Quotes of the Day:
"Our peace and prosperity can never be taken for granted and must constantly be tended, so that never again do we have cause to build monuments to our fallen youth."
- Elizabeth II
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well."
- Jack London
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 13 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. RUSSIAN ANNEXATION OF OCCUPIED UKRAINE IS PUTIN’S UNACCEPTABLE “OFF-RAMP”
3. Is Putin Sick – Or Are We Meant to Think He Is?
4. Interview: Why The 'Failure' Of Russian Spies, Generals Is Leading To 'Apocalyptic' Thinking In The Kremlin
5. DARPA wants to model how ‘disinformation’ flows from fringe to mainstream platforms
6. Modern Resistance – Learning From Non-Western Examples
7. Escape From Moscow
8. With eye on China's zero-Covid chaos, Taiwan seizes chance to open up
9. China builds simulated Taiwan port, ship to test missiles: military analyst
10. Strategies of Unusual Size
11. Can Russia and the West Survive a Nuclear Crisis in Ukraine?
12. Could a Korean-Style Armistice End the Russia-Ukraine War?
13. Chinese Views of the US and Russia After the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
14. Why Ukraine Is the Best Place to be a Comedian
15. Europe’s new Iron Lady: Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas
16. The Covert Operation to Back Ukrainian Independence that Haunts the CIA
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 13 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 13
Kateryna Stepanenko and Frederick W. Kagan
May 13, 7:00 pm ET
The Russian military has likely decided to withdraw fully from its positions around Kharkiv City in the face of Ukrainian counteroffensives and the limited availability of reinforcements. Russian units have generally not attempted to hold ground against counterattacking Ukrainian forces over the past several days, with a few exceptions. Reports from Western officials and a video from an officer of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) indicate that Moscow is focused on conducting an orderly withdrawal and prioritizing getting Russians back home before allowing proxy forces to enter Russia rather than trying to hold its positions near the city.
Ukraine thus appears to have won the Battle of Kharkiv. Ukrainian forces prevented Russian troops from encircling, let alone seizing Kharkiv, and then expelled them from around the city, as they did to Russian forces attempting to seize Kyiv. Ukrainian forces will likely attempt to disrupt at least the westernmost of the ground lines of communication (GLOCs) between Belgorod and Russian forces concentrated around Izyum, although Russia is using several GLOCs, including some further away from current Ukrainian positions than any Ukrainian counteroffensive is likely to reach soon. The terrain east of current Ukrainian positions may also favor the Russians attempting to defend their GLOCs, as large water features canalize movement and create chokepoints that the Ukrainians would have to breakthrough.
Russian troops continued efforts to advance all along the periphery of the Izyum-Donetsk city salient but made little progress. Russian forces attempted a ground offensive from Izyum that made no progress. We had previously hypothesized that Russia might give up on attempts to advance from Izyum, but the Russians have either not made such a decision or have not fully committed to it yet.[1] Small-scale and unsuccessful attacks on the southern end of the salient near Donetsk City continued but made no real progress.
The main Russian effort continues to be the attempt to encircle Severodonetsk and Lysychansk from the north and from the south. Russian troops attacking from Popasna to the north made no significant progress in the last 24 hours. Russian forces coming north-to-south have failed to cross the Siverskyi Donets River and taken devastating losses in their attempts. The Russians may not have enough additional fresh combat power to offset those losses and continue the offensive on a large enough scale to complete the encirclement, although they will likely continue to try to do so.
The Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol continue to fight despite the odds, although Russian attackers appear to have penetrated into the Azovstal facility.
Key Takeaways
- Ukraine has likely won the Battle of Kharkiv. Russian forces continued to withdraw from the northern settlements around Kharkiv City. Ukrainian forces will likely attempt to disrupt Russian ground lines of communication to Izyum.
- Ukrainian forces have likely disrupted the Russian attempt to cross the Siverskyi Donets River in force, undermining Russian efforts to mass troops in northern Donbas and complete the encirclement of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk.
- Russian forces have likely secured the highway near the western entrance to the Azovstal Steel Plant but fighting for the facility continues.
- Russian forces in Zaporizhia Oblast are likely attempting to reach artillery range outside Zaporizhia City.
- Ukrainian forces are reportedly attempting to regain control of Snake Island off the Romanian coast or at least disrupt Russia’s ability to use it.
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 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 resumed offensive operations toward Slovyansk but did not secure any territorial gains on May 13.[2] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces launched airstrikes and fired on Ukrainian positions in Izyum’s vicinity while continuing to replenish logistics.[3] Ukrainian forces likely continued to threaten Russian positions north of Izyum from the west given observed Russian artillery fire on Ukrainian-controlled villages—a Russian offensive operation in that direction is unlikely, whereas a Ukrainian counteroffensive from that direction is plausible.[4] Russian forces instead conducted another unsuccessful assault on Oleksandrivka, a settlement approximately 23 kilometers east of Izyum, likely in a renewed effort to cross the Siverskyi Donets River.[5]
Ukrainian forces likely inflicted heavy casualties on Russian forces attempting to cross the Siverskyi Donets River near Kreminna and encircle Rubizhne from the northwest. An unnamed US defense official noted that Ukrainian artillery has frustrated large-scale Russian preparations to cross the Siverskyi Donets River and prevented the Russians from massing in northern Donbas.[6] Ukrainian forces reported destroying another pontoon bridge on May 13.[7] Pro-Russian Telegram channels reported that Russian artillery had begun “massive preparations” along the left bank of the Siverskyi Donets on May 4-5, with the overall operation reportedly beginning as early as May 2.[8] Luhansk Oblast Administration Head Serhiy Haidai warned that the Russians might still launch an attack on Bilohorivka, a settlement 20 km southwest of Kreminna, based on observed Russian attempts to build another pontoon bridge.[9] Russian forces have likely lost the momentum necessary to execute a large-scale crossing of the Siverskyi Donets River, however. Haidai also reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful attempts to seize settlements east of Popasna to gain access to the T1303 highway to Severodonetsk and Lysychansk.[10] An unnamed US defense official said that Russia’s “incremental gains” around Popasna are not significant, likely due to the slow pace and limited scale of the Russian offensive there.[11]
Russian forces continued disjointed and unsuccessful offensive operations near the Donetsk Oblast border. Pro-Russian Telegram channels claimed that Russian forces secured positions west of Horlivka, but ISW has no independent confirmation of these claims.[12] Previous reporting of Ukrainian artillery strikes in the area suggests that Russian forces are unlikely to have fully seized these settlements.[13] Ukrainian forces destroyed a field command post near the Donetsk Oblast border on May 13.[14]
Supporting Effort #1—Mariupol (Russian objective: Capture Mariupol and reduce the Ukrainian defenders)
Russian forces have likely secured the M14 highway at the western entrance to the Azovstal Steel Plant despite Ukrainian resistance in the area on May 13. Mariupol Mayor Advisor Petro Andryushenko published geolocated images of Russian forces conducting an assault on an area east of the highway, indicating that Russian forces have successfully pushed the Ukrainian defenders back from the Azovstal’s entrance but that Ukrainian forces continue to resist.[15] Russian forces also continued to shell and conduct airstrikes in the western parts of Azovstal, likely in an attempt to suppress Ukrainian resistance.[16] Donetsk Oblast Administration Head Pavlo Kyrylenko said that Ukrainian defenders maintained their positions on May 13.[17]
Supporting Effort #2—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Retain positions on the outskirts of Kharkiv within artillery range of the city and prevent further Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces continued to withdraw units from around Kharkiv City. The Ukrainian General Staff reported for the first time that Russian forces focused on ensuring the withdrawal of units situated around Kharkiv City on May 13.[18] The Russian command is also likely prioritizing the withdrawal of Russian troops over that of its proxies. A Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) serviceman said that the Russian border patrol on the Ukrainian-Russian border along the highway to Belgorod refused to let his battalion, withdrawn from around Kharkiv City, into Russia for two days.[19] Russian forces are likely attempting to defend GLOCs to Izyum in the northeastern part of Kharkiv Oblast after Ukrainian forces reportedly advanced to Ternova—a settlement only three km from the Russian border.[20]
Supporting Effort #3—Southern Axis (Objective: Defend Kherson against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces did not conduct any offensive operations along the Southern Axis and continued to reconnoiter and fire at Ukrainian positions on May 13.[21] The Zaporizhia Oblast Military Administration reported that Russian forces have increased the number of military personnel in the occupied village of Myhalivka, 20 km north of Melitopol.[22] Russian forces are likely attempting to establish artillery positions along the E105 highway to Zaporizhia City, possibly in hopes of getting within artillery range of the city, which could divert Ukrainian from operations along the Donetsk Oblast border. The Zaporizhia Oblast Military Administration added that locals have spotted Russian military trucks in the vicinity of Berdyansk and Melitopol and reported interrupted signals in the area, likely due to the transfer of military equipment and/or personnel from Donetsk Oblast to the west.[23]
Russian forces may have paused their efforts to annex Kherson Oblast, possibly due to their insufficient control and administration of the area. Russian-appointed Deputy Head of Kherson Oblast Kirill Stremousov said on May 12 that Kherson does not currently seek integration with Russia, contradicting numerous indications in the past few days that Russia was preparing to annex it.[24] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command and intelligence reported that Russians “have fallen into the legislative trap” and are attempting to recruit local authorities to establish Russian control of the region.[25]
Ukrainian forces are attempting to regain control of Snake Island, southwest of Odesa and near the Romanian coast. An unnamed US defense official said that Ukrainian forces successfully destroyed Russian surface-to-air missiles and landing ships with drones in recent days in an effort to dislodge Russian troops.[26] Chief of the Ukrainian Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Kyrylo Budanov said Ukraine is prioritizing regaining the island to prevent Russian naval landings. He flagged especially the possibility that Russia might try to transfer troops by sea to Transnistria as provocations intensify at the border.[27] The Transnistrian Internal Affairs Ministry claimed that unknown individuals in a car with foreign license plates thew Molotov cocktails at an oil depot and a military enlistment office in Tiraspol on May 13.[28] Russian forces are unlikely to use Snake Island to attempt amphibious landings near Odesa in the face of continued effective Ukrainian attacks on Russian ships. Russia’s continued presence on Snake Island, however, could greatly complicate efforts under discussion in the West to open a humanitarian sea line of communication to Odesa.
Supporting Effort #4—Sumy and Northeastern Ukraine: (Russian objective: Withdraw combat power in good order for redeployment to eastern Ukraine)
Russian forces are continuing to pin Ukrainian forces in northeastern Ukraine, likely in preparation for their withdrawal from Kharkiv City. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are transferring additional artillery units to Bryansk Oblast to increase their shelling of Ukrainian border settlements.[29]
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces will likely complete their withdrawal from the vicinity of Kharkiv City but attempt to hold a line west of Vovchansk to defend their GLOCs from Belgorod to Izyum. It is unclear if they will succeed.
- The Russians will continue efforts to encircle Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, including by crossing the Siverskyi Donets River, but may have lost the momentum needed to complete this undertaking.
- Isolated and uncoordinated Russian attacks will likely continue along the rest of the Izyum-Donetsk City salient but will not likely make significant gains.
- Russian troops may attempt to drive to within artillery range of Zaporizhia City, although it is far from clear that they will succeed.
- The Battle of Mariupol will, apparently and surprisingly, continue.
2. RUSSIAN ANNEXATION OF OCCUPIED UKRAINE IS PUTIN’S UNACCEPTABLE “OFF-RAMP”
Excerpts:
Ukraine and its Western partners likely have a narrow window of opportunity to support a Ukrainian counteroffensive into occupied Ukrainian territory before the Kremlin annexes that territory (or brings up additional forces). This window of opportunity is not necessarily obvious. In a military sense, Ukrainian forces should begin their counteroffensive before Russian forces decide that their campaign has culminated and begin to dig into more orderly and possibly morale-boosting defensive positions. Poor morale and worse leadership have soundly degraded Russian forces; Ukraine should ideally counter-attack at the time of maximum Russian disorder before Russian forces have time to fully go over to the defensive and dig in.
The political and ethical consequences of a longstanding Russian occupation of southeastern Ukraine would be devastating to the long-term viability of the Ukrainian state and necessitate Western support for a more immediate Ukrainian counteroffensive. Every day that occupied Ukraine remains under Russian control is another day of horrific human rights abuses, targeted degradation of Ukrainian governance structures, and “filtration” of civilian populations. If Ukrainian forces do not retake southeastern Ukraine before Moscow annexes that territory, Kyiv may find that the southeast has become irreparably mired in the same situation that Crimea has faced since 2014.
RUSSIAN ANNEXATION OF OCCUPIED UKRAINE IS PUTIN’S UNACCEPTABLE “OFF-RAMP”
By Katherine Lawlor and Mason Clark
May 13, 2022
Key Takeaway: Russian President Vladimir Putin likely intends to annex occupied southern and eastern Ukraine directly into the Russian Federation in the coming months. He will likely then state, directly or obliquely, that Russian doctrine permitting the use of nuclear weapons to defend Russian territory applies to those newly annexed territories. Such actions would threaten Ukraine and its partners with nuclear attack if Ukrainian counteroffensives to liberate Russian-occupied territory continue. Putin may believe that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would restore Russian deterrence after his disastrous invasion shattered Russia's conventional deterrent capabilities.
Putin’s timeline for annexation is likely contingent on the extent to which he understands the degraded state of the Russian military in Ukraine. The Russian military has not yet achieved Putin’s stated territorial objectives of securing all of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and is unlikely to do so. If Putin understands his military weakness, he will likely rush annexation and introduce the nuclear deterrent quickly in an attempt to retain control of the Ukrainian territory that Russia currently occupies. If Putin believes that Russian forces are capable of additional advances, he will likely delay the annexation in hopes of covering more territory with it. In that case, his poor leadership and Ukrainian counteroffensives could drive the Russian military toward a state of collapse. Putin could also attempt to maintain Russian attacks while mobilizing additional forces. He might delay announcing annexation for far longer in this case, waiting until reinforcements could arrive to gain more territory to annex.
Ukraine and its Western partners likely have a narrow window of opportunity to support a Ukrainian counteroffensive into occupied Ukrainian territory before the Kremlin annexes that territory. Ukraine and the West must also develop a coherent plan for responding to any annexation and to the threat of nuclear attack that might follow it. The political and ethical consequences of a longstanding Russian occupation of southeastern Ukraine would be devastating to the long-term viability of the Ukrainian state. Vital Ukrainian and Western national interests require urgent Western support for an immediate Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Kremlin Plans to Annex Southern Ukraine:
Russian President Vladimir Putin likely intends to annex occupied southern and eastern Ukraine directly into the Russian Federation in the coming months to consolidate his control over these territories and possibly deter Ukrainian counterattacks. The Kremlin likely plans to annex much of the Ukrainian territory currently occupied by Russian forces—portions of Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts in the south and the areas of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in the east that Russian forces and their proxies control. Moscow may also annex other Kremlin proxy statelets like South Ossetia (in Georgia) and Transnistria (in Moldova). ISW has previously detailed the ongoing Kremlin conditions-setting to annex or recognize occupied Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk.[1] That conditions-setting includes replacing local media with Kremlin-run media outlets, installing Russian internet and communications networks, forcibly transitioning local economies to the Russian ruble, kidnapping, executing, and replacing local Ukrainian officials with Russian collaborators, and likely hunting and eliminating anti-occupation activists and partisans. Widespread Russian atrocities against Ukrainian civilians are part of the established Kremlin playbook to gain control over occupied areas.[2]
The Kremlin no longer conceals its intentions to annex areas of occupied Ukraine. The secretary of United Russia, Putin’s political party, visited Kherson on May 6 and announced that “Russia is here forever.”[3] The Russian-appointed deputy head of the Kherson Civil-Military Administration, Kirill Stremousov, announced on May 11 that Kherson would develop a legislative framework for joining Russia by the end of 2022 and would entirely forgo a public referendum after reports that Russian occupation authorities were preparing for a fraudulent Kherson independence referendum.[4] He said that the international community did not recognize Russia’s (rigged) referendum on annexing the Crimean Peninsula after Russian forces invaded and captured that Ukrainian territory in 2014, and that a Kherson referendum was therefore unimportant.
Stremousov said aloud what Russians have tried to obfuscate: Russia will annex Kherson despite widespread local opposition to annexation. Stremousov’s statement shows that the Kremlin likely realizes any attempt to conduct a “referendum” in Kherson would be met with widespread resistance even after months of Russian brutalization and intimidation of the local population. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov did not contradict Stremousov in a May 11 press conference, stating that the Russian annexation of Kherson “must have an absolutely clear legal background, justification, [and] be absolutely legitimate, as was the case with Crimea” but explicitly did not mention a referendum. Russian-appointed Kherson regional head Volodymyr Saldo said on May 9 that “if the Russian Federation is here, then the entire set of laws, the structure and construction of power will be precisely Russian.”[5] He said that he expected “some kind of [Russian] federal district will be created, which will include the Crimea, Kherson, and Zaporizhia regions,” though the Kremlin is not bound to administer an annexed Kherson Oblast in this manner and regularly contravenes the stated expectations of its other proxies.
The Kremlin has many models for the governance of annexed territories based on Russia’s complex and varied federal system. Occupied territories could be incorporated as oblasts (the administrative unit roughly analogous to American states that comprise most of Russia), republics (like the illegally annexed Crimean peninsula), federal cities (like Russia’s two main cities of Moscow and St Petersburg and the city and naval base of Sevastopol), or an entirely new organizational structure.[6] The Kremlin could also choose to first turn occupied territories into proxy “people’s republics” as an intermediate step, or offer a phased path to annexation. ISW cannot currently forecast which path to annexation the Kremlin will likely pursue, but the recent Russian official comments noted above suggest that outright annexation is currently the most likely.
The Kremlin’s planned wave of annexations could also include proxy territories outside Ukraine. The newly elected leader of South Ossetia, one of two Russian proxy regions in Georgia created and defended by the Russian military during and after the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia, said on May 11 that he awaited a Russian “signal” to hold a referendum on joining Russia.[7] His predecessor said in his concession speech on May 9 that his government had already submitted paperwork to prepare and determine a date for the accession referendum.[8] Officials from Abkhazia, the other Russian proxy state in Georgia, said on March 31 that they support but do not share South Ossetia’s aspirations to join Russia, indicating that Abkhazia will likely not be included in a Russian annexation sweep.[9] Separately, US National Intelligence Director Avril Haines warned on May 10 that Putin seeks a land bridge to the Russian proxy Moldovan breakaway region of Transnistria, but does not currently have the military capabilities to achieve that goal.[10] The Kremlin may approve Transnistrian annexation or recognize the independence of the self-declared Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic to set conditions for future operations in Moldova or southwestern Ukraine. Such Russian actions would likely follow the establishment of military control of occupied Ukraine and take account of the fact that Russia almost certainly lacks the military capability to seize the parts of Ukraine, including Odesa, that would be necessary for such a land bridge.
Costs and Benefits of Annexation for Russia:
The direct Russian annexation of any areas of occupied Ukraine would permanently change the pre-invasion legal frameworks codified in the Minsk II Accords and preclude returning to any sort of status quo antebellum. It would thereby cost Putin the opportunity he pursued doggedly from 2014 to 2022—attempting to insert Russian proxies (the DNR and LNR) into the Ukrainian political system as permanent levers of influence. Outright annexation of Ukrainian territory would foreclose the resurrection of the legal frameworks outlined by the Minsk II accords, which depended on treating Russia’s proxy statelets as parts of Ukraine and requiring Kyiv to grant them both autonomy and the rights to participate in the Ukrainian political system. Putin’s recognition of the “independence” of those statelets immediately before the February invasion has already formally changed the situation, to be sure. But whereas one might theoretically imagine Putin trading that “independence” for a return to the Minsk II framework, it is almost impossible to imagine him accepting a retrocession of territory he has formally annexed to the Russian Federation.
If Putin annexes the occupied territories, therefore, he will have decided to give up the option of using proxies within the Ukrainian political system to resume the hybrid war approach he had taken toward Ukraine since 2014. He would likely make such a decision because he knows his latest invasion has already destroyed any possibility of returning to those Kremlin-favorable frameworks, because he fears a Russian military collapse, or because he seeks to restore credible Russian deterrence by introducing a nuclear threat—or all three. Regardless of Putin’s reasoning, Russia cannot—and will not—accept a return to a pre-war status quo. If the Kremlin directly annexes Ukrainian territory, it will mark a fundamental departure in the Kremlin’s approach to Ukraine, from hybrid warfare and political manipulation to outright military coercion and, if possible, conquest.
Annexation of Ukrainian lands is likely the only “off-ramp” that Putin is interested in pursuing at this time. Even this face-saving option, which falls far short of the Kremlin's initial war aims of complete regime change in Kyiv, would be a devastating blow to Ukraine and is likely the minimum outcome that the Kremlin is willing to accept. If Putin can declare victory by annexing large swathes of Ukrainian territory, he can better sell the costs of the war to the Russian population and to any sympathetic global audiences. The Kremlin absurdly justified its unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine as defending the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics from Ukrainian “Nazi” aggression and an alleged planned genocide against Russian speakers. The Kremlin likely assesses it must therefore consolidate and justify its gains by annexing at least the currently occupied portions of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts if it seeks to maintain that narrative and claim that it achieved the war's stated objectives.
A Russian annexation would seek to present Kyiv with a fait accompli that precludes negotiations on territorial boundaries even for a ceasefire by asserting that Russia will not discuss the status of (illegally annexed through military conquest) Russian territory—the argument the Kremlin has used regarding Crimea since 2014. The Kremlin did not seriously engage in its perfunctory negotiations with Ukraine in Istanbul in March and April. After annexing Ukrainian territory, the Kremlin will frame Ukrainian negotiators’ demands for the return of Ukraine’s sovereign territory as absurd requests for Russia to give up its own land and dismiss them.
A Russian military collapse combined with further Ukrainian battlefield successes or the Kremlin's acceptance that a military collapse is imminent are likely the only other circumstances under which Putin would accept something less than his stated objectives for this phase of the war. Collapse does not necessarily mean a mass surrender or rout of the Russian military. A Russian military collapse would more likely be roughly analogous to the state of the French army from April to June of 1917 during the First World War, when over half the divisions in the French army refused to go on the offensive due to shattered morale and poor leadership.[11] Russian forces in such a state would be extraordinarily vulnerable to concentrated Ukrainian counteroffensives, and the Ukrainian military would be able to pick the battles of its choosing if Russian forces were unwilling to attack. A Russian military collapse would likely involve an endemic level of desertions and “fragging“ of officers, the practice of personnel killing their own officers, both of which have been observed throughout the war.[12] Such a collapse would render further offensives impossible in the current phase of the war in Ukraine and could lead to a disorderly withdrawal of Russian forces from the front lines, as was seen following the Russian loss in the Battle for Kyiv.[13] The Russian military will not be completely destroyed, nor would it have to leave Ukraine before reaching a state of collapse. However, a collapsed Russian military would lose its ability to function as a coherent fighting force. If that happened, Putin might well find himself obliged to accept far less than his current stated objectives.
Timing:
The Kremlin has set partial conditions for annexation in areas like Kherson and Zaporizhia and has actually had to rein in some of its proxy officials from the DNR, LNR, and South Ossetia as they clamor for annexation. But the Kremlin has not yet formally announced annexation or the formation of new proxy republics in those areas. The Kremlin must set certain political and military conditions before it can annex occupied territories. Military realities could force a change in timeline or in pacing, however, and Ukrainian military gains in the east could drive a quicker annexation of specific areas.
The Kremlin likely intends to annex all of the territories it wants to incorporate into Russia at once, rather than stagger the annexation process. The Kremlin likely believes that mass annexation would minimize the longevity of international outrage. The international community eventually normalized relations with Russia following its 2008 invasion of Georgia and the stagnation of its 2014 invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea; Putin would likely seek to replicate that pattern.
The Kremlin will need to establish relatively comprehensive security and administration structures within its occupied territories before it can announce effective annexation. Unexpectedly stiff Ukrainian resistance in occupied Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant, as well as anti-occupation protests and partisan activities in Kherson and other occupied areas, have likely slowed the Kremlin’s intended timeline.[14] The Kremlin likely expects strong backlash in occupied Ukrainian territories when it declares formal annexation and therefore is seeking to break up partisan and opposition groups before going forward with annexation, likely through the population-control efforts of Rosgvardia forces.
The Kremlin must also work to transform its military occupation of Ukrainian territories into a series of political administrations capable of governing newly minted Russian regions before it can formally annex those territories. This process will take time as the Kremlin crushes opposition movements, arrests or kills off local Ukrainian officials, eradicates local governance structures, and replaces them with Russian administrators or Ukrainian collaborators. The longer that Russian forces have to control and subdue occupied Ukrainian territory, the more difficult it will be for Ukraine to rebuild local administrative and governance structures in those areas if they can regain control. The political clock on Ukraine’s ability to regain control of the southeast is ticking.
The Russian head of the Kherson region said in a May 9 interview that the formation of a regional government was underway.[15] He claimed that there was no widespread or organized violence in Kherson, only “separate manifestations.” These claims (likely exaggerated) may indicate that occupation forces, probably including Rosgvardia troops, have cracked down on Ukrainian resistance and partisan activities in the region, enabled by Russian control of communications infrastructure. The degree of success of those Russian crackdowns, or of ongoing Ukrainian partisan activities, is unclear.
The Kremlin also likely needs to address internal disagreements on administrative boundaries and organization before formally annexing Ukrainian territory. DNR head Denis Pushilin claimed on May 9 that Mariupol “is the territory of the Donetsk People's Republic forever. No one will take it away from us.”[16] However, conflicting Russian and Ukrainian reports on May 3 suggest that other Russian decisionmakers may be planning to annex Mariupol directly into Russia’s Rostov oblast, rather than into the DNR.[17]
Intended Effects of Annexation:
The Kremlin could threaten to use nuclear weapons against a Ukrainian counteroffensive into annexed territory to deter the ongoing Western military aid that would enable such a counteroffensive. The Kremlin has already falsely claimed that Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory—during an unprovoked war of Russian aggression against Ukraine—are somehow escalatory rather than a legal Ukrainian response under the laws of war.[18] However, Russian nuclear doctrine clearly allows for nuclear weapons use in response to “aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy.”[19] The Kremlin could frame a Ukrainian counteroffensive into annexed Ukrainian territory as a threat to the existence of the Russian state—such an absurd claim would be no less plausible than many other claims Russia has already made. Making that claim, however, likely necessitates Russian annexation of occupied territories, rather than creating additional proxy statelets in places like Kherson and Zaporizhia.
The Kremlin could believe that a nuclear threat would deter ongoing Western military aid that would enable such a Ukrainian counteroffensive. Ukraine and the West should not let that happen. The Kremlin has likely calculated that NATO would rhetorically and materially support Ukrainian counteroffensives into a hypothetical proxy statelet Kherson People’s Republic (or simply Russian-occupied Ukraine), but would not support Ukrainian attacks into the Kherson Oblast of Russia, for example.
The Kremlin may also believe that Kyiv would be unwilling to directly attack claimed Russian territory, particularly after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on March 27 that Ukraine would not try to recapture all Russian-held territory by force, arguing that it could lead to a third world war.[20] Zelensky has repeatedly called for the restoration of the de facto borders as of February 23, the day before Russia’s latest invasion.[21] The Kremlin could conceivably believe that annexation would prevent Ukrainian counteroffensives, even without an explicit nuclear threat.
Military Supporting Effort:
In order to enable the annexation of occupied Ukrainian territories, the Kremlin must accomplish the following military objectives:
- Hold and consolidate control of occupied territory. This objective necessitates the disruption of partisan activities and the defense of held territories.
- Stop Ukraine from retaking additional territory. The Kremlin will likely order Russian forces to settle into defensive positions once Kremlin officials accept that the Russian campaign in Donbas has reached its culmination point—if they ever do.
However, the Kremlin may not have acknowledged that its military campaign in Donbas has stalled. The Kremlin may still believe that its forces can take the rest of Ukrainian-held Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. The Russian proxy head of the DNR claimed on May 9 that the DNR is “faced with the task of regaining control over its territories, and then the republic will decide on its future—almost certainly referring to accession into Russia”[22]
Russian forces are continuing ineffective offensive operations in eastern Ukraine despite the vanishingly small chance that they will make any substantial territorial gains. The Kremlin is likely operating under one of the following mindsets:
- It erroneously assesses that Russian forces can complete their stated objective—the complete capture of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts; or
- It has realized that Russian forces will be unable to completely capture Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts but is continuing to order attacks in order to maintain momentum and prevent the fragmentation of Russian forces; or
- It is planning a larger mobilization of lower-quality Russian reserves or the general population in order to accomplish its original territorial objectives, forcing a months-long delay for additional Russian forces to arrive and turn the tide (or so the Kremlin might believe).[23]
Ongoing Russian attacks, though ineffective, do achieve the military objective of pinning Ukrainian defenders in place by threatening further advances. Kyiv may be unwilling to risk pulling the forces it would need to conduct a counteroffensive against occupied southern Ukraine from areas that are currently under Russian attack. If Russian forces accept that they will gain no additional territory in Ukraine and settle into defensive positions themselves, Ukrainian forces will gain an opportunity to seize the initiative and choose where to launch counter-offensives against the depleted Russian forces, which may collapse in the face of a determined counterattack.
Forecast:
We assess that the remainder of this phase of the war in Ukraine will likely follow one of three courses: either Russian forces will annex occupied Ukrainian territory into Russia, the Russian military will stall for time as it attempts to mobilize additional forces, or the Russian military will continue to pursue impossible military objectives with insufficient resources and ultimately collapse in the coming months. Mobilization does not preclude military collapse. Many of the dangers outlined in this assessment hinge on a Russian recognition of its conventional military weakness and a proactive decision to secure Russian gains in Ukraine. Putin’s mistaken decision to invade Ukraine despite Russia’s poor preparation and conventional military capabilities suggests that the West should not rely on clear-eyed Russian assessments of their own military capabilities. Ukrainian forces may be able to force Russian forces out of occupied Donetsk and Luhansk, or at least back to the pre-February borders of the DNR and LNR, if Russian forces do not decide to end their offensives early. If Russian forces make the deliberate choice to end their offensive before the Ukrainian military forces them to do so, that decision would be a strong indicator of imminent annexation. If Russian forces fail to recognize that their Donbas campaign has culminated, the Russian military in Ukraine may be headed for an outright collapse.
Russian forces will likely either decide to end their offensives in Donetsk and Luhansk and annex the territory they currently hold or they will be militarily defeated by Ukrainian forces. If Russian forces stop shy of capturing the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the Kremlin will owe the Russian population an explanation as to why it did not achieve its stated objectives. The false Kremlin narrative of an anti-Russian “genocide” in eastern Ukraine traps Russian decisionmakers if they care about narrative consistency: they must “rescue” sufficient territory to claim to have stopped the “genocide” in order to claim victory.[24] Alternatively, the Kremlin could calculate that domestic support for the end of the war is unimportant to its aims and simply claim a victory that is inconsistent with the Kremlin’s running narratives.
Policy Implications:
Despite its conventional military failures, the only off-ramp the Kremlin appears to be considering is at least partial victory. Putin likely understands that there will be no return to the Minsk II accords or any similar legal framework that allowed for Russian interference in Ukrainian politics. But Putin has not ceded his longer-term ambition of controlling Kyiv, even though his attempts to take the Ukrainian state by force have failed (for now). If Putin annexes occupied territory and the conflict settles in along new front lines, the Kremlin could reconstitute its forces and renew Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in the coming years, this time from a position of greater strength and territorial advantage.
The West must take seriously the real and likely threat that Russia will annex southeastern Ukraine and the expand Russian nuclear doctrine to cover that newly annexed territory. Russia’s annexation plans are not guaranteed to succeed. They depend on consolidating control of occupied territory, establishing administrative capabilities, and preventing a Ukrainian counteroffensive. The West must do what it can to deter Putin’s expansionism while also preparing an answer that offers Ukraine more than capitulation.
Ukraine and its Western partners likely have a narrow window of opportunity to support a Ukrainian counteroffensive into occupied Ukrainian territory before the Kremlin annexes that territory (or brings up additional forces). This window of opportunity is not necessarily obvious. In a military sense, Ukrainian forces should begin their counteroffensive before Russian forces decide that their campaign has culminated and begin to dig into more orderly and possibly morale-boosting defensive positions. Poor morale and worse leadership have soundly degraded Russian forces; Ukraine should ideally counter-attack at the time of maximum Russian disorder before Russian forces have time to fully go over to the defensive and dig in.
The political and ethical consequences of a longstanding Russian occupation of southeastern Ukraine would be devastating to the long-term viability of the Ukrainian state and necessitate Western support for a more immediate Ukrainian counteroffensive. Every day that occupied Ukraine remains under Russian control is another day of horrific human rights abuses, targeted degradation of Ukrainian governance structures, and “filtration” of civilian populations. If Ukrainian forces do not retake southeastern Ukraine before Moscow annexes that territory, Kyiv may find that the southeast has become irreparably mired in the same situation that Crimea has faced since 2014.
[4] https://lenta dot ru/news/2022/05/11/stremousov/; https://www.unian dot net/war/novosti-hersonskoy-oblasti-russkie-sobirayut-dannye-grazhdan-dlya-provedeniya-referenduma-novosti-vtorzheniya-rossii-na-ukrainu-11801946.html
[8] https://ria dot ru/20220509/referendum-1787575207.html
[11] Ashworth, Tony (2000). Trench Warfare, 1914–18: The Live and Let Live System. Grand Strategy.
[19] https://rusemb dot org dot uk/press/2029#:~:text=25.,with%20the%20Collective%20Security%20Treaty.
[20] https://www.aljazeera dot com/news/2022/3/27/ready-to-go-for-it-zelenskyy-is-willing-to-discuss-neutrality
3. Is Putin Sick – Or Are We Meant to Think He Is?
Excerpts:
The evidence for the preponderance of disparate if not contradictory claims of Putin’s imminent demise is Putin himself. He certainly looks bad. The bullfrog mien, awkward gait, fidgety behavior at televised events including his April 22 meeting with his embattled defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, at which a slumped Putin clung to the edge of a parodically tiny table as if to steady himself against a tremor or vertigo. There is also his notorious self-isolation amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the oft-cited reason for his conducting meetings with foreign visitors, both before and during the war, at medieval banquet-length tables. (Anyone who wants to get close to Putin, Russian independent media have reported, must take a PCR test and even provide a fecal sample.)
What New Lines can establish is that there is indeed a growing chorus of those close to Putin or in his domestic intelligence apparatus who are murmuring much the same as those quoted in the supermarket checkout lane rags and who are in a better position to know of his state of mind and body. Whether these sources are telling the truth or trying to sow disinformation is unknown. It would behoove those disillusioned by Putin’s totalitarian leadership, for instance, to portray him as incapacitated or not long for this world, the better to weaken his hand at home and on the battlefields of Ukraine. Spreading rumors of his declining health could also preempt something more catastrophic such as an order to launch a nuclear weapon, which is less likely to be carried out by military commanders on behalf of a terminally ill despot.
...
Steroids – a common one is prednisone – attack malignant lymphocytes that circulate in the blood, but they are also known for two common side effects.
The first is a high risk of infection owing to how badly they deplete immune cells. “Anyone on heavy doses of steroids will find it much easier to contract COVID-19,” Grossman said, which might account for Putin’s extreme germophobia and recourse to Howard Hughes-like seclusion. Pneumonia, too, can easily kill an immunocompromised steroid user.
And the second side effect?
“Deeply irrational or paranoid behavior.”
Is Putin Sick – Or Are We Meant to Think He Is?
An oligarch close to the Kremlin was recorded on a tape saying the president is ‘very ill with blood cancer.’ Is this true, idle speculation or disinformation designed to make an erratic and paranoid dictator vulnerable?
Michael Weiss is news director at New Lines
May 12, 2022
Is Vladimir Putin sick or even dying?
The tabloid press, bolstered by a sudden efflorescence of Twitter diagnosticians, certainly seems to think so. Since his Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine got underway, the 69-year-old Russian president’s deteriorating health has been a subject of frenzied speculation — speculation that press secretary Dmitry Peskov has downplayed, citing Putin’s “excellent” health.
Boris Karpichkov, a KGB defector to Britain (and formerly an officer of the Second Chief Directorate, specializing in counterintelligence) thinks his fellow sexagenarian ex-spy suffers from Parkinson’s disease, along with “numerous” other maladies including dementia. “He is — or at least acts — insane and obsessed by paranoia ideas,” Karpichkov told Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, comparing Putin in this respect to Stalin, who was the victim of at least one stroke.
A Telegram channel called “General SVR” and purportedly helmed by a former officer from Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service has stated that Putin is set to undergo surgery for an unspecified form of cancer in the near future and that while he’s on the operating table, his temporary replacement will be the grim Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s National Security Council, a fellow ex-KGB man and longtime director of one of its successor agencies. Patrushev, as New Lines has documented, is also one of the most hawkish ideologues of the regime.
The evidence for the preponderance of disparate if not contradictory claims of Putin’s imminent demise is Putin himself. He certainly looks bad. The bullfrog mien, awkward gait, fidgety behavior at televised events including his April 22 meeting with his embattled defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, at which a slumped Putin clung to the edge of a parodically tiny table as if to steady himself against a tremor or vertigo. There is also his notorious self-isolation amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the oft-cited reason for his conducting meetings with foreign visitors, both before and during the war, at medieval banquet-length tables. (Anyone who wants to get close to Putin, Russian independent media have reported, must take a PCR test and even provide a fecal sample.)
What New Lines can establish is that there is indeed a growing chorus of those close to Putin or in his domestic intelligence apparatus who are murmuring much the same as those quoted in the supermarket checkout lane rags and who are in a better position to know of his state of mind and body. Whether these sources are telling the truth or trying to sow disinformation is unknown. It would behoove those disillusioned by Putin’s totalitarian leadership, for instance, to portray him as incapacitated or not long for this world, the better to weaken his hand at home and on the battlefields of Ukraine. Spreading rumors of his declining health could also preempt something more catastrophic such as an order to launch a nuclear weapon, which is less likely to be carried out by military commanders on behalf of a terminally ill despot.
Western governments, not to mention the news organizations they leak to, are similarly inclined to have us envision Putin and the regressive state he rules in the worst possible light. When Alexander Solzhenitsyn sought an allegory to depict the Stalinist slave empire after the purges — one in which everyone from the Central Committee member to the petty apparatchik to the man-in-the-street was made to look complicit in the cannibalization of society — he opted for cancer. Treatment for a metastasizing tumor, as Solzhenitsyn knew from firsthand experience, could be every bit as destructive to the organism as the pathology itself.
Perhaps something of Solzhenitsyn’s literary legacy informs the whispers of Putin as the modern Sick Man of Europe. Then again, maybe he is just that. New Lines has obtained an audio recording of an oligarch close to the Kremlin who describes Putin as “very ill with blood cancer,” although the type of blood cancer was unspecified. Needless to say, we are unable to independently confirm this allegation, Putin’s medical charts being notoriously difficult to come by. But the recording represents rare testimony by someone with proven ties to the Russian government that its fanatical dictator may well be seriously unwell. And the oligarch had no idea he was being recorded.
A Western venture capitalist taped the conversation in mid-March without the oligarch’s foreknowledge or consent. The source provided the recording to New Lines on the condition that we not publicly identify him. He says he betrayed a colleague’s trust out of disgust with the war in Ukraine — a disgust his secretly recorded interlocutor evidently shares. “He absolutely ruined Russia’s economy, Ukraine’s economy and many other economies — ruined [them] absolutely,” the oligarch says of Putin. “The problem is with his head. One crazy guy can turn the world upside down.”
New Lines was easily able to authenticate the oligarch’s identity and voice. We have taken the decision to withhold his name or any compromising details of his biography because of the high probability disclosing it would lead to state retaliation. Russia has imposed a sentence of 15 years imprisonment for those found guilty of spreading “fake” information about the war in Ukraine, which is to say stating the facts about it. Oligarchs in particular have much to lose, given that their ability to earn and spend their hundreds of millions or billions is inextricably tied to their fealty to the Kremlin. Roman Abramovich, erstwhile owner of the Chelsea Football Club in London, may have been poisoned while trying to help Ukraine negotiate a peace deal. In all, eight oligarchs, many involved in Russia’s lucrative energy sector, have turned up dead since January; two under eerily similar circumstances as geographically distant as Catalonia and Moscow, alongside their wives and children, whom they were thought to have murdered before committing suicide.
For the purposes of this article we’ll refer to the oligarch as “Yuri.”
We can reveal that Yuri is currently outside of Russia. As of 2021, his net worth was high enough to qualify him as one of Russian Forbes’ 200 richest businessmen. He is preoccupied with the pariah effect that the country’s economic isolation and U.S. and EU sanctions have had on his own portfolio in Europe, spending the bulk of the 11-minute recording asking the Western venture capitalist as to how he might indemnify himself.
Yuri also lets rip, denouncing the war in vehement terms, trashing the Kremlin’s initial pretext of “trying to find Nazis and fascists.” Yuri then goes on to say that “we all hope” Putin dies from his cancer or possibly from some internal intervention in Moscow such as a coup to spare Russia from further misfortune — either an accidental switch of pronoun or one reflective of shared oligarchic opinion. Furthermore, Yuri personally blames Putin for killing “more than 15,000 Russian soldiers and 4,000 or 5,000 civilians in Ukraine. It’s unbelievable. For what? He killed more people than in 10 years in the [Soviet] Afghan war.”
Yuri’s bona fides were easily established through open source verification methods and consultations with past and present intelligence officials. One former European security chief described him as belonging to a “close circle of 20 to 30 people” with whom Putin met in 2014 in advance of his stealthy seizure of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. “The goal was to explain the motivations of his military actions, why this was the only way,” the ex-official told New Lines of that conclave, indicating that Yuri is — or was at that time — one of Putin’s confidants and plenipotentiaries. Another associate of the oligarch added that he is still in a position to provide “concrete information” about the inner workings of the Presidential Administration of Russia (the formal name of the leader’s executive office).
Somewhat bolstering the fact that Yuri’s allegation is now widespread in the elite corridors of Moscow is the fact that on March 13, a top-secret memo was dispatched from the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the FSB, Russia’s domestic security agency, to all regional directors of the FSB. “The memo instructed the regional chiefs not to trust rumors about the president’s terminal condition,” Christo Grozev, the head of investigations at Bellingcat, a forensic research website famous for unmasking Russian spies and assassins, told New Lines. “The directors were further instructed to dispel any rumors to this effect that may spread within the local FSB units. According to a source at one of the regional units who saw the memo, this unprecedented instruction had the opposite effect, with most FSB officers suddenly coming to believe that Putin indeed suffers from a serious medical condition.” As in the bad old days of the Soviet Union, nothing is believed until the state says it’s a malicious falsehood.
There is always the possibility that Yuri’s revelation is one.
“There is no way to know for sure from the outside, but there are two consistencies in evaluating the Kremlin,” said John Sipher, a former CIA officer specializing in Russia. “Their instinct is to lie and spread disinformation on the one hand, and so this chatter may be an effort to deflect attention. Or, equally likely, we are seeing flashes of elite infighting. Putin has long acted as the de facto mafia boss of the Kremlin, the arbiter between those fighting for influence or money. Those clans are now positioning themselves to survive no matter how this crisis ends. Leaking Putin’s health crisis — or inventing one — would be one to gain leverage.”
The timing of the FSB memo was curious, coming less than a month before Proyekt, a well-respected Russian investigative news outlet, published an exposé showing that Putin routinely travels within Russia in the company of specialist doctors. Among them are Alexei Shcheglov and Igor Yesakov, both head-and-neck surgeons; Konstantin Sim, an orthopedic traumatologist; and Evgeny Selivanov, a neurosurgeon who has produced scholarship on thyroid surgery and on thyroid cancer in geriatic and senile patients. Shcheglov, Yesakov and Selivanov are Putin’s “most frequent travel companions,” Proyekt found. Putin has also taken to homeopathic and nonscientific folk remedies, according to the outlet, such as soaking in baths filled with the blood of deer antlers, which is thought to improve cardiovascularity and skin complexion.
Putin is known to have sustained several injuries to his back since he first became president of Russia in 2000. He fell off a horse during his firs term, an accident that incapacitated him for a time, according to a source cited by Proyekt. He can also be seen limping in more recent videos, a conspicuous feature of his public appearances such that the Kremlin press service at one point banned state news agencies from referring to it. He also took a nasty spill at an ice hockey match in Sochi in May 2017 after another player knocked into him. On that occasion, Sim, the orthopedic traumatologist, remained close to Putin’s residence for eight days. “In at least two cases,” Proyekt reported, “Putin underwent either an operation or a very serious procedure, most likely in the back.”
The president’s poor health was also said to be the reason for his prolonged absences from the spotlight beginning in 2012. Those absences have led to proliferation of what the Russians have dubbed “canned food” or prerecorded footage of his seemingly real-time meetings with visitors. One famous helping of canned food was Putin’s meeting, aired on Feb. 21, with his national security chiefs just before the launch of his latest war with Ukraine: That meeting, judging by the dates shown on the attendees’ watches, was filmed earlier.
Yuri, too, cites Putin’s back problems and suggests they are linked to blood cancer. The oligarch says Putin underwent back surgery in October 2021 — just a few months shy of his “special military operation” in Ukraine — although New Lines could not find any evidence to substantiate this allegation. Whatever the case, Putin isn’t exactly spry these days.
On March 18, at a large pro-war rally in Moscow, Putin delivered an address and was filmed walking off stage down a short flight of stairs putting most of his weight on his left foot. Just this past week, at Russia’s Victory Day celebration in Red Square to commemorate the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, Putin sat with an FDR-esque blanket draped over his lap. (The temperature in Moscow on Victory Day — May 9 — was a non-Arctic 48 degrees Fahrenheit.) His walk during the Victory Day parade was visibly awkward, possibly to conceal a limp that has elsewhere been observed. And his face was even puffier than usual.
Ashley Grossman, a professor of endocrinology at Oxford University, told New Lines, “Putin has always been a very fit-looking man with a slightly gaunt appearance. But over the last couple of years, he seems to have filled out in the face and neck. Cushingoid appearance, it’s called, and it’s compatible with steroid use.”
Steroids, Grossman said, are typically prescribed for various kinds of lymphoma or myeloma, cancer of the plasma cells, which “can cause widespread bone disease and definitely affect the spinal column and back.”
Lymphoma is typically a more aggressive type of blood cancer, requiring heavy-duty chemotherapy that leads to hair loss, something Putin is not known to have ever experienced. Other lymphomas are lower grade, may not require chemotherapy and are less likely to afflict the bones.
Myeloma, even the more aggressive forms of it, doesn’t necessarily require chemotherapy at all anymore. It can often be treated with immnuno-modulatory agents and steroids, neither of which precipitate hair loss. Myeloma can, however, lead to compression fractures of the spine, which make a patient hunched (see again that abnormal vignette with Shoigu) or even shave inches off height.
Steroids – a common one is prednisone – attack malignant lymphocytes that circulate in the blood, but they are also known for two common side effects.
The first is a high risk of infection owing to how badly they deplete immune cells. “Anyone on heavy doses of steroids will find it much easier to contract COVID-19,” Grossman said, which might account for Putin’s extreme germophobia and recourse to Howard Hughes-like seclusion. Pneumonia, too, can easily kill an immunocompromised steroid user.
And the second side effect?
“Deeply irrational or paranoid behavior.”
4. Interview: Why The 'Failure' Of Russian Spies, Generals Is Leading To 'Apocalyptic' Thinking In The Kremlin
Excerpts:
They're quite happy with the decision by Putin to appoint [General Aleksandr] Dvornikov [to be in charge of the Ukraine campaign] because at least that is something that’s been needed since Day One. But again, they still don't quite understand what to do next.
The other problem is that they're not quite ready. The fact is that this war is different from Putin's previous wars [in Georgia, Syria, and eastern Ukraine] because now we have Telegram channels. [On those], you have pro-military public opinion where you have lots of soldiers, lots of officers, [and] lots of veterans all talking -- not very openly -- but still expressing criticism toward the military.
It might be about very small things. For instance, there was a big frustration about radio sets for helicopters recently. [They were asking in these channels] why they don’t have them and whether they need to collect some money, [which] led to a crowd-sourcing campaign [back in Russia.] In response, the Defense Ministry said that they don’t need them [and] that sparked some bitterness among soldiers and veterans alike for seeing the leadership as out of touch with their needs and unable to listen.
So you have this new factor of the public opinion within the military on Telegram combined with a complete lack of tradition for how to talk about these things.
Interview: Why The 'Failure' Of Russian Spies, Generals Is Leading To 'Apocalyptic' Thinking In The Kremlin
As frustration over its stalled war in Ukraine and curtailed goals on the ground has grown, it appears the Kremlin may have begun to look for enemies within.
Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist who has covered the country’s shadowy security services for decades, reported in April that Colonel General Sergei Beseda, the head of the foreign intelligence branch of the Federal Security Service (FSB), was detained and later sent to Moscow’s Lefortovo prison.
[The Russian military is] quite pro-war, actually -- aggressively pro-war, I’d say. They're just not happy with the way it has been conducted."
The reported move was seen as a sign of a deepening rift between the Russian military and the FSB over its alleged intelligence failures leading up to Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine and of growing paranoia in Moscow that forces within the intelligence apparatus may even be working against the Kremlin.
With the brutal Ukraine war grinding on, Russia’s intelligence services and military planners are still grappling with how to respond to stronger than predicted Ukrainian resistance and more formidable Western support for Kyiv. As the war enters its 11th week, questions continue to swirl around how the Kremlin got its prewar planning so wrong, whether it may look to mobilize new soldiers for Ukraine, and what lessons it has learned from its early failures.
To get a better understanding of how things might progress, RFE/RL spoke with Soldatov, who is also a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) in Washington.
RFE/RL: You’ve reported that Colonel General Sergei Beseda was detained and sent to prison. What’s your sense of what is behind this move and what does it tell us about the current state of the Russian intelligence services and Russia’s elite?
Andrei Soldatov speaking to RFE/RL from London.
Andrei Soldatov: [That story] is getting more interesting and more complicated. We already see a lot of confusion, but also some attempts by the FSB to downplay the conflict [under way] among the security services and the military. There were some reports...about Beseda being present at a funeral of a very prominent former KGB officer, [Nikolai] Leonov, who was one of Fidel Castro’s handlers in Cuba years ago, and that’s why he became a sort of legend [within] the KGB.
What that likely tells us is that if the FSB made this large effort to present [Beseda] at this funeral to [try to] kill the conversation [and speculation] about him [and this rift], then they actually have a big problem.
This problem is definitely there [and] right now the military is blaming the FSB for many things. [It’s] not only about the decision to go to war [and how they did it], but also about how the war is being conducted and all the mistakes that are being made.
Of course, we are not talking about the [Russian] military thinking that it was better to not get into the war. Unfortunately, I don't see that as a big sentiment in the military. They're quite pro-war, actually -- aggressively pro-war, I’d say. They're just not happy with the way it has been conducted.
RFE/RL: Intelligence within this war -- and in the lead-up to it -- has played a rather public and prominent role, both in terms of what appears to be a failure on the part of the Russian side and what looks like some well-informed intelligence about the Russian invasion from the West. How is this shaping things and what is the sense in Moscow about why this war went wrong?
Soldatov: [You] might expect the military to blame people like Sergei Shoigu, the minister of defense, for all the failures that the Russian Army has experienced, especially during the first two months of the war, but [I] don't see Shoigu being criticized by the army or by the security services, which [is] very surprising to me.
He's still very popular and widely respected, despite the fact that he has no military background and no military training, and despite all these big failures [since] February [in Ukraine]. The problem here is that the military is getting more and more apocalyptic in how they see this war. They started out thinking that it would be a very short campaign, and they blamed the FSB for misinforming President [Vladimir] Putin that they wouldn’t face more resistance, but now they accept this new reality [on the ground].
And this new reality for them, as they see it, is that Russia still has a peacetime army while [they] face [a] completely mobilized Ukrainian Army that is now being supplied by the West with the best weapons on the planet.
Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting of the Security Council in Moscow on February 21, just a few days before the invasion of Ukraine.
That is why the Russian military feels completely outgunned and outnumbered. It [also] looks like the intelligence agencies [are beginning] to understand that and now they are adjusting to this new narrative. We now see top Russian spies like [Security Council Secretary Nikolai] Patrushev, [the head of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, Sergei] Naryshkin, and others actually supporting this new narrative that it's not only about [fighting] with Ukraine, but that it's [actually] this big war between Russia and NATO. It's a more apocalyptic and a more global [view of the conflict].
RFE/RL: What is your sense about why this view is being adopted? Is this to justify pushing for mobilization across Russia, as some people have theorized could be coming, or do you see something else driving it?
Soldatov: I think it's not only the [prospect of] mobilization, it's also about the feeling [from the military and intelligence services] that they have picked a fight with NATO, but in the wrong place, because [they] are sustaining high casualties but are not in a position to inflict any damage [in return] on NATO. This is a source of big frustration [for] the military. They’re fighting in Ukraine and suffering very high losses while losing lots [of] equipment, [but] are not in a position to fight back as they believe they should.
[This is] also a good explanation for why they are suffering from all these problems [in the first place]. [They] can’t blame [themselves]. Psychologically, it's very uncomfortable to say that [they] did something wrong, that [the] planning was bad, or that the logistics were not sufficient. [It's] much easier to say [that] the problem is what [they’ve] always suspected, which is that the West is being treacherous and attacking us in an [underhanded way]. [They believe] they started a small [conflict] in Ukraine and now they are getting attacked by the West disproportionately and that is why they are facing these problems.
RFE/RL: So where do you see this “apocalyptic” thinking, as you describe it, leading to?
Soldatov: The biggest problem is about objectives. As an example, I checked recently [on] some polls conducted by Telegram channels [that] are really close to the Russian military and [they were] quite astonishing to me. They asked questions about what [soldiers thought] an acceptable objective to declare victory for this war [would be], and you have around 25 percent saying that [they would] need the complete capitulation of Ukraine and more than 30 percent saying they would want to get Russian troops to the border with Poland.
But the most astonishing number is that only 6 percent said they would be happy with only [taking the] Donbas. That is very worrying. It means that the objectives pronounced by Putin at the beginning of the war are not necessarily the same ones the military sees as appropriate and acceptable.
RFE/RL: You have some unparalleled sources within the Russian intelligence services. Why do you think that they are still talking to you?
Soldatov: It was a big concern for me, obviously. After the war started, I thought we might lose some sources because my own anti-war position was very clear and, for [about] three weeks, [that’s] exactly what happened. But after that, the sources came back, and it looks like [they did] for different reasons.
Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in August 2021. "[Shoigu is] still very popular and widely respected, despite the fact that he has no military background and no military training, and despite all these big failures [since] February [in Ukraine]," Soldatov says.
It's not like they are [talking] because they think the [war] is wrong. It's not that [at all]. It's about their sense of frustration and the need to blame someone for all these problems. You have the military blaming the FSB and the FSB blaming some particular departments within the FSB for the problems they are facing. So, it's basically a blame game.
RFE/RL: Is it just looking for a scapegoat or do you also get a sense that there is a genuine urge to understand the mistakes and learn from them?
Soldatov: The problem here is that [there isn’t] a tradition in the Russian military or the Russian security services to [acknowledge] and [learn from] the mistakes they’ve made.
That's part of why Putin was always so popular among the security services. His approach throughout all these years was that if something happened, and you think to blame the FSB or the military, the best option is actually instead to give them more [support and resources] because [they] need to be protected and defended from criticism and [scrutiny].
You have this new factor of the public opinion within the military on Telegram combined with a complete lack of tradition for how to talk about these things."
And that is a problem now [at a time] when they need to adjust and change their strategy. They’re waiting for changes at the top, but they don’t know how to talk about it.
They're quite happy with the decision by Putin to appoint [General Aleksandr] Dvornikov [to be in charge of the Ukraine campaign] because at least that is something that’s been needed since Day One. But again, they still don't quite understand what to do next.
The other problem is that they're not quite ready. The fact is that this war is different from Putin's previous wars [in Georgia, Syria, and eastern Ukraine] because now we have Telegram channels. [On those], you have pro-military public opinion where you have lots of soldiers, lots of officers, [and] lots of veterans all talking -- not very openly -- but still expressing criticism toward the military.
It might be about very small things. For instance, there was a big frustration about radio sets for helicopters recently. [They were asking in these channels] why they don’t have them and whether they need to collect some money, [which] led to a crowd-sourcing campaign [back in Russia.] In response, the Defense Ministry said that they don’t need them [and] that sparked some bitterness among soldiers and veterans alike for seeing the leadership as out of touch with their needs and unable to listen.
So you have this new factor of the public opinion within the military on Telegram combined with a complete lack of tradition for how to talk about these things.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
5. DARPA wants to model how ‘disinformation’ flows from fringe to mainstream platforms
MIP: modeling influence pathways.
Excerpt:
In modeling the flow of information, the Pentagon’s research funding arm could potentially give the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) a powerful tool for its incoming “Disinformation Governance Board,” which critics are already calling the “Ministry of Truth.”
DARPA wants to model how ‘disinformation’ flows from fringe to mainstream platforms
By gaining a deeper understanding of information pathways, DARPA-funded research could become a powerful tool for the Disinformation Governance Board, aka the ‘Ministry of Truth’: perspective
DARPA is looking to automate its understanding of how information flows from fringe to mainstream platforms with a new AI research opportunity.
“MIPs seeks to connect information flows into pathways used to disseminate and amplify mis-,
dis-, and manipulated information” — DARPA, MIP
Rather than attempting to come up with analytics for detecting misinformation, disinformation, or manipulated information, MIP is focused on modeling the pathways that the information flows through.
These information pathways include:
- Social media
- Memes
- Blogs
- Videos
- Corporate media
- Human subjects
- And more
According to DARPA, “The discovery of pathways and patterns will move our understanding of information operations from today’s current focus on individual users, messages, memes, or campaigns to a higher level, structural and temporal understanding of how these operations unfold.”
In modeling the flow of information, the Pentagon’s research funding arm could potentially give the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) a powerful tool for its incoming “Disinformation Governance Board,” which critics are already calling the “Ministry of Truth.”
“MIPs will require data that may be sourced from human subjects” — DARPA, MIP
Mayorkas touts formation of “misinformation and disinformation governance board” to “disseminate information” before the 2022 midterm elections. pic.twitter.com/ShuadO3DRJ
— Merissa Hansen (@MerissaHansen17) April 28, 2022
“Identifying patterns that emerge among [influence] pathways, such as the propagation from certain niche platforms to more mainstream platforms, is essential to understanding influence operations” — DARPA, MIP
Another DARPA/HSARPA connection is former HSARPA Director and DARPA program manager Paul Benda, who “was the de facto head of R&D for the DHS, the senior executive in charge of the design and installation of all security systems on the Pentagon Reservation, and a program manager at DARPA,” according to his bio.
“Some data sources that will enable MIPs’ objectives may contain data that identifies one or more living individuals” — DARPA, MIP
If the incoming DHS Disinformation Governance Board ever got its hands on DARPA’s MIP tools, it would be able to collect data not just from websites, memes, or social media platforms, but from living human beings.
According to the DARPA announcement, “MIPs will require data that may be sourced from human subjects.
“Human subject means a living individual about whom an investigator (whether professional or student) conducting research obtains data through intervention or interaction with an individual, or obtains data that is identifiable private information.
“Even if there is no intent to collect human subject data, some data sources that will enable MIPs’ objectives may contain data that identifies one or more living individuals.”
With MIP, the Pentagon is adding yet another tool to its information warfare kit that has been decades in the making.
“MIPs complements maturing capabilities for identification of misinformation, disinformation, and manipulated information with better mapping and understanding of the pathways used to disseminate and amplify that information” — DARPA, MIP
When combined with other DARPA research programs, MIP follows a pattern of the Department of Defense looking to AI to automate the detection and moderation of online influence campaigns.
For MIP, DARPA says the research “will complement various DARPA efforts,” in particular, “by providing a higher (ecosystem) level of analysis” than the following programs:
The main point of contact for MIP is Dr. Brian Kettler, who is also the program manager for both INCAS and SocialSim.
Dr. Kettler came to DARPA from Lockheed Martin in March, 2019, where he was a Lockheed Martin Fellow and chief scientist of the Informatics Lab in the Advanced Technology Labs.
“INCAS will exploit primarily publicly-available data sources including multilingual, multi-platform social media (e.g. blogs, tweets, messaging), online news sources, and online reference data sources” — DARPA, INCAS
With Dr. Kettler at the helm, the INCAS research program is aimed at detecting, categorizing, and tracking online geopolitical influence campaigns, including those that fly under the radar of most analysts.
To achieve its goals, “INCAS will exploit primarily publicly-available data sources including multilingual, multi-platform social media (e.g. blogs, tweets, messaging), online news sources, and online reference data sources.”
Dr. Kettler’s other program, SocialSim, was launched to “focus specifically on information spread and evolution.”
The idea behind SocialSim was that “a simulation of the spread and evolution of online information, if accurate and at-scale, could enable a deeper and more quantitative understanding of adversaries’ use of the global information environment than is currently possible using existing approaches.”
“DARPA seeks to develop tools to help identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information, reducing adversaries’ ability to manipulate events” — DARPA, Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC)
Going back over a decade, DARPA launched the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program in 2011 “to help identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information” on social media.
More recently, DARPA announced the Civil Sanctuary project, which looks to create multilingual AI moderators that “will exceed current content moderation capabilities by expanding the moderation paradigm from detection/deletion to proactive, cooperative engagement.”
Through its research programs, DARPA continues to develop powerful surveillance tools for modeling, measuring, and analyzing the spread of information.
“We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation” — White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, July, 2021
Whereas the US Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, the current administration has been coordinating with social media companies in flagging problematic posts that spread alleged disinformation.
DARPA’s MIP is not meant to determine whether a piece of content is disinformation or not — that responsibility is beyond their scope — but DARPA is looking to trace the flow of disinformation after it has already been identified.
In the hands of tyrannical governments, DARPA’s disinformation modeling tools would aid any authoritarian censorship effort.
“The discovery of pathways and patterns will move our understanding of information operations from today’s current focus on individual users, messages, memes, or campaigns to a higher level, structural and temporal understanding of how these operations unfold” — DARPA, MIP
For MIP, DARPA is looking for submissions of innovative basic or applied research concepts in the technical domains of:
- Social media analysis
- Classification
- Pattern discovery
- Computational social science modeling
The following features are beyond the scope of MIP:
- Mapping social networks of individual users
- Attributing actions to specific actors or entities
- Analytics for detecting misinformation, disinformation, manipulated information, or influence campaigns
- Advancing text/multimedia or social network analysis techniques
- Advancing bot detection technologies
MIP will explore AI technologies for:
- Connecting various identified influence messaging flows across platforms
- Learning, mapping, and modeling which pathways are used by what types of information
- Discovering patterns that characterize these pathways
“Pathways,” according to the MIP announcement, “might be characterized as a series of edges between nodes in a graph where the nodes represent online or offline platforms or communities.
“Platforms include social media sites, other websites, and broadcast media channels. Communities include online explicit or implicit communities such as discussion groups or ‘offline,’ geographically-rooted communities consuming information from platforms. Nodes could also potentially represent individual persons (e.g., witting or unwitting key influencers).”
In gaining a deeper understanding on how, why, and where information flows, DARPA-funded research could be weaponized to spread disinformation, aid geopolitical influence campaigns, and censor dissent.
DARPA to ‘exploit social media, messaging & blog data’ to track geopolitical influence campaigns
Fourth industrial revolution will change the character of war, enable advanced influence campaigns & information warfare: RAND
Pentagon plans wargames to influence, deceive target audiences
DARPA wants AI to moderate social media groups, mitigate ‘destructive ideas’ during humanitarian efforts
Big tech COVID-19 surveillance data & censorship threaten privacy & free speech: op-ed
‘Censorship destroys the very diversity it was meant to protect’: former NSA foreign surveillance agent
6. Modern Resistance – Learning From Non-Western Examples
An important article from one of the leading resistance thinkers.
Key point (and why this is important):
This article argues that while the idea of asymmetry focused and resistance-based defense strategy is indeed the correct and arguably the only viable solution for small European countries, the current manifestations of such strategy do not ensure maximum results due to the fundamental characteristics and principles of studied historical cases that are limited in their spatial and temporal scope (Fabian, 2015). These strategic approaches drew their lessons only from romanticized western examples from the Second World War (French, Polish, Philippine, and Baltic resistance) and the Cold War (NATO, Italian, and Norwegian stay-behind groups, and Switzerland’s total defense model) while systematically ignored other relevant historical examples (Fiala, 2019). This article suggests that a much more comprehensive analysis of historical cases is needed to achieve the best possible results for a resistance-based national strategy. Such an investigation must include recent experiences such as the Chechen resistance against Russia, Hezbollah’s fight against Israel, the Iraqi and Taliban insurgencies, the Syrian insurgency, and other similar cases. This article offers a starting point for identifying critical lessons by analyzing the First Russo-Chechen War through a research model that is built on the common theoretical principles of Mao Zedong, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, and General Vo Nguyen Giap. The case was selected due to its relevance to the topic, the availability of detailed information about the Chechen and Russian operations, and Russia’s recent attack of Ukraine.
Modern Resistance – Learning From Non-Western Examples
Pub. online: 12 May 2022 Type: Research Article Open Access
Published
12 May 2022
Abstract
Due to Russia’s continuous malicious actions against the Baltic and Scandinavian countries, as well as its ongoing war against Ukraine, most European countries have recently been forced to take a critical look at their national defense strategies and military capabilities. These reviews unearthed serious capability gaps, resulting in the emergence of so-called total defense strategies based on peacetime social resilience and war time resistance. This article focuses on resistance, arguing that the current manifestations of such a strategy do not ensure maximum results for the countries because their fundamental characteristics and principles were derived from cases that are limited in spatial and temporal scope. The article suggests that lessons must be also learned from recent experiences such as the Chechen resistance against Russia, Hezbollah’s fight against Israel, the Iraqi and Taliban insurgencies, the Syrian insurgency, and other similar cases. This article offers a starting point for identifying such critical lessons by analyzing the First Russo-Chechen War through a research model built on the common principles of Mao Zedong, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, and General Vo Nguyen Giap.
Introduction
During the Cold War, small European countries’ defense strategy, military culture, and structure were dictated by their patrons, the United States on one side and the Soviet Union on the other. This period was characterized by large conventional militaries organized, trained, and equipped to fight a Second World War type conflict, in which all militaries had their own clear role to play. This straightforward situation drastically changed with the end of the Cold War and the start of the ‘end-of-history’ period (Fukuyama, 1989). In the absence of both a major sponsor and a clearly defined enemy, small European countries’ defense strategies and military organizations entered a decade that was characterized by a significant identity crisis. This desperate search for relevance brought endless defense reforms across Europe, mostly resulting in defense budget cuts, the abolition of conscription, and major reductions in the size of standing military forces. Regardless of NATO membership, no European country was able to formulate a coherent and long-standing defense strategy, and as a result, the capabilities of their militaries continued to deteriorate during the 1990s. This situation was changed with the tragic events of 9/11 after which the United States stepped in once again as a major sponsor, influencing the directions of military developments and presenting a well-defined single enemy for small European countries.
During the period between 2001 and 2014, all European countries developed defense strategies and military capabilities that matched the requirements of the moment and exclusively focused on expeditionary counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations. However, the unexpected Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its ongoing aggressive actions forced European countries to switch their focus back to their own front yards and once again take a critical look at their national defense strategies and military capabilities. Such reviews led to the realization that the capabilities developed over the last two decades were hardly useful in a national defense scenario against a numerically and technologically superior conventional Russian military. As a result, two major trends emerged among European countries. While some fell back right into the well-known, Cold War type of conventional warfare-based strategies and military structures, others that understood their space-time-force ratio disadvantage started to look at alternative, asymmetric solutions to defend their national sovereignty and ensure their country’s survival.
Such a new approach was developed by the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, called the ‘Total Defense Strategy’ (Wither, 2020). The concept is based on peacetime societal resilience and wartime resistance in which all segments of the government, private organizations, and civil society have tasks in the defense of national sovereignty and waging resistance operations against an occupier. The idea of incorporating patriotic resistance into their national defense strategies is not completely new for these countries, as they all have had a rich history of operating covert organizations in difficult physical terrain during foreign occupation during the Second World War and the Cold War (Davoliūtė, 2021).
This article argues that while the idea of asymmetry focused and resistance-based defense strategy is indeed the correct and arguably the only viable solution for small European countries, the current manifestations of such strategy do not ensure maximum results due to the fundamental characteristics and principles of studied historical cases that are limited in their spatial and temporal scope (Fabian, 2015). These strategic approaches drew their lessons only from romanticized western examples from the Second World War (French, Polish, Philippine, and Baltic resistance) and the Cold War (NATO, Italian, and Norwegian stay-behind groups, and Switzerland’s total defense model) while systematically ignored other relevant historical examples (Fiala, 2019). This article suggests that a much more comprehensive analysis of historical cases is needed to achieve the best possible results for a resistance-based national strategy. Such an investigation must include recent experiences such as the Chechen resistance against Russia, Hezbollah’s fight against Israel, the Iraqi and Taliban insurgencies, the Syrian insurgency, and other similar cases. This article offers a starting point for identifying critical lessons by analyzing the First Russo-Chechen War through a research model that is built on the common theoretical principles of Mao Zedong, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, and General Vo Nguyen Giap. The case was selected due to its relevance to the topic, the availability of detailed information about the Chechen and Russian operations, and Russia’s recent attack of Ukraine.
7. Escape From Moscow
Excerpts:
During the long Cold War, the United States was the only country that had a strategy aimed at Russian exiles. In an effort spearheaded by the diplomat George Kennan, the United States in the early 1950s established the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia and the Free Europe Committee, which used political refugees to foment resistance behind the Iron Curtain. These committees in turn set up Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which brought vital information to audiences across the Eastern bloc. Yet European countries stayed largely on the sidelines. For example, although there were numerous Russian dissidents in West Germany and the US-backed Institute for the Study of the USSR and Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe were headquartered in Munich, the German government did not have any part in running those institutions.
That inaction needs to change now. With hundreds of thousands of Russians on the European continent, it is time for European governments to start thinking of these exile populations far more strategically. Rather than remaining on the defensive, trying to deflect the disinformation and cyberwarfare campaigns that Moscow aims at the West, they should draw on this crucial resource to wage a new kind of information war on the Kremlin. And although much of the emphasis in the Western media has been rightly focused on Ukrainian refugees, European governments should be wary of falling into the trap of regarding Russians exiles themselves as the enemy, rather than crucial allies, in the effort to counter the Putin regime.
By funding and supporting Russian media, educational, and research projects based in Europe, European governments could help bring liberal ideas and independent reporting about Russia to Russians themselves and help counter the propaganda of the Putin regime. Over time, they could also help give rise to a new narrative about Russia and what the future of the country might be. If Western governments fail to support this sudden wave of exiles, however, they will squander what could be one of their most effective forms of soft power against Russian autocracy.
Escape From Moscow
The New Russian Exiles—and How They Can Defeat Putin
May 13, 2022
Russians are fleeing their country in droves. Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan; Estonia, Latvia, Montenegro. In the first two weeks of the war alone, Georgia took in 25,000 Russians, and Armenia was receiving some 6,000 Russians per day. By the end of March, 60,000 Russians had gone to Kazakhstan. And many more have sought refuge in a number of different countries in Eastern Europe. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began, Russians who have the means to do so have been racing for the border in what has become the largest exodus since the Bolshevik Revolution.
The dramatic flight underscores the far-reaching effects of Putin’s war. For Russians who came of age in the 1990s, it seemed at first that the days of having to abandon the country for political reasons were over. One could leave for economic reasons, but there was no longer a fear of persecution or restrictions on personal freedoms. In recent years, as the Putin regime has become increasingly autocratic, all that has changed. The first large group to be affected were opposition politicians, independent journalists, and political activists, who started fleeing to Europe and the United States after 2013 (Putin reintroduced political emigration as early as in 2000, but back then, it was mostly limited to the oligarchs who fell out with the Kremlin). The outflow accelerated in 2020, after Putin intensified his crackdown on civil society and changed the constitution to allow him to stay in power at least until 2036.
But it was the assault on Ukraine that has turned this trend into a giant wave. During the initial weeks of the invasion, amid ever-tightening repression at home, hundreds of thousands of Russians are believed to have left the country. Those who have fled come from many different professions and backgrounds. Many had never contemplated emigration before. But nearly all of them have three things in common: they have a high level of education, are from the bigger cities, and have a liberal outlook.
For Russia, the departure of so many educated professionals, academics, and businesspeople raises profound questions about the future makeup of the country. For those seeking large-scale political change, it also poses a new challenge: whether it will be possible to effectively pressure the regime from abroad, with so much of the domestic opposition now in jail or simply gone. And for those left behind, the hollowing out of civil society means that they may be stuck with a country that is culturally impoverished, paranoid, and hard line.
BRAIN DRAIN
The new wave of exiles from Putin’s Russia can be grouped into four categories. The first and largest consists of IT specialists; according to the Russian Association of Electronic Communication, at least 100,000 such professionals have left since the invasion began. Long known for its engineers and computer scientists, Russia is one of a very few countries in which local Internet platforms can compete successfully with global platforms such as Google and Facebook. Before the war, many of these professionals were employees of U.S. and other Western companies; others ran their own companies and did work for foreign clients.
After February 24, however, it became clear that this kind of international work would no longer be possible. The sweeping sanctions imposed by the West hampered access to Western technologies, and many were unable to be paid by their Western clients or even connect to the servers of their companies. Moreover, many of these people are young, in their mid-20s to 40s, and fear being drafted into the army if they stay.
The second group of emigrants are journalists, activists, and nongovernmental organization employees: this group numbers probably not much more than 1,000 people, although their departure, given their importance in undergirding an independent civil society, will have outsize consequences for the country. They quickly recognized at the start of the war that the regime had made it impossible for them to pursue their work in Russia, and for many of them, staying in the country presented a very real risk of arrest and possibly prison.
Russians are fleeing their country in droves.
The third group is made up of the liberal intelligentsia of big cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg—professors, researchers, and historians. Until now, members of this group were employed by universities, museums, or other research organizations. Many worked on projects supported by Western foundations rather than the Russian government and had previously pursued their work largely free from Kremlin propaganda. Many had ties to Western universities. But in today’s Russia, this kind of independent work is seen as unpatriotic. The fleeing intellectuals do not think that their lives are in danger, but their careers are, and many of them have already lost their jobs because of their liberal views. And for the most part, they are reluctant to work and live in growing isolation from the West.
The last category of exiles is made up of businesspeople and managers of big corporations, including state-owned companies such as Gazprom, as well as the Russian banks. These Russians no longer feel comfortable in a country that is closing its borders and isolating itself from the outside world, and many of them had been working for companies that are now subject to Western sanctions or might become subject to sanctions pretty soon. When the war started, many of these people abruptly left their jobs and fled to Europe. But their chances of finding employment or a project or business to invest in remain slim, owing to their citizenship and the taint of the Russian corporate world.
Already, two months into the war, some of the recent émigrés—above all, IT specialists—are returning to Russia because they lacked resources to remain abroad. Having spent all the cash they brought with them and found themselves unable to access their Russian bank accounts, they were forced to go home. But now, with the rumors of a general mobilization in the cards, many are trying to find a way to leave again—this time, for good.
GOOD RIDDANCE
In part, the current exodus has been encouraged by Putin himself. During the first two months of the war, the Kremlin has made clear that it would rather drive its opponents out of the country than have them make trouble at home. Until now, for example, the Russian government has not put any restrictions on leaving. As Putin said on March 16, “The Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouth.”
In taking this approach, Putin is drawing on a long Russian tradition. In past upheavals—anti-Semitic pogroms under the tsar, the Russian Civil War, World War II, and anti-Semitic campaigns during the Soviet era—millions of people were allowed and even encouraged to emigrate. Even when ordinary Russian and Soviet citizens struggled to get permission to leave, troublemakers were actively pushed out. In 1922, for example, Vladimir Lenin personally drew up a list of 220 “undesirable intellectuals,” over 160 of whom he packed onto the so-called philosophers’ ships and sent to Germany. In the 1970s, Leonid Brezhnev expanded a policy of stripping dissidents of Soviet citizenship and throwing them out of the country.
But unwanted Russians could also make trouble overseas. As we described in our book The Compatriots, throughout the Soviet years, Russian political exiles never stopped trying to change the regime they had left behind. In the 1920s, they launched a campaign of terror, sending undercover agents to bomb a Bolshevik gathering in Russia and attacking Soviet officials when they traveled abroad. In the 1930s, when the Red Army sent forces to back up the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, exiled veterans of the White Army—the Bolsheviks’ opponents in the Russian Revolution—went to fight for Francisco Franco. And when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, some Russians abroad saw a chance to fight communists and joined with the Nazis. Later, during the Cold War, Russian exiles proved instrumental in shaping the anticommunist propaganda war being waged by the United States and the United Kingdom: it was Russians who sent balloons laden with leaflets over the borders of Eastern Europe, and it was their voices that were broadcast from Radio Liberty and other West-backed stations that were beaming information across the Iron Curtain. Similarly, when the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Russian political émigrés in London and Paris launched a propaganda effort to try to convince Soviet soldiers to defect to the mujahideen.
Liberals who have remained in Russia have found their situation increasingly untenable.
At the same time, throughout the communist years, those who had fled tried to influence public opinion in Europe and the United States. They staged protest rallies in numerous Western capitals, and in 1971, they even tried to bomb the New York office of the Soviet trade company Amtorg to raise awareness of the plight of Soviet Jews.
Most of these efforts had little measurable effect. It didn’t help that Russians émigrés were notoriously bad at building political organizations, mostly because they had very conflicting views on the Russian future once it was liberated from communists—democrats clashed with imperialists and nationalists.
But there was one area in which Russians abroad scored some spectacular successes: they wrote a number of important books that, once they were smuggled out of the country, proved instrumental in changing Western opinion about the Soviet Union. (The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the memoir of Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, are just two examples.) And when those books were read aloud and discussed in Russian on the radio stations that targeted the Iron Curtain, they helped reshape public opinion within the Soviet Union itself. Other efforts were less efficacious, but these books and broadcasts worked. Ultimately, for exiles to make a difference in Russia itself, they had to somehow find a way to reach those who had stayed behind.
BUDVA, NOT BERLIN
In many ways, the new Russian exodus differs from previous waves. After the 1917 revolution, some Russian émigrés went to Prague, Istanbul, and Shanghai. But above all, they went to Paris and Berlin. In those cities, vibrant Russian communities developed, publishing their own journals, newspapers, and books and forming important Russian connections in the West. Now, by contrast, visa restrictions and the high cost of living mean that only a small number of Russians are heading to Berlin. Even smaller numbers have gone to London, and Paris is almost entirely out of the picture.
Today’s exiles head elsewhere. Some U.S. software giants have moved their Russian personnel to Ireland. But those IT workers who emigrated on their own to continental Europe have struggled to get visas and bank accounts. That is why many IT specialists have sought refuge in Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey instead of Europe. The cost of living in Tbilisi or Istanbul, two popular destinations, is much cheaper than in the Baltic states. (In addition to Russian exiles, Istanbul has also become home to many foreign correspondents who cover Russia and had been based in Moscow until the new censorship made their work impossible.)
Throughout the Soviet years, Russian political exiles never stopped trying to change the regime they left behind.
For the IT specialists, the landscape has continued to change as the war goes on. Armenia has made an effort to help them register companies and open bank accounts in the country—and it helps the local economy, too, since there is a requirement to hire local staff. On May 3, the United States also announced that it plans to make it easier for Russian IT workers to move to the States. A small colony of the Russian intelligentsia has also emerged in Montenegro, where Russian passport holders are welcomed and real estate is affordable.
The European Union has received its own wave of Russians, though they are going to different countries than previous generations. Vilnius, the small and cozy capital of Lithuania, emerged as the most important center for the Russian political exiles—it is here that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s organization has set up shop, along with many independent Russian journalists and bloggers. This has been possible thanks to the position of the Lithuanian government, which welcomed refugees from Belarus and Russia. Riga, the capital of neighboring Latvia, has agreed to host a small number of NGOs and journalists, and an even smaller number have moved to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, and Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic.
Overall, in contrast to the earlier waves of Russian exiles, which went to Western Europe in the early twentieth century and the United States during the later decades of the Cold War, the current wave has largely been aimed at Central and Eastern Europe.
THE INFORMATION INSURGENCY
Although they have ended up in different countries than their Soviet forebears, the current wave of exiles has faced many of the same challenges in bringing about change at home. Over the past decade, for example, Russian émigrés have launched several political organizations in the West, like Free Russia Forum, launched by chess world champion and political activist Garry Kasparov, who is now in exile in New York. Predictably, they have fallen into the same trap as their Cold War predecessors, unable to form a coherent or united front.
But Russian exiles have been more successful in giving the world—and Russians themselves—an accurate picture of what is happening under Putin. Consider the start of the war, when around 100 of Russia’s top independent journalists left the country, joining colleagues who had left earlier. Many of these journalists have continued to do their work from abroad, producing independent reporting on Russian affairs and generating original content on YouTube, Telegram channels, and other social media.
Even before the war, some political organizations of Russian exiles understood the power of foreign-based news and information directed at the Russian public. Since the start of the war, supporters of the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny and of the oligarch-turned-exile Mikhail Khodorkovsky have moved entirely to online journalism, producing continuous streams of content on YouTube and other channels and reaching millions of Russians.
In part, this is because Russian government censors have failed to build a complete information monopoly inside Russia. Despite recent efforts to ban or shut down independent news sites, and to block access to global platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, many Russians remain connected to the world via the Internet through virtual private networks. Besides, for unknown reasons, Russian censors have not blocked access to YouTube and Telegram. Thus, the portion of Russian society that is well educated and independent minded—perhaps 15 percent or more of the population —have continued to get reliable information about the war from abroad—often from the same independent Russian journalists they had followed before the invasion.
That content is now in huge demand: YouTube videos about the actual course of the war in Ukraine routinely gather several million views, and even some of the individual Telegram channels of exiled Russian journalists have tens of thousands of subscribers.
RETHINKING RUSSIA
As the war in Ukraine continues, liberals who have remained in Russia have found their situation increasingly untenable. The reality of the Russian present has become horrible, but the Russian future appears even more bleak: a joke that has gone viral on social media has it that English classes in Russian schools have stopped teaching the future simple tense—because Russia no longer has a simple future. Nor does the Russian past offer much hope anymore. After the Soviet Union collapsed, then President Boris Yeltsin’s narrative was straightforward and appealing: the Soviet period was a terrible deviation from a more glorious past, and Russians simply needed to regain what they had before 1917, the Russia of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Anton Chekhov. But when Putin invaded Ukraine, the Russian Empire suddenly ceased to look so attractive. Russian liberals, disgusted by this new war of Russian aggression, have begun to look on the imperial exploits of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with horror.
To work on a new national narrative, Russians badly need not only journalists but also larger institutional support, and that support can no longer be based in Russia. Despite the long history of Russian emigration, however, there is only one successful example of such an offshore institution: the Russian Free University, established in Prague in the 1920s, when Prague was a center for Russian intellectual exiles after the Bolshevik Revolution. Dubbed the “Russian Oxford,” the university was financed by the Czech government, thanks to the patronage of the country’s first president, Thomas Masaryk. Until it was shut down by the Germans in 1939, it managed to keep the Russian intellectual tradition alive and thriving.
Now, there is increasing talk about the need to establish a similar kind of university-in-exile. There is certainly no shortage of professors to lead such an institution, given how many have fled the country. But such an institution would need significant Western support, and European countries in particular would need to take the lead.
Europe should not regard Russians exiles as the enemy.
During the long Cold War, the United States was the only country that had a strategy aimed at Russian exiles. In an effort spearheaded by the diplomat George Kennan, the United States in the early 1950s established the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia and the Free Europe Committee, which used political refugees to foment resistance behind the Iron Curtain. These committees in turn set up Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which brought vital information to audiences across the Eastern bloc. Yet European countries stayed largely on the sidelines. For example, although there were numerous Russian dissidents in West Germany and the US-backed Institute for the Study of the USSR and Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe were headquartered in Munich, the German government did not have any part in running those institutions.
That inaction needs to change now. With hundreds of thousands of Russians on the European continent, it is time for European governments to start thinking of these exile populations far more strategically. Rather than remaining on the defensive, trying to deflect the disinformation and cyberwarfare campaigns that Moscow aims at the West, they should draw on this crucial resource to wage a new kind of information war on the Kremlin. And although much of the emphasis in the Western media has been rightly focused on Ukrainian refugees, European governments should be wary of falling into the trap of regarding Russians exiles themselves as the enemy, rather than crucial allies, in the effort to counter the Putin regime.
By funding and supporting Russian media, educational, and research projects based in Europe, European governments could help bring liberal ideas and independent reporting about Russia to Russians themselves and help counter the propaganda of the Putin regime. Over time, they could also help give rise to a new narrative about Russia and what the future of the country might be. If Western governments fail to support this sudden wave of exiles, however, they will squander what could be one of their most effective forms of soft power against Russian autocracy.
8. With eye on China's zero-Covid chaos, Taiwan seizes chance to open up
With eye on China's zero-Covid chaos, Taiwan seizes chance to open up
Updated 0152 GMT (0952 HKT) May 14, 2022
CNN · by Eric Cheung, CNN and photos by John Mees
Taipei, Taiwan (CNN)Business has been swift this week for Oscar Chen, the fourth-generation owner of the Liang Xi Hao restaurant in central Taipei.
The tables at his diner in the Taiwanese capital are buzzing with customers, waiters bustle with dishes of squid soup and rice noodles, and talk and laughter fills the air.
Chen considers himself lucky. Taiwan is allowing restaurants like his to remain open despite a wave of Covid infections -- hitting more than 60,000 cases on Thursday alone -- sweeping through the island.
Things might have been so different. Until recently the island had taken a zero-tolerance approach to the virus: Chen's business was shut for more than two months during the last major outbreak in May 2021, dealing a blow to his employees -- and his bottom line -- that left him "heartbroken."
"We were lucky to have survived and moved on from it," he said.
But since then, the Taiwanese government has had a profound rethink. What was until recently one of the world's last zero-Covid holdouts has now switched its mindset to living with the virus -- prompted by the realization that even the toughest contact-tracing and quarantine regimes are no match for the highly transmissible Omicron variant, as demonstrated by the chaos playing out across the Taiwan Strait in China
For Chen, it's a welcome shift that has ensured his business can continue relatively unaffected by the outbreak. While he remains concerned about the virus, he believes the best approach is to learn from other east Asian economies -- such as Singapore -- that have managed to navigate similar changes in mindset.
"I think we need to overcome our fears, and tread carefully step by step," he said.
Oscar Chen, who owns the Liang Xi Hao restaurant in central Taipei.
A tale of two cities
Taiwan's reopening is in stark contrast to Shanghai. There, in a desperate effort to cling to its zero-Covid ideals, China is resorting to ever more stringent measures in an attempt to rein in an Omicron outbreak that has infected hundreds of thousands of people.
Many neighborhoods in Shanghai, where there is a sizeable Taiwanese community, have been locked down for weeks.
Chaotic scenes of angry confrontations between Shanghai residents and police officers trying to force people into quarantine have received widespread coverage in Taiwanese media, helping to sway public opinion on the island by offering a pointed reminder of the sacrifices required by zero-Covid policies.
It's a contrast not lost on Chen, whose brother lives in Shanghai.
"It is really tough for him. We don't discuss it on the political front, but my brother has been under quarantine for 45 days without being able to leave his home. At least he can still order takeaways -- in some neighborhoods people can't and they have to wait for the government to send supplies."
Taiwan's reopening furthers isolates China as perhaps the last major economy in the world to still be following a zero-Covid policy. Even Hong Kong, which had long clinged to the model in an effort to reopen its borders with the Chinese mainland, has been loosening its restrictions after a recent Omicron-driven wave sent its death rate per capita rocketing at one point to the highest in Asia.
That sense of increasing isolation is likely only to add to the backlash against the policy in Shanghai, and other locked down Chinese cities, where frustration is growing at what seems like a never-ending fight. Even as the policy puts the brakes on the country's economy, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has scotched any suggestion of a let-up, pledging to "unswervingly" double down.
Jeff Huang, a Taipei resident who lived in China for a few years, said it was only natural for Taiwan to open up as vaccination rates went up.
Lessons from Shanghai
Taiwan's move to reopen is driven in part by a desire to avoid exactly the sort of scenes playing out in Shanghai -- described to reporters last week by Taiwan's Premier Su Tseng-chang as "cruel" and not a model for Taiwan to follow.
It is also reflects a recognition that the dawn of Omicron variant left zero-Covid economies with a choice: either double down like China on ever more stringent measures or use the opportunity afforded by high vaccination rates to open up.
Last month, President Tsai Ing-wen chose the latter, announcing Taiwan would focus on ensuring normal lives for its residents as much as possible, rather than aiming for zero infections.
Ironically, it is the freedom the island enjoyed during its long period of zero-Covid that made that choice inevitable, said Chen Chien-jen, who served as Taiwan's vice president between 2016 and 2020.
"In the last two years, people enjoyed a very free life here -- they lived normally and went to work normally. So we don't like city lockdowns or mass testing, and we don't think it is useful to control the spread of the virus," Chen said.
Instead, said Chen, who is now an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica, the milder variant had presented an opportunity as it has "a very high infectivity, but quite low rates of severe cases and deaths" among vaccinated populations. To date, 18.8 million Taiwanese, or 79% of the population are fully vaccinated with two shots, according to University of Oxford's Our World in Data project.
"(Taiwanese people) saw the lockdown situations in Shanghai, Zhengzhou, and Beijing, and we don't consider it really necessary to use city lockdowns to contain the Omicron variant. It is very difficult, a mission impossible."
Chen said Taiwan should now focus on increasing the coverage of Covid-19 boosters, as well as increasing the distribution of antiviral drugs and rapid diagnostic kits to the community.
The government's decision has been popular. Most residents who spoke to CNN said they felt Taiwan's new Covid-19 approach was preferable to the strict lockdown measures imposed in mainland China.
Jeff Huang, a Taipei resident who lived in mainland China for a few years, felt it was not feasible to eradicate the virus.
"If we still had harsh restrictions like in the (Chinese) mainland even after vaccination, it would be very painful and there would be no point in getting the vaccines," he said.
Taiwan's former vice president and epidemiologist Chen Chien-jen says zero-Covid is "mission impossible" as the Omicron variant is highly transmissible.
A beacon of hope?
But if Taiwan's approach is partly driven by a desire to avoid a Shanghai-like fate, there are also optimists who wonder if it could have an effect in the opposite direction -- providing hope to locked-down Chinese cities that there is indeed a way out of the zero-Covid corner.
Chen Chien-jen, who as vice president had led Taiwan's early Covid-19 response, said many Taiwanese people were initially skeptical of abandoning the elimination strategy because it had been successful for so long in maintaining a low rate of community transmission.
Taiwan had previously experienced only one major outbreak of Covid-19 -- in May last year. That time it banned in-person dining, closed entertainment venues, and suspended schools to control the spread. It then managed to keep case numbers at zero or close to zero until as recently as March 15 this year.
But as the latest outbreak grew, Taiwanese people realized that with a less severe variant and high vaccination levels the island could afford to live with it.
The rewards are clear to see. Quarantine for overseas arrivals has been cut from 14 to seven days. The mandatory scanning of QR codes before entering restaurants and shops has been scrapped. Close contacts of confirmed patients are now required to quarantine for just three days.
There is another benefit, too: no longer fighting a futile battle. As Chen put it: "We can see that zero-Covid policy can never reach the goal of totally eliminating the virus in any country."
Taiwanese mother Hsueh, who has a 3-year-old boy, thinks the government should make rules about school suspension clearer before leaving zero-Covid behind.
Skepticism remains
Still, not everyone is convinced Taiwan is fully prepared to move on.
Since the beginning of May, as case numbers spiked, long queues have formed in front of pharmacies across Taipei daily as residents scramble to purchase rapid test kits. Many leave empty handed despite queuing for hours.
The Health Ministry has said those without Covid-19 symptoms must first test positive on a rapid test if they are to be eligible for a more accurate PCR test, which has only heightened demand.
The difficulty of purchasing the test kits has prompted some residents to complain about the authorities' lack of preparedness.
"It would have been better for residents to (be prepared) before we moved towards living with the virus," said a mother surnamed Hsueh, who has a 3-year-old boy. "Many families still do not have adequate access to rapid test kits."
Other parents fear their children, who are still not eligible for vaccination in Taiwan, are vulnerable.
"I feel like the government has not considered children in their move toward living with the virus," said another mother surnamed Chang, whose two children are in kindergarten. "I am worried... I have avoided taking my children to indoor playgrounds, and I only take them to parks when there are fewer people."
"Right now, there are changes to the rules every day or two," Hsueh said. "It can be really confusing, and it is better to have a plan."
CNN's John Mees contributed reporting
CNN · by Eric Cheung, CNN and photos by John Mees
9. China builds simulated Taiwan port, ship to test missiles: military analyst
China builds simulated Taiwan port, ship to test missiles: military analyst - Focus Taiwan
Taipei, May 13 (CNA) China appears to have built mockups of a port in northeastern Taiwan and a military vessel docked there, with the aim of using them as targets to test its ballistic missiles, a retired Taiwan Navy officer said Friday.
Lu Li-shih (呂禮詩), a former lieutenant commander in Taiwan's navy, said that based on the satellite images of the structures, the simulated targets constructed in a desert in China's Xinjiang province seemed to look like Taiwan's Su'ao naval base in Yilan and a Kidd-class destroyer that usually docks there.
In a Facebook post, Lu said he had compared the mockup port to the American naval bases in Yokosuka and Sesabo in Japan and in Subic Bay in the Philippines, but it more closely resembled Su'ao.
Lu was also quoted in a South China Morning Post report Thursday as saying that the mockup vessel moored at the simulated a naval base resembled one that was based in northeast Taiwan and some American vessels based in Guam.
"The mock-ups and drills suggest that Chinese People's Liberation Army warships are simulating precision strikes on both the Guam naval base and the Su'ao military port, using China's YJ-21 anti-ship missiles," Lu was quoted as saying in the report.
U.S. report about mockup piers
According to a report published May 11 on the United States military's USNI News site, one of the full-scale mockup piers and a simulated destroyer-sized ship were constructed last December in the remote Takmalakan desert in Xinjiang. That site was quickly disassembled after a test missile hit the replica ship dead center in February, USNI News said.
Prior to that, China last November had been been building targets that simulated an American aircraft carrier and other U.S. warships, in the Takmalakan desert, to test its hypersonic anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBMs), which are an increasingly significant threat to such vessels, the news site said.
Images of the simulated sites were seen in satellite images reviewed by USNI News, according to the report, but it did not name any similar live structures.
According to the USNI News, China is known to have been developing several types of ASBMs, which has caused concern in the Pentagon, and those actions were mentioned in the U.S. Department of Defense's most recent report on China's military power.
The missiles being developed by China are the land-based DF-21D and DF-26; another type provisionally identified as the YJ-21, which is fired from a Type 055 Renhai Class cruiser; and one of an unknown designation, which is carried on H-6 bombers, USNI News said.
(By Matt Yu and Shih Hsiu-chuan)
Enditem/pc
10. Strategies of Unusual Size
Is grand strategy a "thing?"
Food for thought. A lot of useful references at the embedded hyperlinks.
Strategies of Unusual Size
May 6
May 6, 2022
I wrapped the 2022 edition of my undergraduate “Grand Strategy” seminar this past Tuesday.
I like teaching the class. I really do. But I have significant reservations about “grand strategy” as a classroom subject.
It’s one thing to point to a proposal, such as containment or offshore balancing, and say “this is a grand strategy.” The problem comes when we try to develop consistent standards – ones that allow us to agree that “yep, that’s a grand strategy” or reply “no, that’s merely big tactics.”
Consider some recent high-quality efforts to make sense of the concept.
First, Nina Silove’s “Beyond the Buzzword: The Three Meanings of “Grand Strategy” points to “grand strategy as a plan,” “grand strategy as an organizing principle,” and “grand strategy as a pattern of behavior.” In many respects this is a useful typology. People do identify grand strategies with plans, with organizing principles, and with patterns of behavior. But it remains unclear what makes for a grand-strategic plan, organizing principle, or pattern of behavior.
The “grand strategy as variable” camp seeks to develop analytical arguments that explain the origins of states’ grand strategies and account for their change over time. The “grand strategy as process” camp sees the strategic planning process as the essence of grand strategy and focuses on the improvement and/or generalization of such processes. Finally, a “grand strategy as blueprint” camp outlines prescriptive broad visions for grand strategy, particularly in the United States.
Again, useful. But I’m less convinced by Lissner’s argument that, despite vociferous debate, there’s a working consensus about the meaning of grand strategy.
…two complementary definitions are cited by nearly every major recent study of grand strategy… Paul Kennedy and draws on earlier work… to contend, “The crux of grand strategy lies therefore in policy, that is, in the capacity of the nation’s leaders to bring together all of the elements, both military and nonmilitary, for the preservation and enhancement of the nation’s long-term (that is, in wartime and peacetime) best interests.” …Barry Posen… draws on a similar strategic tradition and offers an even more succinct definition: Grand strategy is “a state’s theory about how it can best ‘cause’ security for itself.”
She argues that these definition fit well together, and quotes Hal Brands:
At its best, then, a grand strategy represents an integrated scheme of interests, threats, resources, and policies. It is the conceptual framework that helps nations determine where they want to go and how they ought to get there; it is the theory, or logic, that guides leaders seeking security in a complex and insecure world.
I can’t think of a single real-world grand strategy – whether descriptive or prescriptive – that comes close to meeting the first definition. Posen’s phrasing is certainly pithy, but I don’t see how it provides much guidance. Brands’ formulation rules out grand strategy as a pattern of behavior – a mistake, in my view, as most work historical work on grand strategy engages in retrospective reconstruction of ‘emergent’ or ‘immanent’ logics.
Third, in the Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy, Thierry Balzacq and Ronald R. Krebs don’t even bother to offer a common definition. They write that “In short, a unified concept and theory of grand strategy continue to elude us. This surely frustrates those who wish knowledge would neatly cumulate.”
So why do I keep teaching the course? The short answer is that the material makes for good undergraduate discussions. I think that it's useful from a pedagogical perspective; the students find it relevant.
Well, mostly. I’m not a fan of the kind of highly stylized, slightly smug case studies that show up in standard grand-strategy readers. I can never decide what to do with them. I oscillate between “Students should read this material because it functions as background knowledge for some participants in these debates” and “Nope. Absolutely not.”
(This year we didn’t read much of this kind of stuff, in part because I adjusted the course a great deal after Russia invaded Ukraine.)
But enough complaining. I only started writing this because I wanted to share what happened on the last day of class.
I asked the students to identify the most important threats faced by, variously, the United States, China, Russia, or the government of another other important powers.
They all listed collective threats: climate change, pandemics, water scarcity, nuclear proliferation, etc. This is a far cry from the topics that dominate standard grand-strategy syllabuses – including my own.
It’s also almost certainly correct.
11. Can Russia and the West Survive a Nuclear Crisis in Ukraine?
Perish the thought.
But if we survive a nuclear crisis will the nuclear theorists someday be studying Ukraine like the "Missiles of October?"
Can Russia and the West Survive a Nuclear Crisis in Ukraine?
The two sides have not managed a bilateral nuclear crisis in a very long time, and one does not really wish to find out if they can easily recover their Cold War vintage crisis management skills.
The Russo-Ukrainian War may soon produce a major U.S.-Russian nuclear crisis. Despite President Joe Biden’s occasional cautionary remarks that he understands the risk of nuclear escalation in the event of a direct clash between U.S. and Russian forces, there are other ways that a very dangerous moment can emerge. Widespread optimism about our ability to avoid such an outcome depends greatly on the assumption that both sides are very cautious where nuclear weapons are concerned and have assimilated that caution into their conduct of the war. This is false.
The critical tools for the avoidance of escalation of any war are the limitation of ends and the limitation of means. These tools are disappearing fast. It is apparent from leaks in several media outlets that the United States is itself deeply involved in the Ukrainian war effort. We are providing billions, and soon tens of billions of dollars in military assistance, and this assistance seems likely to involve ever more sophisticated and longer-range weapons. We are providing the Ukrainians with intelligence to support defensive and offensive operations, such as the sinking of a major Russian warship. Even the defensive intelligence assistance has supported provocative actions. Russian officers at the front are legitimate and useful targets for Ukraine, but not for us. Yet, the United States has apparently assisted these efforts.
Ukrainian forces seem to be raiding across the Russian border. From a strictly military point of view, this makes sense. From the point of view of escalation control, this sacrifices a critical and useful firebreak. Russia does not raid Ukraine’s sources of resupply across the border of NATO countries; Ukraine should not raid the Russian army’s source of resupply in Russia. It does not help that senior British officials have applauded the idea of these raids. Russia’s sponsorship of assassination attempts on British soil certainly deserves some payback. Britain has gotten its payback through the extraordinary tactical success of the anti-tank guided missiles they have supplied to Ukraine. The British, of all people, should remember the meaning of “a bridge too far.”
Meanwhile, senior U.S. officials have touted vastly expanded war goals, beyond helping Ukraine to defend itself from Russian conquest. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has declared an intent to radically weaken Russia to the extent that it could muster no offensive striking power for years to come. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has signed on to the complete recovery of all Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia, a goal that is only possible if Ukraine is sufficiently well-armed to mount powerful counter-offensives against Russian forces. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has simply declared that we will support Ukraine until victory.
Politically and militarily, the United States is deeply engaged in Ukraine’s war effort, and is now supporting maximalist Ukrainian war goals, along with maximalist war goals of its own. Yet, the administration still seems to think that Russian escalation is unlikely.
Russia still has many cards to play, from the mobilization of large numbers of reservists to an expansion of conventional attacks on civilians and economic infrastructure. That said, one can imagine circumstances in which the “tactical” use of nuclear weapons to achieve battlefield effects might seem reasonable, even though Russian president Vladimir Putin and his advisors surely know that this is risky business. The main problem is that we do not know the current true state of Russian or Ukrainian military forces. What we do know is that Ukraine, the United States, the UK, and some NATO European allies all seem a bit cocky. We do not know if this is simply a kind of natural enthusiasm that arises after a victory like the Battle of Kiev or something more fundamental—a belief that Russia’s fielded forces may be on the verge of collapse. In normal times, we would celebrate this outcome. Against a nuclear-armed adversary, fighting for stakes that it obviously considers to be very high, there is however such a thing as an “excess of success.”
It is not hard to imagine what a “theater nuclear” war plan might attempt. The Russians have surely already drawn one up. They would identify their problem as the fountain of U.S. and European weapons reaching Ukrainian forces at the front. They have attempted in recent days to “interdict” this flow of weaponry by attacking railroad infrastructure and airports. But historically, even very good air forces have found interdiction to be a challenge. And Russia only has a mediocre air force. Nuclear strikes with “low yield” weapons on bridges, railroads, and airfields would make it much harder for Ukrainian forces to resupply themselves. Selected strikes against Ukrainian military forces in the field would take the pressure off Russian units. Tactical nuclear targeting was once a high art in both NATO and the Soviet Union. Common sense and a map suggest that even a half dozen attacks could make a difference, but given that today’s Russian army is clearly the descendant of the Soviet Army, their style of military planning would suggest several dozen targets. Ukraine has no nuclear weapons; it cannot respond in kind. Ukraine is not a NATO ally; no other country is committed to the nuclear defense of Ukraine. The Russian leadership may, if the conventional war goes badly enough, reach for a nuclear trump card. We should think hard about what even their preparations for such an attack would set in motion.
During the Cold War, the main task of U.S. intelligence was to watch Soviet nuclear forces. U.S. intelligence agencies are no doubt now watching all Russian nuclear forces intently. Russia would face difficult choices were it to consider tactical nuclear strikes. Moscow might hope to prepare such strikes in secret, but it seems unlikely. U.S. satellites watch their nuclear bunkers and nuclear units. Unusual activity will set off alarm bells. This activity will involve communication. The Russians surely have command networks for this eventuality that they have not revealed in peacetime. But U.S. intelligence collectors will be looking for any unusual patterns of communications traffic, even if we don’t quite know what it says, or even what it is. The Russians are operating at home and can do much of this through landlines. But even landlines may not be secure. The Russians need to worry about what the United States will do with this warning.
Among other things, the Russians need to worry about the rest of their nuclear forces. The mobilization of their tactical forces starts a nuclear crisis well before any weapons are launched. Will their strategic nuclear forces remain inert and unalerted in order to convey a sense of limitation to us? Or will they worry that we will worry, and alert our strategic nuclear forces before they can alert theirs? This matters because more of our forces are “ready” at any one time than theirs. If they delay, and the matter escalates, they know they will be at a disadvantage. Among other qualities of the Russian nuclear forces is the fact that most of their nuclear-powered ballistic missile-carrying submarines (SSBNs) are in port. They rely on these weapons, once they are at sea, to endure a feared U.S. nuclear first strike and survive to retaliate. In a crisis, they will think about sending these boats to sea to ensure that the United States is deterred. The United States watches their ports all the time. An “SSBN surge” will set off alarm bells in the West. One of the reasons we watch their ports is because the U.S. Navy has long hoped to catch these vessels as they deploy and establish trail with our nuclear-powered “hunter-killer” attack submarines. In the event of war, our attack submarines would try to destroy the Russian forces in order to prevent them from firing their weapons at the United States To do so, of course, U.S. subs have to get to the Russian ports in the Arctic and the Pacific quite early in a crisis. It would not take much to produce a tense interaction between Russian and U.S. submarine forces. How these interactions might unfold in a crisis is quite difficult to predict.
Even if the Russians were very restrained in the alerting of their strategic nuclear forces in support of their theater nuclear strike, the United States would be sorely tempted to do something to try to deter an expected Russian attack. But one wonders what American planners will dream up. They failed to deter the Russian attack on Ukraine with the threat of extreme sanctions and the implied threat of additional arms supplies to Ukraine and the very strong likelihood of a NATO buildup on its eastern borders. Russia clearly thinks its vital interests are at stake. The United States won’t make nuclear threats, but it will be tempted to make some kind of threat.
More importantly, even if the United States does not alert its strategic nuclear forces and NATO does not alert its own theater nuclear forces, the general level of military alert in the West will surely go up. In particular, intelligence collection activities, which are already quite intense, will ratchet up even further. All around Ukraine, and indeed, all around Russia, U.S. intelligence collectors, including submarines, patrol aircraft, and drones will be even more active than presently. Western fighter aircraft, no doubt already flying more defensive patrols, would further increase their efforts. The Russians will not fail to observe these activities, which could themselves drive additional Russian preparations.
Thus, even the preparation of a Russian battlefield use of nuclear weapons would likely produce at least some preparations for a strategic nuclear exchange. But the aftermath of nuclear attacks will be even worse. The United States will be grasping for tools with which to punish the Russians. It is unlikely that U.S. military planners will be able to assure the president that this is the last Russian move. Instead, U.S. military leaders may advise additional U.S. nuclear preparations. Even if the United States is quite judicious in what those preparations might be, they will surely elicit additional moves from the Russians.
In sum, if the Russians even begin the preparations for a localized use of small numbers of “low yield” theater weapons, a process will be set in motion that brings both sides’ intelligence and military forces of all kinds, all along the Russian periphery, to much higher levels of activity and alert. Candidly, if I were the Russians, this alone would deter me. But there is no reason to believe that they will be so restrained. Strategic nuclear forces would themselves likely increase their readiness to some extent. The two sides have not managed a bilateral nuclear crisis in a very long time, and one does not really wish to find out if they can easily recover their Cold War vintage crisis management skills. To avoid such an experiment, the United States needs to carefully limit its military and political objectives, and the means it employs to achieve them.
Barry R. Posen is Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT and Director Emeritus of the MIT Security Studies Program.
Image: Reuters.
12. Could a Korean-Style Armistice End the Russia-Ukraine War?
Excerpts:
Some in the West might favor Ukraine’s continued war with Russia rather than an armistice that fails to hold Russia accountable for its aggression and leaves Ukraine’s political and security future uncertain. However, the proponents of an armistice do have legitimate concerns in seeking suspension of the military conflict. As the war prolonged, the risks of the West’s direct military confrontation with Russia could grow, expanding the conflict to the rest of Europe. While military attrition would escalate the world’s economic and food crisis, even Ukraine’s victory on the battlefield could create new security risks, as a desperate Russia might resort to destructive measures, such as chemical and even nuclear weapons.
However, the challenge for advocates of an armistice is that providing an “off-ramp” for Russia alone is not enough to achieve a ceasefire. Ukraine’s government also requires an “off-ramp” to accept an armistice. Will the United States or other countries with sufficient security capacity provide a formal pledge to defend Ukraine from future Russian aggression? Even if Russian forces continue to occupy some parts of Ukraine’s territory after an armistice, will the United States and the international community recognize Ukraine’s political claim over its lost territory and diplomatic efforts to regain them? These are the types of reassurance Zelenskyy’s government might need to justify entering an armistice with an adversarial Russia.
The Korean War lasted for three years before the signing of an armistice. After over seventy years, the armistice is still in effect over a divided Korea. Nearly three months into a war, could Ukraine be convinced that a similar armistice is preferable to continued war? The burden is on the United States and the world to convince Ukrainians not just risks of attrition but reassurances of an armistice, that their security threats would not worsen in the future, and that their territorial losses could be restored in the future.
Could a Korean-Style Armistice End the Russia-Ukraine War?
Without reassurances on various security and political conditions, it is difficult to expect Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to agree to an armistice.
During the Korean War, North Korea launched a military invasion to “reunify” with South Korea. Despite North Korea’s expectations for a quick victory, the war eventually turned into a stalemate. With quick intervention from a U.S.-led multinational military command and South Koreans’ resistance to “liberators,” communist forces were mostly repelled back to the prewar border. However, the United States and South Korea were neither able to completely destroy the northern communist forces nor retake North Korea’s territory claimed by the South, as Communist China’s intervention made further advance north too costly. Anxious to prevent an escalation of the Korean War into a global war, the United States eventually agreed to an armistice.
Several analysts have predicted that the Russo-Ukrainian War could end with a similar armistice. Early this year, Russia launched an invasion to “de-Nazify” Ukraine’s government and “liberate” the Russian-speaking population within Ukraine. So far, however, the war has turned into a stalemate, with Russian forces succeeding in only occupying relatively small parts of Ukraine. Though the United States did not send its own military forces as it did during the Korean War, international sanctions against Russia and aid to Ukraine were important factors in bolstering Ukrainians’ resistance. Nonetheless, the risks of escalating war with Russia have prompted calls for an armistice. In fact, Ukraine’s intelligence chief has warned Russia could impose an armistice similar to that of the Korean War. Such an armistice would partition Ukraine’s territory, with southern, eastern regions currently occupied by Russia and pro-Russia separatist governments remaining under de facto Russian control.
Even if the United States and the international community conclude that an armistice is the “least bad outcome,” could they convince Ukraine to accept a ceasefire as South Korea did? To answer this question, it is important to note that South Korea initially opposed the armistice and attempted to obstruct the armistice talks. The United States eventually achieved South Korea’s qualified compliance only after providing two sets of reassurances to the latter. Similarly, Ukraine’s government is currently opposed to an armistice, which maintains a ceasefire line over its territory. Even if Ukraine were to accept an armistice eventually, it will likely demand similar reassurances as South Korea did during the Korean War.
During the armistice talks, South Korea’s President Syngman Rhee stipulated two core demands of his government. First, the United States should ratify a mutual defense treaty with South Korea. Second, should post-armistice talks fail to achieve political reintegration of communist-occupied territory into the South Korean state, the United States should assist South Korea’s “pukchin” (advance north) military operation to reunify the Korean Peninsula.
South Korea’s first major concern of an armistice was the risk of future communist aggression. While the United States and the multinational forces would withdraw after signing an armistice, North Korea and Chinese forces would regroup north of the armistice line and plot a new invasion. Therefore, South Korea’s minimal security condition for an armistice was a formal treaty that guaranteed future U.S. security commitment. South Korea’s other concern was the permanent loss of its sovereign territory. As South Korea claimed governance over the entire Korean Peninsula, an armistice that would cede its territory was unacceptable and feared to create turmoil within South Korean politics. Therefore, Rhee was willing to accept an armistice only if it included a pathway for South Korea to restore its lost territory. Without attaining these two conditions, Rhee threatened to take action to prevent the signing of an armistice.
With U.S. forces largely responsible for holding back communist forces, the United States held leverage in pressuring South Korea to accept an armistice. U.S. policymakers, however, feared relying on coercive pressure alone, as that could motivate Rhee’s defiant, desperate resistance, destabilizing South Korea even after the signing of an armistice. As a result, the Eisenhower administration partially accommodated Rhee’s conditions. The United States pledged to sign a mutual defense treaty. If post-armistice talks failed to achieve substantial progress within ninety days, the United States pledged to withdraw from the talks with South Korea and discuss alternative strategies to achieve Korea’s political reunification. In return, South Korea had to pledge not to start a military operation without prior U.S. consent. Ultimately, Rhee’s government agreed to observe the armistice “for a limited time” after securing a U.S. security commitment and political (though not military) support for future reunification.
Based on proposals by Ukrainian negotiators, Ukraine’s conditions for an armistice are similar: long-term security reassurance and a political solution to recovering its sovereign territory. In exchange for withdrawing their request for a NATO membership and accepting an official “neutral status,” Ukraine’s negotiators have requested a multilateral security guarantee from countries like the United States, Turkey, and Israel to provide military assistance if Ukraine is attacked in the future. Ukraine has also proposed a fifteen-year negotiation timeframe over its territories currently occupied by Russia, such as Crimea, pledging to rule out the use of force to retake these territories within this time frame.
Without reassurances on these security and political conditions, it is difficult to expect Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to agree to an armistice. In multiple interviews, Zelenskyy has rejected a ceasefire that sacrifices Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty. Though open to compromise on Russia’s demand for Ukraine’s neutral status, Zelenskyy has stated such compromise should be complemented by the Western and international guarantees for Ukraine’s future security. Domestic political considerations also appear to be an important factor, with Zelenskyy’s warning that ratifying an armistice agreement would require a popular referendum.
Accommodating Ukraine’s armistice conditions will be challenging. A formal international security guarantee for Ukraine (particularly by the West) could clash with Russia’s demand for Ukraine’s nonaligned status. Russian negotiators have demanded Ukraine’s recognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the independence of pro-Russia separatist governments in Donbas and Luhansk. For Russia to portray the armistice as victory, international (and Ukraine’s) recognition of Russia’s control over these territories could be necessary.
However, the United States has less leverage than it did with Rhee in persuading Zelenskyy to agree to an armistice without accommodating Ukraine’s political and security conditions. Though the United States provides aid to Ukraine and leads international sanctions against Russia, neither U.S. nor NATO forces are fighting within Ukraine. While Rhee’s threat to continue the Korean War unilaterally was constrained by the weakness of the South Korean military, Zelenskyy has stronger bargaining leverage from Ukraine’s military successes so far in mostly containing Russia’s military advance. If Russia rejects international security guarantees for Ukraine and demands formal recognition of its control over Crimea and Donbas, Ukraine’s government is likely to request continued U.S. and Western aid so that its military could unilaterally combat and eventually repel the Russian military completely from these territories.
Some in the West might favor Ukraine’s continued war with Russia rather than an armistice that fails to hold Russia accountable for its aggression and leaves Ukraine’s political and security future uncertain. However, the proponents of an armistice do have legitimate concerns in seeking suspension of the military conflict. As the war prolonged, the risks of the West’s direct military confrontation with Russia could grow, expanding the conflict to the rest of Europe. While military attrition would escalate the world’s economic and food crisis, even Ukraine’s victory on the battlefield could create new security risks, as a desperate Russia might resort to destructive measures, such as chemical and even nuclear weapons.
However, the challenge for advocates of an armistice is that providing an “off-ramp” for Russia alone is not enough to achieve a ceasefire. Ukraine’s government also requires an “off-ramp” to accept an armistice. Will the United States or other countries with sufficient security capacity provide a formal pledge to defend Ukraine from future Russian aggression? Even if Russian forces continue to occupy some parts of Ukraine’s territory after an armistice, will the United States and the international community recognize Ukraine’s political claim over its lost territory and diplomatic efforts to regain them? These are the types of reassurance Zelenskyy’s government might need to justify entering an armistice with an adversarial Russia.
The Korean War lasted for three years before the signing of an armistice. After over seventy years, the armistice is still in effect over a divided Korea. Nearly three months into a war, could Ukraine be convinced that a similar armistice is preferable to continued war? The burden is on the United States and the world to convince Ukrainians not just risks of attrition but reassurances of an armistice, that their security threats would not worsen in the future, and that their territorial losses could be restored in the future.
Jong Eun Lee is a Ph.D. Candidate and is also an adjunct faculty at the American University School of International Service. Prior to this, he has served as a South Korean Airforce intelligence officer. His research specialty includes U.S. foreign policy, South Korean politics and foreign policy, alliance management, East Asian regional security. He has published articles in The Diplomat, National Interest, East Asia Forum, Eurasia Review, and The Korea Times.
13. Chinese Views of the US and Russia After the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Conclusion:
Overall, it can be observed that a few weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Chinese were very positive about Russia, very negative about the United States, and very confident about China. These findings should be regarded as a snapshot of public attitudes at a certain time when the Chinese public paid high attention to the Russia-Ukraine war, and before the COVID-19 crisis in China escalated at the end of March. It would be indeed interesting to see how these views might have changed a few weeks or months later.
Chinese Views of the US and Russia After the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
A new survey taken after the Russian invasion of Ukraine finds that the Chinese are very negative about the U.S., very positive about Russia – and very confident about China.
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Weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Chinese were unapologetically positive about Russia and highly negative about the United States, according to a survey of public opinion conducted online in mainland China with a research sample of 3,039 respondents in March 2022. The recently published report “Chinese views of the world at the time of the Russia-Ukraine war” sums up some of the main findings of the survey and offers a glimpse of the public sentiments in China when it comes to views of the world – and China’s place in it – at the time of the height of Chinese public attention to Russia-Ukraine war.
The survey was conducted by an international team of researchers coordinated by Palacky University Olomouc, Czechia, as part of its research project “Sinophone Borderlands – Interaction at the Edges,” funded by the European Regional Development Fund.
Among the 25 countries respondents were asked about (Figure 1), Russia was the most positively perceived country with 80 percent of respondents saying they viewed Russia in a positive light while only 12 percent held negative views. The United States, on the other hand, was the most negatively viewed country in China with slightly more than 60 percent of respondents perceiving it negatively and 31 percent holding positive attitudes.
The other very positively perceived countries among Chinese respondents were Pakistan (73 percent), Singapore (66 percent), North Korea (62 percent), and Germany (61 percent). In turn, other very negatively perceived countries included India (56 percent), Japan (54 percent), Vietnam (48 percent), South Korea (47 percent), and Ukraine (46 percent).
To get a more nuanced picture of the perceptions of the United States and Russia, we asked two open-ended questions in which the respondents provided their first associations with the respective country, and also a reason for why their image of the U.S. or Russia got better or worse.
In terms of the U.S. (see Figure 2), the most common association was “hegemon,” while other frequent expressions were “advanced,” “developed,” and “powerful,” but also “bossy,” “war,” “bandit,” and “sowing discord.”
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In the Russian case, the most common association was “warrior nation,” followed by words such as “Putin,” “vodka,” “vast,” “bears,” “powerful,” “war with Ukraine,” and “Sino-Russian friendship.”
The picture we are getting is that both the United States and Russia are seen as powerful, but American power is seen mostly in negative terms, while Russia’s is almost exclusively positive. It may be noteworthy, however, that perceptions of Russia among the Chinese seem to be somewhat stereotypical and linked to the current leader, and might be lacking deeper social roots. Hence, these perceptions may be easily open to change.
When asked about how positively or negatively the respondents assess the foreign policy of major powers (Figure 4), only Russia (besides China) was seen positively, while the U.S. topped the negative ranking, ahead of India, Japan, and the European Union.
Why did the Chinese respondents hold such views in March 2022? It is safe to say they were not disturbed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine – arguably a major breach of China’s long promoted principle of respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of other countries. Quite the opposite: The Chinese still saw Russia in general, and Russian foreign policy in particular, in highly positive terms, while also considering it to be a strong country.
It would be interesting to repeat the study to see whether growing evidence of Russia’s failure to achieve its goals in Ukraine would change Chinese people’s perceptions of Russia in some regards.
Overall, the Chinese respondents seemed to be influenced to a significant degree by the quality of bilateral relations with a given country – or to be more precise, how this bilateral relationship is presented by Chinese media. Besides Russia and the United States, this is particularly evidenced in the case of European countries (such as Germany or France), which are perceived relatively positively, while the foreign policy of the EU is also seen as somewhat positive (especially when compared to the foreign policy of the United States). The Chinese also expect that the people in these countries have relatively positive views of China. In reality, the Germans and French are quite negative about China.
Hence, Chinese people’s images might be a result of Chinese official narratives, which often focus on blaming the U.S. and present Europe as a victim of American influence without its own agency.
Another major finding of the survey is Chinese people’s confidence in China. When asked about how militarily and economically powerful they perceive relevant major powers, China was seen as the most powerful one, while China’s culture was also perceived as the most attractive and Chinese universities were the most recommended ones.
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We also asked how willing the respondents would be to get a COVID-19 vaccine produced by various countries. Again, Chinese vaccines were far more trusted than any other. This seems to be a result of two-plus years of propaganda painting the Western response to the pandemic in negative colors, presenting Western vaccines as ineffective, and even suggesting theories about the virus originating as a U.S. bioweapon. This may be a problem now, however, as Chinese vaccines don’t seem to be working as efficiently against the newer variants of COVID-19 as some Western ones.
Overall, it can be observed that a few weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Chinese were very positive about Russia, very negative about the United States, and very confident about China. These findings should be regarded as a snapshot of public attitudes at a certain time when the Chinese public paid high attention to the Russia-Ukraine war, and before the COVID-19 crisis in China escalated at the end of March. It would be indeed interesting to see how these views might have changed a few weeks or months later.
GUEST AUTHOR
Richard Q. Turcsanyi
Richard Q. Turcsanyi is a program director at Central European Institute of Asian Studies, Palacky University Olomouc, and assistant professor at Mendel University in Brno. He is a PI of survey projects conducted as part of the Sinophone Borderlands project.
14. Why Ukraine Is the Best Place to be a Comedian
Perspective from the human domain.
Based on my limited knowledge and understanding of Ukraine and Russia, one of the things that seems to make Ukraine superior is the national sense of humor and positive attitude in the face of extreme suffering.
Why Ukraine Is the Best Place to be a Comedian
‘If you are a good comedian in the U.S., you can have a late-night show. If you are a good comedian in Ukraine, you can destroy Russia.’
About the author: Veronika Melkozerova is a journalist based in Kyiv. She is the executive editor of the New Voice of Ukraine, an English-language news site.
Late last month, a couple of days after Russian missiles hit Kyiv, killing a Ukrainian journalist; a few weeks after Russian forces laid siege to this city, my hometown; two months after Vladimir Putin’s forces invaded my homeland, I went down into a converted bomb shelter and laughed. A lot. And it felt great.
“It sucks that so many of us have to live in evacuation with our parents,” Anna Kochehura told the crowd around me. “It’s like being a teenager again: Your mom keeps asking you to clean your room. You never know when a Russian rocket is going to hit your apartment nowadays. Do you really want the whole world to see your mess?”
I burst into laughter. So did the people next to me, and everyone else too. For a moment, I forgot about fear. Surrounded by so many young Ukrainians, all of us laughing in spite of all we have seen, all we have gone through, I felt powerful.
The past few months have been horrifying. Russia has brought us so much grief, death, and destruction. More than 2,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed. Millions have fled their homes. Russian soldiers have committed shocking atrocities in places such as Bucha. Tens of billions of dollars’ worth of damage has been caused to our infrastructure, to say nothing of the towns that have been wiped out, the territory that has been occupied. We have not felt safe for a long time. At any moment, a missile might end our days. The war is present and all around us. The fledgling comedy club I visited—the Underground Stand-Up Club—was until recently a field kitchen where volunteers cooked meals for Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces.
And so, that evening, in a basement, we laughed.
I think there are two types of people in the world. There are those who cry after falling, and those who pick themselves up and laugh. We Ukrainians are the second type. Our sense of humor is special. We elected a comedian to be our president, after all.
But our sense of humor is dark—it has to be, given what we’ve been through. We laugh when Russian soldiers accidentally detonate their own mines. We laugh at Chechen fighters filming TikToks in our destroyed city of Mariupol, only to be killed by Ukrainian snipers. We laugh at Russian propaganda that claims we train birds to identify Russians and infect them with diseases we’ve created in our U.S.-sponsored biolabs. “Ukrainian soldiers say the Russian invaders are brainless,” Sviat Zagaikevich, another comedian who performed on the night I went to the comedy club, said, “because a bullet goes in one ear, and comes out the other.”
In fact, to some degree, our sense of humor has always been dark. Eneida, an 18th-century poem by the Ukrainian writer Ivan Kotliarevsky, which parodies Virgil’s Aeneid, commemorates the siege and destruction of Zaporizhian Sich by transforming Virgil’s Trojan heroes into Zaporizhian Cossacks. The parallels with today are striking: Then, it was Catherine the Great’s forces attacking Ukrainian land; today, it is Putin’s.
Modern Ukraine’s sense of humor is probably defined by our election in 2019 of Volodymyr Zelensky. His political-satire show and his Servant of the People sitcom were all-time television favorites. Of course, his election wasn’t a joke: Zelensky has proved a serious, capable president. Perhaps naive at first, he is now a modern wartime leader whom many Western countries admire.
He seems, however, to have brought his comedic sensibilities to government. Whereas the comedians in that basement stand-up club helped us use laughter as a defense mechanism, our leaders have used it for offensive purposes, attacking and undermining Russia’s efforts. Our country now sells stamps emblazoned with the words Russian warship, go fuck yourself, commemorating our troops’ incredible response to the invaders. Our national Twitter account jokingly captions a photograph of our prime minister standing alongside the president of the European Council—two men who look startlingly alike—with “Our PM on the right.” When the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, the Moskva, was sunk after sustaining damage from Ukrainian forces, our defense minister tweeted a photo of himself diving, along with the text “We have one more diving spot in the Black Sea now.”
How can you not laugh, especially when Russian propaganda is so absurd? When the Moskva sank, the country at first denied that anything had happened, then claimed that the warship had not sunk, that it had suffered a localized fire yet “retained buoyancy.” Even when Russia acknowledged the truth, it insisted that the sinking had been caused by a fire, and then a storm. Clearly, admitting that Ukraine could land such a blow was too painful.
Or what about the reported Ukrainian attacks against Russian territory? Moscow cannot officially blame us, given that it claims to have destroyed our aerial capabilities, so instead, Russian outlets describe explosions caused by our rockets and helicopters as loud bangs of unknown origin. (“Russian propagandists are stealing my job,” Kochehura joked to me. “After five years in stand-up comedy, I still can’t make up such funny shit.”) Ukrainian officials, for their part, blame karma—karma that they say will continue to affect Russia until its forces leave Ukraine.
The war has even created its own set of bizarre feedback loops. Among the people serving in the armed forces is Serhiy Lipko, a comedian whose routine centers on the desperation of the war’s first days, when so many Ukrainian men were eager to join the military that he had to finagle his way in. Once his comrades discovered that he was a stand-up, they would constantly ask him to make jokes. “They think that if you can do it onstage, you can fire off jokes every two minutes in real life as well,” he told me. Upon learning that he is a fairly serious person in real life, they were disappointed. Still, he would try. Laughter, he said, devalues fear. “If you can write a good joke, it becomes your weapon,” he said. “I can, and that makes me a double threat—because I also have a gun.”
All of the comedians I watched that night, and all those I’ve spoken with since the invasion, told me about the cathartic effect of comedy, of laughter, in such depressing times. “A stand-up night in a basement is a good way to get people to ignore air-raid sirens, come to a shelter, and spend a couple hours in a safe space,” Zagaikevich told me. “A good joke is the best way to reduce stress and fuel your fighting spirit. There’s no better way to cope with all the horror of our day-to-day news.”
In that, these comics carry a sense of duty. “During the darkest of times, humor helps us to stay sane and return to normality,” Anton Tymoshenko, another comedian, told me. “It is the cheapest form of therapy.”
Tymoshenko is actually more than just another comedian. In 2016, he won a Ukrainian TV competition in which contestants had to make Zelensky—at that point not yet president—laugh out loud. He made our comedian in chief chortle.
So he perhaps has a better grasp than most of what’s at stake. “Ukraine is the best place to be a comedian nowadays,” he said during another bomb-shelter stand-up gig. “Your career can rise very high. If you are a good comedian in the U.S., you can have a late-night show. If you are a good comedian in Ukraine, you can destroy Russia.”
15. Europe’s new Iron Lady: Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas
Excerpts:
Kallas concludes with a warning for readers in the UK, the US and other Western countries. Citing the historian (and sometime New Statesman contributor) Timothy Snyder and his book The Road to Unfreedom, she attributes to Putin the notion that “if Russia can’t become the West, then the West must become Russia”. In other words: the West must devolve into a conspiracist, authoritarian nightmare. The Kremlin, argues Estonia’s prime minister, will continue trying to undermine Western unity through cyber threats and by promoting myths about morally corrupt and “anti-family” liberal societies. “Although we are very focused on the conventional war that is going on in Ukraine, the hybrid threats never vanished,” she says. “It will be harder and harder to keep the unity. But saying that, I am also positively surprised that we have been able to keep the unity. Together we are strong.”
Breathe in. And breathe out. The air of freedom wafted its way through Ukraine in recent years, permeating an imperfect but democratic country that, like Estonia, struggled to escape from Russia’s imperial grasp. On 24 February, Vladimir Putin sent in his troops to still that air of change. When he did so, he put the West’s leaders to the test – a test of their ability to deal with the big and the fundamental.
For many, the invasion has proved too huge an event to fit into their way of thinking, with their focus reduced to the immediate and the tactical. But in the case of a few others, it has revealed leaders who are capable of thinking, working and speaking on the scale this moment demands. Kallas is one of them. She leads a small country, but she is taking her message to an international audience: Ukraine’s crisis is a European crisis, and a crisis facing the West as a whole. And with that message, delivered calmly yet forcefully, Kallas is changing the geopolitical weather.
Europe’s new Iron Lady: Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas
The Baltic leader has become the EU’s strongest advocate for an uncompromising response to Russia.
Breathe in,” Siim Kallas told his daughter in 1988. “It’s the air of freedom that comes from the other side.” Kaja Kallas was 11 at the time. To travel to East Berlin from her native Estonia, then still under Russian occupation as part of the Soviet Union, was a big deal in itself. To visit the Brandenburg Gate, looking towards West Berlin and all that it represented, was to glimpse everything that her family did not have. A photo taken on the trip shows the young Kaja in front of the gate with her brother and mother, wearing a little purple handbag and a steely gaze. The family could not have known then that the Berlin Wall would fall a year later and that the Soviet Union would collapse two years after that, transforming their lives and propelling their small country back towards independence and democracy.
“I didn’t really understand what he meant at the time, because I had never experienced freedom,” Kallas tells me in Tallinn, the Baltic Sea glistening through the window of her office high in the city’s medieval old town. Today, as prime minister of Estonia, Kallas has emerged as the EU’s most robust voice for an uncompromising response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is virtually impossible to separate that development from the momentous events of her own early life.
“I am of the lucky generation,” she says. “We were living in a prison, with no freedom, no choices, nothing. And in 1991, when I was a teenager, we got our independence and freedom back.” She contrasts this with her grand-parents’ generation, which as she puts it “had everything” in an independent Estonia and lost it all when the Soviet Union occupied the country in 1940.
This clear sense of the principles that matter most – and of turning points in history and what they mean – is the best explanation for Kallas’s growing international profile and influence. Drawing on her past and that of her country, she has stood out for the level of support her government has provided to Ukraine (the highest per capita of any country in the world). From the war’s earliest days, she has also argued forcefully and without reservation that Vladimir Putin’s invasion must be defeated, Ukraine must win and the West will only hold the line by countering Russia’s attack with a corresponding will to defend Ukraine, itself and its values.
Estonians do not tend to boast. Theirs is a small country, pressed up against the Baltic Sea and Russia, the north-eastern limit of Nato and the EU in eastern Europe, with a language very different from most other European ones. They are reserved and restrained, like their Finnish cousins. Arriving at the prime ministerial office, at an unassuming door on an old gatehouse in the curving Rahukohtu Street in Tallinn’s old town, I briefly wondered whether I had the right address, before noting the plaque dedicated to the members of Estonia’s independent interwar government killed by the Soviets. A courtyard behind the door leads into Stenbock House, an 18th-century courthouse perched on a northern ledge of Tallinn’s Toompea Hill. Kallas greets me, striding into the room with her arm outstretched. In our interview, Estonia’s prime minister is unassuming, unaffected and wry. She gently ribs me for my scruffy handwriting as I jot down notes: “Can you really read that?”
During our discussion I ask Kallas what it would mean if Ukraine were defeated. She replies by defining not defeat, but its opposite: “Victory would mean that Russia goes back to where the borders of Russia are. So they go back and withdraw.” Defeat, she continues, is harder to define and its meaning is ultimately up to Ukraine. Coming from Berlin, where the German establishment has spent recent weeks lost in petty debates about diplomatic protocol and hand-wringing about whether Russia was provoked and whether Ukraine is doing enough for “peace”, I find the force, frankness and moral clarity of her arguments immediately appealing.
Kallas fundamentally rejects the idea that an end to the conflict should be sought at any price. “I think what everybody has to understand is that peace is not an ultimate goal if it means that the aggression pays off,” she says. “What I mean by this is that when you say ‘OK, let it be peace and everybody stays where they are’, it still means that Russia has taken a big part of Ukraine’s territory, Ukraine being a sovereign, independent country. So it means that aggression really pays off.” If this happens, she adds, it will only be a matter of time until Putin acts again: “If Russia is not punished for what they are doing, then there will be a pause of one, two years, and then everything will continue: the atrocities, the human suffering, everything.” She adds that it will not just be Ukraine at risk of an emboldened Putin. “I mean other countries around Russia. Moldova… The imperialistic dream has never died.” Few doubt that Estonia could be a prime target in such a situation.
Born in Soviet-occupied Estonia in 1977, Kallas came from a family that lived the horrific reality of “Russia’s imperialistic dream”. In 1949 her mother, Kristi (then six months old), her grandmother and her great-grandmother were all sent to Siberia under Stalin’s mass deportations of Baltic citizens who were deemed “anti-Soviet”. “It was a stranger who gave my grandmother a jar of milk that kept my mother alive during this journey,” she told the European Parliament in a speech on 9 March. “It was strangers who dried the baby’s diapers on their skin as it was the only warm place in the cattle car. And it was strangers who helped in untold ways when they were allowed to return to Estonia.”
Her father, Siim Kallas, who had urged her to breathe the air of freedom in Berlin in 1988, oversaw the country’s shift to democratic capitalism as president of the Bank of Estonia in the 1990s, and served as prime minister between 2002 and 2003 before becoming a European Commissioner.
Kaja Kallas studied law and economics and worked as a lawyer before she was elected to the European Parliament for the liberal Estonian Reform Party in 2014. There she rapidly became a top European voice on new digital technology and regulation as well as on EU-Ukraine relations. She returned to Tallinn to head the Reform Party, winning a leadership election in April 2018, and became Estonia’s first ever female prime minister in January 2021, at the helm of a coalition with the centre-left Estonian Centre Party. When Putin started building up his troops on Ukraine’s borders in 2021, many much larger European states bided their time. By contrast, her government sent lethal weapons to Kyiv as early as December 2021, less than a year after she had taken office. “Our problems today are our neighbours’ problems tomorrow,” Kallas tells me now. “So if your neighbour’s house [is in flames] it’s better to put out the fire there than to wait until the fire reaches your house.”
British soldiers take part in a major drill as part of the EFP Nato operation near Rakvere, Estonia, February 2022. Photo by Alain Jocard / AFP via Getty Images
When Russia’s invasion began on 24 February, Kallas and her government were grimly vindicated. Like others, they found themselves in a new world. Unlike others, it was a world that they understood and knew how to navigate. Her government accelerated its transfer of arms to Ukraine, sending FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missiles and artillery such as D-30 howitzers. By mid-April, Germany had transferred 0.01 per cent of its GDP to Ukraine. The figures for the US and UK were close to 0.05 per cent, that for Poland just under 0.2 per cent. Under Kallas, Estonia’s figure was 0.8 per cent. She accompanied this with forceful international interventions such as her speech to the European Parliament two weeks after the invasion. “We might just have rediscovered what the liberal, international rules-based order was all about in the first place,” she told European lawmakers. “We will, in the future, speak about ‘before times’ and ‘after times’.”
Since then, Kallas has emerged as something of an Iron Lady for today’s Europe, setting the standard for a robust and serious response to Putin’s unprovoked onslaught. She gave a diplomatic but frank speech to the German establishment in Berlin in late April. In the two months from 1 March to 2 May, she has been cited 11,560 times in the international media, a staggering number for the leader of a country with a population about the same size as Birmingham’s.
“Estonian PM Kaja Kallas is one of the most lucid and courageous world leaders now. We need more women like her at the helm,” wrote the influential Ukrainian journalist Olga Tokariuk on 29 April. The historian Timothy Garton Ash recently cited her along with the prime ministers of Spain and the Netherlands – both much larger countries than Estonia – as three crucial players who can work with the recently re-elected Emmanuel Macron to build a new, dynamic EU.
“Do you ever get the temptation to say ‘We told you so’?” I ask her, thinking of the many years in which Estonians warned the rest of Europe that Russia had not abandoned its old impulses. “It’s impolite to say so,” Kallas replies. “So, no. But I think some things you just don’t have to say out loud.” I am reminded of this comment when, later in our discussion, she refers to “countries that have much better neighbours than we do”, saying “they don’t feel it in the way that we feel it”. It is a friendly way of suggesting that some nations farther west have been slower than Estonia in adapting to the “after times”. Some things, indeed, one does not have to say out loud.
Kallas is under no illusions about why Estonia has found new influence. “I have a feeling that we are listened to more than we were before. All those years we were telling [the West] that Russia’s imperialistic dream has never died. And especially in the 1990s we were told: ‘Why do you need Nato? Why do you want to join Nato and the EU? Russia doesn’t pose a threat any more.’ But we said that we know our neighbour. And these were very wise decisions that we took at that time. So coming to today, I feel that we are more listened to as we know what we are talking about.”
Estonians may be unassuming but they are also tough. Being a small nation next to a power like Russia and subjected to long years of occupation and domination will do that to you. When I ask Kallas why she thinks her government has done so much more to support Ukraine, proportionally, than its European counterparts, she offers a typically modest answer.
First, she says, all democratic governments must respond to their voters and “for us [in Estonia] there is very high support for defending Ukraine”. I get a glimpse of that when I wander back down the narrow streets of Toompea Hill and past the Russian embassy in Tallinn, with a glorious display of pro-Ukrainian banners, flags and posters outside. And second, Estonia can move fast because of its size: “We are a small country, whereas with some very big countries the discussions take more time.” In any case, Kallas is optimistic that others in Europe are broadly on the right path: “When I’m at the table in those discussions with other European leaders, I think the moral compass is showing the right direction. So even if it takes time, then the direction is the same.”
I suspect that it is this combination of the sober, calm and frank Estonian style with searing historical experience that makes Kallas such an effective European leader. She talks of blood and thunder – at a moment in Europe’s history that demands no less – but in a tone that gives one confidence that she is not doing it for effect.
Towards the end of our interview, I turn to what comes next. Kallas will be among the Nato leaders at the alliance’s landmark summit in Madrid in June. What needs to happen there? “We need the deterrence posture to turn into a defence posture,” she replies. This means a shift from warding Russia off an attack on Nato to being capable of preventing it from taking Nato territory at short notice. She specifies that this requires a division-level Nato presence in each Baltic state (a significant increase in troops from those already present, led by the UK in Estonia), more intelligence sharing and a shift from air policing to air defence. “Where now they just fly up and say ‘You can’t fly here’, air defence means that if someone comes into our airspace, we have a right to take them down as well.”
Kallas concludes with a warning for readers in the UK, the US and other Western countries. Citing the historian (and sometime New Statesman contributor) Timothy Snyder and his book The Road to Unfreedom, she attributes to Putin the notion that “if Russia can’t become the West, then the West must become Russia”. In other words: the West must devolve into a conspiracist, authoritarian nightmare. The Kremlin, argues Estonia’s prime minister, will continue trying to undermine Western unity through cyber threats and by promoting myths about morally corrupt and “anti-family” liberal societies. “Although we are very focused on the conventional war that is going on in Ukraine, the hybrid threats never vanished,” she says. “It will be harder and harder to keep the unity. But saying that, I am also positively surprised that we have been able to keep the unity. Together we are strong.”
Breathe in. And breathe out. The air of freedom wafted its way through Ukraine in recent years, permeating an imperfect but democratic country that, like Estonia, struggled to escape from Russia’s imperial grasp. On 24 February, Vladimir Putin sent in his troops to still that air of change. When he did so, he put the West’s leaders to the test – a test of their ability to deal with the big and the fundamental.
For many, the invasion has proved too huge an event to fit into their way of thinking, with their focus reduced to the immediate and the tactical. But in the case of a few others, it has revealed leaders who are capable of thinking, working and speaking on the scale this moment demands. Kallas is one of them. She leads a small country, but she is taking her message to an international audience: Ukraine’s crisis is a European crisis, and a crisis facing the West as a whole. And with that message, delivered calmly yet forcefully, Kallas is changing the geopolitical weather.
This article appears in the 11 May 2022 issue of the New Statesman, Stalling Starmer
16. The Covert Operation to Back Ukrainian Independence that Haunts the CIA
Excerpts:
Which brings us back to that first Ukrainian mission, decades ago. Because that was an operation whose lessons have apparently been forgotten in Washington. As Lindsay O’Rourke noted in Foreign Affairs earlier this year, “out of 35 U.S. attempts to covertly arm foreign dissidents during the Cold War, only four succeeded in bringing U.S. allies to power.” Washington’s aid for Ukraine this time around is hardly covert; just last month, the White House requested some $33 billion in military aid to Kyiv. But much of Ukraine’s territory remains occupied by Russia outright and Ukrainian partisans are now beginning to emerge behind enemy lines.
Yet those insurgents, who will have to play key roles in rolling back Russian aggression, can’t succeed on their own, or even just with Western arms or Western-trained commandos. As early critics of the CIA’s program in Ukraine tried to highlight, “a handful of airdropped commandos or military advisors might help guide the actions of an ongoing rebellion… but they were not going to be the spark that started or expanded a rebellion,” wrote Anderson. Instead, such insurgency would only succeed when “tangible help is near at hand” — such as when the arrival of a successful, liberating army “was imminent.”
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, that help was nowhere to be found; no Western military was going to arrive to help Ukrainian insurgents beat back Soviet forces. Now, though, there’s a new player at hand: a Ukrainian military that has more than proved itself, and that has used Western support to do so. And that — rather than American support for insurgents elsewhere, or American covert operations designed to stir restive populations — will be the deciding factor for Kyiv to finally break free from Moscow’s imperial grip. Which is why American and Western materiel aid to the Ukrainian army cannot stop. It’s a lesson those who saw the folly of the Americans’ covert Cold War efforts would recognize — and one that the Ukrainians fighting yet again for their independence from Moscow hope the U.S. finally digests.
The Covert Operation to Back Ukrainian Independence that Haunts the CIA
Magazine
After WWII, officials in Washington sent scores of agents to their deaths in a misguided effort to create an uprising against Moscow.
President Truman in the Cabinet Room of the White House with the National Security Council, Aug. 19, 1948. | National Archives and Records Administration
By Casey Michel
05/11/2022 04:30 AM EDT
Casey Michel is an investigative journalist based in New York and the author of American Kleptocracy.
In late 1949, a series of unmarked flights began launching from central Europe. Gargantuan C-47s, flown by Hungarian or Czech pilots, barreled toward Turkey, and then turned north over the Black Sea, evading radar by flying barely above the ground. As the planes flew over Lviv a string of parachutes opened, a handful of commandos tumbling into the sky over Soviet Ukraine. On the ground, they linked up with Ukrainian resistance fighters trying to beat back Soviet expansionism.
Operation Red Sox, as it was known, was one of the first covert missions of the still new Cold War. The American-trained commandos would feed intelligence back to their handlers using new radio and communications equipment, stoking nascent nationalist movements in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the Baltics. The goal was to provide the U.S. unprecedented insight into Moscow’s designs in Eastern Europe — and, if possible, to help crack apart the Soviet empire itself. Over half a decade, dozens of operatives took part in these flights, becoming one of the U.S.’s “biggest covert operations” in post-War Europe. Ukraine’s bloody insurgency was the operation’s centerpiece. And it was in Ukraine that, as one scholar wrote, the CIA saw one of its “most pronounced failures of the Cold War.”
Indeed, almost nothing about the yearslong mission was an actual success. Of the 85 agents who the CIA dropped into Soviet-controlled territory, it is believed that some three-quarters of them were almost immediately captured and tortured or killed outright. And their handlers, undone by a combination of hubris and Soviet misinformation, took years to catch on, sending agent after agent to their death along the Soviet Union’s western reaches.
It was a failure that few Americans recall, and which has been buried by far more successful missions elsewhere. But it’s a failure that’s suddenly worth revisiting as Moscow pushes to yet again suffocate Ukrainian sovereignty and break Ukrainian resistance, regardless of the cost. Moscow’s efforts to seize places like Kyiv and Odesa have stumbled against Ukrainian resistance, but Russia isn’t yet a spent force — especially with the prospect of broader mobilization of the Russian population getting closer to reality. Even at its most shambolic, Moscow has shown a willingness to absorb embarrassing losses while inflicting devastating damage on civilians. “I spent years talking about how the Russian military wasn’t 12 feet tall,” leading Russian analyst Michael Kofman recently said. “It’s already clear to me that I’m going to spend the coming years talking about how the Russian military is not four feet tall, either.”
But the Cold War mission in Ukraine and across Eastern Europe is also a failure that contains myriad lessons. With a potential insurgency in Ukraine looming yet again, it’s those lessons — in American overconfidence, in Kremlin capabilities, in how to actually spark successful armed rebellion in Europe — that will have to inform post-war strategy if the U.S. and its allies want to ensure the Kremlin’s efforts to conquer Ukraine are finished for good.
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, American authorities realized that their insight into their former allies in the Soviet Union was severely restricted.
This dearth of information stemmed from two primary, related reasons. The first was the lack of any kind of structured intelligence apparatus in the U.S., remedied by the formation of the CIA in 1947. But the second was even more concerning: the lack of contacts inside the Soviet Union, especially in the regions pushing back against Moscow’s rule. And it was that latter issue that only became more salient as the Kremlin began seizing and strangling conquered countries and annexing regions in Europe, including a chunk of Ukraine previously outside Moscow’s grip.
In Washington, the newly formed CIA floated a potential solution. American agents would scour displaced-persons camps across Europe in search of exiles they could train and then secretly smuggle back into the Soviet Union. They would use them to both gather intelligence and link up with other anti-Soviet movements. But some CIA higher-ups wondered why they should stop there. What if the U.S. could also arm these returned figures, and potentially fracture the Soviet Union?
The plan had a couple of things going for it. As one of the few scholarly examinations of the operation detailed, “At the time, Soviet air defenses were terribly unorganized, allowing U.S. planes to violate their airspace with near total impunity.” Moreover, as American handlers saw it, these trainees were hardly landing in a vacuum. If anything, they were effectively jumping into a wildfire: a warzone pitting Ukrainian nationalists against the Soviet authorities trying to hold on to Moscow’s colonial empire. And those Ukrainian nationalists appeared to be winning. For the first time in decades, Ukrainian independence appeared within reach, a message the Americans were happy to reinforce. “The Ukrainian organization offers unusual opportunities for penetration of the USSR, and assisting in the development of underground movements behind the Iron Curtain,” one declassified CIA document from the time reads. And if they could succeed, “ultimately an operational base may be established in… Ukraine.”
The emigres “were being told that all was in the service of liberation, of overthrowing the communist regimes,” Scott Anderson wrote in The Quiet Americans, a book on the early history of the CIA. “That message was reinforced by the constant drumbeat of rhetoric now emanating out of Washington.”
Still, the plan did receive pushback from certain quarters in Washington. As the acting chief of the CIA’s Special Projects Division for Soviet operations wrote in 1947, the U.S. had to “face the fact that in the long run operations using the Ukrainians as an organized group will probably turn out to be worthless — simply because without political support the Ukrainian nationalist groups will be decimated by Soviet pressure and demoralization.” But in those early days of the Cold War, the CIA was looking for an early intelligence success that it could expand elsewhere, especially as relations between Washington and Moscow entered a tailspin during the late 1940s.
By September 1949, the operation was ready, and the first flights launched. Ukrainian commandos successfully crossed into Soviet airspace, touching down in western Ukraine, in heart of the Ukrainian resistance to Soviet occupation. And at first, everything appeared to go well. Messages relayed back to American handlers, via new electronic equipment smuggled behind Soviet lines, talked of operational success. Optimism continued to grow as month after month, drop after drop, the same rosy messages came back.
Yet, back in Washington, concerns started to grow. On the one hand, there was the reality of who these Ukrainian emigres were actually linking up with. The main body of Ukrainian insurgents, and in particular the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, had already been linked directly to Nazi atrocities in the region. “They were Nazis, pure and simple,” one CIA operations chief said. “Worse than that, because a lot of them did the Nazis’ dirty work for them.”
Beyond those concerns about enabling fascists, there was also increased understanding of how the Soviet secret police and counter-intelligence operations actually worked — and how little success an operation like Red Sox would likely have in a place like the USSR.
“You’re sending people into these Soviet-controlled areas — Poland or Ukraine or wherever — with the idea that they’re going to start resistance groups or meet up with the ones already there,” one CIA station chief remembered. “But it’s impossible that these resistance groups can exist under the Soviet security system…. It’s a dream. It can’t work. You’re just sending people to their deaths.” If anything, Anderson added, those supposed anti-Soviet resistance groups the CIA thought it was helping support were, in reality, “catchment basins in which the regimes’ enemies, both internal and external, could be concentrated and safely confined until the state was ready to scoop them up.”
All of which was precisely what happened, up and down the region. It was a reality that took the U.S. years to catch on to. In Russia, agents parachuted in only to promptly disappear. In Poland, trained agents suddenly appeared on state radio claiming they’d engaged in “criminal, anti-Polish activity,” all on behalf of a completely fabricated Polish nationalist group. In Latvia, in Lithuania, in Estonia: all of the supposed resistance groups were “either hoaxes or thoroughly controlled by the KGB,” Anderson wrote. Over and again, Soviet intelligence had conned the gullible Americans, sending the exiles directly to their death or imprisonment.
But it was in Ukraine that the Americans saw arguably their most embarrassing fiasco. To be sure, there had been a veritable resistance movement in the region immediately after the war. But by the time the Americans launched their operation, the resistance had already been effectively decimated, hobbled by KGB penetration and an unrelenting Soviet pursuit. The Americans, however, had no idea. “Buoyed by Soviet disinformation,” Anderson noted, the CIA continued sending dozens and dozens of operatives into the region, even through the mid-1950s. Instead of sparking rebellion, some three-quarters of the trained agents simply disappeared into the Soviet maw. “Many of the agents were not on the ground for more than a few hours before they were arrested and shot,” one later analysis found. Without the U.S. even realizing it, Moscow had dismantled one of America’s most significant covert operations across Europe.
Generations later, it remains unclear how, exactly, the Soviets penetrated the program. It remains possible that arch-spy Kim Philby betrayed the program, just as he’d done with similar covert operations in Albania. Whatever the reason, one thing is clear: the mission was a manifest disaster. As one CIA historian summed it up, “In the long run, the Agency’s efforts to penetrate the Iron Curtain using Ukrainian agents was ill-fated and tragic.”
Now, nearly 75 years later, Ukraine burns once again. With Russia’s invasion dragging into its third month, eyes have begun turning to what may come next. It’s clear by now that there’s no returning to status quo ante. Despite Ukraine’s remarkable showing thus far, it appears that a new dividing line will sever part of the country yet again. A new Iron Curtain has already descended. All that remains is to discern the actual dividing line.
All of which means that the U.S. will need to formulate new strategy regarding not just Ukraine, but Russia writ large. We already see the contours of a new policy taking shape, including blanket sanctions designed to degrade Russia’s expansionism and ongoing armed support for Ukraine. But those are mere tactics aimed at short-term gains, with a broader strategy yet to take shape (despite Biden’s ad-lib comments about Putin’s removal). Additionally, even as Ukraine girds to reclaim the territory Russia’s occupied, it’s unclear whether, or how, the U.S. will support the entire effort — or if Washington will do all it can to aid Kyiv’s potential assault on Crimea.
Which brings us back to that first Ukrainian mission, decades ago. Because that was an operation whose lessons have apparently been forgotten in Washington. As Lindsay O’Rourke noted in Foreign Affairs earlier this year, “out of 35 U.S. attempts to covertly arm foreign dissidents during the Cold War, only four succeeded in bringing U.S. allies to power.” Washington’s aid for Ukraine this time around is hardly covert; just last month, the White House requested some $33 billion in military aid to Kyiv. But much of Ukraine’s territory remains occupied by Russia outright and Ukrainian partisans are now beginning to emerge behind enemy lines.
Yet those insurgents, who will have to play key roles in rolling back Russian aggression, can’t succeed on their own, or even just with Western arms or Western-trained commandos. As early critics of the CIA’s program in Ukraine tried to highlight, “a handful of airdropped commandos or military advisors might help guide the actions of an ongoing rebellion… but they were not going to be the spark that started or expanded a rebellion,” wrote Anderson. Instead, such insurgency would only succeed when “tangible help is near at hand” — such as when the arrival of a successful, liberating army “was imminent.”
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, that help was nowhere to be found; no Western military was going to arrive to help Ukrainian insurgents beat back Soviet forces. Now, though, there’s a new player at hand: a Ukrainian military that has more than proved itself, and that has used Western support to do so. And that — rather than American support for insurgents elsewhere, or American covert operations designed to stir restive populations — will be the deciding factor for Kyiv to finally break free from Moscow’s imperial grip. Which is why American and Western materiel aid to the Ukrainian army cannot stop. It’s a lesson those who saw the folly of the Americans’ covert Cold War efforts would recognize — and one that the Ukrainians fighting yet again for their independence from Moscow hope the U.S. finally digests.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
