · by Bryant Harris · May 5, 2022
WASHINGTON — The head of U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees the nuclear arsenal, warned Congress Wednesday that Washington faces a heightened nuclear deterrence risk when it comes to Russia and China.
“We are facing a crisis deterrence dynamic right now that we have only seen a few times in our nation’s history,” Adm. Charles Richard told the Senate’s strategic forces panel. “The war in Ukraine and China’s nuclear trajectory — their strategic breakout — demonstrates that we have a deterrence and assurance gap based on the threat of limited nuclear employment.”
Richard sits on the Nuclear Weapons Council, and his appearance came during the first hearing assembled by the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee. The panel was set to hear testimony from the interagency panel’s six voting members who are tasked with managing nuclear policy.
“The nation and our allies have not faced a crisis like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in over 30 years,” said Richard. “President [Vladimir] Putin simultaneously invaded a sovereign nation while using thinly veiled nuclear threats to deter U.S. and NATO intervention.”
He went on to note that China is “watching the war in Ukraine closely and will likely use nuclear coercion to their advantage in the future. Their intent is to achieve the military capability to reunify Taiwan by 2027 if not sooner.”
Richard said China has doubled its nuclear stockpile within two years, despite expectations it would take Beijing until the end of the decade to do so.
“The biggest and most visible one is the expansion from zero to at least 360 solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missile silos,” he said, noting China has also made significant advances in its air- and submarine-launched nuclear-capable missiles.
Richard used the warning to reiterate his call for “a low-yield, non-ballistic capability that does not require visible generation.”
He confirmed to Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., this was a reference to the sea-launched cruise missile nuclear development program, adding additional fodder to the congressional debate over whether to proceed with the Biden administration’s proposal to cancel the project.
Another voting Nuclear Weapons Council member, Under Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Security Administrator Jill Hruby, said the Biden administration would not meet its statutory requirement to produce 80 plutonium pits per year by 2030.
It’s unclear what impact this would have on U.S. nuclear modernization efforts as Hruby noted scientists at the National Nuclear Security Administration have yet to determine the effects of using old plutonium pits in new weapons.
“We’re making new pits because we’re concerned about pit aging,” said Hruby. “We don’t want to put old pits in new weapons if we think in 30 years those weapons will be in the stockpile, they may have aging problems, but we don’t know for sure.”
Still, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., criticized the plutonium pit production program for running behind and over budget, while Richard and Angus King, I-Maine, who chairs the subcommittee, came to Hruby’s defense.
“STRATCOM supports this or any other measure that [the National Nuclear Security Administration] can execute that minimizes the delay and ultimately reduces the operational risk that I’m going to have to carry because we can’t meet the requirement,” said Richard.
King acknowledged nuclear modernization efforts have meant a greater portion of the defense budget is going to maintain the nuclear triad — it now comprises 6.4% of the defense budget — but noted it’s still drastically lower than the 17% of the budget it encompassed in 1962.
“That doesn’t mean it’s still not a lot of money,” said King. “I refer to it as the pig in the budget python. It’s a very large expenditure that we’re going to have to cover over a few years.”
About Bryant Harris
Bryant Harris is the Congress reporter for Defense News. He has covered the intersection of U.S. foreign policy and national security in Washington since 2014. He previously wrote for Foreign Policy, Al-Monitor, Al Jazeera English and IPS News.



6. U.S. to boost defense posture, prepositioned stocks in Indo-Pacific: Austin

Excerpts:
"So this budget invests some six billion dollars in the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, and in keeping with our new national defense strategy, we are going to enhance our force posture, our infrastructure, our presence and our readiness in the Indo-Pacific, including the missile defense of Guam," he said in a budget hearing before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense.
"At the same time we must be prepared for threats that pay no heed to borders, from pandemics to climate change. And we must tackle the persistent threats posed by North Korea, Iran and global terrorist groups," he added.



U.S. to boost defense posture, prepositioned stocks in Indo-Pacific: Austin | Yonhap News Agency
en.yna.co.kr · by 변덕근 · May 4, 2022
By Byun Duk-kun
WASHINGTON, May 3 (Yonhap) -- The United States plans to boost its deterrence against China and North Korea, partly by increasing its "prepositioned stocks" of military supplies in the Indo-Pacific, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said Monday.
The U.S. defense chief also said the defense department plans to spend some US$6 billion in fiscal year 2023 to boost its deterrence posture in the Indo-Pacific.
"So this budget invests some six billion dollars in the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, and in keeping with our new national defense strategy, we are going to enhance our force posture, our infrastructure, our presence and our readiness in the Indo-Pacific, including the missile defense of Guam," he said in a budget hearing before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense.
"At the same time we must be prepared for threats that pay no heed to borders, from pandemics to climate change. And we must tackle the persistent threats posed by North Korea, Iran and global terrorist groups," he added.

The remarks come after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un hinted at the possible use of his country's nuclear weapons to "preemptively and thoroughly contain and frustrate all dangerous attempts and threatening moves" in a massive military parade held in Pyongyang on April 25 (Seoul time), in which the North also showcased its largest known intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
The recalcitrant country has fired more than a dozen missiles this year, including its first ICBM in more than four years.
Austin reiterated that the investment the U.S. plans to make in the Indo-Pacific will provide greater capability to counter possible aggression from China.
"In terms of what we are investing in with the Pacific Deterrent Initiative, we are investing in infrastructure and a number of other things to ensure that we have capability further forward in the theater," the secretary said when asked if the defense department had plans to increase its prepositioned stocks in the Indo-Pacific.
Prepositioned stocks refer to supplies, including weapons, that are positioned at strategic locations in advance. The U.S. currently maintains some 28,500 troops in South Korea.
"So, that's our goal; to make sure that we have that ability in the Indo-Pacific to a greater degree in the future," added Austin.
(END)
en.yna.co.kr · by 변덕근 · May 4, 2022


7. The War Over Ukrainian Identity

Excerpts:
Analysts are rightly distrustful of politicians who use history as a manipulative tool for pursuing political, social, or military ends. History, however, is an inescapable part of how people see the world, structure their beliefs, and determine their actions. It shapes and affects the lives of millions in this conflict and cannot be dismissed.
Ukraine as a nation-state finds its legitimacy in the history distilled by such figures as Hrushevsky. Ukrainians see their existence in time and space as resting on this vision of a sovereign history, emancipated from Russia. Putin and his allies use history to claim that Ukraine is not a legitimate country; denying Ukrainians their sovereign history was the first and decisive step in rejecting the right of Ukraine to exist. Both Russia and Ukraine are obsessed with the past and are guilty of distorting the historical record for modern purposes. But there is a fundamental difference in their positions. Russia turns to the past to justify expansion, aggression, and domination, to resurrect an empire. Ukraine does it in self-defense and self-determination to preserve and nurture an independent republic. Russia fights for the past. Ukraine fights for the future.



The War Over Ukrainian Identity
Nationalism, Russian Imperialism, and the Quest to Define Ukraine’s History
May 4, 2022
Foreign Affairs · by Georgiy Kasianov · May 4, 2022
Europe’s first twenty-first-century war is very much about the past. Russian President Vladimir Putin has ventured on wild forays into the depths of history to insist that Russians and Ukrainians are a single people, that Ukraine never truly existed as a sovereign entity until the Bolsheviks mistakenly brought it into existence, and that the territories of Ukraine are fundamentally Russian lands. He published an essay in July 2021 making this case at length, a bloated historical exegesis that few expected would lead to an actual war.
Russian forces have been smashing their way through Ukraine for over two months now, spurred in large part by historical fiction. But history also propels the fierce Ukrainian resistance. Ukrainians, too, harbor a particular understanding of the past that motivates them to fight. In many ways, this war is the collision of two incompatible historical narratives. Putin’s desire to restore an imperial Russia (of which Ukraine is but a constituent part) has crashed into a Ukrainian nationalism that imagines a sovereign Ukrainian state and a distinct Ukrainian people persisting in various forms for over a thousand years. Like all grand narratives, both have their share of mythology. But for Ukrainians, the stakes are more existential: Putin’s reading of history would deny them the very right to exist.
ITS OWN NATION
In 1903, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, an academic based in Lviv, published an article that remains powerful today. Weightily titled “The Traditional Scheme of ‘Russian’ History and the Problem of a Rational Organization of the History of the East Slavs,” the essay insisted that Ukrainian history was not a province of an overarching Russian story. Ukraine was not Russia. A coherent and distinct Ukrainian national history, he argued, stretched back over a millennium.
Hrushevsky sketched the story of Ukraine in the following way. Ukraine, as both a nation and a state, had its roots in the Kievan Rus’—a conglomerate of peoples ruled by a warrior elite that traced its ancestry to Scandinavia—that emerged on the banks of the Dnieper River in the late ninth century. Various Ukrainian polities followed, including the principality of Galicia-Volhynia and the kingdom of Ruthenia in the medieval period and a Cossack state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But by the nineteenth century, the territory of Ukraine was largely divided between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. Ukrainians did not surrender to this imperial domination; just as other eastern European intellectuals turned to national liberation and self-determination in the nineteenth century, so, too, did Ukrainian thinkers and writers seek to revive their nation by constructing a modern language and a master narrative of their nation’s history. That revival set the stage for a modern, independent Ukraine to join the family of nations in the twentieth century. Hrushevsky’s vision of Ukrainian identity had much in common with similar schemes in eastern Europe: it was ethnocentric, teleological (insofar as it treated Ukrainian nationhood as the inevitable outcome of centuries of history), and powerful in its ability to mobilize broad swaths of people.
Hrushevsky was not just the father of modern Ukrainian nationalism and history but also a key political actor, the inaugural president of the first Ukrainian parliament from 1917 to 1918, and the spiritual leader of the national revolution that led to the creation of an independent Ukrainian republic between 1917 and 1920. Today, many Ukrainians imagine their country through the framework that Hrushevsky put in place. They see Ukraine as the successor to not just the briefly independent republic but to a thousand years of kingdoms, principalities, and other forms of states. They note that Ukrainians have a culture, a language, and religious traditions distinct from their neighbors. This narrative has become the basis for contemporary Ukraine’s school curriculum, civic education, and official historiography.

This vision of Ukrainian history is full of striving dreamers, Ukrainians who sacrificed for their country and fought against many external oppressors. Few notions of national identity exist without some kind of other, an opposing force against which the nation can be defined. For Ukrainians, the principal other, of course, has been Russia. In its imperial and Soviet guises, Russia looms over Ukrainian history as a colonial force of exploitation, assimilation, repression, and humiliation. In this narrative, the Russian state lords over its citizens and imbues them with a false sense of pride and greatness, whereas Ukraine appears as the antithesis of Russia. It embodies the values of democracy, freedom, individualism, private initiative, and national pride. Where the Russian state oppresses, the Ukrainian state should guarantee security and independence for the Ukrainian people. At the broadest level, Ukrainians insist that Ukraine belongs to European civilization, not a Russian one.
Forever Together, Forever Apart
For around 70 years, the Soviet Union attempted to dull the distinctions between Russians and Ukrainians. The Soviet version of history admitted ethnographic and cultural differences between the two peoples while insisting on their unity and shared historical destiny. Soviet officials coined the slogan “Forever together!” in 1954 to commemorate the Treaty of Pereyaslav of 1654, when Cossacks in what is now Ukraine declared allegiance to the Russian tsar. The Soviet historical myth still upheld Russia as the big brother in this tandem of fraternal countries.
But this brotherliness came to an end after an independent Ukraine emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union in 1991. In the ensuing decade, both Russia and Ukraine adopted pre-Soviet historical narratives that rejected the convivial Soviet reading of the past. Russian officials tried to overcome the surge of local and ethnic nationalisms in Russia that followed the crackup of the Soviet Union by harking back to the imperial past. Many Russian scholars and public figures acquiesced to this return to an imperial version of history, one that enshrined a supranational state as the protector of a greater Russia.
When it came to Ukraine, Russian elites and state-backed historians sought to trace a chronology that would reinforce the notion that Russians and Ukrainians were one people. There should be no schism between the two: both shared descent from the Kievan Rus’, and their union was reaffirmed by the 1654 Pereyaslav treaty. This Russian account demonized or downplayed figures and events that suggested the uniqueness of Ukraine. For instance, Russians vilified the seventeenth-century Cossack leader Ivan Mazepa, who sided with Sweden against Muscovy. They dismissed the Ukrainian revolution of 1917–1920 (and the accompanying independent republic) as a fleeting and unfortunate civil conflict within a single community. They portrayed the great famine of 1932–33, which killed as many as four million Ukrainians, as a shared tragedy of all the peoples of the Soviet Union—a view contrary to the one held by Ukrainians, who called the event the Holodomor (“death by starvation”) and saw it as a genocide perpetrated against them. The Ukrainian nationalist movement that followed in the 1930s and 1940s was, in the Russian view, merely the work of anti-Russian collaborators with Nazi Germany.
Few notions of national identity exist without an opposing force against which the nation can be defined.
Many Ukrainian historians saw the same events differently from how their Russian counterparts saw them. They perceived the Kievan Rus’ as the progenitors of the Ukrainian people alone and the founders of Ukrainian statehood. The supposed reunification of 1654 only inaugurated three centuries of Russian colonial oppression. The Cossack leader Mazepa was a hero of national revival and resistance to imperial rule. The Ukrainian revolution and Ukraine’s brief statehood between 1917 and 1920 was the culmination of centuries of struggle against Russian imperial dominance. The Holodomor was an act of genocide committed by Moscow. And the Ukrainian nationalist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, including its heroic partisan guerrilla campaigns against the Soviets, was the apogee of the national liberation struggle against Moscow’s totalitarianism.
In 2003, a joint Russian-Ukrainian commission of historians tried to discuss these historical events with the goal of “harmonizing” their narratives, but it ended up underscoring the gulf between both sides. The Ukrainian historians involved produced a book that synthesized the history of Ukraine by recapitulating the standard Ukrainian national narrative in gentler, more academic terms. Russian members of the commission drafted their history of Russia, which followed all the prescriptions of the official statist narrative. The scholars found common ground only in their acceptance of the fundamental difference of each other’s position.

That same year, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, whose political opponents consistently accused him of being pro-Russian, published a book titled Ukraine Is Not Russia. The volume was written in Russian, printed in Moscow, and addressed to Russian readers. The title spoke for itself. Kuchma emphasized that Russians and Ukrainians have separate historical experiences, identities, languages, and cultures. Perhaps not coincidentally, the book came out exactly 100 years after Hrushevsky published his seminal essay on Ukraine’s claim to its own identity.
THE COLLISION OF PASTS
In the years following the publication of Ukraine Is Not Russia, the two countries increasingly clashed over history. In international organizations such as the United Nations and UNESCO, Russia effectively blocked all Ukrainian initiatives to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide targeting Ukrainians. Russia’s foreign ministry routinely accused Ukrainian authorities of glorifying Nazi collaborators and disseminating anti-Russian propaganda. In 2008, Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev refused to pay an official visit to the opening of a memorial in Kyiv to the victims of the Holodomor, accusing Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko of politicizing the shared tragedy of Soviet citizens. Russia’s state-controlled media caricatured Ukraine as a zoo filled with rabid nationalists.
These claims fueled Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Russia repeatedly invoked historical arguments to justify its annexation of Crimea and its long-running proxy war in Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, claiming that these lands were illegally passed to Ukraine by the Bolsheviks between the 1920s and 1950s. It has frequently invoked World War II in the messaging around its interventions in Ukraine. The breakaway republics in Donbas have described their military actions as part of a similar struggle against the “Kyiv junta” and have adopted the Saint George stripe, a symbol that commemorates the Russian defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.
For their part, Ukrainians have developed a more bristling and uncompromising understanding of their country’s history in the wake of the 2014 invasion. In 2015, the government launched a massive campaign to purge the evidence of the Soviet era, razing several thousand Soviet monuments and renaming about 50,000 streets and around 1,000 villages and cities. The parliament passed legislation that equated Soviet symbols to Nazi ones and criminalized their public use.
"The Motherland," a Soviet-era statue in Kyiv, March 2014
Konstantin Grishin / Reuters
A cult of heroism and military sacrifice gained new importance, adding to the Holodomor’s tragedy of victimhood. Ukrainians trumpeted the rugged resistance of the Cossacks to foreign rule, the bravery of the war for independence between 1917 and 1920, and the heroism of two controversial World War II–era militant organizations: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a radical right-wing group founded in 1929 that sought to secure Ukrainian independence, and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (known by its Ukrainian initials, UPA), which fought against the Poles, Soviets, and Germans during and after the war. New state-sanctioned politics of memory ignored the darker aspects of the OUN and the UPA, including their collaboration with Nazis, their xenophobic and totalitarian nature, and the participation of their members in the Holocaust and in massacres of Polish and Ukrainian civilians. A special law passed in April 2015 obliged citizens to respect all Ukrainians who fought for the country’s independence and declared public disrespect or criticism of the OUN and the UPA to be unlawful.
Unsurprisingly, the OUN and the UPA grew increasingly popular during wartime: the share of Ukrainians who held positive attitudes toward these organizations increased from 27 percent in 2013 to a peak of 49 percent in 2017, according to the Ukrainian research organization Rating. But that did not translate into actual support for the far-right nationalist block in Ukraine, which received less than two percent of the vote in the 2019 presidential election and won only one seat in parliamentary elections that year.
Nevertheless, Putin readily presented Ukraine’s commemoration of the OUN and the UPA as a festival of nationalism and what he called “Nazism.” At least in this sense, the Ukrainian right-wingers, who tried to impose the history of their political party on the whole of Ukraine, and the populists who supported them were unwitting allies of Putin’s propaganda; evoking the memory of World War II, Putin could point to the checkered legacy of the OUN and UPA to frame his “special military operation” as a continuation of the struggle against Nazism. This rhetoric points to the abiding power of history and memory in shaping the modern politics of the region. Many Russians and Ukrainians see the battles of the present as echoes of the battles of the past.
The past as future
Analysts are rightly distrustful of politicians who use history as a manipulative tool for pursuing political, social, or military ends. History, however, is an inescapable part of how people see the world, structure their beliefs, and determine their actions. It shapes and affects the lives of millions in this conflict and cannot be dismissed.

Ukraine as a nation-state finds its legitimacy in the history distilled by such figures as Hrushevsky. Ukrainians see their existence in time and space as resting on this vision of a sovereign history, emancipated from Russia. Putin and his allies use history to claim that Ukraine is not a legitimate country; denying Ukrainians their sovereign history was the first and decisive step in rejecting the right of Ukraine to exist. Both Russia and Ukraine are obsessed with the past and are guilty of distorting the historical record for modern purposes. But there is a fundamental difference in their positions. Russia turns to the past to justify expansion, aggression, and domination, to resurrect an empire. Ukraine does it in self-defense and self-determination to preserve and nurture an independent republic. Russia fights for the past. Ukraine fights for the future.

Foreign Affairs · by Georgiy Kasianov · May 4, 2022

8. The West vs. the Rest
My graphic view of the new cold war and the west (+) and the rest.




The West vs. the Rest
Welcome to the 21st-century Cold War.
By Angela Stent, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest.
Foreign Policy · by Angela Stent · May 2, 2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin made four major miscalculations before he launched his invasion of Ukraine. He overestimated Russian military competence and effectiveness and underestimated the Ukrainians’ will to resist and determination to fight back. He was also wrong in his assumption that a distracted West would be unable to unite politically in the face of the Russian attack and that the Europeans and the United States’ Asian allies would never support far-reaching financial, trade, and energy sanctions against Russia.
But he did get one thing right: He correctly estimated that what I call “the Rest”—the non-Western world—would not condemn Russia or impose sanctions. On the day the war broke out, U.S. President Joe Biden said the West would make sure that Putin became a “pariah on the international stage”—but for much of the world, Putin is not a pariah.
For the past decade, Russia has been cultivating ties with countries in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Africa—regions from which Russia withdrew after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. And the Kremlin has assiduously courted China since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. When the West sought to isolate Russia, Beijing stepped in to support Moscow, including by signing the massive “Power of Siberia” gas pipeline deal.
The United Nations has voted three times since the war began: twice to condemn Russia’s invasion and once to suspend it from the Human Rights Council. These resolutions passed. But tally up the size of the populations in those countries that abstained or voted against the resolutions, and it amounts to more than half of the world’s population.
In short, the world is not united in the view that Russia’s aggression is unjustified, nor is a significant part of the world willing to punish Russia for its actions. Indeed, some countries are seeking to profit from Russia’s current situation. The reluctance of the Rest to jeopardize relations with Putin’s Russia will complicate the West’s ability to manage ties with allies and others not only now but also when the war is over.
Leading the Rest in refusing to condemn Russia is China. Without the understanding that China would support Russia in whatever it did, Putin would not have invaded Ukraine. The Russian-Chinese joint statement on Feb. 4, signed when Putin visited Beijing at the beginning of the Winter Olympics, extols their “no limits” partnership and commitment to push back against Western hegemony. According to the Chinese ambassador to the United States, Chinese President Xi Jinping was not informed of Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine when the two met in Beijing. Whatever Putin actually said to Xi—whether it was a wink or something more explicit—we will probably never know.
But however one interprets that claim, it is undeniable that China has supported Russia since the invasion began. Beijing abstained on U.N. votes condemning Russia and voted against the resolution to suspend the country from the Human Rights Council. Chinese media reiterate, with some fidelity, Russian propaganda about “denazifying” and demilitarizing Ukraine and blame the United States and NATO for the war. They have questioned whether the Bucha massacre was carried out by Russian troops and have called for an independent investigation.
But there is some equivocation in the Chinese position. They have also called for an end to hostilities and have reiterated that they believe in the territorial integrity and sovereignty of all states—including Ukraine. China has been Ukraine’s top trading partner, and Ukraine is part of the Belt and Road project, so Beijing cannot welcome the economic devastation that the country is experiencing.
Nevertheless, Xi has chosen to ally with fellow autocrat Putin, and they share deep grievances against a U.S.-dominated world order they believe has neglected their interests. They are determined to create a post-Western global order, although they differ in what this order should look like.
For China, it would be a rules-based order in which China has a much greater role in setting the agenda than it currently does. For Putin, on the other hand, it would be a disruptive world order with few rules. Both countries are allergic to Western criticisms of their domestic systems and their human rights records. China and Russia both need each other in their joint quest to make the world safe for autocracy. Xi would not like to see Putin defeated. Hence, despite China’s discomfort at the scale of violence and brutality in Ukraine and the risks of escalation to a wider war, it remains unwilling to speak out against Russia.
Major Chinese financial institutions have so far complied with Western sanctions, though. After all, China’s economic stake in relations both with Europe and the United States is far larger than with Russia. Moreover, given the extensive Western sanctions against Russia, Beijing must be wondering what the Western reaction might be were it to invade Taiwan. The Chinese are undoubtedly studying the sanctions carefully.
The other major holdout against criticizing Russia has been India, the world’s largest democracy and a U.S. partner in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or the Quad, with Japan and Australia. India abstained on the three U.N. resolutions and has refused to sanction Russia. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called reports of atrocities against civilians in Bucha, Ukraine, “very worrying,” and India’s ambassador to the United Nations said the country “unequivocally condemn[s] these killings and support[s] the call for an independent investigation,” yet neither Modi nor the U.N. ambassador blamed Russia for them.
Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar has said Russia is a “very important partner in a variety of areas,” and India continues to purchase Russian arms and oil. Indeed, India obtains two-thirds of its weapons from Russia and is Moscow’s top arms customer. U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland has admitted that this stems partly from Washington’s reluctance to supply India—a leader in the nonaligned world during the Cold War—with more weapons. The United States is now contemplating stronger defense cooperation with India.
Modi has several reasons for refusing to condemn Russia. The China factor is key. India views Russia as an important balancer against China, and Russia acted to defuse Indian-Chinese tensions after their border clashes in 2020. Moreover, India’s Cold War tradition of neutrality and skepticism toward the United States has created considerable public sympathy for Russia in India. Going forward, India will have to balance its traditional security relationship with Russia against its new strategic partnership with the United States in the Quad.
One of Putin’s major foreign-policy successes during the past decade has been Russia’s return to the Middle East, reestablishing ties with countries from which post-Soviet Russia withdrew and establishing new ones with countries that had no previous ties with the Soviet Union.
Russia is now the only major power that talks to all countries in the region—including Sunni-led countries such as Saudi Arabia, Shiite-led countries such as Iran and Syria, and Israel—and has ties with all groups on all sides of every dispute. This cultivation of Middle Eastern countries has been in evidence since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Although most Arab countries voted to condemn Russia’s invasion in the first U.N. vote, the 22-member Arab League subsequently did not. Many Arab countries abstained in the vote suspending Russia from the Human Rights Council. Staunch U.S. allies including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Israel have not imposed sanctions on Russia. Indeed, Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have spoken twice since the war began.
Israel’s position is largely determined by Russia’s support for Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, where both Russian and Iranian forces are present. Israel negotiated a deconfliction agreement with Russia that enables it to strike Iranian targets in Syria. Israel fears that antagonizing Russia could endanger its ability to defend its northern border. It has sent a field hospital and other humanitarian assistance to Ukraine—but no weapons. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett even briefly acted as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine, but his efforts proved unsuccessful.
For many Middle Eastern countries, their stance toward Russia is also shaped by their skepticism about the United States as a sometimes unreliable partner in the region and their irritation at U.S. criticisms of their human rights records. The only truly pro-Russian country is Syria, whose leader, Assad, would be long gone were it not for Russian military support.
Russia’s return to Africa in recent years and the support the mercenary Wagner Group gives to embattled leaders there have produced a continent that has largely refused to condemn or sanction Russia. Most African countries abstained in the vote condemning Russia’s invasion, and many voted against suspending Russia from the Human Rights Council. South Africa, a democratic member of the BRICS group of emerging economies, has not criticized Russia.
For many African countries, Russia is seen as the heir to the Soviet Union, which supported them during their anti-colonial struggles. The Soviet Union was a major backer of the African National Congress during the apartheid era, and the current South African leadership feels gratitude toward Russia. As in the Middle East, hostility toward the United States also plays a role in influencing African views of the invasion.
Even in the United States’ own backyard, Russia has its cheerleaders. Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua have supported Moscow—as expected—but others have also refused to condemn the invasion. Brazil, a BRICS member, declared a stance of “impartiality,” and President Jair Bolsonaro visited Putin in Moscow shortly before the invasion and declared himself “in solidarity with Russia.” Brazil remains highly dependent on imports of Russian fertilizer.
More disturbing was Mexico’s refusal to present a common North American front with the United States and Canada and condemn the invasion. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Morena party even launched a Mexico-Russia Friendship Caucus in the lower house of the country’s Congress in March, inviting the Russian ambassador to address the caucus. Traditional leftist 1970s-style anti-Americanism may explain a large part of this embrace of Russia, and it presents Russia with new opportunities to sow discord in the West.
The Rest may represent more than half of the world’s population, but it is the poorer half, composed of many less developed countries. The West’s combined GDP, economic power, and geopolitical heft far outweigh the influence of those countries that have refused to condemn the invasion or sanction Russia.
Nevertheless, the current divisions between the West and the Rest will shape whatever world order emerges after the war ends. The two key countries are China and India, which will ensure that Putin will not be an international pariah after the conflict ends. Indeed, Indonesia, the host of the next G-20 Summit in November, has said it will welcome Putin’s presence. However, it has also extended an invitation to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
In the aftermath of this brutal war, the United States will have enhanced its military presence in Europe and will likely permanently station troops in one or more country on NATO’s eastern flank. If one of Putin’s long-standing goals is to weaken NATO, his war against Ukraine has achieved the exact opposite, not only reviving the alliance but also giving it new purpose after Afghanistan and, with the likely accession of Sweden and Finland, expanding it. NATO will return to a policy of enhanced containment of Russia as long as Putin remains in power and possibly thereafter, depending on who the next Russian leader is.
But in this 21st-century version of the Cold War, non-Western countries will refuse to take sides the way many had to during the original Cold War. The nonaligned movement of the Cold War years will reemerge in a new incarnation. This time, the Rest will maintain their ties to Russia even as Washington and its allies treat Putin as a pariah.
Russia’s economy will be diminished, and if it succeeds in creating a “sovereign internet,” it will de-modernize and become ever more dependent on China. But it will remain a country with which a significant number of states will still be quite content to do business—and quite careful not to antagonize Moscow.
Foreign Policy · by Angela Stent · May 2, 2022

9. The War in Ukraine Calls for a Reset of Biden’s Foreign Policy

Sovereign and the right to self determination.

What kind of future do we want? What is te acceptable durable political arrangement(s) that will protect, sustain, and advance US national interests?

Excerpts:
Finally, as the United States considers what future it wants, it is helpful to remember the choices it didn’t make when it had the opportunity. In the years leading up to 9/11, a global justice movement began to emerge in the global North. The protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 and months later against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington saw the mainstreaming of an environmental and labor coalition that had been fostered by years of work on the part of activists in the global South and that took a stand against the corporate-dominated international trade system that enabled neoliberal plunder, elite corruption, and environmental devastation. Unfortunately, much of that movement’s momentum was buried in the rubble of the World Trade Center.
In late 2019 and early 2020, the world saw a wave of protests driven by similar outrage against government corruption and self-dealing elites. These protest movements were momentarily snuffed out by the pandemic closures, but they will return, because the sources of those grievances endure. If the United States really wants to put itself on the side of democracy, it will hear these voices and commit to supporting a more expansive redistribution of global power and wealth and the building of a more humanitarian global order. The Biden administration took office having made bold promises about restoring American leadership for a new era. It now has an opportunity to fulfill those promises, but only if it has the courage to hear what the wider world is asking for. This approach would not come at the expense of the necessary and appropriate attention to Ukraine. This is not an either/or proposition but a both/and one. Properly framed as just one element of a renewed and genuine commitment to democracy and justice, the administration’s policy in Ukraine could herald a new era of American leadership. If all that Biden seeks in Ukraine, however, is to reaffirm U.S. dominance, it will be just the latest instance of the United States failing to meet the moment.


The War in Ukraine Calls for a Reset of Biden’s Foreign Policy
America Can’t Support Democracy Only When It’s Convenient
May 4, 2022
Foreign Affairs · by Matthew Duss · May 4, 2022
“The invasion of Ukraine is a paradigm shift on the scale of 9/11,” British Foreign Minister Liz Truss told an audience in Washington on March 10. “How we respond today will set the pattern for this new era.”
Truss’s comments capture the prevailing view in Washington. A member of Congress remarked days later, “You’d have to go back to 9/11 to see such a unified commitment.” Considering how that post-9/11 unity was put to use, its invocation now should be viewed more as a warning than as encouragement. The United States and its allies made many disastrously wrong choices in the wake of 9/11, choices that had far-reaching consequences: the declaration of a global “war on terror,” the decision to turn the initial military intervention in Afghanistan into a long-term state-building operation, the invasion of Iraq, a worldwide campaign of kidnapping, torture, and assassination, to name a few. With those mistakes and abuses in mind, the United States must tread carefully as it responds to this new geopolitical turning point. It is desperately important that it makes the right choices this time around.
There is no doubt Russia’s horrendous war in Ukraine has engendered a sense of unity and purpose among many U.S. foreign-policy makers who have struggled to respond to the United States’ relative but steady decline in power. Russian aggression has also reinvigorated a moribund transatlantic alliance. The danger is that rather than develop a new paradigm for this era, policymakers will simply attempt to exhume an old “us versus them” Cold War model, shock it back to life, and put a tuxedo on it. As in the days after 9/11, a momentary sense of unity could be used to promote a set of tragically counterproductive policies.
So far, the Biden administration has delivered a robust but measured policy response to Russia’s war in Ukraine, rebuffing calls for more aggressive action that might be satisfying in the short term but could prove catastrophic down the road. Although the White House should be applauded for its judicious reaction to the Ukraine crisis, it also deserves scrutiny for failing to apply similar attention and effort in places where just as much is at stake.
GETTING IT RIGHT
The Biden administration deserves credit for its handling of the war in Ukraine thus far. Its diplomatic surge ahead of the invasion, including the effective use of declassified intelligence, and the strenuous effort to forge and maintain unity among the transatlantic alliance was expertly done. By declaring early and continually reiterating that U.S. troops would not fight a war in Ukraine, President Joe Biden has created space for a considerable amount of U.S. and allied material support for Ukraine’s defense. The United States and its allies should continue to supply these defensive weapons, but the administration should reject calls for the United States to threaten Russia more directly—for example, by signaling preparations to “win” a nuclear war, as a Wall Street Journal op-ed recently urged. Exhortations to “call Putin’s bluff” by ignoring his nuclear saber rattling and dramatically ramping up military support for Ukraine may be emotionally satisfying to pundits, but the deterrent effect of Russia’s thousands of nuclear weapons cannot be simply wished away: that arsenal must factor into the decision-making in Washington and allied capitals as leaders work to support Ukraine’s defense while avoiding unnecessary escalation.

The administration’s rallying of European allies and Asian partners such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan around a set of stringent sanctions has also been impressive. But the United States should make distinctions among the different sanctions it applies. Washington should strengthen sanctions that target regime officials with decision-making power and deny access to materials and technology necessary for Russia’s war effort. But broad-based sanctions that only further immiserate ordinary working people in Russia by cratering the economy should face more scrutiny. After all, it has never been clear how laying siege to a population that has little say in its government’s policy decisions is supposed to change those policies. As seen in Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela, such sanctions tend to achieve little beyond entrenching the target regimes and raising the domestic political costs of future diplomacy (something that hawkish advocates of such sanctions occasionally admit is the point).
The United States should also be aware of the compounding impact of both the war and the sanctions (along with, of course, climate change) on global food supplies. Ukraine and Russia are both major exporters of fertilizer, grain, and wheat, and shortages are already having a cascading effect on the most vulnerable populations across the globe. There are few things that can inflame conflict as quickly as food scarcity. The world could be facing a mounting set of crises if a formula for bringing these exports back online is not found quickly.
The United States must tread carefully as it responds to this new geopolitical turning point.
The easiest way out of this mess, of course, would be for Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree to end his war. Although it is not the United States’ place to dictate terms to Ukraine or to stand in the way of any agreement that ends the bloodshed, the Biden administration and its allies should be clearer about what steps Russia needs to take to get relief from sanctions. This should obviously include a sustained and verified cease-fire and the creation of humanitarian corridors, leading to a process of Russian withdrawal from Ukrainian territory and a return of the thousands of Ukrainian citizens that Russian forces have deported to Russia.
In the meantime, while military and humanitarian supplies remain the most urgent need, Washington and its allies can do far more for Ukraine. Among these steps would be forgiving its foreign debt, a measure advocated by a number of Ukrainian officials and a wider coalition of activists. This also points to a widening of the aperture that should take place in the U.S. approach to global security. Ukraine is not the only country in the world whose government is saddled with crippling debt, forced to spend the country’s limited wealth filling the coffers of the International Monetary Fund rather than improving conditions for its own people. A more expansive program of international debt forgiveness would put the United States in a much better position to turn the reinvigorated transatlantic alliance toward a more genuine and sustainable global unity.
The fact is that the majority of the world’s population, particularly in the “global South,” has still not taken a side on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Many countries are skeptical of the rallying calls being made by a set of powerful nations that they see as never having hesitated to exploit the less powerful when their interests required it. It is quite true that some of these governments’ hedging is driven by their own economic and military ties to Russia and China. At the same time, antipathy toward U.S. hegemony is genuine, particularly in regions that have endured American military interventions, coups, occupations, and assassinations.
POLICY NEGLECT
The Biden administration’s attention to the Ukraine crisis puts in stark relief the areas where it has fallen short. One of the most egregious examples is its global vaccination efforts. Today some 2.7 billion people, mostly in Africa, are still waiting to get their first vaccine dose. Almost a year ago, after months of pressure from international activists and members of Congress, the Biden administration announced its support for a waiver on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) at the World Trade Organization, a measure that would temporarily suspend intellectual property protections and make sorely needed technologies available for COVID-19 testing, treatment, and vaccine production in poor countries. On May 2, the World Trade Organization director general finally submitted a text for a proposed “compromise” waiver, a draft of which had been leaked to reporters in March. According to many global health advocates, this compromise would not lift enough of the barriers blocking equitable access and could actually prove worse than the status quo. Doctors Without Borders urged countries to reject the proposal, saying that the plan “does not provide a meaningful solution to facilitate increasing people's access to needed medical tools during the pandemic...and in fact would set a negative precedent for future global health challenges.”

The demand by the U.S. ambassador to the UN that countries in the global South get off “the sidelines” and condemn Russia’s war might ring less hollow if Washington itself would get off the sidelines when it comes to debt relief and vaccine access as first steps toward the larger redistribution of global power and wealth that these countries have urged.
What is more, the administration’s framing of the Russian war on Ukraine as symbolic of a battle between democracy and autocracy might be rhetorically satisfying but obscures more than clarifies the challenges and opportunities of this moment. First, it overlooks that the contest between democracy and autocracy is being waged within states as much as between them, including within the United States, as authoritarian-leaning ethnonationalist forces continue to gain strength—indeed, draw strength—from an us versus them discourse of civilizational struggle. It is also unconvincing in light of Washington’s own support for many autocratic governments, particularly (but certainly not only) in the Middle East. The Biden administration’s politically expedient coddling of repressive partners such as EgyptIsraelSaudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates doesn’t just undermine its democracy and human rights agenda among global audiences—it makes a mockery of it.
U.S. support for those governments—in the form of continued arms supplies and diplomatic support in the face of credible and serious allegations of ongoing human rights abuses and violations of international law—handicaps efforts to hold Russia accountable for credibly alleged crimes in Ukraine. Although there are important differences in what the United States did in Afghanistan and Iraq and what Russia is doing in Ukraine, one reason Putin and other war criminals around the world believe they can get away with such abuses is that the United States consistently refuses to impose any meaningful accountability, let alone submit to an international tribunal, for its own transgressions. If Washington is serious about an investigation into Russian war crimes in Ukraine, then one of the best things it can do is to join the International Criminal Court, as called for recently by Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Strengthening global rules against atrocities requires the United States to end its insistence that those rules don’t apply to the United States and its friends.
The administration’s policy in Ukraine could herald a new era of American leadership.
The democracy versus autocracy framing also glosses over how the United States continues to treat many autocratic regimes as key partners for stabilizing global energy markets, especially amid efforts to cut off Russian gas. Such tradeoffs may be necessary to address the more urgent crisis, but it is also worth noting that this is precisely the same logic that led the United States to treat Putin as an ally in the war on terror and former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as an ally against Iran, to name only two partners who became problems.
To prevent future administrations from having to go hat in hand to corrupt authoritarian petrostate friends for help against corrupt authoritarian petrostate enemies, the United States ought to be accelerating a transition to green energy both at home and abroad. Biden can use his powers as president under the Defense Production Act to jump-start a long-overdue and desperately needed shift away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy. A recent bill sponsored by Democratic Representatives Cori Bush of Missouri and Jason Crow of Colorado and independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont would invest $150 billion in onshore renewable energy manufacturing to speed that process.
Finally, as the United States considers what future it wants, it is helpful to remember the choices it didn’t make when it had the opportunity. In the years leading up to 9/11, a global justice movement began to emerge in the global North. The protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 and months later against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington saw the mainstreaming of an environmental and labor coalition that had been fostered by years of work on the part of activists in the global South and that took a stand against the corporate-dominated international trade system that enabled neoliberal plunder, elite corruption, and environmental devastation. Unfortunately, much of that movement’s momentum was buried in the rubble of the World Trade Center.
In late 2019 and early 2020, the world saw a wave of protests driven by similar outrage against government corruption and self-dealing elites. These protest movements were momentarily snuffed out by the pandemic closures, but they will return, because the sources of those grievances endure. If the United States really wants to put itself on the side of democracy, it will hear these voices and commit to supporting a more expansive redistribution of global power and wealth and the building of a more humanitarian global order. The Biden administration took office having made bold promises about restoring American leadership for a new era. It now has an opportunity to fulfill those promises, but only if it has the courage to hear what the wider world is asking for. This approach would not come at the expense of the necessary and appropriate attention to Ukraine. This is not an either/or proposition but a both/and one. Properly framed as just one element of a renewed and genuine commitment to democracy and justice, the administration’s policy in Ukraine could herald a new era of American leadership. If all that Biden seeks in Ukraine, however, is to reaffirm U.S. dominance, it will be just the latest instance of the United States failing to meet the moment.

Foreign Affairs · by Matthew Duss · May 4, 2022


10. Finland’s New Frontier


Conclusion:

It is impossible to know for sure how Putin and his military forces will react to a Finnish bid to join NATO. As Russia’s initially bungled invasion of Ukraine and frequent targeting of civilians there has shown, the Kremlin’s own motives these days seem less strategic and more emotional, hobbled by miscalculations and Putin’s apparent isolation, and driven by the Russian leader’s sense of rage against the West. Given Finland’s long-standing membership in the EU community and defense ties with NATO, to join the alliance officially seems more like a logical next step than a sea change, but Putin’s reaction remains unpredictable. In the face of that unpredictability, it is probably safer for Finland to be inside the alliance than out.


Finland’s New Frontier
Will Russia Seek to Disrupt Helsinki’s NATO Bid?
May 4, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Kimberly Marten · May 4, 2022
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has destroyed the 30-year post-Cold War order in Europe. Among its most significant and unexpected geopolitical effects is that Finland, long a nonaligned country, will likely soon join NATO, probably followed by its similarly nonaligned neighbor, Sweden. Finland shares an 830-mile border with Russia, and the Finnish capital of Helsinki is closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg than it is to Stockholm. A NATO that includes Finland will more than double the alliance’s land borders with Russia.
Fear of Russia isn’t new for Finland. The country spent a century inside the Russian empire before gaining independence in 1917. It lost a chunk of its southeastern territory to the Soviet Union following Joseph Stalin’s brief Winter War of 1939-40, and then it lost its autonomy under the so-called Finlandization policy of the Cold War. During those decades, Finns engaged in self-censorship and committed to a pro-Soviet foreign policy in return for not being occupied by Moscow. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Finland (like Sweden) made its Western identity clear by joining the European Union (EU) in 1995. Along with the rest of the EU, Helsinki also ratified the 2007 Lisbon Treaty, which commits each member to aid and assist any others who face an external military attack.
Starting in 2014, following Putin’s seizure of Crimea, Russia began menacing Finland again, in many ways treating Helsinki no differently than nearby NATO states. Moscow repeatedly breached Finnish air space, and twice interfered with Finnish scientific research ships operating in international waters. Yet Finland remained formally nonaligned, with a public afraid of antagonizing its powerful Russian neighbor. As recently as fall 2021, less than a third of the Finnish population supported NATO membership, a disposition that had held for decades. Finns instead preferred to serve as an economic and diplomatic bridge between Russia and the West. Indeed, Finland’s head of state, President Sauli Niinistö, knows Putin well (even playing hockey with him) and has long been seen as a political interpreter between Europe and Russia. While Finland’s bilateral trade relationship with Russia was badly affected by the 2020 pandemic—and has now been completely upended by EU sanctions—in prior years it often exceeded $10 billion, making Moscow one of Helsinki’s top five trading partners. Over 900 Finnish businesses had invested in Russia by 2019.
Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, and especially growing reports of Russian atrocities and war crimes there, have quickly transformed Finnish public opinion. For the first time ever, a hefty majority of the Finnish public and most of Finland’s leading political parties now support NATO membership, and Finland is likely to apply for membership before the alliance’s June 29 summit in Madrid. (It will probably be followed by Sweden, with Stockholm waiting for Helsinki to act first.) Marking a historic shift in Helsinki’s strategic posture, NATO membership would give Finland the collective security guarantee of the world’s most powerful military alliance, backed by U.S. nuclear weapons. But it also could further upend Finland’s traditional economic relationship with Russia and expose the country to the risk of retaliation.
Location, Location, Location
In addition to their extensive shared land border, Finland and Russia are coastal neighbors along the Gulf of Finland. This gulf empties into the Baltic Sea, where the heavily militarized Russian exclave of Kaliningrad serves as home to Moscow’s Baltic Sea fleet. NATO dominates the southeastern shores of the Baltic Sea, with members Germany, Poland, and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Yet Kaliningrad is wedged between Poland and Lithuania, and adding Finland and Sweden to the alliance on the northwestern shores of the Baltic would have significant geopolitical effects. For one thing, it would complicate Moscow’s ability to maintain sea and air access to Kaliningrad in the event of a war with the West, since the corridor linking the exclave and the rest of Russia would be surrounded by NATO members.

Gaining control of the Baltic Sea perimeter would also greatly ease NATO’s ability to defend its Baltic members in the event of a Russian attack. NATO planners have worried about this scenario ever since Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014, because Estonia and Latvia border Russia and have significant Russian ethnic minority populations, leaving them potentially vulnerable to Russian hybrid warfare operations. For example, Russian intelligence forces could conceivably launch an information warfare campaign that falsely accused authorities of persecuting ethnic Russians in Estonia, staging a fictitious request from locals that Russia send protective peacekeeping forces across the border. NATO planners are concerned that Russia could use Kaliningrad’s ships, aircraft, drones, and missiles—some of which are capable of carrying nuclear warheads—to deny the alliance easy naval and air access to Estonia and Latvia. Moreover, those states are connected by land to the rest of the alliance only along the tiny border between Lithuania and Poland—the so-called Suwalki gap—which is straddled by Kaliningrad on one side and Russian ally Belarus on the other, making wartime NATO land access equally risky. Under NATO’s current configuration, wartime defense of the Baltic states would probably involve high NATO casualties.

In the time between application and admission to NATO, Finland would not be covered by Article 5.
But the inclusion of Finland and Sweden, both of which border NATO member Norway, would alter the balance of power in the region. Finland lies just over 200 miles across the Gulf of Finland from Estonia and is already in the process of upgrading its air defense systems. Finland and Estonia have also launched a commercial initiative to connect Helsinki and Tallinn with a high-speed train tunnel under the gulf, making them a single urban area. Such a tunnel could presumably serve military purposes, too.
For Finland, though, joining NATO carries risks, putting the Finnish military on the frontlines of a newly critical border. Of special concern is the question of how Moscow will react to a formal request by Helsinki to join the alliance—there will likely be a gap of many months between Finland’s membership application and its official welcome into NATO. During that time, Finland would not yet be covered by NATO’s Article 5 collective defense guarantee, and Russia might be tempted to threaten or attack Finland, hoping that Finnish public opinion would once again turn against joining the alliance and short-circuit the membership process.
Hungarian Haggling
The geographic enlargement of NATO is not a new phenomenon. In Article 10 of its founding document, the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, alliance architects foresaw that any capable European state that shared NATO’s security goals could be invited to join its initial 12 members. With North Macedonia’s accession in 2020, NATO now includes 30 states. Fourteen of them have joined since the end of the Cold War. In a 1995 document, NATO laid out the basic (if rather vague) requirements for new members, which have always been subject to political negotiation: a commitment to liberal democracy, rule of law, and democratic control over military forces; a market economy capable of contributing to the common defense; and the resolution of all outstanding ethnic and border disputes. Designed for former Warsaw Pact and other eastern European states undergoing Westernizing reforms, these requirements involve a cumbersome set of procedures and preparations, culminating in a unique and detailed “membership action plan” for each aspirant.
Finland, with a constitutional democracy established in 1919, an advanced trading economy, and a highly capable military, meets all of the membership criteria with ease, placing it in a different category from other recent NATO aspirants. Helsinki’s armed forces are also a known quantity for the alliance. Since 1994, Finland has participated in NATO’s Partnership for Peace program, designed to build trust and interoperability between NATO and other countries through joint education, training, and force deployments. Finland has served on NATO-led missions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. It is also one of six “Enhanced Opportunities Partners” with which NATO has shared additional resources and information since the Russian seizure of Crimea. That year, NATO entered a host-nation support agreement with Finland, allowing the country to receive help from the alliance in the event of “disasters, disruptions and threats to security” and deepening its participation in NATO training and exercises. Since 2017, Helsinki has also coordinated with NATO on cyberdefense issues, and it has opened a Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats in partnership with NATO and the EU. (While the concept of “hybrid threats” is not well defined, it can include everything from information warfare and political influence operations to the use of non-state armed actors, either with or without the use of regular military forces.)
For these reasons, NATO could easily create a fast-track accession procedure for Finland, possibly compressing the timeline to as little as a month. The same is likely to hold true for Sweden. Indeed, NATO foreign ministers discussed these potential new membership requests at meetings in early April that included their Swedish and Finnish counterparts, indicating that such a process may already have begun.

Nonetheless, Finnish accession to the alliance could still be delayed by the requirement of legal ratification by each of NATO’s 30 member states. In the most recent ratification case, North Macedonia, this process took nearly a year. While it appears that all NATO members want Finland to join, there is concern among some analysts that Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, might threaten to slow the process in order to gain some political quid pro quo—probably not from NATO per se, but from the EU. As a right-wing authoritarian nationalist known for his continuing overtures to Russia, Orban has sparred with Helsinki since 2019, when Finland held the rotating EU presidency and led hearings (mandated by the EU parliament) on whether Hungary should have its EU voting rights curtailed in light of Orban’s rule-of-law violations at home. Now the European Commission is threatening to withhold COVID-19 support payments to Budapest over accusations of government corruption and Orban’s anti-LGBTQ policies. Since not all EU members are NATO members, and since the EU and NATO serve fundamentally differing purposes, any demands by Orban to link the two could complicate the accession process and require extended diplomatic maneuvering.
Minding the Gap
A direct Russian military attack on Finland seems unlikely. According to unconfirmed video footage, Moscow has already begun moving additional heavy weapons systems and missiles toward the Finnish border in response to media reports about Finland’s likely membership bid. But Kremlin planners would likely think twice about crossing that boundary. Since 2014, Helsinki’s 280,000-member defense forces have been reconfigured to respond rapidly to Russian-style hybrid warfare. In early April, the Finnish government further authorized a one-time $2 billion surge in defense spending, a 70 percent increase over its usual annual military budget. The budget emphasizes border and air defense, and the increase may have been designed to push Finland over NATO’s goal for its members to spend two percent of GDP on defense. As Russian forces get bogged down in Ukraine, it is also doubtful whether Moscow has the capacity to take on an additional theater of operations.
But the Kremlin could choose to pressure Finland in other ways. It might try some kind of cyber or intelligence action against Helsinki to turn the Finnish public against NATO, for example. (In 2016, when Montenegro was poised for NATO membership, Montenegrin officials allege that Russian intelligence operatives made an unsuccessful bid to engineer a coup against the elected government there.) In early April, Finnish government websites faced a surge of denial-of-service attacks linked to Russia. For now, such attacks have been quickly overcome and seem mostly symbolic, providing a way to register Moscow’s displeasure at Finland’s discussions about joining NATO. Finland has so far been spared the ransomware and critical infrastructure attacks that have plagued other countries in Russia’s sights, but it could now be targeted that way, too. Finnish officials have warned the public about possible political influence and information warfare campaigns, perhaps using deep-fake video technology to invent stories of mistreatment of the tens of thousands of Russian citizens and Finnish citizens of Russian ancestry who live in the country.
The United States and its fellow NATO members can provide bilateral defense support for Finland during its vulnerable transition to NATO membership. Such assistance would likely focus on cyber and air defenses and would build on long-standing military relationships. Finland has been buying U.S. weapons for 30 years, and just weeks before the Ukraine invasion began, it signed a $9 billion agreement to purchase 64 advanced F-35 fighter jets. Helsinki also has a close military relationship with London, including as a member (alongside Sweden and six current NATO members) of the United Kingdom’s Joint Expeditionary Force, established in 2014 for rapid crisis response in the Baltics.

Russia could seek to pressure Finland through cyberattacks or disinformation campaigns.
At the same time, Finland has a card of its own to play in any pressure campaign from Moscow: its deep economic relationship with Russia. That relationship has deteriorated significantly since the war in Ukraine began. The Finnish economy has been hit hard by Western sanctions against Russia, as well as by decisions to halt trade by Finnish firms reluctant to be associated with Moscow. Given the extensive history of economic ties between the two countries, however, Finland can position itself as a crucial bridge for any future Russian efforts to reestablish a relationship with the West.
In fact, at least some members of the Russian political elite around Putin have a direct stake in Moscow’s economic ties with Finland: oligarchs Vladimir Potanin, Oleg Deripaska, and Roman Abramovich, who through their Nornickel firm control a nickel refinery in Harjavalta, Finland. The Harjavalta refinery is part of a major new joint venture with Germany’s BASF company to supply Europe’s lithium-ion electric vehicle market with batteries, using nickel and cobalt imported from Russia. In 2021, Nornickel was the world’s largest producer of high-grade nickel and a leading producer of cobalt, and the firm has not yet been sanctioned by anyone. The refinery gives Russia good reason to maintain working relations with the Finnish government, although of course the West’s commodities dependence makes that relationship a two-way street.
Offense or Defense?
Counterintuitively, Moscow may not perceive Finnish membership in NATO as a major new threat. No one is suggesting moving any NATO troops to Finland or establishing any new military bases there. If NATO changed its military posture in Finland to prepare for an offensive attack against Russia, Moscow would have plenty of advance warning. Indeed, despite Putin’s frequent statements to the contrary, NATO’s land borders with Russia may not even be the threat that worries the Russian military the most. A 2020 RAND study found that Russian military doctrine is instead focused on the ability of major Western powers to launch long-range airstrikes against Russia in situations where ground troops would likely be used mostly to mop up afterwards.
Moreover, Finland cooperates so closely with NATO that the Russian military already sees it as tied to the alliance. Russian defense analysts have noted Finnish cooperation in NATO military exercises and labeled them an effort to jointly contain Russia. As the Finnish ambassador to the United States, Mikko Hautala, has said, “We are basically as close to NATO as you can get without being a member.” Although Russian officials have threatened unspecified military and diplomatic consequences if Finland and Sweden join NATO—even raising the specter of nuclear escalation—Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has clarified that Russia would not see such a step as an existential threat but rather a prod to rebalance Russian force positioning in its western regions.

It is impossible to know for sure how Putin and his military forces will react to a Finnish bid to join NATO. As Russia’s initially bungled invasion of Ukraine and frequent targeting of civilians there has shown, the Kremlin’s own motives these days seem less strategic and more emotional, hobbled by miscalculations and Putin’s apparent isolation, and driven by the Russian leader’s sense of rage against the West. Given Finland’s long-standing membership in the EU community and defense ties with NATO, to join the alliance officially seems more like a logical next step than a sea change, but Putin’s reaction remains unpredictable. In the face of that unpredictability, it is probably safer for Finland to be inside the alliance than out.

Foreign Affairs · by Kimberly Marten · May 4, 2022


11. U.S. Sent Cyber Team to Lithuania Over Russia Hacking Threat
Excerpts:
But Hartman said that while the Russians had undertaken “a fairly competent operation,” citing an attack that took down part of Viasat’s satellite network at the onset of the invasion, Russian cyber operations against Ukraine since then have not been “well synchronized.” Viasat Inc. said on March 1 that it suffered a cyberattack, after the invasion, that affected thousands of residential and business internet customers in Ukraine. 
“There doesn’t appear to me that there was a coordinated plan, which surprised us,” he said. 
The Biden administration has warned Russia may carry out cyberattacks against U.S. critical infrastructure in retaliation for punitive financial sanctions. 
American officials have said that a cyberattack against a NATO country could trigger Article 5, the transatlantic alliance’s mutual defense clause. Lithuania is a NATO member.


U.S. Sent Cyber Team to Lithuania Over Russia Hacking Threat
  • Teams scan networks and help countries bolster their defenses
  • Units have carried out 28 missions in 16 nations since 2018
May 4, 2022, 10:15 PM EDTUpdated onMay 4, 2022, 11:22 PM EDT
The U.S. rushed cyber forces to Lithuania to help defend against online threats that have risen since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an Army general said Wednesday.
“Our deployment in Lithuania was directly related to the ongoing crisis in the Ukraine,” Major General Joe Hartman, who commands the U.S. Cyber National Mission Force, told reporters at a roundtable interview in Nashville. 
The so-called hunt forward missions involve cyber teams going to nations where they’ve been invited by partner countries, where they scan networks with the goal of building the host countries’ resilience and share any new information about threats with government and private industry circles back in the U.S. 
Hartman said the Lithuanian operation, which the U.S. and Lithuania revealed in an unusual disclosure earlier this week, was “moved up in the queue” because of the threat posed by Russia to Baltic states and other organizations in the region. 
Margiris Abukevicius, Lithuania’s vice minister of national defense, said in a statement on Tuesday that the three-month operation had “offered a wealth of intelligence and skills” to participants. 
The U.S. initiated the hunt forward missions in 2018 and has now carried out 28 in 16 countries, on more than 50 networks, Hartman said. Estonia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Ukraine have been among the nations publicly identified as having participated. 
A mission to Ukraine in December was extended amid growing fears that war could soon break out. The team withdrew in February when the Defense Department pulled back personnel as Russia’s invasion plans became clearer. But Hartman said members of his command still talk to Ukrainian officials on a “daily” basis. 
He insisted that the U.S. operations in Ukraine and Lithuania were limited to friendly networks and should not trigger an escalatory response from Russia. “We’re not attacking Russia,” he said. 
General Paul Nakasone, who leads U.S. Cyber Command, told Congress last month that U.S. support to Ukraine and NATO allies and partners since Moscow began the invasion on Feb. 24 had helped bolster efforts to repel Russian cyberattacks. 
Some experts have been surprised that cyber weapons are playing a relatively limited role in Russia’s war on Ukraine, but Nakasone has urged caution.
“This idea that nothing has happened is not right,” Nakasone told a Vanderbilt University summit on modern conflict on Wednesday. “We don’t necessarily believe that by any means this is done.”
Nakasone said there had been a series of destructive attacks targeting Ukraine, including satellite communications. He added the Ukrainians have done “a tremendous job” defending their networks.

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Ukrainian authorities have reported a more than threefold increase in cyberattacks since the war started compared with the same period last year. Microsoft. Corp. issued a report late last month saying Russian cyberattacks against Ukraine have been “relentless and destructive.” 
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But Hartman said that while the Russians had undertaken “a fairly competent operation,” citing an attack that took down part of Viasat’s satellite network at the onset of the invasion, Russian cyber operations against Ukraine since then have not been “well synchronized.” Viasat Inc. said on March 1 that it suffered a cyberattack, after the invasion, that affected thousands of residential and business internet customers in Ukraine. 
“There doesn’t appear to me that there was a coordinated plan, which surprised us,” he said. 
The Biden administration has warned Russia may carry out cyberattacks against U.S. critical infrastructure in retaliation for punitive financial sanctions. 
American officials have said that a cyberattack against a NATO country could trigger Article 5, the transatlantic alliance’s mutual defense clause. Lithuania is a NATO member.
(Adds comment in 12th pargraph. An earlier version of this story correct wording of negative in 11th paragraph.)


12. Taiwan's military is training for urban warfare against Chinese troops. Here's the kind of fight they're facing.
Resistance and unconventional deterrence.

Excerpts:
"Much like water, urban warfare is an equalizer. You put a bunch of city blocks in the equation and all of a sudden you and the opposition are on a more even scale. You see any technological advantage you have devalue[d]," a US Army Special Forces officer, who is on active-duty and requested anonymity, told Insider.
...
Taiwanese forces could likely "hold out for a good amount of time," the officer added. "They have a competent military with many advanced weapon systems. They are well-prepared and they know where the enemy will be coming from."
Should China invade Taiwan, it would have to make sure that it can defeat the defenders in a few days or that it can blockade Taiwan to prevent outside intervention for an extended period.
"Yes, the Chinese might win at the end of the day because of their sheer numbers, but it won't be easy and it will cost them a lot. What we're seeing unfolding in Ukraine right now is the best deterrence Taiwan could ask for," the officer told Ins anunconvetional ider.

Taiwan's military is training for urban warfare against Chinese troops. Here's the kind of fight they're facing.
Business Insider · by Stavros Atlamazoglou

Taiwanese troops during an exercise simulating an attempted amphibious landing by Chinese forces, May 30, 2019.
Kyodo News Stills via Getty Images
  • Russia's attack on Ukraine has raised concerns about China attacking Taiwan.
  • China has military superiority by most measures, but Taiwan has the advantage of defense.
  • As Russia's struggles in Ukraine show, capturing major urban areas is a challenge for any military.
Get a daily selection of our top stories based on your reading preferences.

China has for decades vowed to absorb Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing regards as a breakaway province.
Beijing has said it would pursue unification through force if necessary, and Taiwan's military has been increasing its budget and intensifying its training in order to improve its ability to fight off such an assault.
China has been modernizing its military as well, adding scores of fighter jets and dozens of warships. If it were to invade Taiwan, however, it would likely face a scenario where high-end weapons would be of little advantage: urban warfare.
'An equalizer'

Taiwanese marines during an urban-warfare drill at Tsoying Naval Base in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, August 27, 2013.
Ashley Pon/Getty Images
Taiwan is home to about 23 million people, most of whom live in several major cities where a war for the island would be won. China's military has superiority on pretty much every level, but Taiwan has the advantage of defense, which its military is betting on.
"The Chinese communist troops' battle plans will be invading and landing firstly from coastal towns. Then the fighting will progress into more populated residential and commercial areas and lastly push into mountainous villages. Any future battle to protect Taiwan will be an urban warfare," Lt. Col. Kiwi Yang, a military instructor at the Taiwan Army Infantry School, told news agency AFP.
Urban warfare is one of the most challenging military operations. City streets and alleys are easy to barricade and inhibit maneuver warfare. To capture a city, a military has to sacrifice its agility for brute strength.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine shows how difficult and costly urban warfare is. For weeks, Russian forces has been trying to capture the southern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, but they have been thwarted by determined defenders with modern anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons.

Taiwanese soldiers take part in a military exercises in Hualien, eastern Taiwan, January 30, 2018.
Associated Press
China's military is surely taking notes from Russia's operations in Ukraine to inform its own plans for a potential invasion of Taiwan, but fighting in urban environments will remain costly for even the most technologically advanced military.
"Much like water, urban warfare is an equalizer. You put a bunch of city blocks in the equation and all of a sudden you and the opposition are on a more even scale. You see any technological advantage you have devalue[d]," a US Army Special Forces officer, who is on active-duty and requested anonymity, told Insider.
The inherent advantages of defense are increased in an urban environment, the officer said, pointing to events in Mariupol as an example.
The Ukrainians "have been holed up against the Russians for weeks now. The Russians have the complete sea, air, and long-range fires advantage, though they lack our precision-strike capabilities," which could explain why they resort to indiscriminate shelling, the officer told Insider. "Despite their advantages, they are still struggling to take the city."
The defenders have more freedom of movement within the city. They can engage the attackers at times and places of their choosing and inflict heavy casualties.

A Chinook helicopter carries a Taiwanese flag over Taipei during a rehearsal for National Day celebrations, October 7, 2021.
REUTERS/Ann Wang
Success in such an environment requires mastery of small-unit tactics and close-quarters combat, and regular infantry typically isn't as proficient in those skills as top-tier special-operations forces. "There would be no hostages to rescue in a building, and a grenade could solve a lot of problems in such scenarios," the Special Forces officer said.
Taiwanese forces could likely "hold out for a good amount of time," the officer added. "They have a competent military with many advanced weapon systems. They are well-prepared and they know where the enemy will be coming from."
Should China invade Taiwan, it would have to make sure that it can defeat the defenders in a few days or that it can blockade Taiwan to prevent outside intervention for an extended period.
"Yes, the Chinese might win at the end of the day because of their sheer numbers, but it won't be easy and it will cost them a lot. What we're seeing unfolding in Ukraine right now is the best deterrence Taiwan could ask for," the officer told Insider.
Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.

Business Insider · by Stavros Atlamazoglou



13. Special Operations Command Europe kicks off Trojan Footprint 22 with participants from more than 30 nations


Special Operations Command Europe kicks off Trojan Footprint 22 with participants from more than 30 nations
Photo By Sgt. Monique ONeill | Romanian, Ukrainian and U.S. Army Green Berets repel down a tower during exercise...... read more
Photo By Sgt. Monique ONeill | Romanian, Ukrainian and U.S. Army Green Berets repel down a tower during exercise Trojan Footprint 21 in Romania on May 5, 2021. Trojan Footprint 21 is Special Operations Command Europe's annual exercise to demonstrate proficiencies, assess the readiness and lethality of our respective forces, and to continue improving interoperability with allies and partners. (Courtesy photo by Romanian captain Roxana Davidovits) | View Image Page
STUTTGART, GERMANY
05.03.2022
STUTTGART, Germany – Trojan Footprint (TFP) 22 is set to begin May 2 and conclude May 13, with U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) proactively working and training together with NATO allies and European partners across Southeastern Europe, the Baltics and the Black Sea Region to demonstrate their collective military readiness to deploy and respond to any crisis that may arise.

This year’s TFP includes more than 3,300 participants from 30 nations, doubling in size from the previous year and making it the largest SOCEUR exercise to date. Land, air, and sea operations for Trojan Footprint 22 will occur across Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

“One of our priorities is building resilience against adversary efforts to undermine democratic processes and values,” said Maj. Gen. David H. Tabor, Commander of Special Operations Command Europe. “This joint, combined training in Europe will continue to build and strengthen those relationships with our allies and partners, establishing a common sight-picture for combat and peacekeeping missions abroad.”

Trojan Footprint 22 is the premier exercise of U.S. Special Operations Command Europe (SOCEUR) and the primary SOF certification event to assess the readiness and ability of SOF to counter threats. It continues to demonstrate transatlantic solidarity and the security commitments of the participating nations to defense along NATO’s eastern flank.

The two-week exercise also increases integration with conventional forces and will highlight the professional skillsets of land, air, and sea units to respond to hybrid threats through discreet theatre entry and exit. As an exercise in coalition building, TFP 22 is focused on cultivating trust and developing lasting relationships that will promote peace and stability throughout Europe.

“Special Operations Forces remain a pillar of international defense, and close coordination between SOF and conventional forces acts as a force multiplier, leveraging the discreet capabilities of SOF to enhance lethality and dominance on the battlefield,” Tabor said. “SOF elements add capabilities, technology, and strength to conventional forces throughout Europe.”

Media access to the exercise may be limited. For full resolution photos and videos, please visit:
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14. US, Japan Defense Ministers Pledge To Defend Rules-Based Order

The three things that democracies must defend: sovereignty, the right to self determination, and the rules based order.


US, Japan Defense Ministers Pledge To Defend Rules-Based Order
eurasiareview.com · by DoD News · May 4, 2022
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi pledged to work together to defend the international rules-based architecture wherever it is threatened.
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The treaty allies met at the Pentagon Wednesday, with the Japanese minister saying that since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February “the world has drastically changed.”
Kishi said the Russian attack on Ukraine and North Korea’s continuing launches of ballistic missiles are absolutely unacceptable.
“We are here because the U.S.-Japan alliance remains a cornerstone of peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific,” Austin said at the beginning of the meeting. “Our two countries are bound by deep friendship and trust, as well as by common interests and shared values.”
But those interests and values are under attack, the secretary said, and the United States and Japan must work closely together to counter the threats emanating from Russia, China and North Korea. “Russia’s baseless, and the reckless invasion of Ukraine is an affront to the rules-based international order, and it poses a challenge to free people everywhere,” he said.
Austin said Japan reiterated its commitment at last week’s meeting of defense ministers. Kishi attended the meeting of the Ukraine Security Consultative Group last week in Ramstein Air Base, Germany. “Your presence underscored Japan’s commitment to helping the Ukrainian people defend their sovereignty now and over the long haul,” Austin said.
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While Russia has gained the headlines, Austin said China also poses a threat to the rules-based order. “China’s recent behavior poses a profound challenge to common norms, values and institutions that underpin that order,” Austin said.
The two men and their staffs discussed ways to ensure the Indo-Pacific region remains open and free. Japan is a treaty ally of the United States, and Austin reaffirmed America’s “unwavering commitment to the defense of Japan to include our extended deterrence commitments using our full range of conventional and nuclear capabilities.”
The two nations share much in common, and the leaders will look at ways to better align defense strategies and optimize force posture in the region. “We’ll also discuss ways to further deepen our cooperation with other like-minded partners, including the Quad [Partnership] … and South Korea,” the secretary said.
“The Quad Partnership” refers to the U.S., Australia, India and Japan.
Kishi unequivocally emphasized that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means that the Japanese can no longer separate the security of the Indo-Pacific from that of Europe.
The defense minister said “there is no time to lose” in strengthening the U.S.-Japan alliance.
eurasiareview.com · by DoD News · May 4, 2022
15. Better weather may shift Russia’s fortunes in Ukraine
But as Bonaparte said, "never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."

And I hope they did not find a chaplain like Patton's at the Battle of the Bulge who could produce a "weather prayer."


Better weather may shift Russia’s fortunes in Ukraine
No combatant can rely on their enemy making mistakes ad infinitum while new emerging conditions appear to favor Moscow

asiatimes.com · by Andrew Salmon · May 4, 2022
The widely-heralded, much-feared Russian offensive in the Donbas has in 17 days made slow progress in grabbing key terrain and has so far failed to wipe out the main force Ukrainian army.
This is despite the highly vulnerable state of the Ukrainian forces, surrounded on three sides but still holding out.
But with “demilitarization” being one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stated war aims, if the Kremlin raises its game and closes off the salient, it could change the war.

If Russian forces trap and destroy the main Ukrainian maneuver force in Donbas, their own forces would win the freedom of maneuver to rampage across much of the country during campaign season, which runs from mid-May to late October.
While even that circumstance might not allow it to capture big cities – manpower-challenged Russia has so far only stormed Mariupol – it could firm up territorial gains in both the south and east and re-orient its main force westward toward Moldova.
Perhaps more dangerously for Ukraine, Russia could shift its efforts to severing the flow of weapons, munitions, fuel and other critical materials from the West. If that is achieved, Kiev would be vulnerable to a knockout blow late in the year.
New conditions are potentially coming into play that look to be to Russia’s advantage. One relates to climate and freedom of movement and the other to manpower.
The spring thaw that restricted Russian armor to roads in the first phase of the invasion is largely over, leaving the ground dry for sweeping maneuvers. And Russia’s battered forces in Ukraine may get reinforcements if – as is being predicted in both east and west – Putin calls for the mobilization of conscript troops on World War II Victory Day on May 9.

Center of war gravity
The key fighting power of both sides has converged on Donbas.
Conflict has been ongoing in the disputed, coal-rich area of eastern Ukraine since 2014. Russia-backed separatists in the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk hold major chunks of the region, winning huge sympathy from both the Russian public and polity.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that the major Russian offensive in Donbas opened on April 18. That followed an announcement weeks earlier by Russian sources, following the retreat by Russian units from northern Ukraine, of a strategic refocus.
Sergei Rudskoy, head of the General Staff’s operations directive, said on March 26 that the redeployment “allows us to concentrate our main efforts on achieving the main goal: the liberation of Donbas.”
In April, Moscow appointed General Aleksander Dvornikov to take overall command of operations in Ukraine, linking up a disjointed fight. He has since concentrated his forces.

Russian General Aleksander Dvornikov has his work cut out for him. Image: Facebook
Some 93 Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs – the key Russian fighting unit in this war) are believed to be deployed in or around the Donbas, though other sources put that number as high as 111 BTGs.
Facing them, the main force of the Ukrainian Army – the 10 brigades of the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) – has been built up in western Donbas over eight years.
The key focus of action is the Severodonetsk Salient – a Ukrainian position surrounded on three sides by Russian forces advancing on three axes, from north, east and south. Around the perimeter of the salient, the Russians have taken Kreminna and the towns of Severodonetsk, Rubizhne, Popasna and Lysychansk are in play.
If they can keep the Ukrainians engaged in the east while seizing the key communications hubs west of or behind the Ukrainians – in Slovyansk and nearby Kramatorsk – the defenders will be trapped in a kessel, or cauldron, and can then be annihilated.
Indeed, Russian advances south and west of Izyum are making the Ukrainian position increasingly perilous.

Yet despite the gradual Russian advances in Donbas, despite the vulnerability of the Ukrainian positions and despite the massive firepower the Russians are bringing to the fight, the salient has not been closed off. No kessel has – yet – been created.
According to an email sent to reporters by the US-based Institute for the Study of War, Russia’s pace is “slow and halting.”
There are even reports that a Ukrainian unit, the 81st Air Assault, which other information shows is holding the northwest shoulder of this area of operations, is rotating companies out of the line for one-week rests and refits.
While the reports make clear the ferocity of the fighting and how the unit’s ranks have been fleshed out with older conscripts led by “fresh-out-of-the-academy” officers, the rotation does not suggest a desperate situation.
This may be because the JFO has long prepared. Prit Buttar, a military historian of World War II who has traveled widely in Ukraine, told Asia Times the area is dotted with villages, most within tank-gun range of each other, offering defenders an echeloned network of defenses to fall back through.
Meanwhile, the Russian offensive on the northern shoulder is itself precarious. Russian forces have not taken Kharkiv – a major communications junction – and it is not clear how secure their control of Izyum is. Successful Ukrainian counter-attacks have been reported.
This shows the competing forces – and the possible avenue of attack to be taken by Russian forces from Izium, trapping Ukrainian forces. Map: Twitter
The limited gains it is winning suggest that Russia just does not have enough manpower to fight such a fierce war over such huge spaces and it is unclear if the new generalship has made a difference at the tactical level.
“We don’t know the impact that a unified command chain is having,” Eun Graham, a senior fellow at the International Institute of Strategic Studies think tank, told Asia Times. “And Ukraine is a big country, so even this concentration of force is relative.”
Still, these matters could change.
Campaign season opens at last
The soft ground of the first phase of the war forced armored columns convoys onto roads. These narrow axes of advance, frequently passing through urban areas, were easy to block and ambush – as were supply columns.
Now, the late spring and summer – long days and firm ground – is bad news for the dug-in defenders of Ukraine. It favors mobile attackers and the armor-heavy Russians.
If the latter effectively deploy drones and other reconnaissance assets in the service of their big guns, their artillery can suppress Ukrainian anti-tank positions, while tanks and mobile infantry, charging off-road, can fight a fast “deep battle”, bypassing fortified villages and dislocating defenses.
That would be classic armored warfare. While the fighting on the Eastern Front during World War II was notorious for its freezing winter conditions, most of history’s armored maneuver battles war took place in fine conditions.
The current change of season “could be a game-changer,” Graham said. “Improvement of the ground favors the offensive.” But he warned: “It also favors the counter-offensive, so that does not stand as much in Russia’s favor as we may think.”
Classic armored warfare: German tanks and armored troop carriers, maneuvering off-road, en-masse, on a broad front. Battle of Kursk, 1943. Photo: Bundesarchiv-Bild-101III-Merz-014-12A,
Time to mobilize?
May 9 is Russia’s World War II Victory Day and a massive parade in front of the Kremlin is an appropriate national stage for patriotic messaging.
A range of opinions from Russian experts and US State Department officials, aired in Western media, as well as from UK officials, repeated in Ukrainian media, suggests that Putin could use the day to upgrade the status of his “special military operation.” That could mean a grand call to national mobilization or even a formal declaration of war.
Thus far, the operation has been fought almost entirely by professionals. But a new fighting format could send conscripts into Ukraine, call up reservists or extend conscription terms beyond the current year.
Those would be turnarounds. Early in the conflict, on March 8, Putin said that no conscripts were being deployed in Ukraine, but was contradicted the following day.
Russian Ministry of Defense Spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov admitted, according to Russian media: “Unfortunately, several facts of the presence of conscripts … on the territory of Ukraine were discovered.”
Still, Konashenkov added that “practically all such servicemen have been returned to Russian territory.”
Clearly, the conscript issue is delicate even for a leader as empowered as Putin. Yet call-ups are not being discussed only in Western media.
Regardless of the official narrative in Russia, there is an understanding that the war has not gone according to plan. As early as April 16, columnist Petr Akopov wrote in Russian state-run media Ria Novosti: “It is necessary to say what everyone has been waiting for a long time: we need mobilization.
“The West is now making every effort to ensure that the conflict lasts as long as possible, pumping Ukraine with weapons and encouraging it psychologically.”
Akopov expressed hope that “Russia will destroy most of the heavy equipment before it reaches the Ukrainian troops … and the fuel crisis in Ukraine is just around the corner,” but Western assistance, nevertheless, “can significantly delay the time of the military operation.”
Akopov was writing last month. Other opinion leaders are now openly expressing direr analyses. A high-profile commentator on a television talk show last week raised the possibility of military defeat in Ukraine and subsequent Armageddon.
“I recently took part in a conversation, and one of the experts said there are two paths: Either we lose in Ukraine and give everything up, or World War III starts,” Margarita Simonoyan, a senior journalist, said, sparking nervous jokes from the host about the latter possibility.
But would a call-up improve Russia’s battlefield position?
There are no firm Russian figures on the number of conscripts in the armed forces. Most estimates are that they make up around 25%. Nor are there any indications that an army of pro-Russian Syrian mercenaries is massing to join the fight, as was suggested earlier in the conflict.
Graham of IISS is unconvinced that shoving more, rather than better, troops into battle will shift Russia’s fortunes.
“Any attempt to surge a mix of mercenaries or conscripts looks like barrel-scraping,” he said. “Conscripts in Russia serve one year, so they are turning out troops who leave just at the point they gaining confidence.
“They have structural headwinds against them,” Graham added. “Putting conscripts in to make up for the deficiencies of professionals is asking for trouble.”
Even if it calls up conscripts, it is not clear that Russia has enough men to generate a viable mass of force against Ukraine. Photo: AFP / Sputnik / Igor Rudenko
More men, longer fight
With Ukraine having already ordered a general mobilization, it is not clear that the manpower matrix can shift to Russia’s favor. And the issues of Ukrainian morale, and its soldiers’ determination, have so far amazed much of the world.
Moreover, Ukraine’s defense thus far has been magnified by the errors Russia has made in virtually every area of the war.
Its opening offensive was widely dispersed across the country, lacked a supreme commander and was launched at a time of year when mobile forces were restricted to road networks.
Russia’s coup-de-main operation in the north was overly ambitious, failed to account for Ukrainian resistance and may have substituted wishful thinking for cold intelligence analyses.
In both the north and east, the Russians have faced logistics, communications and coordination challenges, and in some units, problems related to morale and basic tactical skills. These latter points have led to the losses among Russian generals.
“There may be an element of Ukrainian propaganda in all these issues, but clearly, there are problems,” said Graham. “This is why they are putting generals into the front ranks to lead, 19th-century style, against 21st-century weapons.”
But no combatant can rely on his enemy making mistakes ad infinitum. An April 22 report from thank tank RUSI, Operation Z: The Death Throes of an Imperial Delusion, states that following earlier failures, the Russian army has wrested control of the war from the intelligence service, the FSB.
It is also far from clear how trained or skilled many of the Ukrainians holding weapons are. Many of these hastily armed militias may be unsuitable for any operation other than sentry duty or guarding urban areas.
This again points to a major trend in this war thus far: Russia attacks, Ukraine defends. And with the former wielding the bigger maneuver force, the initiative rests with Moscow.
The last question, then, must be strategic patience. Which combatant will outlast the other? On that, RUSI warns, “Russia is now preparing, diplomatically, militarily and economically for a protracted conflict.”
asiatimes.com · by Andrew Salmon · May 4, 2022


16. Global NATO Takes Shape Ahead of US-ASEAN Meet


A title like this one surely will not please China.

Excerpts:
The Americans were deeply annoyed when the initial dates for this ASEAN summit were postponed in March, due to clashing schedules. But they are now no doubt well-prepped for the first of its type summit to be held in the U.S. capital.
It’s a meeting that deserves to be closely watched.


Global NATO Takes Shape Ahead of US-ASEAN Meet
Democracies on the edge in Southeast Asia likely face difficult choices in the years to come.
thediplomat.com · by Luke Hunt · May 5, 2022
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Britain’s Foreign Secretary Liz Truss set the cat among the pigeons last week when she suggested that NATO should seek to boost security in the Indo-Pacific region by working with allies like Japan and Australia, and within groups like ASEAN.
For cheerleaders of the re-energized Quad, the recent formation of the AUKUS security pact, and a division of the geopolitical world between democracies and authoritarianism, her remarks were a welcome endorsement of an expansion of the West’s Indo-Pacific strategy.
That will be in play when the U.S. and ASEAN hold a Special Summit in Washington, D.C. – billed as a celebration of “four and a half decades of Dialogue Relations” – on May 12 and 13.
“NATO must have a global outlook, ready to tackle global threats,” Truss said. “We need to preempt threats in the Indo-Pacific, working with allies like Japan and Australia to ensure that the Pacific is protected,” she added. “We must ensure that democracies like Taiwan are able to defend themselves.”

Ever since the West began turning on China in the mid-2010s, the 10 ASEAN members have been pressured into choosing between the West or China, and have recently withdrawn with more of a focus on the economic and political problems at home.
Meanwhile, an Indo-Pacific NATO strategy was emerging by late 2020, when the first NATO Foreign Ministerial Meeting with Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand was held, and it’s a strategy that has only gained credibility following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This is now a formal part of the NATO 2030 agenda. Washington has also made it known that ASEAN members are welcome to join the Quad alongside the U.S., Australia, India, and Japan, though there will be conditions.
“The Russia-Ukraine war has pressured the grouping’s members to choose sides. All members support the U.N. Charter and national sovereignty, but have differed on naming and shaming,” noted the Thai analyst Kavi Chongkittavorn.
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The big three hitters – Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines – are all democracies and fit neatly within Joe Biden’s grand plans for a security alliance capable of countering Chinese expansion and made-up of countries with shared democratic values.
Myanmar’s military has little choice but to side with Beijing while heavy debt will ensure Laos remains a Chinese vassal. Brunei has room to move and Vietnamese preferences lie with its export markets in the West, despite their incompatible style of governments.
Those on the edge of democracy – Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore – would be expected to demure on choosing while employing delaying tactics until there is little choice, as Kavi noted. However, signs of change are emerging.
Cambodia is increasingly leaning towards Japan as a traditional bridge between East and West to repair its damaged ties with the U.S. and scout-out alternative sources -of foreign funding as China scales back its generosity.
Singapore co-signed the U.N. resolution condemning Russia’s invasion alongside Cambodia, and will likely block Timor-Leste’s bid for ASEAN membership because of Dili’s growing ties with China.
On Monday, Japan and Thailand announced plans for an upgrade in economic relations and a new defense agreement, which would enable defense hardware and technology transfers from Japan and they also noted Tokyo’s “long history of ties with the United States military.”
The Americans were deeply annoyed when the initial dates for this ASEAN summit were postponed in March, due to clashing schedules. But they are now no doubt well-prepped for the first of its type summit to be held in the U.S. capital.
It’s a meeting that deserves to be closely watched.
thediplomat.com · by Luke Hunt · May 5, 2022


17. Why Hasn’t Russia Unleashed ‘Cybergeddon’ in Its War on Ukraine?


A survey of experts.

Why Hasn’t Russia Unleashed ‘Cybergeddon’ in Its War on Ukraine? | Russia Matters
May 04, 2022
RM Staff
Russia’s war in Ukraine, now nearing its 10-week mark, has been devastating, killing thousands of civilians and forcing millions to flee their homes. Thus far, this devastation has been wrought primarily by conventional military means, without Moscow launching the “full-scale cyber assault” or “cybergeddon-scale attacks” feared early on. As various authors have pointed out, “Ukrainian air defense and aircraft didn’t appear to be affected by cyber disruptions, and there are no reports of critical infrastructure damage from cyberattacks”; “Ukraine’s electricity grid, its communications systems and other infrastructure are still largely up. Its president is streaming from his government office.” Why?
One group of scholars has long argued that expectations of cyber apocalypse have been overblown, with doomsayers ignoring that cyber and military campaigns serve different purposes. Cyber operations, these experts say, are neither “catastrophic weapons of destruction” nor good for “managing destruction at scale”—meaning they’re unlikely to be the game-changers many anticipated in modern warfare. “It’s much simpler,” four of these authors write, “for Russia to launch an artillery barrage at a [Ukrainian] power substation than to hack it from Moscow.”
Other experts have pointed out that, even without catastrophic attacks, Russia has done plenty of cyber damage in Ukraine—part of its holistic, hybrid approach to warfare—and “the digital confrontation is playing out in the shadows, as inconspicuous as it is insidious.”
Still others have offered additional possible reasons for the Kremlin’s relative cyber restraint:
  • No need: If the Kremlin expected its invasion to succeed quickly, as many analysts have assumed, it may not have given its cyber teams orders to launch major attacks, deeming them unnecessary (then, once the campaign stalled and Russia began bombing Ukrainian cities, cyber weapons that could damage infrastructure became “largely beside the point”);
  • “Don’t break what you buy”: Moscow may have wanted to keep Ukrainian infrastructure intact during and/or after the invasion—whether for its own use or for intelligence gathering—making cyberattacks counterproductive;
  • Improved Ukrainian defenses: Compared to 2014-2015—when Moscow annexed Crimea, fomented an armed uprising in eastern Ukraine and temporarily disabled the country’s power grid by cyber means—Kyiv’s ability to fight cyberattacks has increased, bolstered further by support from Western governments and the global tech sector;
  • Cyber pros out of the loop/busy with other tasks: Russian groups that could have planned and carried out major cyber operations were either kept out of the decision-making process on Ukraine and thus were unable to prepare or have been too busy with disinformation campaigns to launch offensive strikes;
  • Eye on NATO: Russia could be loath to do damage that might draw NATO members deeper into the war or it’s holding onto the cyber card for more leverage against the West at a later stage;
  • Over-hyped skills: Maybe Russia never had the capabilities its adversaries ascribed to it;
  • Hacker free-for-all: “Maybe the widespread skirmishing of cyber ‘partisans’ from both sides has got in the way.”
Indeed, the proxy hacker war is on: While Microsoft and others have enumerated the cyberattacks against Ukraine by Russian actors, Russia itself has been “plundered” by “digital assailants,” according to The Washington Post. The paper reported this month that “one recent survey showed more passwords and other sensitive data from Russia were dumped onto the open web in March than information from any other country.”
Whatever the reasons that the world has not yet seen cataclysmic cyber actions by Moscow, even those experts who saw predictions of cyber doom as exaggerated point to pressing cyber threats and caution against complacency.
Below, we share excerpts of expert opinion on Russia’s use (and non-use) of cyber means in the war on Ukraine. Comments are listed from most recent to earliest.
WESTERN OFFICIALS AND EXPERTS cited by ANTON TROIANOVSKI, Moscow Bureau Chief, and JULIAN E. BARNES, National Security Reporter, New York Times (NYT, 05.03.22)
  • “American and allied officials have debated why [Russian President Vladimir] Putin hasn’t tried widespread or more damaging cyber strikes. Some say … Putin has been effectively deterred. The Russian military, struggling to make gains in Ukraine, cannot handle a wider war with NATO and does not want to give the alliance any excuse to enter the war more directly.”
  • “Others argue that a cyber strike on a NATO country is one of the few cards Mr. Putin can play and that he may be waiting for a later stage in his campaign to do that.”
TOM BURT, Corporate Vice President, Customer Security and Trust, Microsoft (Microsoft, 04.27.22)
  • “Starting just before the invasion, we have seen at least six separate Russia-aligned … actors launch more than 237 operations against Ukraine—including destructive attacks that are ongoing and threaten civilian welfare … [as well as] broad espionage and intelligence activities.”
  • “Russia’s use of cyberattacks appears to be strongly correlated and sometimes directly timed with its kinetic military operations… For example, a Russian actor launched cyberattacks against a major broadcasting company on March 1, the same day the Russian military announced its intention to destroy Ukrainian ‘disinformation’ targets and directed a missile strike against a TV tower in Kyiv.”
  • Microsoft has observed close to 40 “destructive attacks … targeting hundreds of systems”; more than 40% of these “were aimed at organizations in critical infrastructure sectors that could have negative second-order effects on the Ukrainian government, military, economy and civilians.”
  • “Russia-aligned actors began pre-positioning for conflict as early as March 2021 … to gain a larger foothold into Ukrainian systems. When Russian troops first started to move toward the border with Ukraine, we saw efforts to gain initial access to targets that could provide intelligence on Ukraine’s military and foreign partnerships. By mid-2021, Russian actors were targeting supply chain vendors in Ukraine and abroad to secure further access not only to systems in Ukraine but also NATO member states.”
  • “In early 2022 … Russian actors launched destructive wiper malware attacks against Ukrainian organizations with increasing intensity. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Russian cyberattacks have been deployed to support the military’s strategic and tactical objectives. It’s likely the attacks we’ve observed are only a fraction of activity targeting Ukraine. … [W]e believe cyberattacks will continue to escalate as the conflict rages. Russian nation-state threat actors may be tasked to expand their destructive actions outside of Ukraine.”
LAUREN ZABIEREK, Executive Director, Cyber Project, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School of Government (RM, 04.20.22)
  • “Just because certain expectations of the use of cyber have not matched what we have thus far observed does not mean that Russia is not using cyber to achieve intended effects against Ukraine. We have seen major cyber operations such as disrupting access to the internet, denial of service attacks against websites, deployment of malware intended to disrupt services and most recently a breach of a Ukrainian energy company and a thwarted attempt to shut down power.”
  • “Activities in the cyber domain don’t compare to battlefield operations when trying to achieve lethal effects. But it's still important to understand that disruption of services … can have major impacts on the physical safety and psychological wellbeing of the people of Ukraine—sowing confusion, chaos, panic, distrust, for example—and that falls squarely into the Russian playbook of information operations.”
  • “Look at the latest discoveries this past week: Two new, very sophisticated malware families designed to disrupt and even have destructive effects upon industrial control systems—those devices that take a computer command and translate it into physical action in things like water treatment plants, energy substations and gas pipelines—were discovered before, it appears, they had a chance to infect these systems, but this is further evidence that the intent and the capability are there. We must remember that great harm to people can result after a cyberattack due to disruptions in essential services and public safety.”
ERICA D. LONERGAN, Assistant Professor, Army Cyber Institute, West Point, and Research Scholar, Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University (Foreign Affairs, 04.15.22)
  • “The negligible role of cyberattacks in the Ukraine conflict should come as no surprise. Through war simulations, statistical analyses and other kinds of studies, scholars have found little evidence that cyber operations provide effective forms of coercion or that they cause escalation to actual military conflict.”
  • “For all its potential to disrupt companies, hospitals and utility grids during peacetime, cyber power is much harder to use against targets of strategic significance or to achieve outcomes with decisive impacts, either on the battlefield or during crises short of war.”
  • “In failing to recognize this, U.S. officials and policymakers are approaching the use of cyber power in a way that may be doing more harm than good—treating cyber operations like any other weapon of war rather than as a nonlethal instrument of statecraft and, in the process, overlooking the considerable opportunities as well as risks they present.”
WESTERN OFFICIALS AND EXPERTS cited by DUSTIN VOLZ, Cybersecurity and Intelligence Reporter, and ROBERT McMILLAN, Computer Security Reporter, Wall Street Journal (WSJ, 04.12.22)
  • “While cybersecurity analysts and intelligence officials are working to understand why the scale of the Russian cyber-offenses has been so much more limited than feared, several theories have emerged. Russian strategists assumed the conventional campaign would wrap up in a matter of days and didn’t appear to deploy their toughest cyber weapons, U.S. officials said. Ukraine’s cyber defenses have improved in recent years, under constant attack from Russian hackers. Some of Russia’s intelligence agencies may be engaged in waging propaganda and disinformation campaigns instead of launching offensive strikes, analysts say. And, as in the conventional fight, Russia may have overestimated its own capabilities and underestimated Kyiv’s.”
DAVID CATTLER, Assistant Secretary General for Intelligence and Security, NATO; and DANIEL BLACK, Principal Analyst, Cyber Threat Analysis Branch, NATO (Foreign Affairs, 04.06.22)
  • “All available evidence indicates that Russia has employed a coordinated cyber campaign intended to provide its forces with an early advantage during its war in Ukraine. The apparent disconnect between these observed incidents, on the one hand, and the public analysis that Russian cyber operations have been minimal, on the other, is jarring.”
  • “The belief that cyber operations have played no role in Ukraine does not stem from a lack of real-world impact. To the contrary, the magnitude of Moscow’s pre-kinetic destructive cyber operations was unprecedented. On the day the invasion began, Russian cyber units successfully deployed more destructive malware—including against conventional military targets such as civilian communications infrastructure and military command and control centers—than the rest of the world’s cyber powers combined typically use in a given year.”
  • “With the likelihood that the conflict will become a protracted war, Russia will probably not exercise restraint in its use of additional disruptive and destructive cyber actions.”
NADIYA KOSTYUK, Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology; and ERIK GARTZKE, Professor, University of California San Diego (The Conversation, 04.04.22)
  • “Cyber operations did not replace the military invasion and, as far as we can tell, the Russian government has not yet used cyber operations as an integral part of its military campaign. … Cyber and military operations serve different political objectives. … Cyber operations are most effective in pursuing informational goals, such as gathering intelligence, stealing technology or winning public opinion or diplomatic debates. In contrast, nations use military operations to occupy territory, capture resources, diminish an opponent’s military capability and terrorize a population.”
CHRISTOPHER WHYTE, Assistant Professor, Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness Program, Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, Virginia Commonwealth University (Foreign Policy, 03.24.22)
  • “What’s interesting about the digital dimensions of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine thus far is the fact that events seem to bear out much of what cybersecurity scholars have said for years about the utility of cyber instruments for enhancing state power. … [They] aren’t good tools for controlling escalation or affecting the battlefield.”
  • “The strategic utility for using cyber tactics in Ukraine in support of the invasion itself just wasn’t there. Cyber tools produce only temporary victories and so aren’t all that good for direct coercion. And an expected quick victory on Russia’s part took sophisticated cyber tools off the table immediately by the logic of ‘don’t break what you’re about to buy.’”
  • “That said, it’s important that we exercise caution as we look to learn from the digital dimensions of this conflict thus far. … Several features of the crisis suggest that the peculiarities of the Russian state’s security apparatus may have played substantially into decisions on whether or not to deploy cyber assets. … The message here is simple. General principles about the practicality of cyber operations only tell us what is likely. Parochial political, social and institutional contexts determine what transpires.”
WESTERN OFFICIALS AND EXPERTS cited by SUE HALPERN, Staff Writer, The New Yorker (The New Yorker, 03.22.22)
  • “The fact that devastating attacks haven’t occurred so far has raised doubts in some quarters about the viability and efficacy of using malicious software as a weapon of war. … It may be that the Kremlin, high on its own propaganda, believed that the Russian army would conquer Ukraine in record time and install a puppet government that would need to have those services intact. When that didn’t happen and the Russians began bombing cities, it made cyber weapons that could turn off the lights, say, largely beside the point.”
  • “But it also may be that Russia never had the capabilities that its adversaries ascribed to it in the first place. … Right now the Russians appear to be spending a lot of time defending their own networks, which may be taking resources away from a cyber offensive.”
  • “Something that has largely been lost in the musings about Russia’s failure—so far—to use cyber weapons to crippling effect in the war: Ukraine has actually been under a constant barrage of cyberattacks that began before the invasion. … While the world was waiting for Russia to turn off the lights in Ukraine, the Kremlin was, instead, engaging in more targeted and strategic attacks.”
  • “Russia might do something more comprehensive and destructive going forward. … There is also no guarantee that, just because they haven’t done so yet, the Russians won’t retaliate against the U.S. and its allies for supporting Ukraine.”
CHRIS KREBS, Former Head of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; Co-Founder and Partner, Krebs Stamos Group (Financial Times, 03.20.22)
  • “[T]here are several factors which would explain why Moscow’s proven cyber capabilities took a back seat in the overall strategy. For one, it seems the Kremlin kept battle-planning to a small group that may have excluded the Russian security services’ cyber personnel.”
  • “There’s also the matter of necessity. Intercepted transmissions point to Russian forces using radio handsets and Ukrainian telecommunications networks to co-ordinate movements and update commanders back in Russia. In this scenario, Moscow would keep networks operational for their own use.”
  • “The danger is that as political and economic conditions deteriorate, the red lines and escalation judgments that kept Moscow’s most potent cyber capabilities in check may adjust. Western sanctions and lethal aid support to Ukraine may prompt Russian hackers to lash out against the West, sending a clear message: ‘Knock it off, we can make this much worse for you.’ Russian ransomware actors may also take advantage of the situation, possibly resorting to cybercrime as one of the few means of revenue generation.”
  • “Mitigating this risk means we need decisive action. Government offensive cyber teams must continue to disrupt Russian attacks, while rapidly sharing information with industry on Moscow’s intent and capabilities. We must accept, however, that stopping all attacks is not realistic.”
THOMAS RID, Professor, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University (New York Times, 03.18.22)
  • Claims that cyberattacks on Ukraine have been conspicuous by their absence “are misleading. Cyberwar has come, is happening now and will most likely escalate. But the digital confrontation is playing out in the shadows, as inconspicuous as it is insidious.”
  • “First, some cyberattacks are meant to be visible and, in effect, distract from the stealthier and more dangerous sabotage. On Feb. 15 and 16, Ukrainian banks suffered major denial-of-service attacks, meaning their websites were rendered inaccessible. Western authorities swiftly attributed the attacks to Russia's intelligence service, and Google is now helping protect 150 websites in Ukraine from such attacks.”
  • “Second, cyber operations in wartime are not as useful as bombs and missiles when it comes to inflicting the maximum amount of physical and psychological damage on the enemy. An explosive charge is more likely to create long-term harm than malicious software.”
  • “Finally, without deeper integration within a broader military campaign, the tactical effects of cyberattacks remain rather limited.”
CHRISTOPHER WHYTE, Assistant Professor, Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness Program, Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, Virginia Commonwealth University (The National Interest, 03.18.22)
  • “In spite of Russia’s relative restraint in cyberspace, media reports and even some practitioner assessments continue to expound on the possibility of a coming ‘cyberwar’ in which Moscow strikes back at the West for its support of Ukraine. Certainly, there is some room for concern. Russia has increasingly turned to the use of its ‘gray zone’ capacities for disrupting Western competitors and degrading their ability to act. And yet, warnings about digital disasters to come persistently fail to place the Russian cyber threat in a strategic context.”
  • “Fears of ‘Cyber Pearl Harbor’ or ‘Cyber 9/11’ events in which digital actions produce devastating societal disruption are not just unrealistic; they are irresponsible. While it’s true that Russia’s cyber capabilities are immense and include assets prepositioned in Western networks, there is little strategic utility to be found in such an attack. Absent the outbreak of conventional conflict between NATO members and the Russian Federation, the truth is that cyber spectacles would be walked back in days or weeks at most. Victory in the ‘cyberwar’ predicted by some will always be temporary and so generally not worth the effort.”
  • “What’s more likely in the near to medium term is that Russia will continue to seek out lateral means of disruption to address its new, more isolated state. … Sanctions are likely to push Russia to increasingly use cyber to ease economic tensions and retaliate against specific Western political factions without fearing escalation. Just as sanctions have pushed North Korea toward cybercrime as a method of bypassing economic hurt, Russia will likely feel freer to utilize its substantial cyber capabilities in months to come.”
  • “Businesses and societal institutions in Europe and the United States would be foolish if they did not expect … Russian digital antagonism to find its way into networks closer to home.”
JELENA VICIC, Postdoctoral Scholar, Center for Peace and Security Studies, University of California, San Diego; and RUPAL N. MEHTA, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (War on the Rocks, 03.14.22)
  • “Policymakers and experts remain concerned about the cyber escalation potential and speculate about several explanations for the lack of large-scale cyber events launched by Russia to date.”
  • “First, as media reports suggest, the United States took on some of the early work to prepare Ukraine for cyber onslaught in the aftermath of the invasion of Crimea. … Since then, the United States has deepened strategic defense cooperation with Ukraine, including intelligence sharing. In addition, NATO has worked with Ukraine to boost its cyber defense and counter ‘Russian aggression in cyberspace.’ These defenses may have worked well, causing Russian attempts to fail.”
  • “Second, Russia may be holding some of its cyber assets in reserve, and waiting for the right moment to strike—ostensibly using cyber as a force multiplier as they push deeper into Ukraine… Security researchers also speculate that as sanctions continue to wear Russia down, governments, financial and other institutions may become targets of reprisals both in Ukraine and the West.”
MARCUS WILLETT, Senior Advisor for Cyber, International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS, 03.10.22)
  • “Theories abound as to why Russia has not used destructive cyber operations in its offensive on Ukraine so far. Perhaps Ukrainian cyber security has improved, especially with Western help. Maybe the widespread skirmishing of cyber ‘partisans’ from both sides has got in the way. It could be that the Russians are keeping Ukrainian networks operating for their own purposes, including to assist their intelligence gathering. And it is of course unlikely that everything the Russians may be doing has been made public.”
  • “In extremis, the Russians might care less about the risk of an indiscriminate use of cyber capabilities in Ukraine causing damage beyond Ukraine’s borders. As Western governments have been warning, we must be well prepared for that eventuality and not lulled into any false sense of cyber complacency, especially given the threat is likely to arise more from Russian desperation than strength.”
RAFAL ROHOZINSKI, Principal, SecDev Group; Senior Fellow, Center for International Governance Innovation (IISS, 03.09.22)
  • “While the expected cyber war in Ukraine has yet to materialize, this doesn't mean that all is quiet on the cyber front. The extraordinary sanctions imposed on Russia … have significant implications for software programs, networks and devices. Companies such as Oracle and SAP—widely used by Russian banks, telecommunications operators and government institutions—suspended their operations in Russia, raising the prospect of licenses being revoked and thus rendering most databases inoperable. … The net result is that Russia’s military and economy may be left bereft of the digital tools needed to build, field or employ weapons and materiel in pursuit of its objectives in Ukraine. In fact, the entire Russian economy could be forced into a pre-information-technology age.”
  • “There are signs that Russia is belatedly waking up to the importance of the cyber front. Russia’s information warfare has been more present and robust in recent days, with the volume of pro-government disinformation increasing. … A government decree ordered Russian websites to remove scripts that make them vulnerable to cyberattacks, and to switch to domestic domain-name servers. … Digital defenses are starting to take shape, and this may signal a shift toward a more dangerous phase of the cyber war.”
JACQUELYN SCHNEIDER, Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University (Foreign Affairs, 03.07.22)
  • “It seems unlikely, given the amount of indiscriminate damage currently being inflicted by Russia, that cyber operations will escalate the violence of the campaign within Ukraine. That said, could cyber operations lead to horizontal escalation, drawing NATO into the fight, for example? Or, given that the United States and Russia are the world’s largest nuclear powers, could cyber operations escalate to the worst possible outcome—nuclear war? Recent wargaming research suggests that cyber exploits into nuclear command and control may be enticing for states looking to neutralize a nuclear escalation threat in the midst of a conventional war, and that actors may underestimate the danger of these exploits and vulnerabilities to nuclear stability.”
  • “A deliberate choice by Russia to use cyberattacks against the United States or NATO to ‘escalate to dominate’—deliberately ratcheting up the pressure to force Washington to back off—would likely fail.”
  • “A more troubling scenario involves accidental escalation from cyber operations—that is, when critical infrastructure is unintentionally damaged by a cyberattack or when a cyberattack is misattributed to Russia (or the United States). This is especially dangerous for civilian infrastructure that also serves military or security purposes… Plus, a jumble of actors has jumped into this space, from criminal syndicates to cyber militias to hacker collectives… That increases the chances that one of these players will target civilian infrastructure and misattribution … could needlessly trigger retaliation.”
  • “Beginning in 2017, my team at the Naval War College and the Hoover Institution ran a [three-year, 580-player] wargame that … found that teams who were told they possessed cyber exploits against nuclear command-and-control systems overwhelmingly used them.”
  • “One way to avoid this type of escalation is resilience. … Resilient nuclear weapons and command-and-control systems, which make states more confident in their second-strike capability, … [are] less likely to find themselves vulnerable to counterforce campaigns and less tempted to launch their own preemptive nuclear attacks.”
ERICA D. LONERGAN (nee BORGHARD), Assistant Professor, Army Cyber Institute, West Point, and Research Scholar, Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University; SHAWN W. LONERGAN, U.S. Army Reserve Officer assigned to 75th Innovation Command; BRANDON VALERIANO, Senior Fellow, Cato Institute, and Distinguished Senior Fellow, Marine Corps University; and BENJAMIN JENSEN, Professor of Strategic Studies, School of Advanced Warfighting, Marine Corps University, and Senior Fellow for Future War, Gaming and Strategy, Center for Strategic and International Studies (The Washington Post, 03.07.22)
  • “Experts who inferred from Russia’s past behavior that the current conflict would be a ‘Cyber Pearl Harbor’ moment may have been drawing the wrong lesson. … Cyber operations in combat contexts may not be as prolific or decisive as many expect, as demonstrated by evidence not only from Ukraine, but also from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. … These operations don’t win wars but instead support espionage, deception, subversion and propaganda efforts.”
  • “Here’s why the current cyber operations are neither as easy nor as effective as the conventional wisdom would suggest. First, the global tech sector plays a major role in cyber defense, with firms such as Microsoft, Alphabet and others working overtime to identify threats to Ukraine, patch vulnerabilities and share information. Additionally, … the United States and Britain dispatched cyber defensive teams to Ukraine in December. Reporting suggests that U.S. cyber mission teams continue to support Ukraine’s cyber defense.”
  • “Second, preemptive actions may have boosted Ukraine’s resilience. Ukrainians were downloading encrypted communications applications such as Signal and offline maps—but the Ukrainian military also relied on old-school wired communications.”
  • “Third, low-cost cyber operations readily available to hacktivists and proxy groups … disrupt and distract more than they create tangible battlefield gains. In contrast, offensive cyber operations tailored to shut down another country’s command-and-control or air-defense systems, for instance, can be challenging. It takes years of investment and human capital, pre-positioned access points and a mature, well-resourced organization to plan and carry out this type of complex cyber campaign.”
  • “And even the most sophisticated offensive cyber operations can’t compete with conventional munitions. It’s far easier to target the enemy with artillery, mortars and bombers than with exquisite and ephemeral cyber power. Notwithstanding any cyber vulnerabilities, it’s much simpler for Russia to launch an artillery barrage at a power substation than to hack it from Moscow. Russia’s airstrikes against a Ukrainian television tower may be a case in point.”
JASON BLESSING, Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Research Fellow, Foreign and Defense Policy Department, American Enterprise Institute (The Hill, 03.04.22)
  • “There is every chance that we will see increased cyberattacks, but cyber hype about scope and scale … is completely unwarranted. … Exaggerating the threat distracts us from hardening against much more likely Russian assaults that are short of cyber war.”
  • “One key threat is the potential spillover from Russian cyber operations in Ukraine. … Disruption to U.S. supply chains is a second threat. … Finally, Russian cyber activity can target critical infrastructure with low-cost, low-sophistication methods that are indistinguishable from criminal activity.”
  • “Instead of preparing for cyber-doomsday scenarios, the U.S. private and public sectors should be hardening targets against actual threats. This means having a game plan for when networks go dark, rebooting quickly and using failure to better evaluate future risks.”
LAUREN ZABIEREK, Executive Director, Cyber Project, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School of Government (The Economist, 03.03.22)
  • “Conspicuous by its absence … has been something that many observers thought would be one of the defining features of a 21st-century conflict between high-tech opponents. ‘Cyberattacks’ aimed at Ukrainian computer systems seem to have played hardly any role. … The run-up to the invasion saw the websites of Ukraine’s government and banks knocked temporarily offline and the discovery of malware designed to delete files on Ukrainian computer systems. … But all that is small beer compared with what many had been anticipating.”
  • “Theories [about why that was] abound. One … is that Russia may have left Ukrainian infrastructure intact because Russia, too, is making use of it. … Another is that large-scale, damaging attacks were attempted but failed. … And once a war has started cyberattacks may become less enticing.”
  • “Less than a week into the war, though, few experts are willing to stick their necks out and say definitively that no big cyberattacks will happen. … Absence of evidence, in the digital realm, never quite adds up to evidence of absence.”
CIARAN MARTIN, Professor of Practice, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford (Lawfare, 03.02.22)
  • “Even those of us long skeptical about the mischaracterization of cyber operations and cyber risk as catastrophic weapons of destruction, rather than a still serious but quite different threat of chronic disruption and destabilization, have been surprised by just how little cyber operations have featured in the early part of the invasion. … The reasons for this underuse of Russia’s sophisticated cyber capabilities so far in the conflict are unclear.”
  • “Even though cyber operations have featured to an unexpectedly small extent in the conflict so far, the West still remains at higher risk of serious disruption—as distinct from catastrophic attack—via the cyber domain than it was before the invasion.”
  • “It is significant that the warnings coming from the likes of Washington and London to their own citizens are not about ‘cybergeddon.’ They are about the risks of overspill from Russian attacks and from Russian proxies, and the potential that the Putin regime may decide to take over from the proxies and do it better.”
  • “However this horrendous war turns out, the West will be left with … strategic cybersecurity weaknesses to tackle. And in the meantime, the cyber domain may influence the war at the margins, but it will not decide it.”
18. How Layered Defense in Ukraine is Shaping Future U.S. Military Operations

How Layered Defense in Ukraine is Shaping Future U.S. Military Operations
Fine Print
May 3rd, 2022 by Walter Pincus, |

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. [...] Read more
OPINION — Last week, senior Pentagon officials offered some initial lessons learned from the first two months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
At an April 27, Senate Armed Services Subcommittee hearing, Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, Commanding General, Army Special Operations Command (USASOC), pointed out, “When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, we were not forward postured in Ukraine. In response to this unprovoked aggression, we invested time and talent campaigning in support of Ukrainian territorial defense.”
Starting eight years ago, Braga said, “We built enduring relationships, provided logistical support, and began training with the intent to increase societal resilience to bolster their resistance posture.” That forward presence of Army Special Forces “provided a foundational understanding of the operating environment [in Ukraine] and played a role in humanitarian assistance, and information operations, while providing on-the-ground daily assessments for senior leaders,” Braga added.
The Ukrainian Special Operations Command was established in December 2015, and agreed to cooperate with NATO Special Operations Headquarters, according to Janes, the military-intelligence publication. Both U.S. and British special forces have helped train the Ukrainians who developed four special operations regiments; three navy special operations regiments; and two training centers.
“In recent years, Ukrainian SOF have participated in an extensive number of joint training packages with NATO and non-NATO partners,” Janes reported.
The last U.S. Army training team taking part in the Joint Multinational Training Group Ukraine consisted of 165 members of the Florida National Guard that arrived in Ukraine in November 2021, just as Russian forces were beginning to amass near the border. The team was removed from the country in early February, as concern about the invasion mounted.
Last Friday, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby announced “the recent reunion now of these Florida National Guard members with their Ukrainian colleagues.” He said the reunion took place at a U.S. military installation in Germany where the Ukrainians will be trained by the Florida Guard team on the artillery, radar and armored vehicles that were part of the latest U.S. military assistance packages.
Braga talked of other types of assistance. “As armed conflict broke out [in Ukraine],” he said, “our regionally-aligned forces [in Europe] led a Coalition Planning Cell of seventeen nations to coordinate information [warfare] with international SOF (special operation forces) partners and Allies.”
One result, said Braga, was that “Ukraine is imposing great cost on Russia in the information space,” adding that U.S. SOF, along with NATO and European partners, are aiding the Ukrainians in information operations.
Summing up, Braga said, “The strategic value of our existing partnerships – built over the past eight years particularly with our Ukrainian partners – quickly became apparent” after the February 24, Russian invasion.
He went on to say, “We are applying these same lessons to our nation’s most consequential strategic pacing challenge, the People’s Republic of China (PRC)…PRC influence is increasing in scope, scale, and velocity without regard for international norms or boundaries. Just as we demonstrated in Ukraine, irregular warfare investments are required now in preparation for the PRC’s stated intentions to challenge the global order. These irregular warfare tenets are being applied as we expand our focus to PRC activities in alignment with the NDS,” referring to the 2022 National Defense Strategy, which has yet to be released publicly.
At an April 27, House Armed Services Committee meeting on the Air Force fiscal 2023 budget, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall was asked what lessons had been learned so far from the Ukraine war.
“Generally speaking,” Kendall said, “the type of threat we are seeing there is not a surprise to us…We are watching Ukraine right now; it’s a bit early to tell based on judgment of performance.”
He did suggest, “From the performance of operations…the failure of Russia to achieve air superiority early and control the air decisively was a major impediment to their attempt in the invasion.”
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The other thing Kendall pointed out was “the effectiveness of air defenses, particularly like Stinger [a man-portable air-defense system] and the SA-10 [a Russian long-range, surface-to-air missile system]…Part of that is the tactics the Ukrainians used – they used what they had very well and they were able to keep those systems alive despite the threat.”
Both Kendall and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown during the hearing then had to defend against committee members who questioned plans in the Biden fiscal 2023 budget to retire so-called legacy aircraft like the A-10 fighter-bomber and the E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system (AWACS). Kendall and Brown repeatedly pointed out the two aircrafts’ vulnerability to anti-air weapons such as those successfully used by the Ukrainians.
As Brown put it, these legacy aircraft could operate in places like Iraq and Afghanistan where the enemy had no meaningful air defenses. With China and Russia, as shown in Ukraine, the threat to aircraft would exist. “I don’t expect we’ll be in very many permissive environments in the future,” Brown said at one point.
At the same hearing, General John W. Raymond, U.S. Space Force Chief of Operations, explained the useful role space had played so far in the Ukraine war.
“I think you’ve seen very clearly in the Russia Ukraine conflict where space, including commercial space, has provided a great advantage to Ukraine,” Raymond said. He added, “Commercial space has allowed us to show information much more broadly. It has allowed us to see the AOR (area of responsibility) with much greater clarity…especially leading up to the conflict.”
Last Thursday, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday, interviewed at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on the future of the U.S. Navy, was asked what lessons were learned from the sinking of the Russian cruiser Moskva?
Gilday pointed out, “We don’t think that they [the Russians] tried to defend themselves ahead of time,” and one lesson was “that you have to understand the environment you’re operating in. You have to understand the threat. And you have to understand yourself and your own capabilities, and how you would use them, and train to them.”
In answering a question about his soon-to-be-released 2022 Navigation Plan, Gilday indicated the plan covered some areas he had identified that were associated with the Moskva sinking.
Gilday answered “Counter C5ISR&T,” which stands for command, control, computers, communications, cyber-defense (C5), intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). “So,” Gilday continued, “This is our effort to blind the opposition so that we can maneuver effectively and maneuver inside the enemy’s WEZ [weapons engagement zone] for a certain amount of time.”
He added, “And so that work is all classified. Actually, the north start objective is classified for that work, but essentially, it’s to give – it’s to be able to maneuver the fleet.”
Terminal defense is another initiative in the plan, Gilday said. “So think laser-directed energy, microwave energy. Think about layered defense for survivability of the fleet; so long-range fighters [aircraft].”
He also mentioned another area that has shown to be a Russian problem in Ukraine. “Sustain the fleet,” Gilday listed as being in his plan. “So there’s an element of contested logistics that also is a big effort for us right now, and actually leveraging unmanned, potentially in that area,” he said.
“I think more broadly,” Gilday said, “there are things that we’re learning about what’s gone well in Ukraine and what hasn’t, and what potential lessons we could draw with China, Taiwan, that we need to – that we need to examine very, very closely.”
Lesson learned has always been the military’s way of making adjustments. The Ukraine war already has provided another means for doing just that.
Read A Picture of Putin’s Nuclear Option from Senior National Security Columnist Walter Pincus only in The Cipher Brief
Fine Print
Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.


19. In new directive, US Army reins in Army Futures Command

Are we no longer interested in the future? Or do we just want to get there more slowly? (apologies for the snarky comments)

In new directive, US Army reins in Army Futures Command
Defense News · by Jen Judson · May 4, 2022
WASHINGTON — The Army secretary has issued a new directive on modernization that sets new boundaries around Army Futures Command and reasserts the role of the service’s acquisition shop.
The directive rescinds the language of previous directives from 2018 and 2020 that establishes Army Futures Command as “leading the modernization enterprise.” It also says the Army’s science and technology arm will fall under the control of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Acquisition, Logistics and Technology),or ASAALT, as opposed to under Army Futures Command.
“With the initial establishment of Army Futures Command, the Army issued a number of policy directives to accelerate its development and address AFC’s role in the Army modernization,” Ellen Lovett of Army Public Affairs told Defense News in a statement. “While well-intentioned, this guidance had the unintended consequence of creating ambiguity in long-established acquisition authorities. This administrative change eliminates that ambiguity with clearly defined roles consistent with statute, and will better facilitate collaboration in our modernization and equipping enterprise.”
The directive suggests the service is still working out the kinks following the 2018 formation of Army Futures Command, tasked with leading the service’s major modernization efforts.
Critics have argued the command has had too much control over modernization, including a high level of power over the acquisition enterprise.
ASAALT is responsible for “the overall supervision of Army acquisition matters,” Lovett added. “This responsibility includes the oversight of Army research and development, to include science and technology efforts and associated resourcing decisions.”
According to the May 3 directive, signed by Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, establishing Army Futures Command was an “essential step in accelerating our modernization efforts, helping to drive focus and attention on experimentation, prototyping, concept development, and requirements generation for the Army of the future.”
While previous directives intended “to build momentum, this guidance primarily addressed roles arising early in the equipping lifecycle, when requirements are evolving and experimentation takes place,” she wrote. “It did not adequately account for the shifting roles and functions as requirements move into development as programs of record through production, fielding, and sustainment.”
The previous directives also “created ambiguity regarding the primacy of acquisition authorities vested in the Army Secretariat that preserve civilian oversight and control in acquisition matters,” Wormuth said.
To get capabilities delivered to soldiers, the Army needs input and contributions of a variety of organizations, “not the unitary direction of one Army command,” she said.
Now as modernization programs move through the lifecycle, different Army organizations will assume primary roles, Wormuth noted.
Retired Lt. Gen. Tom Spoehr, now with the Heritage Foundation, told Defense News the directive “returns the Army to the way things were pre-2018 with a few exceptions. Army Futures Command exists but does not share or drive any acquisition efforts.”
“AFC clearly still develops requirements and concepts, but now has a much more limited role in the acquisition of capabilities,” he added.
The directive recertifies Army Futures Command as an enduring command and notes the commanding general of AFC is “responsible for force design and force development, and is the capabilities developer and operational architect for the future Army.”
“AFC assesses and integrates the future operational environment, emerging threats, and technologies to provide warfighters with the concepts and future force designs needed to dominate a future battlefield,” according to the directive.
While ASAALT is responsible for research and development, AFC will be responsible for the operation of the service’s research laboratories and centers, the directive states.
Just before he retired, then-Army Futures Command chief Gen. Mike Murray told Defense News he was comfortable with the relationship between ASAALT and his command, but that it did not come without rocky patches. “There are some people out there that said pieces of ASAALT should be part of AFC,” he said, “I don’t agree with that.
“When you have people looking at things from two different perspectives, I think that tension is good,” Murray said.
About Jen Judson
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts from Kenyon College.


20. US ramps up training of Ukrainian forces

US ramps up training of Ukrainian forces
BY THEHILL.COM - 05/04/22 7:16 PM ET
The Hill · May 4, 2022
The U.S. military is ramping up its weapons training for Ukrainian forces, with hundreds now being trained on artillery systems, drones and radars, defense officials said Wednesday.
The effort, which involves taking Ukrainians out of their country to train at multiple locations in Europe, has picked up significantly after the Pentagon in early April revealed it trained about a dozen such troops on how to use Switchblade drones.
Now, more than 220 Ukrainians have been trained on U.S. artillery, particularly the M777 Howitzer, a 10,000-pound system that can be towed by vehicles and hit targets up to 18 miles away with 155 mm rounds. Washington has promised 90 such systems to Kyiv.
Another 20 Ukrainian soldiers on Sunday finished a week-long training course on the newly developed Phoenix Ghost unmanned aerial system, 121 of which are being sent to Ukraine.
“And there’s more of that coming,” a senior U.S. defense official said Monday, noting that another 50-plus Ukrainians would arrive at one of the sites to begin their training later this week.
“We are running them through a streamlined course here on the new equipment that they’ll be receiving. The goal in all of this is to get them back as soon as possible, so that then they can train others within their army on the equipment,” Gen. Joseph Hilbert, head of the 7th Army Training Command in Europe, told reporters Tuesday.
American forces training Ukrainian troops is nothing new, though the Pentagon has had to make some adjustments on how to go about such activities since Russia attacked Ukraine on Feb. 24.
Over the last seven years, the U.S. has trained some 23,000 Ukrainian soldiers inside the country, a $126 million effort, with training provided mostly by American National Guard troops, according to Hilbert.
That training began in 2015 — after Russian-backed separatists began fighting in the Donbas region of Ukraine — and ran up until early this year, when the threat of the incoming Russian invasion forced the Pentagon to pull U.S. forces from Ukraine.
In addition, Ukrainian forces have taken part in more than a dozen large war drills with U.S. troops in Germany since 2015, according to Hilbert.
Ahead of Russia’s invasion, the U.S. military was also planning for Ukrainian troops to lead a division-level exercise across the country.
Among the U.S. troops pulled out of Ukraine earlier this year were 160 members of the Florida National Guard, who had been training Ukrainians at the Yavoriv Combat Training Center in Lviv.
“One of the lowest parts of the mission … was when we had to pull them out of Ukraine, out of the operation back in February,” Hilbert said.
Now U.S. forces, including Florida Guard members, are back instructing the Ukrainians from locations outside the country, with the Pentagon first revealing late last month that it had begun training Ukrainians on artillery systems and radars at U.S. military installations in Germany.
Among the locations is Grafenwöhr, home of U.S. Army Garrison Bavaria, where about 50 to 60 Ukrainian troops have been instructed on howitzers. That first group is now back in their country and another tranche of 50 to 60 soldiers are being trained.
Hilbert said the Ukrainians training there already have a background with what they’re using, “so for the howitzers, they are already Ukrainian artillerymen.”
Though defense officials have declined to offer specifics on the other locations of training and equipment involved, Hilbert said the troops are taking their training “to heart.”
“They understand how to operate it and employ it as effectively as they can on their own and in accordance with their own tactics and their own doctrine,” Hilbert said of the weapons and equipment. “The soldiers that we are receiving here are absolutely motivated, incredibly professional.”
Lt. Col. Jeremy “Todd” Hopkins, deputy commander for the Florida National Guard’s 53rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, described a scene only a few days prior when a Ukrainian soldier, during a lunch break, heard that his hometown was being attacked.
“He and his team immediately stopped with what they were doing and stopped eating their lunch and went back to training knowing that that was how they were going to go back and support their homeland,” Hopkins told reporters.
The training is not without its “natural challenges,” Hilbert noted, including the difficulties with overcoming language barriers when describing more technical pieces of weapons and equipment.
The U.S. also must adapt lessons based off of what’s happening on the ground in battles in Ukraine.
“We’re absolutely paying attention to what is happening out there and we’re absolutely incorporating the lessons observed and the lessons that we learned in a part of training that we do, and that’s across the whole force,” Hilbert said.
The Hill · May 4, 2022




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David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
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David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Subscribe to FDD’s new podcastForeign Podicy
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."
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