Quotes of the Day:
“One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion. This was a fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan. Our victory was won over countries which sought to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other nations... We shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes. This is no more than a frank recognition that totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.”
- President Truman
"I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."
- Robert Frost
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
- Aldous Huxley
1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 9 (PUTIN's WAR)
2. Putin’s Victory Day Speech Forgoes an Opportunity to Escalate Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
3. Russia pounds Ukraine's vital port of Odesa, Mariupol plant
4. Marcos Jr. won Philippine presidency, unofficial count shows
5. What the Marcos' return to power means for the Philippines
6. The Biggest Reason Russia’s Military Is Struggling
7. SOF News Update - May 10, 2022 | SOF News
8. Don’t Cling to Hopes That Putin Will Ever Face Justice
9. Russian brags of using horrific torture methods on Ukrainian civilians
10. WET BLANKET ‘Cancer-stricken’ Putin watches military parade with BLANKET over his legs as rumours swirl around tyrant’s health
11. Qatar is Hamas' patron. Its 'moderate' rebranding is a dangerous delusion | Opinion
12. Opinion | Putin is trapped in a quagmire and doesn’t know how to get out
13. New Mideast task force can counter Iranian arms smuggling, but more capabilities are needed
14. Guam’s THAAD missile defense battery will relocate to new Marine Corps base
15. ‘Nazi’ lies, missing jets and rare dissent: What happened, what didn’t, and why on Putin’s Victory Day
16. Biden Signs Lend-Lease Act to Supply More Security Assistance to Ukraine
17. A More Talkative Place: Why the Human Domain Still Matters in Strategic Competition — #Reviewing Brutality in an Age of Human Rights
18. It’s Time to Secure the Water Sector from Cyber Threats
19. From Tycoons to Pop Singers, Ukrainians of All Walks Come Together on the Front Lines
20. To Really Hurt Russia’s Economy, Target Investment and Human Capital, Not Gas
21. Japan's push to double defense spending ties directly back to Ukraine
22. Exclusive: Putin 'has recognized he has no victory to celebrate,' US ambassador to UN says
23. The Coup in the Kremlin
24. Opinion | Ukraine’s soldiers are inspiring. Their bodies and families are devastated.
25. Analysis | Americans now see both political parties as equally extreme
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 9 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 9
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 9
Karolina Hird, Kateryna Stepanenko, and Mason Clark
May 9, 7:15pm ET
Russian forces continue to face widespread force generation challenges. A senior US defense official stated on May 9 that the US has not observed any indicators of a “new major Russian mobilization” and that members of the private military company Wagner Group “urgently” requested hundreds of thousands of additional troops to reinforce Russian efforts in Donbas.[1] The official noted that Russia currently has 97 battalion tactical groups (BTGs) in Ukraine, but that BTGs have been moving in and out of Ukraine to refit and resupply, suggesting that Russian troops continue to sustain substantial damage in combat.[2] ISW has previously assessed that most Russian BTGs are heavily degraded and counting BTGs is not a useful metric of Russian combat power.[3] The Main Ukrainian Intelligence Directorate (GUR) claimed that under-trained, ill-equipped Russian conscripts are still being sent into active combat despite the Kremlin denying this practice.[4] A prisoner of war from the BARS-7 detachment of the Wagner Group claimed that a ”covert mobilization” is underway in Russian to send conscripts to clean damage caused by combat in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.[5]
Russian troops in Ukraine continue to display low morale and poor discipline as fighting in many areas has stalled out against Ukrainian resistance. A senior US defense official claimed that Russian troops in Donbas are failing to obey orders from top generals.[6] Russian forces deployed to the Zaporizhzhia area reportedly are experiencing very low morale and psychological conditions, complain about the ineffectiveness of operations in the area, frequently abuse alcohol, and shoot at their own vehicles in order to avoid going to the frontline.[7] This is consistent with reports made by the Ukrainian General Staff that the extent of Russian losses is having widespread impacts on the willingness of Russian troops to engage in offensive operations.[8]
Russian authorities are likely setting conditions to integrate occupied Ukrainian territories directly into Russia, as opposed to creating proxy “People’s Republics.” The Kherson occupation Deputy Chairman of Military Civil Administration Kirill Stremousov stated on May 9 that the Kherson region intends to become part of Russia and that Kherson authorities do not intend to hold a referendum to create an independent republic.[9] Spokesperson for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry Oleksandr Motuzyanyk reported that Russian occupation authorities are intensifying reconnaissance measures and increasing checkpoints and patrols in occupied areas in order to prepare to integrate these regions directly into Russia.[10] Motuzyanyk noted that Russian and Crimean groups have been arriving to occupied regions to intensify propaganda measures to prepare for integration. ISW will publish our assessment of the Kremlin’s most likely course of actions towards their occupied territories in Ukraine in the coming days.
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces did not make any confirmed advances to the southeast or southwest of Izyum on May 9 but are likely attempting to concentrate the forces necessary to resume offensive operations in the coming days.
- Russian forces made marginal gains around Severodonetsk in the past 24 hours.
- Russian forces are likely continuing to amass troops in Belgorod Oblast to stop Ukrainian counterattacks around Kharkiv City from reaching the Ukrainian-Russian border.
- Russian units in Zaporizhia Oblast are regrouping and will likely receive reinforcements from forces previously deployed in Mariupol.
- The Kremlin continues to face severe force mobilization challenges, and ongoing “covert mobilization” efforts are unlikely to generate substantial combat power.
- Russian authorities are likely setting conditions to integrate occupied Ukrainian territories directly into Russia, as opposed to creating proxy “People’s Republics.”
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 did not make any confirmed advances to the southeast or southwest of Izyum on May 9 but are likely attempting to concentrate the forces necessary to resume offensive operations in the coming days. Russian troops are likely reprioritizing a push southeast of Izyum towards Slovyansk after focusing on advancing southwest to Barvinkove in the past few weeks. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that elements of the Russian Airborne Forces (VDV), 1st Tank Army, 20th Combined Arms Army of the Western Military District, and 29th, 35th, 36th Combined Arms Armies and 68th Army Corps of the Eastern Military District are preparing for an offensive south of Sulyivka (about 25 kilometers south of Izyum) towards Nova Dmytrivka and Kurulka, both of which lie within 10 kilometers of the border between Kharkiv and Donetsk Oblasts.[11] A senior US defense official notably reported that Russian forces are conducting artillery strikes and ground attacks southeast of Izyum to drive towards Lyman and Slovyansk, but that Ukrainian resistance in this area has confined Russian advances to gains in the "single digits” of miles.[12]
Russian forces continued attacks westward in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts and made marginal gains around Severodonetsk on May 9. Troops of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) reportedly captured Nyzhnje and are fighting for control of Toshkivka, about 25 kilometers southeast of Severodonetsk.[13] Ukrainian sources reported fierce fighting around Rubizhne and Vojevodivka, immediately to the north of Severodonetsk and in Bilohorivka, about 25 kilometers west of Severodonetsk.[14] NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) imagery showed fires in the area west of Severodonetsk around Bilohorivka, Pryvillya and Novodruzhesk, likely indicating that Russian forces are shelling Ukrainian positions in this area in order to encircle Severodonesk and Rubizhne from the west and continue to push towards the Donetsk Oblast border.[15]
[Source: NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System]
Supporting Effort #1—Mariupol (Russian objective: Capture Mariupol and reduce the Ukrainian defenders)
Russian forces continued to conduct artillery strikes and assaults against Ukrainian defenders in the Azovstal Steel Plant on May 9.[16] A senior US defense official reported that 2 Russian battalion tactical groups (BTGs) remain in Mariupol and continue to storm Azovstal as over a dozen of the BTGs previously deployed to Mariupol are moving into other areas in Donbas, though ISW cannot independently confirm the actual strength of these reported BTGs.[17] Russian forces reportedly blew up a bridge in the northern part of the Azovstal complex previously used to evacuate civilians, indicating that Russian troops have advanced into the northern part of the plant.[18] Russian occupying forces conducted a “Victory Day” parade in Mariupol on May 9, consistent with ISW’s previous forecasts that the city is a focal point of the Kremlin’s occupation narrative.[19]
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 are likely continuing to amass troops in Belgorod Oblast to stop Ukrainian counterattacks around Kharkiv City from reaching the Ukrainian-Russian border.[20] A senior US defense official said on May 9 that Russian forces have not abandoned efforts to encircle Kharkiv City from the north and east in “a horseshoe-like shape,” despite having only three battalion tactical groups (BTGs) operating in northern Kharkiv Oblast.[21] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces accumulated 19 BTGs in Belgorod Oblast, which could reinforce the Kharkiv City axis.[22]
ISW cannot confirm if Russian forces withdrew past Ruski Tyshky, a settlement approximately 18 northeast kilometers of Kharkiv City.[23] The senior US defense official said that Ukrainian forces pushed Russian forces nearly 48 kilometers east in the past week, likely referring to the Ukrainian liberation of Staryi Saltiv on May 2.[24] Pro-Russian Telegram channels posted images of Victory Day celebrations in occupied Kozacha Lopan, despite previous unconfirmed reports that Ukrainian forces were fighting near the settlement on May 7.[25]
Supporting Effort #3—Southern Axis (Objective: Defend Kherson against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed offensive operations in southern Ukraine on May 9 but continued to shell and launch missile strikes to pin Ukrainian troops and prevent them from transferring to other axes.[26] The Ukrainian Genral Staff reported that Russian units in Zaporizhia Oblast are regrouping and will likely receive reinforcements from forces previously deployed in Mariupol.[27] Russian forces will likely reinforce units pushing toward Zaporizhia City and Donetsk Oblast due to the reports of an ineffective offensive around Huliaipole.[28] Satellite imagery from May 6 also showed that Russian forces have significantly increased their concentrations of military equipment and anti-aircraft and missile systems in southwestern Kherson Oblast since April 27, likely due to newly resumed railway connection with Crimea.[29] Russian forces may have paused offensive operations in Southern Ukraine on May 9 due to Victory Day celebrations in occupied areas.[30]
Russian forces continued to target Odesa with missile strikes on May 8 and 9.[31] An unnamed US defense official said that Russia has no ability to threaten Odesa from the sea and the ground, despite consistent missile strikes and ongoing aerial reconnaissance.[32] Russian forces will likely continue to shell Odesa but are unlikely to inflict significant damage or resume advances towards the city. The official also noted that the US has no confirmation that Ukrainian forces recaptured Snake Island, off the coast of Odesa Oblast.[33] Russian and Transnistrian sources claimed Ukrainian forces closed the border with Moldova on May 9 amidst growing tensions in Transnistria, although ISW cannot independently verify this claim.[34]
Supporting Effort #4—Sumy and Northeastern Ukraine: (Russian objective: Withdraw combat power in good order for redeployment to eastern Ukraine)
There were no significant events on this axis in the past 24 hours.
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces will likely continue to merge offensive efforts southward of Izyum with westward advances from Donetsk in order to encircle Ukrainian troops in southern Kharkiv Oblast and Western Donetsk.
- Russia may change the status of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, possibly by merging them into a single “Donbas Republic” and/or by annexing them directly to Russia.
- Russian forces have apparently decided to seize the Azovstal plant through ground assault and will likely continue operations accordingly.
- Ukrainian counteroffensives around Kharkiv City are pushing back Russian positions northeast of the city and will likely continue to force the Russians to reinforce those positions at the cost of reinforcing Russian offensive operations elsewhere.
- Russian forces may be preparing to conduct renewed offensive operations to capture the entirety of Kherson Oblast in the coming days.
[5] https://armyinform dpt com.ua/2022/05/09/rosijski-okupanty-yakyh-mobilizuvaty-u-kvitni-vzhe-potrapyly-u-polon-i-dayut-svidchennya/
[7] https://t dot me/zoda_gov_ua/7560
[9] https://t dot me/istorijaoruzija/62218; https://t dot me/istorijaoruzija/62161
[10] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/05/09/na-okupovanyh-terytoriyah-vorog-obmezhyv-peremishhennya-misczevyh-znimayut-syuzhety-dlya-rosijskyh-zmi/
[23] https://t dot me/synegubov/3154
[28] https://t dot me/zoda_gov_ua/7560
2. Putin’s Victory Day Speech Forgoes an Opportunity to Escalate Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
PUTIN’S VICTORY DAY SPEECH FORGOES AN OPPORTUNITY TO ESCALATE RUSSIA’S INVASION OF UKRAINE
Putin’s Victory Day Speech Forgoes an Opportunity to Escalate Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
Katherine Lawlor and Mason Clark
May 9, 2022
Key Takeaways:
- Russian President Vladimir Putin used his May 9 speech to praise ongoing Russian efforts in Ukraine and reinforce existing Kremlin framing rather than announcing a change. He did not announce an escalation or declare victory in the Russian war in Ukraine.
- Putin likely calculated that he could not ask the Russian population for a greater commitment to the war effort and implicitly reassured the Russian people that he would not ask for a greater societal commitment in his speech.
- Putin may be recognizing the growing risks he faces at home and in Ukraine and may be adjusting his objectives, and his desired end state in Ukraine, accordingly.
- The Kremlin has already scaled down its objectives in Ukraine (from its initial objective of capturing Kyiv and full regime change) and will likely do so again—or be forced to do so by Ukrainian battlefield successes.
- Regardless of any change—or lack thereof—in the Kremlin's objectives, Putin’s speech indicates that the Kremlin has likely decided to maintain its current level of resourcing in the war.
- The Kremlin attempted to demonstrate the alleged popularity of its occupation of eastern Ukraine through forced Victory Day celebrations in occupied Ukrainian territories.
Russian President Vladimir Putin used his May 9 speech to praise ongoing Russian efforts in Ukraine and reinforce existing Kremlin framing rather than announce a change. He did not announce an escalation or declare victory in the Russian war in Ukraine.[1] May 9, Victory Day, is Russia’s most important patriotic holiday and commemorates the Soviet victory in the Second World War, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. Putin’s much-anticipated speech was a ready-made opportunity for him to alter the Kremlin’s current framing of the war in Ukraine or announce a policy change. Putin had three general options for his Victory Day address: declare some sort of Russian victory, make a policy change to ramp up the war effort in some way (such as by calling for a larger-scale mobilization or formally declaring war on Ukraine), or what he chose—to pursue a steady state narrative and reinforce the Kremlin’s existing framing (and resourcing) of the war.
Many Western officials and analysts speculated that Putin would formally declare war on Ukraine to enable a larger-scale mobilization.[2] Instead, the Kremlin’s framing of Victory Day celebrations reiterated existing Kremlin justifications for the war and drew on purported historical parallels between the Second World War and the Kremlin‘s framing of its invasion of Ukraine. Putin reinforced each of the Kremlin’s core (and patently false) narratives attempting to justify its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine: that Ukraine is a Nazi state; that the United States and NATO refused to acknowledge Russia‘s security concerns and provoked the war; and that the Ukrainian government was preparing an imminent attack and genocide against Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine. He did not introduce any new justifications for the conflict, nor did he ask for a greater commitment from the Russian military or population.
Putin bizarrely framed Nazi Germany and modern-day Ukraine as equal Nazi threats to Russia’s security. He relied heavily on present-tense language as he congratulated servicemembers who fought in World War 2 and who “these days … are fighting for our people in Donbas. For the security of our Motherland—Russia.” Putin celebrated the participation of “fighters of different nationalities” and “the great, indestructible strength of our united multinational people,” recognizing the Russian proxy fighters from the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and implicitly recognizing fighters from other Russian proxy separatist regions like South Ossetia.
Putin implicitly reassured the Russian population that he would not ask them for a greater commitment to the war effort. Putin likely calculates that he cannot ask the Russian people to mobilize without triggering a destabilizing backlash against his regime. Putin could have used Victory Day as a rallying cry to declare a larger mobilization. However, backlash from large-scale mobilization could destabilize Putin’s regime, whereas current levels of commitment appear to be acceptable to the Russian population—or at least generating controllable levels of discontent. Public opinion polling from Russia’s independent Levada Center in mid-April indicated that 80% of Russians supported Russia’s military activities in Ukraine, but only 50% strongly supported the war, and 31% of all Russians felt “anxiety, fear, and horror” relating to the invasion.[3] Western sanctions will likely increasingly impact Russian citizens in the coming months, limiting the enthusiasm of the general population to make greater sacrifices for the war effort. Putin likely also faces internal discontent from Russian elites and security forces, and the war has degraded the military that would defend his regime from large-scale domestic unrest.[4] Putin likely factored these calculations into his decision to pursue a steady-state approach to the war, rather than an escalatory mobilization.
The Kremlin also attempted to demonstrate the alleged popularity of its occupation of eastern Ukraine through contrived Victory Day celebrations in occupied Ukrainian territories. Russian forces and occupation officials likely compelled Ukrainian civilians to participate in Victory Day events across occupied Ukraine in parallel with over 15,000 Victory Day events across the Russian Federation.[5] Events in occupied territories included commemorative ceremonies, broadcasts of Putin’s parade and speech in Moscow, and Immortals Regiment marches commemorating veterans of the Second World War.[6] Occupation authorities in Kherson claimed that they prevented multiple ”provocations” and established checkpoints around the city to prevent Ukrainian counter-demonstrations.[7] The Ukrainian Armed Forces General Staff reported that Russian forces seized the personal identification documents of civilians in occupied Zaporizhia and promised to return the documents only if those civilians attended the demonstrations.[8] Ukrainian media reported that Russian forces brought people from Crimea and Luhansk to participate in a Victory Day event in Melitopol, and the Ukrainian mayor of Melitopol denied that any Melitopol residents participated in the event.[9]
Putin may be recognizing the growing risks he faces at home and in Ukraine and may be adjusting his objectives, and his desired end state in Ukraine, accordingly. Putin may still announce a full or partial mobilization in the future and has not given up his ability to do so. May 9 would have been an opportune time to announce a new policy or declare victory in Ukraine, but the Kremlin was certainly not bound to this date. Putin may also pursue a more covert mobilization, such as forcing conscripts into contract soldier positions or forcing public servants into conscription, to avoid the likely backlash to a larger-scale mobilization effort.
The Kremlin has already scaled down its objectives in Ukraine (from its initial objective of capturing Kyiv and full regime change) and will likely do so again—or be forced to do so by Ukrainian battlefield successes. Putin will likely seek the complete occupation and securitization of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and large swathes of southern Ukraine, including Mariupol, Zaporizhia, and Kherson, which Russia may then annex. The Kremlin will likely announce sham referendums calling for the independence or ascension to Russia of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories in the coming weeks. The fact that the Kremlin has not yet done so suggests that it may still hope to gain additional territory in Ukraine, or that it has not yet achieved sufficient securitization of occupied areas.
Regardless of any change—or lack thereof—in the Kremlin's objectives, Putin’s speech indicates that the Kremlin has likely decided to maintain its current level of resourcing in the war. That level of investment is unlikely to be sufficient to achieve the Kremlin’s objectives for the current, second phase of the war (capturing the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts and holding its occupied territory in southern Ukraine). However, it is unclear if the Kremlin understands that reality, and the war remains likely to protract
[6] https://tass dot ru/obschestvo/14582197; https://riafan dot ru/23189040-zhiteli_osvobozhdennogo_energodara_smotryat_translyatsiyu_parada_pobedi_v_moskve;
[8] https://www.unian dot net/war/voyna-v-ukraine-2022-okkupanty-otbirayut-dokumenty-u-ukraincev-novosti-vtorzheniya-rossii-na-ukrainu-11818641.html
[9] https://hromadske dot ua/posts/mer-melitopolya-zayaviv-sho-zhiteli-ne-svyatkuyut-9-travnya-z-okupantami-propagandistski-zmi-povidomlyayut-pro-urochistosti; https://www dot unian.net/war/9-maya-rf-svezla-v-melitopol-tysyachi-lyudey-iz-kryma-i-luganska-foto-novosti-vtorzheniya-rossii-na-ukrainu-11819592.html
3. Russia pounds Ukraine's vital port of Odesa, Mariupol plant
Excerpts:
The Ukrainian military said Tuesday that Russian forces fired seven missiles a day earlier from the air at the crucial Black Sea port of Odesa, hitting a shopping center and a warehouse. One person was killed and five were wounded, the military said.
Ukraine alleged at least some of the munitions used dated back to the Soviet era, making them unreliable in targeting. But the Center for Defense Strategies, a Ukrainian think tank tracking the war, said Moscow did use some precision weapons against Odesa: Kinzhal, or “Dagger,” hypersonic air-to-surface missiles.
Russia pounds Ukraine's vital port of Odesa, Mariupol plant
AP · by ELENA BECATOROS and JON GAMBRELL · May 10, 2022
ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (AP) — Russian forces pounded away at the vital port of Odesa, Ukrainian officials said Tuesday, as part of an apparent effort to disrupt supply lines and weapons shipments. On the other end of the southern coast, they hammered a steel plant where Ukrainian fighters are denying Moscow full control of another critical port.
Days after the dramatic rescue of what some officials said were the last civilians trapped at the plant in Mariupol, authorities said about 100 were still believed to be in the network of underground tunnels under bombardment. The strikes come as the grisly toll of the war continued to take shape, with the Ukrainians saying they found the bodies of 44 civilians in the rubble of a building in the northeast that was destroyed weeks ago.
The Ukrainian military said Tuesday that Russian forces fired seven missiles a day earlier from the air at the crucial Black Sea port of Odesa, hitting a shopping center and a warehouse. One person was killed and five were wounded, the military said.
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Ukraine alleged at least some of the munitions used dated back to the Soviet era, making them unreliable in targeting. But the Center for Defense Strategies, a Ukrainian think tank tracking the war, said Moscow did use some precision weapons against Odesa: Kinzhal, or “Dagger,” hypersonic air-to-surface missiles.
Ukrainian, British and American officials warn Russia is rapidly using up its stock of precision weapons and may not be able to quickly build more, raising the risk of more imprecise rockets being used as the conflict grinds on.
Ever since President Vladimir Putin’s forces failed to take Kyiv in the early days of the war, he has said his focus is the country’s eastern industrial heartland of the Donbas — but one general has suggested Moscow’s aims also include cutting Ukraine off from its entire Black Sea coast.
That would give it a swath of territory that would link Russia to both the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized in 2014, and Transnistria, a pro-Russian breakaway region of Moldova.
Even if it falls short in the goal of severing Ukraine from the Black Sea Coast — and it appears to lack the forces to do so — continuing missile strikes on Odesa reflect the city’s importance as a strategic transport hub. The Russian military has repeatedly targeted the city’s airport and claimed that it has destroyed several batches of the Western weapons that have been key to Ukraine’s resistance.
The strikes came the same day Russian President Vladimir Putin marked his country’s biggest patriotic holiday without being able to boast of major new battlefield successes. On Monday, he watched troops march in formation and military hardware roll by in a Victory Day parade on Moscow’s Red Square to celebrate the Soviet Union’s role in the 1945 defeat of Nazi Germany.
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A symbol of Russia’s difficulties is the city of Mariupol, where Russian forces have sought for weeks to end the resistance of Ukrainian defenders making their last stand.
Petro Andryushchenko, advisor to the city’s mayor, estimated in a social-media post that at least 100 civilians remain trapped in underground bunkers in the Azovstal mill. Ukrainian and Russian authorities previously said a convoy over the weekend led a third evacuation of hundreds of civilians from the mill to safety in a government-controlled city.
Separately, Donetsk regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said Tuesday that those civilians were people “that the Russians have not selected” for evacuation. It wasn’t immediately clear how the two officials knew that, and the fighters still at the plant were yet to confirm it.
Earlier, Ukrainian and Russian officials had said all civilians had been evacuated from the plant.
With Russian forces struggling to gain ground in the Donbas, military analysts suggest that hitting Odesa might serve to stoke concern about southwestern Ukraine, thus forcing Kyiv to station more forces there. That would pull them away from the eastern front as its military stages counteroffensives near the city of Kharkiv, aiming to push the Russians back across the border there.
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Kharkiv and the surrounding area has been under sustained Russian attack since the beginning of the war in late February. Dozens of bodies were found in a five-story building that collapsed in March in Izyum, about 120 kilometers (75 miles) from Kharkiv, Oleh Synehubov, the head of the regional administration, said Tuesday in a social media message.
“This is another horrible war crime of the Russian occupiers against the civilian population!” said Synehubov.
Izyum lies on a key route to the eastern industrial region of the Donbas, now the focus of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Synehubov did not say specifically where the building was.
Also Tuesday, the Ukrainian military warned that Russia could target the country’s chemical industries. The claim wasn’t immediately explained in the report. But Russian shelling has previously targeted oil depots and other industrial sites during the war.
Meanwhile, satellite photos showed intense fires in Russian-held territory in southern Ukraine on Monday. A cause for the fires wasn’t immediately clear. However, Planet Labs images showed thick smoke rising to the east of Vasylivka, a city which is flanked by nature preserves.
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Also, satellite pictures analyzed by The Associated Press showed two ships off Ukraine’s Snake Island on Monday afternoon.
One of the ships seen in the images from Planet Labs PBC appeared to be a landing craft. Ukraine has repeatedly struck Russian positions there recently, suggesting Russian forces may be trying to re-staff or remove personnel from the Black Sea island.
In Washington, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan measure to reboot the World War II-era “lend-lease” program, which helped defeat Nazi Germany, to bolster Kyiv and Eastern European allies.
Elsewhere on the diplomatic front, Western powers continued to rally around Kyiv’s embattled government. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock travelled to the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, where the bodies of many civilians were found — some killed at short range — after Russian forces withdrew last month.
The office of French President Emmanuel Macron said he was speaking with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, one of the most Putin-friendly leaders in the European Union, who has resisted calls from many bloc members to ban oil imports from Russia.
___
Gambrell reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Yesica Fisch in Bakhmut, David Keyton in Kyiv, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Mstyslav Chernov in Kharkiv, Lolita C. Baldor in Washington, and AP staff around the world contributed to this report.
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AP · by ELENA BECATOROS and JON GAMBRELL · May 10, 2022
4. Marcos Jr. won Philippine presidency, unofficial count shows
Who would have thought there would be a return of the Marcos family?
Marcos Jr. won Philippine presidency, unofficial count shows
AP · by JIM GOMEZ · May 10, 2022
MANILA, Philippines (AP) — The namesake son of late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos appeared to have been elected Philippine president by a landslide in an astonishing reversal of the 1986 “People Power” pro-democracy revolt that ousted his father.
Marcos Jr. had more than 30.8 million votes in the unofficial results with more than 97% of the votes tabulated as of Tuesday afternoon. His nearest challenger, Vice President Leni Robredo, a champion of human rights, had 14.7 million votes in Monday’s election, and boxing great Manny Pacquiao appeared to have the third highest total with 3.5 million.
His running mate, Sara Duterte, the daughter of the outgoing leader and mayor of southern Davao city, had a formidable lead in the separate vice presidential race.
The alliance of the scions of two authoritarian leaders combined the voting power of their families’ political strongholds in the north and south but compounded worries of human rights activists.
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Dozens of anti-Marcos protesters rallied at the Commission on Elections, blaming the agency for the breakdown of vote-counting machines and other issues that prevented people from casting their votes. Elections officials said the impact of the malfunctioning machines was minimal.
A group of activists, who suffered under the dictatorship said it was enraged by Marcos’s apparent victory and would oppose it.
“A possible win based on a campaign built on blatant lies, historical distortions and mass deception is tantamount to cheating your way to victory,” said the group Campaign Against the Return of the Marcoses and Martial Law, or CARMMA. “This is not acceptable.”
Etta Rosales, a former Commission on Human Rights chairwoman, who was twice arrested and tortured under martial law in the 1970s, said Marcos Jr.’s apparent victory drove her to tears but would not stop her from continuing efforts to hold the Marcoses to account.
“I’m just one among the many who were tortured; others were killed, I was raped. We suffered under the Marcos regime in the fight for justice and freedom and this happens,” Rosales said.
Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte avoided volatile issues during their campaign and steadfastly stuck instead to a battle cry of national unity, even though their fathers’ presidencies opened some of the most turbulent divisions in the country’s history.
Marcos Jr. has not claimed victory but thanked his supporters in a late-night “address to the nation” video, where he urged them to stay vigilant until the vote count is completed.
“If we’ll be fortunate, I’ll expect that your help will not wane, your trust will not wane because we have a lot of things to do in the times ahead,” he said.
Robredo has not conceded defeat but acknowledged the massive Marcos Jr. lead in the unofficial count. She told her supporters the fight for reforms and democracy won’t end with the elections.
“The voice of the people is getting clearer and clearer,” she said. “In the name of the Philippines, which I know you also love so dearly, we should hear this voice because in the end, we only have this one nation to share.”
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She asked her supporters to continue to stand up: “Press for the truth. It took long for the structure of lies to be erected. We have the time and opportunity now to fight and dismantle this.”
The election winner will take office on June 30 for a single, six-year term as leader of a Southeast Asian nation hit hard by two years of COVID-19 outbreaks and lockdowns and long-troubled by crushing poverty, gaping inequalities, Muslim and communist insurgencies and deep political divisions.
The next president will also likely face demands to prosecute outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte for thousands of killings during his anti-drug crackdown — deaths already under investigation by the International Criminal Court.
Amnesty International said it was deeply concerned by Marcos Jr.′ and Sara Duterte’s avoidance of discussing human rights violations, past and present, in the Philippines. “If confirmed, the Marcos Jr administration will face a wide array of urgent human rights challenges,” the rights group said in a statement Tuesday.
Human Rights Watch also called for Marcos Jr., if he takes office, to improve the human rights situation in the Philippines.
“He should declare an end to the ‘war on drugs’ that has resulted in the extrajudicial killing of thousands of Filipinos, and order the impartial investigation and appropriate prosecution of officials responsible for these unlawful killings,” said Phil Robertson, the group’s deputy director for Asia.
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Marcos Jr., a 64-year-old former provincial governor, congressman and senator, has defended the legacy of his father and steadfastly refused to acknowledge and apologize for the massive human rights violations and plunder under his father’s strongman rule.
After his ouster by the largely peaceful 1986 uprising, the elder Marcos died in 1989 while in exile in Hawaii without admitting any wrongdoing, including accusations that he, his family and cronies amassed an estimated $5 billion to $10 billion while he was in power. A Hawaii court later found him liable for human rights violations and awarded $2 billion from his estate to compensate more than 9,000 Filipinos who filed a lawsuit against him for torture, incarceration, extrajudicial killings and disappearances.
His widow, Imelda Marcos, and their children were allowed to return to the Philippines in 1991 and worked on a stunning political comeback, helped by a well-funded social media campaign to refurbish the family name.
AP · by JIM GOMEZ · May 10, 2022
5. What the Marcos' return to power means for the Philippines
Bongbong faces some interesting problems:
So what can we expect from the Marcos presidency? He spoke little about the details of his policy platform while campaigning, which in any case is an unremarkable list of promises, largely to continue the policies of President Duterte.
One obvious concern is what happens to the efforts to recover the money allegedly stolen by the Marcoses when they were last in power.
The Presidential Commission on Good Governance (PCGG), established after the 1986 uprising, has recovered about one third of the $10-15bn of so-called "ill-gotten wealth" - including jewellery, valuable paintings and Imelda's famous shoes - but is officially still pursuing the rest.
Bongbong has suggested that he would widen the PCGG's remit to include other families, but given the limited progress in holding the Marcoses to account while they were out of power, it is hard to imagine much progress now they are back.
There is also the matter of unpaid tax on the Marcos estate - Bongbong was found guilty of failing to file a tax return in 1995.
And there's a verdict in the United States that he is in contempt of court for failing to pay reparations to victims of his father's human rights violations, which will make any official visit to the US, a treaty ally of the Philippines, tricky.
What the Marcos' return to power means for the Philippines
By Jonathan Head
South East Asia correspondent
Published
1 hour ago
History has come full circle in the Philippines.
A ruling family which was driven out of power 36 years ago, accused of spectacular greed and brutality, is all but set to return to the Malacañang - the presidential palace.
It is a stunning blow to those in the Philippines who have campaigned for accountability for the abuses of the old Marcos era. The Marcos family has never apologised for those abuses, nor given back much of the treasure they are accused of stealing from the national purse.
How has Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr done it? And what are the implications for the 110 million people of the Philippines, and for its place in the world?
Lies and distortion
In 1986, public anger towards the Marcos regime saw Ferdinand Marcos and his family toppled and forced out of the Philippines.
But after just five years in exile, the family returned - and immediately began making their way back into political circles.
Bongbong has been almost continually in office since the age of 23, aside from his time abroad. Winning the presidency is something he has been preparing for all his life.
Other members of his family have also held various political offices since they were allowed to return to the Philippines, including his mother Imelda and his older sister Imee. Imelda even contested the presidency just a year after coming back in 1992.
They have also benefitted greatly by aligning themselves with another powerful family, the Dutertes. Rodrigo Duterte is the current president of the Philippines.
This brought together the Marcos' fiefdom in the provinces of Ilocos Norte and Leyte in the north and centre, together with the Duterte's stronghold of Mindanao in the south.
"If I'm going to put a number on it that's at least 50% of the reason he has come this far," says political strategist Alan German. "The Duterte machinery is strong, he is a well-loved president."
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
The Marcos and Duterte families came together in the 2022 election
Then there was the social media campaign to rebrand the old Marcos era - not as a period of martial law, with its terrible human rights abuses, corruption and near-economic collapse - but as a golden age of crime-free prosperity.
This began at least a decade ago, with hundreds of deceptively-edited videos being uploaded to Youtube, which were then reposted on sympathetic Facebook pages.
These persuaded millions of Filipinos that the vilification of the Marcoses after their downfall was unfair, that the stories of unrivalled greed were untrue.
"There's a spectrum of lies and distortion in these videos," says Fatima Gaw at the University of the Philippines Department of Communications Research.
"There is outright denial of the atrocities of the martial era. There's also a lot of distortion, claims of economic progress during the so-called golden years of the Philippines, by cherry picking particular details."
And then there are the myths, widely believed in poorer parts of the Philippines, that the Marcoses do indeed hold vast wealth in offshore accounts or hidden stashes of gold bullion, but that these are being kept to benefit the Filipino people once they are restored to power.
Collaborative fact-checking venture Tsek.ph found that up to the end of April, 92% of online disinformation about the Marcos campaign was in its favour, whereas 96% about his main rival, Vice President Leni Robredo, was negative - including some nasty slanders against her.
But the pro-Marcos disinformation campaign has also benefited from widespread public disappointment over the failure of the post-1986 administrations to bring significant improvements to the lives of poorer Filipinos.
Bongbong has successfully portrayed himself as the candidate for change, promising happiness and unity to a country weary of years of political polarisation and pandemic hardship, and hungry for a better story.
By staying away from all the presidential debates and refusing media interviews, he avoided having his family's record challenged, and was able to maintain the illusion of harmony, despite millions remaining opposed to his presidency.
The fact that he faced so many rivals was also a significant advantage. The anti-Marcos vote was divided among nine candidates, and the strongest among them, Leni Robredo, declared late, giving her unusually spirited campaign little time to counter the powerful Marcos narrative.
The fate of democracy
So what can we expect from the Marcos presidency? He spoke little about the details of his policy platform while campaigning, which in any case is an unremarkable list of promises, largely to continue the policies of President Duterte.
One obvious concern is what happens to the efforts to recover the money allegedly stolen by the Marcoses when they were last in power.
The Presidential Commission on Good Governance (PCGG), established after the 1986 uprising, has recovered about one third of the $10-15bn of so-called "ill-gotten wealth" - including jewellery, valuable paintings and Imelda's famous shoes - but is officially still pursuing the rest.
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
Imelda Marcos' infamous shoe collection
Bongbong has suggested that he would widen the PCGG's remit to include other families, but given the limited progress in holding the Marcoses to account while they were out of power, it is hard to imagine much progress now they are back.
There is also the matter of unpaid tax on the Marcos estate - Bongbong was found guilty of failing to file a tax return in 1995.
And there's a verdict in the United States that he is in contempt of court for failing to pay reparations to victims of his father's human rights violations, which will make any official visit to the US, a treaty ally of the Philippines, tricky.
His partnership with the Dutertes will also be watched closely.
Bongbong has promised to continue President Duterte's controversial anti-drug campaign, but hinted that he would support less violent methods.
Sara Duterte, the president's daughter, is near-certain to win the vice-presidency, and her own popularity makes her a likely presidential candidate in 2028.
But President Duterte has not formally endorsed Marcos, nor is his relationship with his daughter always smooth.
The vice-president is elected separately from the president, and Ms Duterte may wish to use her position to propel her own political career.
However the post carries little power compared to that of the president. While formally allied in the campaign, they will need to agree on how to divide the spoils of office.
But there are some bigger questions.
How much corruption - always a problem in the Philippines - will there be under a family with the reputation of the Marcoses?
And perhaps the greatest concern will be over the fate of democracy and civil rights, both of which suffered under President Duterte.
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
Mr Duterte's administration has been condemned for its brutality
How will Bongbong deal with opposition to a Marcos administration? How free will the media be to keep investigating his family's past?
The Marcos campaign's open hostility to all but the most friendly media outlets is not an encouraging sign.
Voters in the Philippines have long shown a partiality to strongman rule, to roguish characters who promise to dispense with the messy compromises of democracy and get things done.
That explains the election of Joseph Estrada in 1998, and more recently in the 2016 of Mr Duterte, who made no secret of his impatience with democratic norms.
Bongbong Marcos does not have that kind of charisma, but he has run largely on refashioned memories of the strongman rule of his father.
His social media campaign has proved so successful there are fears this will now be the model for future elections in the Philippines, with the mainstream media sidelined, and a blizzard of fact-free narratives competing online.
His family's return to power also neatly bookends the optimistic age of globalisation. This arguably began when the US refused to support his autocratic father in the waning years of the Cold War, inspiring pro-democracy movements across the world.
It has now come to an end with the war in Ukraine, the breakdown of China-US relations, and the rise of populist leaders riding a tsunami of social media disinformation.
6. The Biggest Reason Russia’s Military Is Struggling
It is interesting to see The Atlantic touting the importance of air power.
Excerpts:
Airpower is potentially decisive in any war, but difficult to wield effectively. Air forces are dependent on an array of technologies that require highly trained personnel who can quickly set up what amounts to an airborne military ecosystem: airborne radar stations to provide command and control, fighters to protect and police the skies, refueling aircraft to keep everyone full of gas, electronic-warfare planes to keep enemy defenses suppressed, and a range of intelligence-gatherers and attack aircraft to locate and destroy enemy forces. These sorts of combined operations involve hundreds of aircraft and thousands of people in a tightly choreographed dance that takes a lifetime to master. But when managed correctly, these overlapping operations allow a military to dominate the skies, making life much easier for the ground or naval forces below.
...
The coming weeks will reveal whether the Russians have the capability to learn from their mistakes and take better advantage of their still-massive numerical superiority in aircraft. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, will soon see their offensive air capabilities grow. Their newest drones may be enabling better long-range artillery targeting. On April 30, Ukrainian artillery fire seemed to come close to hitting General Valery Gerasimov, the Russian chief of the general staff, while he was visiting the front. The Ukrainians are receiving even more advanced systems, including new Switchblade and Phoenix Ghost drones, which have the capability of lingering over enemy positions for some time before being used to destroy vehicles.
As long as the airspace over the field of battle remains contested, the Ukrainians will be able to improve and expand their use of airpower. They may not win the war outright. But they’ve already revolutionized how the next ones will be fought.
The Biggest Reason Russia’s Military Is Struggling
Russia has failed to understand the importance of airpower.
The Atlantic · by Phillips Payson O’Brien, Edward Stringer · May 9, 2022
Airpower should have been one of Russia’s greatest advantages over Ukraine. With almost 4,000 combat aircraft and extensive experience bombing targets in Syria, Georgia, and Chechnya, Russia’s air force was expected to play a vital role in the invasion, allowing the Russian army to plunge deep into Ukraine, seize Kyiv, and destroy the Ukrainian military. But more than two months into the war, Vladimir Putin’s air force is still fighting for control of the skies.
The Russian air force’s failure is perhaps the most important, but least discussed, story of the military conflict so far. Ukrainian forces showed surprising strength in the air war, and adapted as the fighting progressed. But either side of this war could still gain air supremacy—and fundamentally change the course of the conflict.
Airpower is potentially decisive in any war, but difficult to wield effectively. Air forces are dependent on an array of technologies that require highly trained personnel who can quickly set up what amounts to an airborne military ecosystem: airborne radar stations to provide command and control, fighters to protect and police the skies, refueling aircraft to keep everyone full of gas, electronic-warfare planes to keep enemy defenses suppressed, and a range of intelligence-gatherers and attack aircraft to locate and destroy enemy forces. These sorts of combined operations involve hundreds of aircraft and thousands of people in a tightly choreographed dance that takes a lifetime to master. But when managed correctly, these overlapping operations allow a military to dominate the skies, making life much easier for the ground or naval forces below.
Unfortunately for the Russians, the recent modernization of the Russian air force, although intended to enable it to conduct modern combined operations, was mostly for show. The Russians wasted money and effort on corruption and inefficiency. Though much was made of the flashy new equipment, such as the much-hyped SU-34 strike aircraft, the Russian air force continues to suffer from flawed logistics operations and the lack of regular, realistic training. Above all, the autocratic Russian kleptocracy does not trust low-ranking and middle-ranking officers, and so cannot allow the imaginative, flexible decision making that NATO air forces rely upon.
All this meant that when the invasion started, the Russian air force was incapable of running a well-thought-out, complex campaign. Instead of working to control the skies, Russia’s air force has mostly provided air support to ground troops or bombed Ukrainian cities. In this it has followed the traditional tactics of a continental power that privileges land forces. Focusing on ground troops can work if you have almost endless numbers of soldiers and are prepared to lose them. But so wedded is Russia to its history of successes on the ground that it fails to understand the importance of airpower.
“Russia has never fully appreciated the use of airpower beyond support to ground forces,” David A. Deptula, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant general, told us. “As a result, Russia, in all its wars, has never conceived of or run a strategic air campaign.”
Russian aircraft are instead left flying their straightforward missions, many of which use single aircraft without the mutual support from combined air operations that would be expected in an advanced NATO air force. The pilots are given a target; fly in quickly to attack it, in many cases relying on unguided munitions to try to hit their target; and then fly out and try to not get shot down. They are not allowed to act flexibly within their commanders’ intent to achieve a mission. They have task orders and they execute them, come what may. Even Russia’s vaunted intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities seem surprisingly weak. Rarely do Russian forces seem capable of identifying possible Ukrainian targets and deploying air assets to attack them swiftly enough to make a difference.
Of course, the most important reason for the failure of Russian airpower, and the evident caution of Russian pilots, has been Ukrainian opposition. Unlike their enemy, the Ukrainians have developed a coherent concept of air operations, one that has allowed them to block what looked like an easy path to Russian air dominance.
The Ukrainians have integrated a range of air and anti-air capabilities to stymie the much larger Russian air force. Starting with cheap, handheld, portable surface-to-air missiles, the Ukrainians have been able to restrict Russian airpower to a few eastern and southern areas, greatly limiting Russian freedom of maneuver. The addition of much more potent, and longer-range, S-300 missile systems from Slovakia makes the Russians even more vulnerable. The threat of the S-300s forces individual Russian aircraft, which generally lack refueling, electronic-warfare, and command-and-control support, to fly low to the ground to screen themselves from attack. This, in turn, makes them more vulnerable to the handheld surface-to-air missiles. Ukraine cannot target every Russian aircraft, but it has cleverly used what it has to ensure that Russian pilots worry they might be targeted anywhere, forcing them to behave more defensively and reducing their effectiveness.
Ukraine’s ability to contest its airspace has not only provided protection to its own forces but also allowed it to occasionally go on the offensive. Early in the war, the Ukrainians were able to use Turkish-made Bayraktar drones to attack some high-value targets. The Ukrainians have also used drones to identify and destroy Russian ground-to-air missiles, making Russian ground forces more vulnerable to attack from above.
The Ukrainians have also shown a far greater ability than the Russians to use their limited airpower resources creatively. The sinking of the Russian Black Sea flagship Moskva, which stunned the world, seems to have come about through a clever double punch. Ukrainian officials have claimed that they used an unmanned aerial vehicle to distract the Moskva’s anti-air capabilities, then launched their homegrown Neptune anti-ship missiles before the confused Russian crew could react.
This inventive use of airpower reveals that the Ukrainians might even have a more sophisticated understanding of air operations than even many NATO countries, which take their dominance of the air for granted. What the Ukrainians have done—contesting the skies against a richer, more powerful enemy on the cheap—is extremely difficult. The West has much to learn from Ukraine’s successes, Deptula told us. “We have become so dominant in the air that we have never had to think through how we would use airpower if we were the inferior force,” he said. “Ukraine is posing us some very interesting questions that we should seriously consider, if only to understand how a clever opponent would take us on.”
The coming weeks will reveal whether the Russians have the capability to learn from their mistakes and take better advantage of their still-massive numerical superiority in aircraft. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, will soon see their offensive air capabilities grow. Their newest drones may be enabling better long-range artillery targeting. On April 30, Ukrainian artillery fire seemed to come close to hitting General Valery Gerasimov, the Russian chief of the general staff, while he was visiting the front. The Ukrainians are receiving even more advanced systems, including new Switchblade and Phoenix Ghost drones, which have the capability of lingering over enemy positions for some time before being used to destroy vehicles.
As long as the airspace over the field of battle remains contested, the Ukrainians will be able to improve and expand their use of airpower. They may not win the war outright. But they’ve already revolutionized how the next ones will be fought.
The Atlantic · by Phillips Payson O’Brien, Edward Stringer · May 9, 2022
7. SOF News Update - May 10, 2022 | SOF News
SOF News Update - May 10, 2022 | SOF News
Curated news, analysis, and commentary about special operations, national security, and conflicts around the world.
Photo: Members of Greek Special Forces (SOF) prepare for Exercise Orion 22 as they jump from the ramp of a Greek Air Force C-130 aircraft during airborne operation over a coastal area near Elefsina, Greece, March 30, 2022. Exercise Orion reinforces Greece as a regional SOF leader, enhances interoperability across multiple domains, and strengthens relationships with NATO and non-NATO partners. The exercise focuses on highlighting operational capabilities, international collaborations and conventional and hybrid warfare training. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Hannah Hawkins)
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SOF News
SOFIC 2022. The annual Special Operations Forces Industry Conference will be held in Tampa, Florida from May 16-19, 2022. The event features the latest in SOF equipment and capabilities from over 400 companies in the exhibit hall. There are a host of speakers from the United States Special Operations command and industry experts that will provide presentations as well as engage in discussions in panel events. https://www.sofic.org/
Pentagon Bureaucracy and USSOCOM. The Special Operations Forces Digital Applications program office is bypassing the traditional DoD bureaucracy to field software such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) at a rapid pace. In existence for over two years, the SDA has done well. “Special Ops Software Office Takes on Pentagon Bureaucracy”, National Defense Magazine, May 9, 2022.
SOCOM and IT. United States Special Operations Command is incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning into its digital world. SOCOM’s efforts in this area is having benefits for the Department of Defense as well. Technologies that are unique to the special operations communities soon are used across the department. “SOCOM Technologies Blaze Trails for Others in Defense”, The Cyber Edge, May 1, 2022.
International SOF
Two NATO SOF Units Almost Fought Each Other in the 1990s. In early 1996, Greek and Turkish special operations forces came very close to fighting each other over a pair of small Aegean islands. (Business Insider, May 8, 2022).
SOF History
Maj Gen “Swede” Svendsen Remembered. An Air Force officer who served in three wars once served with the 1st Air Commando Wing in Vietnam. His career is detailed in “What’s in a Photo?”, Air Force’s Personnel Center, May 9, 2022.
Soldier of Fortune Magazine. In the 1970s, one of the more interesting print journals available for members of Special Forces was Soldier of Fortune Magazine. The magazine provided stories of the Vietnam War, elite units of the U.S. military like the Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces, and covered conflict areas in Africa, Central and South American, and around the world. If you entered the ‘team room’ of an SF detachment, you would likely find Soldier of Fortune magazine on a shelf or or table. The magazine no longer has a print edition but maintains a presence online. The magazine publisher is turning the enterprise over to a new publisher. “Soldier of Fortune Founder Robert K. Brown Passes the Torch to New Publisher After 47 Years”, SOFMAG.com, May 6, 2022.
National Security
H&K MP5. One of the most recognized and popular sub-machine guns ever is the MP5. One of its first uses took place in 1977 at the airport in Mogadishu, Somalia, when members of the West German counterterrorism unit GSG-9 rescued 91 passengers and crew on the hijacked Lufthansa Flight 181. A few years later the British SAS would use the weapon when doing the hostage rescue at the Iranian Embassy in London. “Meet the Heckler & Koch MP5: The Most Popular Submachine Gun Ever?”, 1945, May 9, 2022.
Report on Cyber Incidents. For more than 20 years cyber-enabled espionage against the United States has been a challenge and the future seems likely to see more and more of these challenges. A recent report examines recent cyber attacks by Russia and China against the U.S. and our governments response to the cyber threat. The publication provides four general recommendations. Read Many Hands in the Cookie Jar, RAND Corporation, May 2022, PDF, 52 pages.
Anti-Terrorism and Cyberspace. One of the most crucial missions performed by intelligence services is the fight against jihadist terrorism on the internet. But the effort has little publicity and is mostly fought behind the curtains. The United States Cyber Command has acknowledged publicly that it is conducting offensive operations in cyberspace to combat the Islamic State and other jihadist terrorist organizations. “How to Erode Terrorists’ Trust in Cyberspace: The Role of Intelligence Services”, Homeland Security Today, May 9, 2022.
Russia, Europe, NATO, and Ukraine
Putin’s Victory Day Speech. Every year on May 9th Russia celebrates the Soviet Union’s victory over Germany at the end of World War II. There were some worries and speculation on what the President of Russia would be saying this year. Some thought he would take the occasion to declare victory in Ukraine, call on a general mobilization for a general war in Ukraine, or make threats to escalate the confrontation between Russia and NATO nations. None of this seems to have taken place. “In Speech, Putin Shows Reluctance in Demanding Too Much of Russians”, The New York Times, May 9, 2022. (subscription)
GRU Takes Lead from FSB. At the start of the invasion of Ukraine, the Fifth Service of the Federal Security Service (FSB) provided Putin with intelligence on Ukraine and had a leading role in the invasion preparation. The FSB is now being sidelined with the emergence of the GRU in the Ukrainian War effort. The man heading up the GRU’s activities in Ukraine started out his career in the GRU with the 14th Directorate – leading the Spetsnaz, the paramilitary arm of the agency. Read more in “The Shadow War: Putin Strips Spies of Ukraine Role”, Europe’s Edge, May 9, 2022.
Scandinavian Non-Alignment. For decades two northern European countries have maintained a neutral stance in the confrontation between western European powers and the Soviet Union (and then Russia). The aggressive actions of Russia over the past two decades, and now the invasion of Ukraine, have swayed both Sweden and Finland to reconsider their positions. “The end of Nordic neutrality”, The Strategist, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, May 5, 2022.
Task Force Yankee in Ukraine. There are various non-government organizations in the U.S. and Europe assisting Ukraine with medical supplies, humanitarian aid, and other means to resist the invasion of Ukraine. Some news articles about these organizations are publishing inaccurate accounts of the activities of these organizations. One of these groups is Task Force Yankee. Read more in “Task Force Yankee: ‘We Are Not a Mercenary Group”, SOFREP, May 9, 2022.
Afghanistan
Afghan Adjustment Act (AAA). There is a big push by various organizations that are helping Afghans who fled Afghanistan during the August 2021 non-combatant evacuation operation (NEO) at Kabul airport and afterwards who are now in the United States and others who still wish to leave Afghanistan. Over 70,000 Afghans who entered the U.S. shortly after the fall of the government and Taliban takeover were given Humanitarian Parole. Now there is an effort to have language inserted into the Ukraine Supplemental bill currently being considered in Congress to assist these Afghans and many thousands of others who wish to come to the United States. The Afghan Adjustment Act provides a pathway to citizenship for the many currently resettled in the U.S. There are various versions of the legislative text that goes much further. Some veteran organizations are endorsing the AAA. But some are not; displeased with a lack of transparency on the bill and some inadequacies in what the bill does. The Moral Compass Federation, a group representing 18 SOF-focused veteran organizations involved in the Afghan evac effort, has come out against the AAA.
Africa
White Mercenaries in Africa. Paramilitary groups have increased their presence and influence in many countries in Africa over the past few decades. Governments have found their militaries have been unable to cope with bandits and insurgents, and are now relying on private contractors to provide security. One of the more active organizations is the Wagner Group, a group that has a close association with Russian intelligence agencies. “White Hands: The rise of private armies in Africa conflicts”, Alazeera, April 28, 2022.
Niger Replacing Mali as Western Ally? France and its European partners are leaving Mali due to increasing anti-French sentiment and military takeover of the Mali government. The redeployment of two French-led CT missions – Operation Barkhane and Task Force Takuba (European SOF) – from Mali is taking place. However, the decade long struggle against jihadists continues. Niger is stepping up – offering the Europeans a space to operate against the terrorist groups that are found in the Sahel. “Analysis: Can Niger become the main Western ally in the Sahel?”, Aljazeera, May 9, 2022.
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SOF News welcomes the submission of articles for publication. If it is related to special operations, current conflicts, national security, or defense then we are interested.
Podcasts, Videos, and Movies
Podcast – That Post-West Point CEO Life. A retired SOF West Point alum discusses life after wearing the U.S. Army uniform. Hear about some world class information for anyone entering the civilian workplace with military experience. Pineland Underground Podcast, USAJFKSWCS, April 29, 2022.
Video – The First Green Beret in Afghanistan | Justin Sapp. After the 9/11 attacks, small CIA paramilitary teams were secreted into Afghanistan to pave the way for a larger Special Forces deployment. Amongst them was Green Beret Justin Sapp who was the first U.S. Special Forces soldier to infiltrate into Afghanistan. The Team House, April 29, 2022, YouTube.
Video – AFSOC Heritage Week 2022. The Air Force Special Operations Command celebrates its history with events and flyovers at Hurlburt Field, Florida, during the week of April 18-22, 2022. Watch a quick 2-minute video with flyovers and speeches celebrating the occasion. DVIDS, April 28, 2022, 2 minutes.
Chris Pratt – Navy SEAL. Well, maybe not in real life, but the action movie star plays one in an upcoming series to air on Prime Video July 1st. The Terminal List is based on a book by the same name. (Entertainment, May 9, 2022).
SOF News is not a ‘money making’ enterprise; but we do have administrative, operating, and publishing expenses. Individuals and businesses provide the funds to defray these expenses. Their contributions are deeply appreciated. Learn how you can support SOF News.
8. Don’t Cling to Hopes That Putin Will Ever Face Justice
Excerpts:
There is no established playbook for making a pariah out of a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. Nor will it be easy to sideline the world’s top oil exporter. But this is a more promising route to accountability than compiling evidence of atrocities in the vain hope there will someday be a venue capable of prosecuting Putin and his lieutenants.
First and foremost, aggressively enforced sanctions have the potential to hobble the Russian war machine. The debacle in Ukraine has already exposed the deficiencies of Moscow’s efforts to build a first-rate military. Enduring sanctions could put that objective permanently out of reach, by depriving Russia both of capital to invest in its armed forces and, perhaps more importantly, of access to Western technology, such as microprocessors for precision-guided weapons.
Rather than a dubious strategy of deterring Putin from renewed aggression in Europe, this approach seeks to deprive him of the means to intimidate his neighbors in the first place. As a pariah wielding only depleted and dilapidated armed forces, Putin will never achieve his vision of restoring Russian imperial greatness.
Of course, Putin’s own champagne-and-caviar lifestyle is unlikely to be affected by sanctions, including on luxury goods. In that regard, sanctions will never be as satisfying as seeing him stew in a prison in The Hague. The problem is that we can’t always get the justice we want. Yet enduring restraints on Russian military strength and strategic influence are a punishment that fits the crime and reduces the risk of committing another. That may just be the justice we need.
Don’t Cling to Hopes That Putin Will Ever Face Justice
The system for prosecuting war crimes is broken—but focusing on sanctions could work.
By David Adesnik, a senior fellow and the director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
The White House has made an ironclad commitment to holding Russian President Vladimir Putin accountable for the atrocities his forces have committed in Ukraine. But don’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen. That’s because the Biden administration clings to wishful thinking about war crimes accountability: that leaders can be made to face justice for war crimes using international tribunals and other legal mechanisms, like the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders and the tribunal in The Hague faced by deposed Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.
But successful prosecution remains a rare exception. The system for prosecuting crimes against humanity has failed in case after case: In Myanmar, the Biden administration has determined that the military junta is committing genocide against its Rohingya minority—but there is little hope of bringing the perpetrators to justice. In Ethiopia’s Tigray region, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, atrocities amount to “ethnic cleansing”—but those words have had no consequence. In China, more than a million Uyghurs languish in concentration camps. There is little hope for accountability in any of these cases.
Yet nowhere is the failure of the system for bringing war criminals to justice more visible than in Syria. Putin and his proxy, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, have demonstrated their impunity despite committing horrific war crimes against the civilian population, including the use of chemical weapons, targeting of hospitals and clinics, and obliteration of entire cities and neighborhoods. Ten years of brutal ongoing war have shown the deficiency of the process U.S. President Joe Biden and his administration hope to apply to Ukraine now.
The White House has made an ironclad commitment to holding Russian President Vladimir Putin accountable for the atrocities his forces have committed in Ukraine. But don’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen. That’s because the Biden administration clings to wishful thinking about war crimes accountability: that leaders can be made to face justice for war crimes using international tribunals and other legal mechanisms, like the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders and the tribunal in The Hague faced by deposed Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.
But successful prosecution remains a rare exception. The system for prosecuting crimes against humanity has failed in case after case: In Myanmar, the Biden administration has determined that the military junta is committing genocide against its Rohingya minority—but there is little hope of bringing the perpetrators to justice. In Ethiopia’s Tigray region, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, atrocities amount to “ethnic cleansing”—but those words have had no consequence. In China, more than a million Uyghurs languish in concentration camps. There is little hope for accountability in any of these cases.
Yet nowhere is the failure of the system for bringing war criminals to justice more visible than in Syria. Putin and his proxy, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, have demonstrated their impunity despite committing horrific war crimes against the civilian population, including the use of chemical weapons, targeting of hospitals and clinics, and obliteration of entire cities and neighborhoods. Ten years of brutal ongoing war have shown the deficiency of the process U.S. President Joe Biden and his administration hope to apply to Ukraine now.
That doesn’t mean the idea of holding Putin accountable is hopeless. Sanctions and diplomatic isolation have greater promise as vehicles of accountability, not least because they deprive their targets of the resources that fuel aggression and atrocities. Already, Russia is reportedly running short of precision weapons such as cruise missiles, whose manufacture relies on Western technology. Comprehensive sanctions may ensure that Putin never again has armed forces strong enough to unleash on his European neighbors.
Western leaders will have to shift focus on how to pursue accountability—and recognize that judicial approaches are likely to fail.
The most formidable challenge to sanctions as a vehicle for accountability is maintaining the will to enforce and refine them as the target adapts. In Syria, for example, the Western commitment to punishing Assad was intermittent at best—and has now diminished to a point where Damascus was able to begin a process of diplomatic rehabilitation.
Before tackling the challenge of how to get sanctions right, Western leaders will have to shift focus on how to pursue accountability—and recognize that judicial approaches are likely to fail. Sadly, that recognition still seems a long way off. When the Russian withdrawal from the Ukrainian town of Bucha exposed evidence of massacres, Biden called for “a war crime trial.” When Blinken told reporters at a press conference, “I can say with conviction that there will be accountability for any war crimes that are determined to have occurred” in Ukraine, he got some well-deserved pushback. “How can you say that after Aleppo and Grozny?” one of the journalists shot back, “[Putin] does it repeatedly.” Blinken did not have a concrete answer, responding, “I hope you’ll take me at my word.”
Reporters have continued to ask variations of the same question. In response, the White House and State Department have begun to emphasize their cooperation with the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), the International Criminal Court (ICC), and various nongovernmental organizations that are working to collect evidence of war crimes in Ukraine. To be sure, these efforts are important, because they solidify the moral foundation for punishing war criminals and may provide rare moments of catharsis and validation to their victims. But the record is sobering. Similar efforts in Syria were never able to touch Assad or his principal enablers in Moscow and Tehran, whose forces participated directly in numerous atrocities.
One reason using international institutions to hold Putin accountable will be difficult is Russia’s power within them. Moscow has vetoed 16 resolutions on Syria in the U.N. Security Council, including several that had no concrete consequence beyond criticizing the Assad regime. That didn’t keep U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield from declaring in late February that “Russia cannot, and will not, veto accountability.”
This kind of aspirational rhetoric from the administration is a recipe for disappointment given the history of failed efforts to bring perpetrators to justice. When that disappointment inevitably sets in, it makes the search for accountability look like a futile distraction, which in turn lowers the bar for reengaging with the perpetrators. That is the story of the Biden administration’s Syria policy.
A month after Biden’s inauguration, Blinken committed to “putting human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy.” On Syria, State Department officials pledged to seek accountability and enforce the Caesar Act, a sanctions law that Congress passed with bipartisan majorities in 2019. The law’s passage put investors, especially from the Persian Gulf states, on notice that sanctions awaited those who participated in Assad’s reconstruction plans. Although Emirati leaders continued to probe Washington’s commitment to isolating Damascus, Assad got none of the Gulf capital he was hoping for.
In addition to the new sanctions, the Syrian regime suffered two major economic blows in 2020. The first was the COVID-19 pandemic; the second was the collapse of the Lebanese banking system, which held tens of billions of dollars’ worth of Syrian deposits. A major regime offensive in northwest Syria ground to a halt in March 2020 and never resumed, although low-level fighting persists.
Thus, the Biden administration inherited a situation where Assad was already on the defensive. Nonetheless, within six months of taking office, the Biden administration reversed its policy of isolating the regime. The White House informed key Arab allies, including Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, that it welcomed their efforts to include Damascus in a pair of regional energy deals that would earn tens of millions dollars for the Assad regime. As daily electricity blackouts were adding to Lebanon’s misery amid a severe economic crisis, there was even a humanitarian rationale for allowing Assad to cash in.
Blinken sought to persuade reporters that U.S. policy on Assad’s war crimes had not changed, yet Arab governments had no trouble reading between the lines that they had a green light for business as usual with the Syrian regime. The New York Times reported that, according to an interview with an unnamed senior Biden administration official, “it was clear that Mr. al-Assad had survived and that sanctions had yielded few concessions, so the administration preferred to focus on other issues.” Despite sanctions, Assad still enjoyed a steady supply of crude oil from Iran and rapidly growing revenue from drug trafficking. If the United States and its allies did not adapt along with Assad and his patrons, there was no reason to expect concessions.
Sadly, the Biden administration’s turn from accountability to normalization offers a preview of likely Western policy toward Russia once the current outrage subsides. Right now, Western anger seems unquenchable as reports of executions, mass graves, and gang rapes pour out of Ukraine. But that was also the case after a chemical weapons massacre left 1,400 Syrians dead in the Damascus suburbs in 2013. Assad waited for the Western temper to pass—and resumed his chemical attacks on civilians.
Imagine Ukraine six months from now. The war has settled into a punishing stalemate. Russian forces cannot advance, but their artillery and rocket attacks continue to kill civilians, while starvation exhausts towns under siege. The burden of hosting millions of refugees begins to weigh on Europe. Moscow says it will negotiate peace—but only if Western sanctions are lifted. Wouldn’t such an offer tempt the White House? Peace would come with immediate humanitarian benefits. Kyiv might resist, but, without U.S. support, Ukrainians cannot keep fighting.
Enduring restraints on Russian military strength and strategic influence are a punishment that fits the crime and reduces the risk of committing another.
Yet a pivotal lesson of the war in Syria is that impunity leads to even greater suffering in the future. The task is therefore not to trade sanctions for peace but to build a sustainable sanctions regime that the United States and its allies are prepared to enforce consistently and vigorously for several years or even a decade. The U.S. Treasury Department and its European counterparts will have to staff up to stay one step ahead of the Kremlin’s finance professionals, who are already well practiced in illicitly evading sanctions. Given the lack of any realistic perspective for Putin to face justice, sanctions and isolation are the only way to punish his regime.
Learning from the Syrian debacle, the United States and its allies should also be prepared to encounter growing opposition to sanctions—including on humanitarian grounds—as outrage subsides. For now, Biden is proud to say that Russia’s “economy is on track to be cut in half in the coming years.” In practice, that means impoverishing millions of Russians who have no say in what their government does in Ukraine. A sustainable sanctions policy depends on a firm belief that protecting Russia’s neighbors from brutal attacks, reducing the risk of future bloody wars in Europe, and holding the Kremlin accountable takes precedence over sparing the Russian people from the sanctions’ effects.
The Biden administration, in concert with allies, should also launch a long-term campaign to expel Russia from international organizations or marginalize it when expulsion proves impracticable. Voting Russia off the UNHRC was a small first step in the right direction. Next, Russia should face suspension from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, whose rules it has flagrantly violated. A country that bombs hospitals also has no place on the executive board of the World Health Organization. Across the U.N. system, the United States and its allies and supporters should block the election or appointment of Putin regime officials to leadership positions.
Putin and his cabinet should become personae non grata. Russian participation in summits with U.S. or European leaders should be out of the question unless Putin makes a credible commitment to repair the damage he has done in Ukraine and elsewhere.
There is no established playbook for making a pariah out of a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. Nor will it be easy to sideline the world’s top oil exporter. But this is a more promising route to accountability than compiling evidence of atrocities in the vain hope there will someday be a venue capable of prosecuting Putin and his lieutenants.
First and foremost, aggressively enforced sanctions have the potential to hobble the Russian war machine. The debacle in Ukraine has already exposed the deficiencies of Moscow’s efforts to build a first-rate military. Enduring sanctions could put that objective permanently out of reach, by depriving Russia both of capital to invest in its armed forces and, perhaps more importantly, of access to Western technology, such as microprocessors for precision-guided weapons.
Rather than a dubious strategy of deterring Putin from renewed aggression in Europe, this approach seeks to deprive him of the means to intimidate his neighbors in the first place. As a pariah wielding only depleted and dilapidated armed forces, Putin will never achieve his vision of restoring Russian imperial greatness.
Of course, Putin’s own champagne-and-caviar lifestyle is unlikely to be affected by sanctions, including on luxury goods. In that regard, sanctions will never be as satisfying as seeing him stew in a prison in The Hague. The problem is that we can’t always get the justice we want. Yet enduring restraints on Russian military strength and strategic influence are a punishment that fits the crime and reduces the risk of committing another. That may just be the justice we need.
9. Russian brags of using horrific torture methods on Ukrainian civilians
More on the evil nature of the Russian security services and military. This is graphic and gruesome.
Russian brags of using horrific torture methods on Ukrainian civilians
'I like it so much, mum': Russian brags about using '21 roses' FSB torture method of slicing open Ukrainians' fingers, toes and penis to his mother... who says she would have 'liked it too'
- The soldier was identified as Konstantin Solovyov of Russian 11th Army Corps
- He told his mother of barbaric torture methods used on Ukrainian civilians
- Their phonecall was intercepted by the intelligence arm of Ukraine's MoD
- The pair laughed as Solovyov recounted skin-crawling incidents of torture
- WARNING: Graphic content
PUBLISHED: 16:33 BST, 9 May 2022 | UPDATED: 19:48 BST, 9 May 2022
Daily Mail · by David Averre For Mailonline · May 9, 2022
Disturbing audio has emerged of a phonecall between a Russian machine gunner and his mother who took great pleasure in laughing about the torture and murder of Ukrainian civilians.
The call, intercepted and published by the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine's Ministry of Defence, was shared by a soldier of Russia's 11th Army Corps - identified as Konstantin Solovyov - and his mother Tatiana Solovyova.
After a brief exchange of small talk and jokes about taking food from local villagers near Kharkiv, Solovyov quickly begins describing, in graphic detail, a variety of heinous torture methods used by members of Russia's security service (FSB).
Some of the tactics included the '21 roses' - stripping the skin back from a man's fingers, toes and penis like the petals of a flower - and the 'barrel' method, when a line of barbed wire is inserted into a prisoner's anus via a tube before being slowly and painstakingly ripped back out.
Solovyov, whose unit is deployed near the eastern front in Kharkiv according to Ukraine's MoD, also explained how he and his colleagues in the FSB beat an old man to death for taking photos of Russian troop positions, and excitedly recounted conversations he shared with a prisoner whose legs he had broken to prevent him from running away.
When asked by his mother whether he enjoyed taking part in the torture, the soldier replied: 'I like it... I don't know.'
Incredibly, Tatiana responded in kind: 'I always told you that, in principle, I'm holding myself back. If I had ended up there I would also be enjoying it. We're the same.'
The call, intercepted and published by the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine's Ministry of Defence, was shared by a soldier of Russia's 11th Army Corps - identified as Konstantin Solovyov (pictured) - and his mother Tatiana Solovyova
When asked by his mother whether he enjoyed taking part in the torture of Ukrainian civilians, the soldier replied: ' I like it... I don't know.' Incredibly, Tatiana (pictured) responded in kind: ' I always told you that, in principle, I'm holding myself back. If I had ended up there I would also be enjoying it. We're the same'
An elderly lady gets assisted while crossing the Irpin river, under a bridge that was destroyed, as civilians flee the town of Irpin, Ukraine, Saturday, March 5, 2022
Alla, 42, hugs her son Savelii, 10, as she stands next to the grave of her husband Ihor Krotkih, on May 1, 2022 in Irpin, Ukraine. Ihor Krotkih was a Ukrainian soldier who was killed during the Russian occupation of Irpin
A new grave for people killed during Russia's invasion of Ukraine, is seen at a cemetery in Irpin, Kyiv region, Ukraine April 19, 2022
Solovyov also said he felt 'not a smidge of regret' for his harrowing crimes, alleging Ukrainian forces would do the same in his position and because some of the captives did not give into their torturers.
He later added: 'I'm not even feeling remorse anymore. After more than 20 [murders], I stopped feeling anything.'
Tatiana meanwhile appears to offer her full support for her son's war crimes, at one stage of the conversation directing an expletive-laden tirade at Ukrainian civilians for resisting the Russian abuse before later joking about her son breaking a man's fingers 'so he can't point or pick his nose'.
Ukraine's MoD published a link to the pair's social media profiles along with the unedited audio of their disturbing call - the profiles have since been deleted.
Solovyov is said to be aged just 20 years old, having been born in 2002, while his mother is aged 50.
The Ukrainian MoD posted a link to Solovyov's profile on Russian social media platform VKontakte, but it has since been deleted
The unsettling conversation, initially published by the Ukraine's MoD on May 3, is one of several in which Russian soldiers have admitted to committing grave war crimes on Ukrainian soil.
Widespread reports of rape, torture and brutal violence carried out on civilians first began flooding out of Ukraine after authorities discovered the horrors committed in towns north of Kyiv such as Bucha, Irpin and Borodyanka.
Survivors who witnessed the tragedy unfold in their communities before the Russians withdrew to focus their assault on the east of Ukraine told of how their countrymen and women had been treated with savagery by the invaders.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the Russian army as 'the most barbaric and inhuman in the world' in light of these accounts, and said Russia will be stained 'as a source of absolute evil for generations'.
'A Russian passport will mean only one thing in any country: Unequivocal condemnation from all decent people,' Zelensky warned in April.
The Ukrainian leader also drew a number of comparisons between infamous Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and Russian President Vladimir Putin in a 15-minute-long video published yesterday to mark VE Day.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the Russian army as 'the most barbaric and inhuman in the world' in light of the accounts of rape, torture and murder of Ukrainian civilians, and said Russia will be stained 'as a source of absolute evil for generations' (Zelensky pictured visiting the mass grave sites in Bucha in April)
A Ukrainian policeman walks by a pit in the village of Motyzhyn, Ukraine, April 3, where the town mayor and her family were thrown after being murdered by Russian forces
A total of 25,500 Russian soldiers have been killed in bitter fighting, while Putin's forces have lost 1130 tanks, 199 planes, 156 helicopters, 509 artillery systems and 2741 armoured personnel carriers, the Land Forces of Ukraine claim
The Ukrainian MoD's Main Intelligence Directorate has also intercepted calls between Russian soldiers and their families in which the invaders open up about the true scale of the losses suffered by Putin's troops on the front lines.
New figures published at the weekend by the Land Forces of Ukraine suggest that more than 25,000 Russian servicemen have now been killed in action since the invasion began on February 24 - the Kremlin by contrast has not given any death toll since early in the war, when it admitted that several hundred of its soldiers had died.
Western estimates put the scale of Russian losses somewhat lower than the figure given by Ukrainian authorities, but well over 15,000 of Putin's fighters are thought to have died.
A total of 25,500 Russian soldiers have been killed in bitter fighting, while Putin's forces have lost 1130 tanks, 199 planes, 156 helicopters, 509 artillery systems and 2741 armoured personnel carriers, the Land Forces of Ukraine claimed on Sunday.
It came as Russia lost its 39th high-ranking officer on the battlefield.
Lt-Col Fezul Bichikaev, 36, was killed in a skirmish near Ukraine's second city Kharkiv, where Ukrainian forces have mounted a counter-offensive to take a number of nearby towns.
An intelligence update posted on Saturday by Britain's Ministry of Defence said several of Putin's senior commanders are being forced onto the battlefield 'to take personal leadership of operations' due to 'faltering Russian performance on the frontline'.
Daily Mail · by David Averre For Mailonline · May 9, 2022
10. WET BLANKET ‘Cancer-stricken’ Putin watches military parade with BLANKET over his legs as rumours swirl around tyrant’s health
WET BLANKET ‘Cancer-stricken’ Putin watches military parade with BLANKET over his legs as rumours swirl around tyrant’s health
The Sun · by Henry Holloway · May 9, 2022
VLADIMIR Putin sat watching his meagre military parade with a thick green blanket across his legs as rumours continue to swirl around his health.
The Russian president was one of the only attendees using the covering as he sat amongst elderly World War 2 veterans while Russian celebrated Victory Day.
Vladimir Putin waves as he appears during the Victory Day parade in MoscowCredit: Getty
Putin sits with a heavy blanket across his knees in the 9C temperature in MoscowCredit: RIA
Vlad is one of the only people using the warming blanket
But across his legs was a thick green blanket, which had been left for him on his seat when he first arrived at the viewing platform.
It is believed to have been around 9C at the time.
Putin appears to have not used the heavy blanket at first, moving and tucking it next to him when he first sit down.
Vlad then give an 11-minute speech in which he claimed Russia were fighting Nazis in Ukraine, and accused the West of planning to invade Crimea.
The slightly blunted address did not match predictions which suggested Putin would either declare victory over Kyiv or order full mobilisation of the Russian army against Ukraine.
But after his speech and when the state-controlled cameras pivoted back to him during the parade, Putin could be seen with the thick blanket covering his knees.
Putin appeared in reasonable fitness throughout the rest of the parade and even went for an extended walkabout in what may have been an attempt to dispel ongoing rumours about his poor health.
Kremlin officials have always denied there is anything wrong with their leader, who turns 70 in October.
His use of the blanket did not go unnoticed, with former British diplomat Sir Tony Brenton commenting on it on Sky News.
Sir Tony said: "The heavy blanket is an interesting detail. There have been regular rumours of ill health in Putin, which of course have not been acknowledged by the Kremlin.
It comes as...
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Sixty people are feared dead after Putin's troops bombed a school in Ukraine where survivors were sheltering.
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Putin’s mental health is “bad” and the threat he could launch nuclear weapons is “very real”, an oligarch close to the tyrant has revealed.
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Volodymr Zelensky yesterday commemorated Victory Day by promising besieged Ukraine would see a new dawn
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A missile mountain lays bare the scale of Russia’s murderous bombardment in Ukraine.
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Putin has been stunned to discover his lover is pregnant again, it was reported in Moscow yesterday.
"But he has been locked away as a result of Covid for the last two years and is only now having to re-engage.
“Those people who have spoken to him, people like Macron and the Americans, have reported back less coherence than they are used to getting from him.
“So there are reasons to be worried about him. But we need to be a little bit careful about what we wish for."
It comes after a string of strange appearances which have cast doubt on Putin's fitness.
Putin arrives at his seat to pick up his blanket
Vlad scoops it up and sits down before his speech
And in one of the most telling, a slouching and bloated Putin appeared to grip onto a table for 12 minutes as he feet twitched during a meeting with defence chief Sergei Shoigu.
The report by investigative Proekt media - which is blocked in Russia - states that surgeon Yevgeny Selivanov, of Moscow's Central Clinical Hospital, had flown to the Russian leader no less than 35 times in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.
The discovery backs recent theories that Putin declared war when he was suffering medical problems hidden from the Russian people.
Back in November 2020, political analyst Valery Solovei revealed the cancer and Parkinson's theory claiming that Putin also needed to have emergency surgery.
Video footage showed Putin's leg moving constantly and his fingers twitching, backing the Parkinson's theory.
Putin also suffered a coughing fit during a televised meeting but the claims about his health were disputed by Kremlin.
The report continues to identify medics who regularly travel with Putin on trips, especially in Sochi which he prefers to Moscow.
Alongside Selivanov the Russian leader is also followed by a neurosurgeon.
Another surgeon Dr Alexey Shcheglov "follows Putin so relentlessly that during public events he allegedly gets into joint photographs with the head of state.”
During his speech, Putin said the war in Ukraine had been necessary because the West was "preparing for the invasion of our land, including Crimea".
Ben Wallace the UK Defence Secretary, said Putin was trying to intimidate the world with the annual parade.
In a speech at the National Army Museum in London, Wallace said: "Really what President Putin wants is the Russian people and the world to be awed and intimidated by the ongoing memorial to militarism.
"I believe the ongoing and unprovoked conflict in Ukraine does nothing but dishonour those same soldiers."
The Sun · by Henry Holloway · May 9, 2022
11. Qatar is Hamas' patron. Its 'moderate' rebranding is a dangerous delusion | Opinion
Excerpts:
Throughout its live coverage of the summit, Al-Jazeera invited Israeli guests to argue their country’s points. One of them, Victor Nahmias, was an articulate retired diplomat whose foolproof arguments still ring in my head.
Annoyed by Al-Jazeera, Hezbollah and Hamas journalists at the summit’s media center protested next to the network’s live position and tried to sabotage its coverage. This was Qatar’s foreign policy two decades ago.
Over the past few weeks alone, Al-Jazeera has described terrorism that killed Israeli non-combatants as "martyrdom" operations. Al-Jazeera even posted articles describing Israel as "the Zionist entity," arguing that armed "resistance" is the only way forward.
Over the past two decades, Qatar’s foreign policy has shifted, but not toward moderation. To give Doha a standing ovation for endorsing and sponsoring radicalism is misplaced, misinformed and dangerously naïve.
Qatar is Hamas' patron. Its 'moderate' rebranding is a dangerous delusion | Opinion
There’s been an upswing recently of commentary celebrating what is often termed a welcome "shift" in the policies and behavior of Qatar: away from promoting and subsidizing radical Islamist groups, and towards "deconfliction" and moderation.
This analysis is not only fundamentally incorrect, but plays into Doha’s ongoing attempts to create an illusion of rebranding as a moderating actor in the Middle East and beyond.
The truth is that Qatar’s sponsorship of radical groups has not moderated any of them, and does not reflect a recent "shift" in Doha’s foreign policy. If there has been any shift, it would be Qatar itself switching, some 20 years ago, from moderation to radicalism.
The argument that Qatari investment in extremist groups is "to maintain dialogue with and moderate them" (made in Haaretz, too: In a Shift, Qatar Plays Central Role in Stabilizing Israeli-Palestinian Ties) breaks down upon closer scrutiny. When Qatar was criticized for shuttling top Taliban leaders aboard its royal C17 aircraft from Doha to Kabul in August last year, as they took over the country, Qatari leaders responded that their strong ties with the Afghan group would moderate policies of the new Taliban government.
In September, Taliban announced that the "morality police" would replace the ministry of women. Taliban also reinstated executions and amputations. In March, the radical Islamist group banned Afghan women from flying without male chaperones. This month, Taliban stopped issuing driving licenses for women, and this week decreed all women must veil their faces with the burqa.
Burqa-clad women walk on Nadir Khan hilltop overlooking Kabul, Afghanistan: The Taliban has now ordered all Afghan women to wear the all-covering burqa in public AP Photo
If Qatar thought its strong ties with the Taliban would moderate the Afghani group, Doha better think again.
Similarly, Qatar’s policy of "moderating" Hamas has yet to yield results. Despite all the Qatari money, Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar recently called on every Arab Israeli to kill all and every Jewish Israeli they can. "Everybody who has a gun should take it, and those who don’t have a gun should take a butcher’s knife, axe or any knife he can get," Sinwar said in a speech on April 30.
True that Hamas has reportedly stopped Islamic Jihad from firing rockets onto Israel, but that was unlikely due to Qatari funds or ties and more likely due to Hamas’s calculus that instigating Arab Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem, to start a third intifada, would be more cost efficient for Gaza’s autocratic rulers. Full-scale war with Israel only results in large scale destruction in the Strip, which weakens Hamas’s grip, and achieves little to hurt Israel or would deflect its attention away from the Iranian nuclear program.
A year before he became Iran’s Foreign Minister, Amir Abdollahian implied that pro-Iran militias, like Hamas, allow Iran to better counteract Israel.
Yahya Sinwar, head of Hamas in Gaza, delivers a speech at a hall in Gaza City late last monthAP Photo/Adel Hana
Doha subsidizes Hamas to the tune of $360 million to $480 million a year. With one third of that money, Qatar buys Egyptian fuel that Cairo then ships into Gaza, where Hamas sells it and pockets its revenue. Another third goes to impoverished Gazan families, while the last third pays the salaries of the Hamas bureaucracy.
Qatari spending in Gaza might look humanitarian, but in reality, Doha is funding Hamas’s coffers through oil sales. Doha is also bankrolling Hamas’s social services, the main vehicle of the organization’s rentier network that helps Hamas maintain support among Palestinians, in the Strip as well as across the West Bank and Jerusalem. Without Qatari money, Hamas’s governorship of Gaza would have become untenable and its popularity among Palestinians would have collapsed.
In 2002, I was reporting on the Arab League Summit in Beirut, during which the Saudis presented Israel with what came to be known as the Arab Peace Initiative. If Israel withdrew from the 1967 territory and East Jerusalem and allowed for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state over this land, all Arab countries would ratify peace with Israel and normalize relations.
At the time, Syria’s Bashar Assad instructed his Lebanese puppet president Emile Lahoud, the summit’s chair, to insert a clause that caused the initiative to implode: The "right of return" of Palestinian refugees to Israel.
Besieged in his Muqata and aware that Assad was undermining his position in Beirut, Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat asked his delegation to keep the "right of return" out. Assad and the radicals, however, prevailed. To counter the radicals, Arafat addressed the Arab summit in Beirut through Qatar’s Al-Jazeera.
Gazans supporting Qatar near a mosque funded by Doha in Khan Yunis, GazaAli Jadallah / Anadolu Agency
The Qatari network went further by allowing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to address the Arab summit live and articulate a vision of peace similar to the Saudi proposal: Withdrawal for peace.
Throughout its live coverage of the summit, Al-Jazeera invited Israeli guests to argue their country’s points. One of them, Victor Nahmias, was an articulate retired diplomat whose foolproof arguments still ring in my head.
Annoyed by Al-Jazeera, Hezbollah and Hamas journalists at the summit’s media center protested next to the network’s live position and tried to sabotage its coverage. This was Qatar’s foreign policy two decades ago.
Over the past few weeks alone, Al-Jazeera has described terrorism that killed Israeli non-combatants as "martyrdom" operations. Al-Jazeera even posted articles describing Israel as "the Zionist entity," arguing that armed "resistance" is the only way forward.
Over the past two decades, Qatar’s foreign policy has shifted, but not toward moderation. To give Doha a standing ovation for endorsing and sponsoring radicalism is misplaced, misinformed and dangerously naïve.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Twitter: @hahussain
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12. Opinion | Putin is trapped in a quagmire and doesn’t know how to get out
Excerpts:
Putin is now in a strategic quandary that should be familiar to Americans after our misbegotten wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq — only many times worse. Russia has launched a “war of choice” based on bad intelligence (such as the assumption that Ukrainians would welcome the Russians as liberators). The war is going badly, but once troops are committed, emotions run high and national prestige is on the line. Both escalation and withdrawal are too painful to contemplate. The easiest thing to do is to continue doing what you’ve been doing, even if there is scant hope that the results will get any better.
It often requires a new leader to extract a nation from such a quagmire. That’s what Richard M. Nixon did in Vietnam, Mikhail Gorbachev did in Afghanistan and, more recently, Joe Biden did in Afghanistan. The West should signal to Russia’s siloviki (the security and military elite) that if they want to live the good life again, then they need to get rid of Putin and get out of Ukraine. But Putin has had an iron grip on power for more than 22 years, and there is no reason to expect that he will be toppled anytime soon.
That means the most likely outcome in Ukraine is another frozen conflict — the situation that prevailed between 2014 and 2022. The major issue now is how far east the front line will run. That is far from ideal, but if Ukraine can return its borders close to where they were on Feb. 24, while sanctions continue to erode the Russian economy, it will be a tremendous victory for the West and a terrible defeat for Russia. Putin’s Victory Day speech might indicate he is groping for a way out, as the British defense minister suggests, but there is no easy exit from the disaster he created.
Opinion | Putin is trapped in a quagmire and doesn’t know how to get out
By Max Boot
Columnist
Yesterday at 1:17 p.m. EDT
Always grandiose and fascistic, the Victory Day celebrations in Moscow were more restrained than usual on Monday, with the normal aerial display canceled on account of the “weather,” even though the skies were clear. Some experts had worried that Russian President Vladimir Putin would declare war on Ukraine and a total mobilization of Russian society while threatening the West with nuclear weapons. There was even speculation that he might parade Ukrainian prisoners through Red Square as in a Roman triumph. None of that came to pass. Putin was defiant but subdued, trying to portray Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine as a preemptive response to a looming Ukrainian invasion of Russia.
It was ludicrous and pathetic — but also strangely reassuring. There has been much discussion about whether Putin is rational, because attacking Ukraine with such a small army was an act of lunacy. The evidence suggests that, while Putin is isolated and prone to miscalculation, he is not insane.
He appears to grasp, as I argued last week, that mobilization would bring more problems than it would solve. It would risk undermining Russia’s already battered economy, along with popular support for his criminal regime, but it would not deliver any immediate military benefits. Mobilizing more troops would take many months — and it would be exceedingly difficult to train, equip or supply them. As for using nuclear weapons, that would be the action of a madman who fears that the end is near. Putin’s troops are carrying out unspeakable war crimes, but he is far from Hitler-in-the-bunker territory.
Putin seems to understand when the war is not going his way — hence his withdrawal from the environs of Kyiv at the beginning of April rather than risk the complete destruction of his forces. He gambled on winning a more limited victory in Donbas in eastern Ukraine, but that’s not happening, either. The Institute for the Study of War reported on Sunday: “Russian forces did not make any significant advances on any axis of advance on May 8.” Putin is running out of options.
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Russia has paid a fearsome price for meager gains. Kyiv claims that more than 25,000 Russian soldiers have been killed; that figure might be exaggerated but probably not by much. Open-source reporting confirms that Russia has lost more than 3,500 vehicles (including more than 600 tanks), 121 aircraft and nine naval vessels, including the flagship of the Black Sea fleet. Those are the worst losses Russia has suffered since World War II.
While Russia gets weaker, Ukraine gets stronger: It now has more tanks than at the start of the war, much better artillery and far more weapons systems of all kinds. Russian morale is poor, with officers reportedly disobeying orders; Ukrainian morale is sky-high.
The Russian economy hasn’t collapsed under sanctions, but it has taken a severe hit: The economy is forecast to shrink by as much as 10 percent this year, and inflation could reach 23 percent. The damage will only accelerate as Russian production lines are cut off from Western imports such as microchips.
Far from striking a blow against the West, Putin has united the West against him, and his actions have led to a surge of NATO military activity in Eastern Europe. If Finland and Sweden join the Atlantic alliance, as seems likely, that will bring even more NATO troops to Russia’s doorstep.
Putin is now in a strategic quandary that should be familiar to Americans after our misbegotten wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq — only many times worse. Russia has launched a “war of choice” based on bad intelligence (such as the assumption that Ukrainians would welcome the Russians as liberators). The war is going badly, but once troops are committed, emotions run high and national prestige is on the line. Both escalation and withdrawal are too painful to contemplate. The easiest thing to do is to continue doing what you’ve been doing, even if there is scant hope that the results will get any better.
It often requires a new leader to extract a nation from such a quagmire. That’s what Richard M. Nixon did in Vietnam, Mikhail Gorbachev did in Afghanistan and, more recently, Joe Biden did in Afghanistan. The West should signal to Russia’s siloviki (the security and military elite) that if they want to live the good life again, then they need to get rid of Putin and get out of Ukraine. But Putin has had an iron grip on power for more than 22 years, and there is no reason to expect that he will be toppled anytime soon.
That means the most likely outcome in Ukraine is another frozen conflict — the situation that prevailed between 2014 and 2022. The major issue now is how far east the front line will run. That is far from ideal, but if Ukraine can return its borders close to where they were on Feb. 24, while sanctions continue to erode the Russian economy, it will be a tremendous victory for the West and a terrible defeat for Russia. Putin’s Victory Day speech might indicate he is groping for a way out, as the British defense minister suggests, but there is no easy exit from the disaster he created.
13. New Mideast task force can counter Iranian arms smuggling, but more capabilities are needed
Excerpts:
The new task force also offers an opportunity to build a more unified and capable coalition of countries countering Iran. The experience working with U.S. senior staff in conducting complex maritime operations will raise the operational expertise of regional navies.
The Combined Maritime Forces’ 34 member nations include Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Washington should encourage each of these countries to participate in CTF-153 while simultaneously inviting Israel to at least join CTF-153 patrols, if not formally join the task force, depending on Jerusalem’s preferences. CENTCOM should also specifically encourage Saudi Arabia to participate in CTF-153, as Riyadh has a deep interest in Red Sea security and possesses meaningful naval forces.
In short, if properly resourced and supported by the United States and its regional partners, CTF-153 will help counter weapons smuggling and terror attacks in the waters around Yemen, which remain vital to U.S. and international economic and security interests, while advancing Arab-American-Israeli security cooperation and sending a positive deterrent message to Tehran.
New Mideast task force can counter Iranian arms smuggling, but more capabilities are needed
By Bradley Bowman, Ryan Brobst and Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery (ret.)
Eyeing the continued flow of Iranian weapons to the Houthis in Yemen, the Combined Maritime Forces, a naval partnership comprising 34 nations led by U.S. Central Command, established a new multinational task force last month that will focus on the Red Sea, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden. If properly resourced and supported, Combined Task Force 153 could facilitate a more effective response to the persistent problem of Iranian weapons smuggling to terrorist proxies that fuel conflicts across the Middle East.
The new task force will operate in the Red Sea from the Suez Canal down through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and around the southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula to the waters off the Yemen-Oman border, according to U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander of U.S. 5th Fleet and Naval Forces Central Command.
Another task force, CTF-150, one of three existing combined task forces under the auspices of the Combined Maritime Forces, was previously responsible for those waters as well as parts of the Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman. The establishment of CTF-153 will essentially divide CTF-150′s vast maritime area of responsibility into two parts, enabling both task forces to bring greater focus to smaller and more manageable regions.
CTF-153 will initially be led by the United States, but a regional partner will assume the leadership role in the fall. Task force staff will include 15 U.S. and foreign military personnel, who will initially operate from a ship and later transfer to a headquarters in Bahrain.
A Yemeni supporter of the Shiite Houthi movement holds models of rockets during a 2015 rally in the capital Sanaa, during which participants condemned air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition on rebel targets. (Mohammed Huwais/AFP via Getty Images)
So what’s to be done?
The United States and its regional partners must make it more difficult for Tehran to send arms to its terrorist proxies, by sharing intelligence, building interdiction capability with regional partners and actually increasing the interdiction of illicit weapons shipments. The establishment of CTF-153 could help advance each of these goals.
Fortunately, there have already been positive steps in this direction, stemming from a multilateral approach similar to what CTF-153 will institutionalize. Vice Adm. Cooper said 9,000 weapons were seized in 2021 “along routes historically used to unlawfully supply the Houthis in Yemen.” That’s “three times the amount of weapons interdicted in 2020,” according to Cooper.
That progress is encouraging, but it is unclear if the increase in seizures is primarily due to improved interdiction efforts, a growing quantity of Iranian weapons being smuggled to Yemen, or both. Regardless, unless the United States and its partners dramatically reduce the flow of weapons to the Houthis, the war in Yemen will likely continue, exacerbating one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
It remains to be seen whether task force participants will devote sufficient naval assets to the new task force’s mission. At least initially, CTF-153 will oversee around two to five ships operating in the designated area on any given day. That number of ships, unfortunately, is not an increase over the status quo and is almost certainly insufficient.
With the U.S. Navy struggling to build a fleet with an adequate number of ships, and with global threats competing for finite naval resources, the Pentagon has had difficulty maintaining sufficient naval forces in the Middle East. Meanwhile, America’s military partners in the region often lack the naval capability they need and require help detecting and interdicting malign maritime activity. This shortfall in military capabilities creates opportunities that Tehran and its terrorist proxies exploit.
To make progress countering Iranian weapons smuggling, CTF-153 will need to have sufficient intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and interdiction capabilities. The Pentagon and Central Command should ensure the task force retains expeditious access to theaterwide P-8 aircraft as well as medium-altitude, unmanned, airborne ISR systems to detect threats when indications and warnings suggest they are needed.
In addition to the airborne assets, CENTCOM needs the ability to analyze and exploit the intelligence, which will require a robust cadre of analysts. To act on that intelligence, the task force will also need at least four to six ships on station at any given time based on the size of the area of responsibility. Ideally, most of these ships would come from regional partners, and their contributions would grow. Combined training among the participants and the sharing of best practices will help each of those ships operate more effectively over time.
If CTF-153 works with partners to build increased naval capacity and capability in the Red Sea, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden, it would help secure these vital commercial and military waterways, counter weapons smuggling and potentially reduce the regional security burden on the United States.
The new task force also offers an opportunity to build a more unified and capable coalition of countries countering Iran. The experience working with U.S. senior staff in conducting complex maritime operations will raise the operational expertise of regional navies.
The Combined Maritime Forces’ 34 member nations include Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Washington should encourage each of these countries to participate in CTF-153 while simultaneously inviting Israel to at least join CTF-153 patrols, if not formally join the task force, depending on Jerusalem’s preferences. CENTCOM should also specifically encourage Saudi Arabia to participate in CTF-153, as Riyadh has a deep interest in Red Sea security and possesses meaningful naval forces.
In short, if properly resourced and supported by the United States and its regional partners, CTF-153 will help counter weapons smuggling and terror attacks in the waters around Yemen, which remain vital to U.S. and international economic and security interests, while advancing Arab-American-Israeli security cooperation and sending a positive deterrent message to Tehran.
Bradley Bowman serves as senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Ryan Brobst is a research analyst. Retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery is a senior fellow at FDD and senior director of its Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation.
14. Guam’s THAAD missile defense battery will relocate to new Marine Corps base
I think the Stars and Stripes might have chosen a better photo of THAAD.
Guam’s THAAD missile defense battery will relocate to new Marine Corps base
Visitors to the Fun in the Field event at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, pose by a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, launcher on April 23, 2022. (U.S. Army)
The Army is relocating its THAAD missile defense battery on Guam from Andersen Air Force Base to the nearby Marine Corps base still under construction, according to military officials.
The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, which has been on the island for almost a decade, will move to nearby Camp Blaz, Capt. Nicholas Chopp, spokesman for the Hawaii-headquartered 94th Army Air and Missile Defense Command, said in a phone interview Monday.
Blaz provides more room for the THAAD battery to operate, while freeing up space for the Air Force to use on Andersen, Chopp said.
Relocating THAAD came as the result of recent evaluations by the Missile Defense Agency of the risks the island faces from hypersonic and ballistic missile threats, the commander of Joint Region Marianas told reporters on Guam earlier Monday.
“They brought some highly technical gear with them to really assess how things are in the electromagnetic spectrum, where things are best meant to go — these sorts of things,” Rear Adm. Benjamin Nicholson said, according to The Guam Daily Post. “And in the process of doing that we’ve learned some things.”
“We’ve realized that if we move the THAAD battery to another location here on the island, we can actually do a couple of things,” he aid. “We can increase the capability that the THAAD provides for the defense of Guam.”
About 5,000 Marines from the III Marine Expeditionary Force on Okinawa will move to Blaz over the next five years as construction is completed.
Guam has become ever more important to Pentagon strategy as the size and ambitions of China’s military have grown over the past two decades.
As the closest U.S. territory to the contested South China Sea, Guam is seen by defense officials as a strategic hub for projecting power into and defense of the region, particularly the so-called first island chain that includes Okinawa, northern Philippines and Taiwan.
In March, the White House unveiled its proposed budget for the next fiscal year, which included almost $1 billion to fully fund a comprehensive missile defense system for Guam.
In a video announcement posted on Facebook Thursday, Nicholson told Guam residents they would be seeing equipment being moved on the island over the next couple months.
“And I don’t want you to be alarmed,” he said in the video without mentioning THAAD or any other system by name.
“What’s coming up next is the movement of some of the existing systems to new locations to be able to better defend the island and the region,” Nicholson said. “All of this is part of our long-term efforts to better defend our homeland. So anything we do in the coming weeks or months is not necessarily tied to anything a particular bad actor or adversary in the region has done. It’s through the process of experimentation and calculations and engineering that we have figured out there are better ways that we can do business with what we have now and also what is coming in the future.”
The THAAD battery has operated out of a remote section of jungle on Anderson since 2013.
The roughly two-mile move to Camp Blaz will likely take place at night sometime within the next two months, Chopp said. He declined to narrow down the time frame due to operational security concerns.
15. ‘Nazi’ lies, missing jets and rare dissent: What happened, what didn’t, and why on Putin’s Victory Day
‘Nazi’ lies, missing jets and rare dissent: What happened, what didn’t, and why on Putin’s Victory Day
On a critical day in the war, what didn’t happen was as surprising as what did.
It was perhaps the most highly anticipated date since Russia launched its war on Ukraine, and it came with crucial questions:
How would Russian President Vladmir Putin and his regime mark May 9 — “Victory Day” — the annual commemoration of the triumph over Nazi Germany? As Grid put it not long ago — How would Putin organize a military celebration when there was so little to celebrate?
On Monday, there were answers and new questions. At the flagship event in Moscow, Russian troops were there in large numbers — roughly 11,000, including, Putin noted, a group of soldiers just back from Ukraine. The usual parade of heavy weaponry moved through Red Square, including tanks and missile systems currently in use in Ukraine. And Putin was at his perch above Lenin’s Tomb, fulminating about the West and the “Nazis” that he insists the Russians are fighting.
“You are fighting for the motherland,” Putin said, “for its future, for no one to forget the lessons of World War II.”
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It was a bombastic mix — of honoring past heroes, blasting new enemies and presenting a fervent defense of the current war.
But Victory Day, the 2022 edition, was just as interesting for what didn’t happen.
For weeks, experts and intelligence analysts — many of whom had nailed earlier forecasts about the war — predicted Putin would use the day to recalibrate his military plans, formally declare war and remind the world of the Russian nuclear arsenal. CNN reported U.S. intelligence intercepts suggesting Putin was focused on May 9, as a date on which “he can show a victory.”
In the event, there was no declaration of a wider war — or any “war,” for that matter; Putin continues to call his assault on Ukraine a “special military operation.” And beyond the rhetoric, without a war declaration there can be no mass mobilization of additional forces — something military experts have said repeatedly Putin will need to achieve his aims.
Even a planned flyover of military jets — which this year was to have included the so-called “Doomsday plane” that carries Russian officials in the event of a nuclear attack — was canceled. Bad weather, officials said, though the skies over Red Square looked clear.
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Was Putin trying to lower the temperature? Perhaps, although a Grid analysis of Russian media coverage of Victory Day showed no letup in the searing language used not only against the Ukrainians but NATO and the West as well. Security concerns may have played a part in calling off the flyover; after all, Russian generals, warships and tanks have been taken out at high rates — and recent strikes inside Russian territory may have given the Kremlin pause.
It is also possible that on a day that demands a certain degree of triumphalism, this was the best Putin could manage.
What Putin said
Putin’s Victory Day speech hammered at two main themes: a justification for the invasion of Ukraine, replete with grievances and false claims; and the failure of NATO and the U.S. to listen to Russian demands. In a sense it was an extension of the two Kremlin addresses Putin gave in late February on the eve of war.
Here again were the claims that Russia had sought “an honest dialogue” with the West, that “it was all in vain,” and that “NATO countries did not want to listen.” There were fresh shots at Washington: “The United States, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, began talking about its exclusivity, abasing not only the whole world but also its satellites, which have to pretend that they don’t see anything and obediently swallow it up.”
Above all, Putin wallowed in his trademark mangling of the facts — some call it “misinformation,” but really these are outright fictions: The invasion was necessary because foreign “preparations were underway for another punitive operation in Donbas, the invasion of our historical lands, including Crimea.” Putin said the Ukrainian government had “announced the possible acquisition of nuclear weapons.” And on a day that exists to recall the victory over Nazi Germany, he made frequent (and false) references to the “Nazis” in Ukraine. Russia had been forced into battle, he said, “so that there is no place in the world for executioners, punishers and Nazis.”
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It was perhaps impossible — on a date so intertwined with past military sacrifice — for Putin to avoid some acknowledgment of current sacrifice. But the Kremlin has understated Russian losses, and Putin himself has rarely mentioned them. So it was surprising to hear the Russian leader state publicly that “the death of each one of our soldiers and officers is our shared grief, and an irreparable loss for their friends and relatives.”
What Russian media said
The Russian media, which marches in lockstep with the Kremlin, carried blanket coverage of the Victory Day events, and if anything, they took their messaging a few steps further.
In the run-up to May 9, there were frequent reports of preparations for Victory Day in the “liberated” territories of Ukraine. “Peaceful life is slowly returning in the territories liberated from Ukrainian nationalists,” the Federal News Agency claimed. People “are actively preparing to celebrate Victory Day, honoring monuments to Soviet soldiers and bringing order to the streets.” Channel One noted that “nothing will prevent residents of the liberated territories from taking part in all the events that we plan to hold on May 9.”
But there are in fact few such “liberated territories” — and in the few areas where Russian forces walk the streets, no signs they have been met as “liberators.”
The closest Russian media came to reporting a “celebration” inside Ukraine was from the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, where Russian attacks have killed at least 10,000 civilians, and a small group of Ukrainian forces continue to hold out in the Azovstal steelworks. Major Russian networks noted that the Eternal Flame was lit at Mariupol’s World War II monument to “Victims of Fascism,” and that “participants in the parade unfurled a 300-meter St. George ribbon in honor of Victory Day.” Even here, “victory” was a subdued one.
Russian broadcasters took pains to draw parallels between the past and present wars. One phrase was repeated on many broadcasts: “We won then, we will win now.” Ukraine.ru published an article titled “The Great Patriotic War in Ukraine” — using the term Russians use to describe World War II. The article included this outlandish charge against today’s Ukraine: “Is it any wonder that the grandchildren of the Nazi collaborators from the Great Patriotic War, having seized power, continue the work of their grandfathers to destroy the Russian urban culture of Ukraine, which is hostile to them?”
In other words, the people in charge of Ukraine today are Nazis or their equivalent.
This has been a mantra of the Russian press since the onset of war: Multiple Russian platforms have compared Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to Hitler. An article under the headline, “Revealed, what Zelenskyy and Hitler have in common,” was published by Radio Sputnik in the first days of the war. Ukraine itself is regularly equated with the Third Reich; some Russian media have even coined a special term: “Ukroreich.”
Meanwhile, Russian talk shows and information programs used Victory Day coverage to attack the West. Said one: “The West is rewriting history and is on the side of the fascists, because it was on the side of the fascists the previous time.” A longer version of this myth was published at the end of March; on Monday it was repeated widely. What this means — about the current situation or the past — is not clear. But it is a Russian narrative. As is the contention that Russia is not at war with Ukraine, but with the U.S. and NATO.
That latter point has only been amplified following last week’s reports in the American press that the U.S. was providing Ukrainian forces with intelligence that helped them kill Russian generals. The business newspaper Vzglyad said the reports proved that “the Americans in essence are already participating in the war against Russia, albeit by proxy.” A similar line was picked up by the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin. “We are not only fighting the Nazis in Ukraine,” he wrote on his Telegram channel. “We are liberating Ukraine from NATO occupation and pushing the worst enemy away from our western borders.”
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Off message
For a few moments, the Russian media production of Victory Day went off script. Way off script.
According to BBC Monitoring, digital program guides for several major Russian television networks switched to an anti-war message. On the Channel 1 electronic program guide, the names of all the listed programs vanished, and this was in their place: “On your hands is the blood of thousands of Ukrainians and hundreds of their murdered children. TV and the authorities are lying. No to war.”
Meanwhile, workers at a formerly independent news website, Lenta.ru, changed the text of roughly a dozen articles Monday morning to condemn the “pathetic dictator Putin” and the “weak-willed Russian elite” who were enabling the war in Ukraine. The articles called President Vladimir Putin a “pitiful and paranoid dictator” and accused him of waging “the bloodiest war of the 21st Century.” Another said that “war makes it easier to cover up failures in the economy. Putin must go.”
The articles have disappeared. So have the TV program guides.
But one of the journalists, Yegor Polakov, took the brave step of taking credit for the act and speaking about it.
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“We had to do it today,” Polakov told the Guardian. “We wanted to remind everyone what our grandfathers really fought for on this beautiful Victory Day — for peace. We couldn’t accept this any longer. This was the only right thing we could do.”
Meanwhile, on the battlefields …
While Putin and his aides were preparing for Victory Day, Ukrainian forces were marshaling a counteroffensive around the strategically critical city of Kharkiv, a move that will likely draw Russian forces from their operations in other parts of eastern Ukraine, according to the Institute for the Study of War. It was only the latest setback for Moscow, the latest example of how “victory” — whether in time for Victory Day or any other occasion — has proved so elusive.
As Grid reported in late March, Russian military leaders had announced a tactical shift to the east, a move that many believed was meant in part to capture some terrain ahead of the Victory Day celebrations.
But even in the east, the gains have been few, and the war there looks like a long slog. More than two months into the war, Russian ground forces have incurred staggering losses of men and materiel, and without the mobilization — the callup Putin did not announce Monday — the stresses will remain. Rob Lee, an expert in the Russian military at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, said via Twitter that “the level of attrition and forces committed isn’t sustainable.”
Putin ended his speech with the traditional May 9 rallying cry: “To Russia! To victory! Hooray!” The soldiers on Red Square responded with a lusty “Hooray!” of their own.
It is impossible to know when or whether “victory” in Ukraine will come, and if it does, for what side or at what cost. Only that it will carry enormous sacrifice. It’s impossible also to imagine what “Victory Day” will look like — in Red Square and other parts of Russia — in 2023.
16. Biden Signs Lend-Lease Act to Supply More Security Assistance to Ukraine
Biden Signs Lend-Lease Act to Supply More Security Assistance to Ukraine
Today, President Joe Biden signed into law the "Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022."
The act authorizes the administration, through fiscal year 2023, to lend or lease military equipment to Ukraine and other Eastern European countries. The act would exempt the administration from certain provisions of law that govern the loan or lease of military equipment to foreign countries, such as the five-year limit on the duration of the loan or the requirement that receiving countries pay all costs incurred by the United States in leasing the defense equipment.
Lend-Lease Memorial
The Lend-Lease Memorial in Fairbanks, Alaska commemorates the shipment of U.S. aircraft to the Soviet Union.
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Photo By: Air Force Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen
VIRIN: 060827-O-D0439-000C
Any loan or lease of military equipment to Ukraine would still be subject to all applicable laws concerning the return of such equipment.
Under current law, payments received under leasing agreements with foreign countries are deposited in the Treasury Department as miscellaneous receipts and are classified as direct spending.
This act could increase amounts deposited in the treasury if the administration lends or leases equipment that it otherwise would not have provided under current law.
Support Battalion
A contractor assigned to Army Field Support Battalion-Mannheim, 405th Army Field Support Brigade, guides a bridge transporter carrying a bridge erection boat and boat cradle in Radom, Poland, April 28, 2022.
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Photo By: Army Maj. Leonard Weschler
VIRIN: 220505-A-SM279-719C
Conversely, those deposits would decrease if the administration lends or leases equipment at a reduced cost under the act relative to amounts it otherwise would have charged under its existing authorities.
Lend-lease has been used before, during World War II.
At that time, total of $50.1 billion, equivalent to $690 billion in 2020, worth of supplies were shipped. In all, $31.4 billion went to the United Kingdom, $3.2 billion to France, $1.6 billion to China, $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union and the remaining $2.6 billion to other allies.
17. A More Talkative Place: Why the Human Domain Still Matters in Strategic Competition — #Reviewing Brutality in an Age of Human Rights
I concur. The human domain matters in all forms of competition and conflict.
Conclusion:
Culture and, more specifically, human terrain has not gone away with the returned focus on strategic competition. Drohan’s work highlights the tensions between moral and immoral and legal and illegal ways of seeking to defeat insurgencies as well as how governments shape and disseminate narratives that will be equally important in more conventional conflicts of the future. From winning hearts and minds to large-scale combat operations themselves, morality—indeed the whole expanse of human terrain—is just as important as lethality, not only to strategic narratives but to strategy itself.
A More Talkative Place: Why the Human Domain Still Matters in Strategic Competition — #Reviewing Brutality in an Age of Human Rights
One of the guiding yet implicit assumptions of the return to strategic competition appears to be that human terrain does not matter in a near-peer or peer-conflict as much as it does in counterinsurgency. As such, Brian Drohan’s Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire may read as a relic of the COIN-infused approach to the Global War on Terror. But that interpretation would be wrong. Drohan’s work on counterinsurgency speaks to increasingly important issues ranging from lawfare to crafting narratives that are foundational to strategic competition.
Drohan—an Army officer who received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina before returning to teach at West Point—begins by pointing out the convenient myths that surround British counterinsurgency after World War II, especially the idea that the nation succeeded by adhering to its own laws, unlike other colonial powers. According to Drohan, this kind of myth infuses more contemporary documents as well, such as Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency.[1]
In reality, though, Drohan highlights the paradox between British rhetoric and British reality. British officials did not conform to laws in conducting counterinsurgency, and activists pushed back, forcing those officials to craft their own competing narratives. The British continually insisted they used only “minimum force” and adhered to the “rule of law” but “rights activists” disagreed, and their efforts to challenge British officials helped shape “wartime policies and practices.”[2] Thus Drohan focuses his work on the human “topography of war.”[3]
Drohan labels the British strategy of responding to social activists as “cooperative manipulation.”[4] He describes how activists managed to stoke the public’s outrage at British violence, although they often found themselves outmaneuvered by British officials who only seemed to be cooperating. At times, this strategy worked for the British until its involvement in Northern Ireland in 1969. Drohan avoids making a strongly-worded argument about the success of British strategy because he believes these situations had too many causes to justify sweeping assertions about cooperative manipulation. Also, the larger implied point for the book is not whether cooperative manipulation worked, but what Western nations should do in the future.
Drohan explores three case studies: an insurgency in Cyprus from 1955 to 1959, one in Aden from 1962 to 1967, and the aforementioned one in Northern Ireland, focused specifically on 1969 to 1976. As some British officials found to their dismay, norms and communication patterns changed during these decades, with the world becoming a “more talkative place” by 1970 than it had been in the 1950s and 1960s.[5] And the events central to Drohan’s book occured before billions of people gained near constant connectivity.
A Round-up Operation near Famagusta, Cyprus in 1958 (National Army Museum)
The first case study on Cyprus shows how Cypriot lawyers cleverly attempted to attack British legitimacy in both Cyprus and abroad. Naturally, the British responsed and adapted to manage and disseminate information while seeking to maintain developments they found advantageous, such as by threatening the death penalty to gain valuable intelligence.[6]
Having declared a state of emergency in 1955, the British had enormous powers. Any person ranked major or higher, for example, could authorize an individual’s detainment for close to a month without pressing charges.[7] Further antagonizing Cypriots, children up to the age of 18 could be whipped as punishment by police officers for minor actions including handing out propaganda.[8] And some of these harsh measures worked at times to disrupt the insurgency.[9]
But lawyers countered British counterinsurgency efforts by turning the Cyprus Bar Council into “an activist organization.”[10] They worked to allow detainees to access lawyers and brought evidence of torture to the European Commission of Human Rights, which embarrassed the British. Scholars increasingly are highlighting the critical relevance of these issues on the battlefield of the law, which is essential to strategic competition.
Drohan reveals how the British responded by seeking to “deflect future allegations” and created the Special Investigation Group (SIG), which helped British public relations go from being on the defensive to the offensive.[11] Four months after its creation, for example, the British used a new counter-propaganda unit after searching a residential area to determine which civilians had complaints. Before the curfew ended, unit members spoke with locals and then quickly prepared responses, such as pointing out contradictions in the locals’ allegations.[12] The almost dizzying developments in information warfare point to the challenge of such responses today. As Zac Rogers provocatively argues, for example, the “net effect of the fragmentation and disutility of the information environment is not merely one of many more contested narratives. It is of no narratives.”[13] The case of the conflict in Ukraine, however, provides some challenge to this view, as that nation has crafted consistently powerful narratives since Russia invaded again in February 2022.
An important but understandable weakness of the work is that it primarily highlights the interactions and power plays between British officials and Cypriot lawyers, thus it is largely a story of the powerful and relatively powerful more than the powerless. Drohan, for example, makes a strong case for the cleverness of the Cypriot lawyers, many of whom had been educated and even fought for Great Britain in World War II. They could use their familiarity with English common law, for example, against their imperial overlords.[14] But the impact that British publicity had on the average Cypriot is unknown. How much did Cypriots buy the evolving British responses designed to pacify them? Certainly some British officials believed that they had successfully “disguise[d] propaganda so that it appears to be perfectly ordinary news” but that does not mean locals reacted to it in that way.[15] These insights—understandably difficult to obtain—could provide a more comprehensive picture of messaging and counter-messaging in insurgencies.
Prisoners Under Guard in Aden, 1966 (National Army Museum)
The Cypriot experience fed into subsequent British efforts to quell an insurgency in Aden, as British officials there deliberately sought to learn from the experience in Cyprus.[16] Ironically, though, Drohan notes how those officials employed a far more brutal “scorched-earth campaign” to which British citizens rather than Cypriot lawyers provided the main source of push back.[17]
While the International Committee of the Red Cross had taken a conservative position of keeping quiet about British abuses, Drohan highlights how the newly-formed Amnesty International (AI) took a different approach. In fact, the two teamed up to reinforce each other’s capabilities, with some of the same British citizens who collaborated with Cypriot lawyers founding Amnesty International. Meanwhile, British officials took steps to appear more humane, such as by building new prison buildings. Thus the British avoided garnering as much negative international attention as they did in Cyprus by ensuring that investigators from the International Committee of the Red Cross in South Arabia would not be shocked at the prisoners’ conditions.[18]
With lawyers in Aden unable to mobilize as successfully as their Cypriot counterparts, Drohan explains how Amnesty International offered the most significant challenges to highly questionable British counterinsurgency practices such as destroying homes. Drohan found enlisted soldiers, however, who expressed their “reluctan[ce]” to participate in such activities.[19]
Amnesty International’s outcry instigated an official investigation that led to changes in interrogations, although these changes were largely superficial. Since the information gained from interrogation provided one of the only useful sources of intelligence, the British continually pushed back at reform attempts. As it had in Cyprus, the British government managed critiques by appearing to make reforms and undertake investigations and then undermining them once the initial furor had died down.
The British had been brutal in Aden, launching a “scorched-earth campaign” in the mountains north of Aden city that resulted in a “humanitarian crisis.”[20] As tensions escalated, the British sought to extricate themselves as quickly as possible. Only two years later they faced a new and different situation in Northern Ireland, which was neither a colony nor fully part of Britain. Yet the British continued to use many of the same brutal tactics that they had in the past. Here, as in the previous chapters, Drohan provides some contradictory evidence regarding whether harsh interrogation was effective or counterproductive in containing insurgency. And, of course this very issue dogged the Bush Administration during Operation Iraqi Freedom.[21]
An important difference, though, from previous counterinsurgencies was the involvement of British citizens, who engaged in more sustained and outspoken debates regarding these practices than had occurred previously. Moreover, British involvement in Northern Ireland occurred at a time when Westerners as a whole had become more committed to promoting human rights. Thus the government eventually adopted a strategy that departed from previous military-based counterinsurgency approaches to more police-based ones.[22]
Drohan concludes that British actions in Cyprus and Northern Ireland might be deemed successes whereas involvement in Aden represents more of an abject failure.[23] But assessing their effectiveness is not Drohan’s primary concern. Rather, he wants to stress how the British determination to “hide evidence of brutality fueled the contemporary myth that British forces were exceptionally successful in fighting insurgencies because they obeyed the rule of law.”[24]
Undercutting this myth is essential because of similarities in the Global War on Terror, where Drohan notes that U.S. lawyers “used the same trick” that the British had in Norther Ireland by narrowly defining torture in ways that “ignore the important role of moral appeals in contemporary warfare.”[25] What may seem like a pedantic legal issue, then, has strategic implications because a nation can no longer wage war without a “moral explanation of the conflict” undergirding its “strategic narrative.” Drohan’s work thus explicitly builds on Emile Simpson’s arguments for narratives based on Simpson’s own experiences in Afghanistan.[26] But the U.S. at times struggled with this even in counterinsurgency, at times disseminating offensive images, making the challenges of crafting effective narratives in strategic competition seem almost staggering.[27]
Of course all of Drohan’s cases studies help contextualize U.S. involvement in regions around the world since the onset of the Cold War. In 1965, a Marine general suggested that combatants on both sides of the Vietnam War could “move to another planet” and still not win using the current strategy because the real prize was the Vietnamese people.[28] As such, the general sought to create the ultimate infantrymen to win in Vietnam by “defeating the enemy not just through combat power but through ingenuity, diplomacy, flexibility, decency, and tact.”[29]
Similarly, a focus on the human domain reigned supreme, even if it was problematic at times during the Global War on Terror.[30] The Department of Defense sent teams of anthropologists to Afghanistan and Iraq.[31] And students in professional military education read and wrote widely on the cultures of the nations they often returned to wage counterinsurgency in after graduation.
A United States Army Human Terrain Team social scientist, talking to local residents to investigate a tribal dispute in the village of Wum Kalay, Paktia Province, Afghanistan in 2009. (Marco Di Lauro/Getty)
The formal return to great power conflict—occurring with the release of the National Defense Strategy in 2016—changed that. Suddenly, the human domain became more of an afterthought in a struggle dominated by louder debates over A2/AD, which included endless debates on the relevance of aircraft carriers and the pursuit of lethality, with the qualities seen as requisite to fight so-called small wars largely have been relegated to the past as irrelevant.
Even as the U.S. military at times acknowledges the increasing importance of information operations, it also too narrowly focuses on force-on-force engagements and the technology required to do so. A description of a wargame in a city, for example, ignores the actual inhabitants, instead stressing game results like the conclusion that “teams that failed to take full advantage of the flexibility of this all-domain mosaic force resorted to conventional tactics that were ineffective and quickly devolved into costly fights for buildings that bled their force.”[32] The game assumes the existence of buildings but ignores that of civilians.
In a similar vein, the dominant focus of the Army and Air Force since the release of the 2016 National Defense Strategy has been on what has now been termed joint all-domain command and control (JADC2). While some aspects of JADC2 do stress human terrain, JADC2 is first and foremost a technological solution to future warfare because it rests on “assured communication” between the various branches to bring coordinated effects on the necessary domain while capitalizing on “windows of superiority.”[33]
Even the arguably more people-based services have put technology first and people second in some of their public documents. Marine Corps Commandant David Berger’s 2019 guidance, for example, flips the typical prioritization of the Marine Corps on people by placing “force design”—meaning the kind of equipment needed to support the Navy—first in his guidance.[34]
Similarly, counterinsurgency—and thus culture and human terrain—quickly fell out of favor in professional military education. While some argued for reading more Mao and teaching more counterinsurgency, others pushed back. Elsewhere, the emphasis on culture dropped dramatically as well.[35]
These changes reflect Department of Defense guidance to its educators. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 2019 memo to guide professional military education’s “special areas of emphasis” for the upcoming academic years mentions lethality more than once. It only vaguely mentions the “importance of understanding human, physical, and informational aspects of the security environment.” But culture matters just as much in strategic competition as it does in less conventional conflicts.[36]
Culture and, more specifically, human terrain has not gone away with the returned focus on strategic competition. Drohan’s work highlights the tensions between moral and immoral and legal and illegal ways of seeking to defeat insurgencies as well as how governments shape and disseminate narratives that will be equally important in more conventional conflicts of the future. From winning hearts and minds to large-scale combat operations themselves, morality—indeed the whole expanse of human terrain—is just as important as lethality, not only to strategic narratives but to strategy itself.
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Header Image: "Wessex, Beach Landing, Aden, Yemen," painted by Stella Schmolle (Defence Academy of the United Kingdom)
Notes:
[1] Drohan, 2.
[2] Brian Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017),15.
[3] Drohan, 194.
[4] Drohan, 4.
[5] Drohan, 152.
[6] Drohan, 35.
[7] Drohan, 20.
[8] Drohan, 21.
[9] Drohan, 45.
[10] Drohan, 46.
[11] Drohan, 58, 61, and 63.
[12] Drohan, 64.
[13] Zac Rogers, “The End of Information Warfare?,” Modern War Institute, 18 June 2020; https://mwi.usma.edu/end-information-warfare/.
[14] Drohan, 27-28.
[15] Drohan, 74.
[16] Drohan, 81.
[17] Drohan, 94.
[18] Drohan, 113.
[19] Drohan, 95.
[20] Drohan, 94.
[21] See, for example, James Risen, “American Psychological Association Bolstered C.I.A. Torture Program, Report Says,” NY Times, 30 April 2015.The U.S. military spent over $800 million in seven years on its Human Terrain System’s program. The name in itself is cringe-worthy. At the program’s peak, it used 31 teams of 5-9 members consisting of academics, analysis, data collectors, and other individuals. Brian Price, “Human Terrain at the Crossroads,” Joint Force Quarterly 87, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Publications/Article/1325979/human-terrain-at-the-crossroads/.
[22] Drohan, 181.
[23] Drohan, 189.
[24] Drohan, 190.
[25] Drohan, 193.
[26] Drohan, 193.
[27] Sultan Faizy and Shashank Bengali,“U.S. military apologizes for ‘highly offensive’ leaflets it distributed in Afghanistan,” Los Angeles Times, 6 September 2017; https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-afghanistan-usmilitary-apology-20170906-story.html.
[28] John C. McManus, Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II through Iraq (New York: NAL Caliber, 2001), 208.
[29] McManus, Grunts, 214.
[30] Joan Johnson-Freese, Educating the U.S. Military (New York: Routledge, 2013), 26.
[31] See, for example, Whitney Cassel, “The Army Needs Anthropologists,” Foreign Policy, 28 July 2015; https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/28/the-army-needs-anthropologists-iraq-afghanistan-human-terrain/.
[32] Benjamin Jensen and John Paschkewitz, “Mosaic Warfare: Small and Scaleable are Beautiful,” War on the Rocks, 23 December 2019; https://warontherocks.com/2019/12/mosaic-warfare-small-and-scalable-are-beautiful/.
[34] U.S. Marine Corps, Commandant’s Planning Guidance, 2019; https://www.hqmc.marines.mil/Portals/142/Docs/%2038th%20Commandant%27s%20Planning%20Guidance_2019.pdf?ver=2019-07-16-200152-700.
[35] See, for example, The Rise and Decline of U.S. Military Culture Programs, ed. Kerry B. Fosher and Lauren Mackenzie (Quantico: Marine Corps University Press, 2021); https://www.usmcu.edu/Portals/218/TheRiseAndDeclineOfUSMilitaryCulturePrograms_web.pdf?ver=n7Ok7X4Yiz3K0ERNKyG92w%3D%3D.
18. It’s Time to Secure the Water Sector from Cyber Threats
Conclusion:
The Biden administration’s goal of a clean and reliable global water supply as an issue of national security is commendable. Poor cybersecurity in the water sector not only imperils health and human safety, but it also impacts national security and our economic stability. It is vital that the United States pursue effective public-private collaboration that ensures a clean and reliable water supply at home, so that America can lead by example while helping international partners to ensure a sustainable global water supply.
It’s Time to Secure the Water Sector from Cyber Threats - Cybersecurity Magazine
The Biden administration is reportedly considering a first-ever integrated action plan for global water security, linking global access to clean, reliable water to U.S. national security for the first time. At home, the linkage between national security and security of the water and wastewater sector is self-evident by its very definition as critical infrastructure. Yet decades of chronic underinvestment and under-resourcing of federal support to the industry has left this life-supporting and life-sustaining infrastructure vulnerable to cyber threats.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provides federal support and technical assistance to the nation’s water and wastewater sectors as a sector risk management agency (SRMA). These responsibilities include helping to secure the sector against cyber threats. However, for decades, the EPA has not been sufficiently organized or resourced to provide the support the sector needs, my colleague and I concluded in a Foundation for Defense of Democracies report published at the end of last year. The federal government has too often used a “top-down, one-size-fits-all approach” to cybersecurity, which does not adapt to the unique risks, threats, and vulnerabilities that water organizations face. Building on the work of the congressionally mandated Cyberspace Solarium Commission, we analyzed how insufficient federal support and oversight combined with insufficient industry understanding of the threat has culminated in the water sector’s cybersecurity woes.
Securing the U.S. water sector against natural and manmade threats is not easy. The U.S. currently has approximately 52,000 drinking water and 16,000 wastewater systems, most serving communities with fewer than 50,000 residents. These systems operate with limited budgets overseen by even more limited cybersecurity personnel and expertise. Providing adequate federal support and oversight of these distributed networks is inherently difficult, but it is not impossible. It requires getting the right experts around the table, as detailed in the FDD report’s policy recommendations and subsequent model legislative text.
To date, the U.S. government has failed to bring the right people around the table to improve the cybersecurity of the water sector. “There are no water sector cybersecurity experts in the federal government,” industry representatives warned bluntly, yet the government has pressed ahead on flawed proposals that lack sector buy-in. Stakeholders from the water sector have criticized EPA’s plan to use sanitation surveys to apply new cybersecurity controls, saying that it is not the right tool for the job. Industry representatives also expressed caution about the EPA’s 100-day initiative safeguarding Industrial Control Systems, noting that it focuses only on actions that can be taken quickly by larger utilities. Other experts questioned whether the sector – and other critical infrastructure sectors – will benefit from the visibility and information the federal government will gain.
Rectifying the problems associated with the cybersecurity of U.S. water infrastructure requires increasing government resources to better support the sector and closer collaboration between the government and industry. Congress can take the first step by increasing EPA budget to ensure that the agency has the staff and funding to fulfill its responsibilities as an SRMA. Congress will also need to set aside funding in existing grant programs to ensure that climate change and natural disaster mitigation funding do not crowd out cybersecurity investments.
Meanwhile, ensuring that rural water systems are not left behind can be achieved with a relatively modest increase in funding for the Rural Water Circuit Rider program. Currently, 147 circuit rider experts provide traveling technical support to the almost 70,000 U.S. rural water organizations around the country in 49 states and Puerto Rico. The program offers a critical service for small water organizations, but the current Circuit Riders cannot assist all the water organizations that need their help. Congress should increase funding to expand the Circuit Rider program by 50 cybersecurity experts. While 50 will not completely mitigate the Circuit Rider program’s capacity shortfalls, it is a step in the right direction to help protect the most vulnerable water organizations.
The most significant step in better public-private collaboration would be a joint industry-government voluntary, regulatory program for cybersecurity in the water sector. Mirroring the successful example in the electricity subsector, this partnership should be led by experts in the water industry so that they can identify the technical standards needed to regulate the sector. The government can then provide support for those standards and together they can help ensure that a baseline of cybersecurity readiness is met.
The Biden administration’s goal of a clean and reliable global water supply as an issue of national security is commendable. Poor cybersecurity in the water sector not only imperils health and human safety, but it also impacts national security and our economic stability. It is vital that the United States pursue effective public-private collaboration that ensures a clean and reliable water supply at home, so that America can lead by example while helping international partners to ensure a sustainable global water supply.
19. From Tycoons to Pop Singers, Ukrainians of All Walks Come Together on the Front Lines
Whole of society.
Photos and video at the link:
From Tycoons to Pop Singers, Ukrainians of All Walks Come Together on the Front Lines
Ukraine’s Territorial Defense forces, steeled in battle, try to make up with motivation what they lack in experience
| Photographs by Manu Brabo for The Wall Street Journal
Updated May. 9, 2022 10:33 am ET
RUSKA LOZOVA, Ukraine—When Russia invaded Ukraine, Vsevolod Kozhemiako, one of Ukraine’s leading businessmen, was skiing with his family in the Austrian Alps.
This weekend, in his new role as military commander, he sprinted between courtyards of this front-line village north of Kharkiv, trying to avoid being spotted by a Russian tank that operated from a nearby tree line.
“For me it was natural. There was no other way,” Mr. Kozhemiako, 49, said about his decision to take up arms for Ukraine. “All my friends are here. I didn’t see any other options.”
The farming entrepreneur was ranked by Forbes magazine’s Ukrainian edition as the 88th wealthiest Ukrainian for 2020, with a net worth of around $100 million. Together with other Kharkiv businesspeople, he has poured personal funds into helping stand up a company-size special unit of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense’s 127th Brigade.
These days, Mr. Kozhemiako’s unit is fighting on its first combat mission in Ruska Lozova, just north of Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv. The village, along the main highway to Russia, was recaptured from the Russians on April 29, at the outset of the unfolding Ukrainian counteroffensive in this part of the country.
Russian troops are still constantly shelling Ruska Lozova, with tank incursions from Russian positions down the road probing Ukrainian defenses. Virtually all the civilians are gone. One of the few buildings that was still intact Saturday morning caught fire after being hit by a tank round by the afternoon.
A soldier in Ruska Lozova in Kharkiv, Ukraine, last week. The area is still coming under Russian fire.
Members of a Ukrainian Territorial Defense unit commanded by businessman Vsevolod Kozhemiako in Ruska Lozova, Ukraine, on Saturday.
“Our task is to enter the liberated areas, dig in, and prepare for a counterattack so that the enemy doesn’t return,” Mr. Kozhemiako said as he hunkered in a cellar that has become an improvised bunker. He reprimanded some men who got too close to the entrance, and scolded some others for taking off their helmets. A Russian shell had just landed outside.
“Our discipline is severe, maybe even stricter than in some army units,” Mr. Kozhemiako said. “You can’t relax when you’re at war.”
Established in January, Territorial Defense forces are part of the Ukrainian military, following the overall chain of command and operating jointly with other services in the battlefield. Unlike the regular army, they recruited civilians through a simplified procedure once the war began. The force’s membership cuts across class lines, ranging from business tycoons like Mr. Kozhemiako to teachers, cabdrivers and music stars.
While some of these Territorial Defense units mostly operate checkpoints in the rear, other, better-trained ones are fighting on the front lines— particularly here in the Kharkiv region, whose two Territorial Defense brigades have spearheaded some of the recent Ukrainian advances, and in capital, Kyiv, when the Russians were trying to seize it in February and March.
“We find time to keep teaching our troops about everything from small-arms fire to artillery systems,” said Col. Roman Hryshchenko, the commander of the Kharkiv-based 127th Territorial Defense Brigade, who served before the war as a military prosecutor and as governor of the neighboring Sumy region. “These people are motivated, and because of that they learn much faster than the programs envisage. They know that they will need all these skills tomorrow, and not in a year or two.”
The brigade’s soldiers in recent days destroyed an ultramodern T-90 Russian tank northeast of Kharkiv using a Swedish-supplied Carl-Gustaf recoilless rifle, the first-such documented success since the war began, Col. Hryshchenko said.
Taras Topolia, a popular Ukrainian singer and Ukrainian Territorial Defense paramedic, at a military position in Kharkiv on Saturday.
Ukrainian Territorial Defense forces patrolled the Saltivka district in Kharkiv on Saturday.
Recent legislation has allowed Ukraine’s Territorial Defense troops to be moved from their home region across the country, and the forces deployed on the Kharkiv front now include the 130th battalion of the Territorial Defense from Kyiv. Among its soldiers are Taras Topolia, the lead singer of Ukraine’s music band Antytila, or Antibodies, and fellow band members, who joined the force in Kyiv as combat medics as soon as the war began.
“Antibodies kills viruses. Orcs are a virus,” says a poster on the wall of their ambulance van, using the common slang term for Russian troops that Ukrainians have borrowed from J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. “Kill the orcs,” it adds.
Mr. Topolia said he sent his wife, also a singer, and three children to New Jersey when the Russians invaded on Feb. 24, and then immediately joined the force. On day four of the war, his company commander, a historian by training who goes by the call sign Historian, was injured in a firefight with a Russian infiltrator group in Kyiv. He has recovered and now is also serving in Kharkiv.
PHOTO: RENA EFFENDI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Ukraine’s resilience against a much stronger enemy lies in a sense of community that has emerged in times of trouble throughout the nation’s history, Mr. Topolia said. “It’s like bees. Everyone does their own thing, collects their own honey—until a bear with its bloody paws comes in,” he explained.
The 130th battalion fought Russian forces in Bucha and Irpin, where Mr. Topolia recorded part of a recent clip released in collaboration with British pop star Ed Sheeran. After Russian forces withdrew from the Kyiv region in late March, the battalion redeployed to protect the northern and eastern approaches to Kharkiv, including the north Saltivka district that until Ukrainian advances this weekend was in the immediate vicinity of Russian positions in the town of Tsyrkuny. On Sunday, Mr. Topolia took a brief leave to perform with Bono, the frontman of the band U2, in a Kyiv subway station.
Hardly any civilians remain in north Saltivka, a landscape of charred high-rises, burned vehicles and unexploded rocket warheads sticking out from roads and gardens. The Territorial Defense troops there have spent recent weeks operating privately purchased commercial drones to fly into Tsyrkuny and beyond to spot Russian positions and pass the information to Ukrainian artillery units.
Mariupol Steel Plant Survivors Reach Safety Amid Calls to Evacuate Soldiers
Mariupol Steel Plant Survivors Reach Safety Amid Calls to Evacuate Soldiers
Play video: Mariupol Steel Plant Survivors Reach Safety Amid Calls to Evacuate Soldiers
Civilians from Mariupol’s Azovstal plant arrived in Zaporizhzhia, while soldiers said the government abandoned them; Bono, Justin Trudeau and Jill Biden visited Ukraine in show of solidarity; rescuers searched for survivors after Russian strikes hit a school. Photo: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images
“We’ve had to earn our keep, and so we started flying these drones to provide reconnaissance,” said a company commander deployed in north Saltivka, a lawyer in civilian life, who goes by the call sign Abrams because he once served in tank troops. He showed on his phone footage of a Russian tank recently destroyed thanks to these drones.
The Territorial Defense position in north Saltivka was stacked up with gifts of food sent by volunteers from as far away as Lviv on the Polish border. Many of these Territorial Defense recruits themselves started off as volunteers helping the underequipped Ukrainian army when Russia fomented the military conflict in Donbas in 2014. Risking their own lives, these volunteers ferried body armor, medical supplies, scopes, night-vision goggles and other essentials to the front lines at the time.
“All those who used to be volunteers have now gone to war, and the ones who weren’t volunteers have become volunteers,” said Lesya Ganzha, a journalist who spent the past three weeks serving at a Territorial Defense position in north Saltivka. She spoke by the basement of a high-rise apartment complex that was repeatedly hit—and that doesn’t have any civilians left after the last holdout died as a result of Russian shelling in recent days, jumping to his death after the building caught fire.
Businessman Vsevolod Kozhemiako has poured personal funds into helping stand up a unit of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense’s 127th Brigade.
Members of the Ukrainian National Guard rested in a shelter in Ruska Lozova on Saturday.
Mr. Kozhemiako, too, joined the volunteer movement in 2014, helping Ukrainian forces in Donbas. He says he has found some frustrations in the transition from corporate life to military service. “My business is built in a Western way. The company is smaller and decisions are made quickly by one man, the entrepreneur,” he said. “The army is a big organization with its own bureaucracy.”
Mr. Kozhemiako, whose unit is operating in Ruska Lozova together with the Ukrainian National Guard, sat in a bunker this weekend with a National Guard commander as they plotted mortar attacks on Russian positions using a commercially available drone. The Ukrainian outpost had access to the internet thanks to a Starlink satellite terminal, one of many provided to Ukraine by Elon Musk’s SpaceX network, and the drone operator was calling in the artillery.
Russian soldiers who fled Ruska Lozova didn’t have time to escape with items they tried to loot, leaving several refrigerators in the courtyard of a villa that they used as their base. Mannequins with women’s lacy underwear were also left behind, alongside green Russian army rations and a stuffed boar’s head. A Russian multiple-launch rocket system, a blown-up Russian armored personnel carrier, and a green Lada car with bullet holes in its windshield and a Russian military Z marker on the hood remain on Ruska Lozova’s main road.
In the home of the village mayor, who according to residents collaborated with the Russians and is believed to have fled to Russia with them, the contents of the bookcase shed light on his tastes: a biography of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, two biographies of Stalin, and a thick volume called “Russia, a Great Destiny.”
Major Artyom of the National Guard, who is working with Mr. Kozhemiako’s unit in Ruska Lozova and provided only his first name and rank`, said that the Ukrainian forces are slowly taking high ground in the surrounding areas, making it untenable for Russian troops to remain. “Our forces are advancing,” he said. “And the main thing is that we are doing it with minor losses from our side.”
A shelter in the frequently bombed part of Saltivka in Kharkiv.
20. To Really Hurt Russia’s Economy, Target Investment and Human Capital, Not Gas
Excerpts:
Where does this leave us? First, so long as the West can’t physically evacuate the projects that it has built in Russia or otherwise render them unavailable, the Russian economy will continue to plug along, and sanctions can only do so much. While it might come as a blow to Western companies, the West should apply pressure on firms operating in Russia to evacuate or destroy their assets rather than allow them to be seized or sell them at fire-sale discounts.
Second, the longer the war goes on, the more the Russian government can react to and ameliorate the lack of foreign investment. One important mechanism for this might be oligarchs reshoring their wealth and investing it domestically. By going after wealthy Russians, the West may actually be accelerating this process, and thus undermining the goals of sanctions. The aim should be to weaken Russia’s capacity to wage war, not to impoverish oligarchs, and every penny that they repatriate runs counter to that goal. Rather than viewing Russians who want to move their money and lives abroad with suspicion (a policy that will inevitably place burdens on the innocent), the West should work to encourage this ongoing drain of Russian money and capital. While obviously any corruption should be investigated and reported, outright bans on Russian visas, such as that recently applied by the Netherlands, are completely counterproductive. The argument that placing pressure on oligarchs, who will then place pressure domestically, could help destabilize Putin’s regime is wishful thinking that ignores the fact that current oligarchs aren’t independent titans of industry but rather spineless survivors and lackeys. Instead, the West should be doing what it can to accelerate the emigration of Russia’s best and brightest. Things are bad for Russia’s economy now, but it would be in even worse shape without the disgruntled but technically sophisticated Muscovites who Putin despises.
To Really Hurt Russia’s Economy, Target Investment and Human Capital, Not Gas - War on the Rocks
In early 2015, I found myself presenting economic projections, via simultaneous translation, to an audience of po-faced Russian economists gathered in Moscow. We had gathered there at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration for an annual event where the government sets its economic agenda. But the audience wasn’t interested in our projections, which had been made just before the 2014 invasion of Crimea and the Western sanctions that followed. Instead, they wanted to know how much these sanctions would cost Russia, and just how vulnerable Russia was to even stronger Western sanctions. And so, in the months and years that followed, I performed research in this area with a team of Russian economists at the Gaidar Institute. This is an economic think tank in Russia with a unique connection to Russian leadership, and my time working with its staff gave me unique insight into how Russian technocrats think about sanctions. It might even have helped to influence these views.
At the start of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Western countries imposed severe sanctions on Russia, restricting Russians’ access to key dual-use products and technologies and pushing many Russian banks out of the global financial system. Two months later, the war is still raging. The Russian economy has taken a blow, but is far from collapse. One Russian analysis predicted a 9.2 percent contraction in GDP for 2022, roughly in line with Western predictions of -10 to -15 percent. While some sanctions, such as those on key technological inputs, will only bite in the long run, Russia has experienced other GDP declines of comparable amounts over the last 30 years, and there is reason to believe that the generational distribution of pain from sanctions will make this shock at least temporarily sustainable for President Vladimir Putin.
In this context, the West has debated how to further punish Russia economically. Two ideas in vogue are halting European purchases of Russian natural gas and seizing the assets of wealthy Russians held abroad. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, however, these actions would produce relatively little damage to Russia’s warfighting capacity or economy and may even prove to be counterproductive. The real key to damaging the Russian economy in the long run is to target investment and human capital. It is foreign companies and investment that drive Russian GDP and jobs, and talented young Russians who are the country’s hope for the future.
I came to these conclusions while researching the effect of sanctions on Russia in 2015, while I was a Ph.D. candidate collaborating with economists at the Gaidar Institute. Working at that think tank, blocks from the Kremlin, I learned about the tremendous importance of foreign investment to Russia. From 1992 through 2020, Russia experienced net inflows of foreign direct investment of over $715 billion (in 2022 U.S. dollars), or about 42 percent of Russia’s 2020 GDP. This represents a large stock of accumulated capital — literally machines, inventories, facilities, etc. — that creates jobs and output. If these assets are destroyed, repatriated, or otherwise permanently denied to the Russian economy, it will take a large share of Russia’s most technologically advanced and productive capital out of play. Some of this has occurred — Ikea, for example, has suspended operations, and 318 companies from Yale University’s tracker of over 1200 foreign businesses are completely exiting Russia. Unfortunately, however, that 318 figure also includes firms that are divesting themselves of Russian assets, often at fire-sale prices, meaning that many of their resources will still be available to the Russian economy. In addition, Russia has noted this danger and is taking steps to prevent it from effecting more industries. The government has implemented strict capital controls and threatened to nationalize businesses. Russia’s goal is to give foreign businesses two choices: unload their assets at fire-sale prices or continue operating as normal. Furthermore, the West has strengthened Russia’s ability to retain and even repatriate assets through its heavy-handed counter-seizures of wealthy Russians’ assets. Putin himself has pounced on these events, arguing in favor of repatriation by saying that “seizure of foreign assets and accounts of Russian companies and individuals is also a lesson for domestic businesses that there is nothing as reliable as investing in one’s own country.”
On the other hand, energy sales to the West (especially of natural gas) are, in aggregate terms, less important to the Russian economy. In the most recent data available (2020), rents from oil sales contributed 6 percent of Russian GDP, and rents from natural gas only 2.3 percent. In 2021, these values were likely higher due to high energy prices, but, still, energy as a share of Russian GDP has slowly been declining over time. In the medium term, sales (especially of oil) can be redirected to allies and the global south, albeit somewhat less profitably. China and India may be able to absorb much of Russia’s excess oil capacity in the relatively short term; oil also has a large and well established grey market. Finding new outlets for natural gas means building new pipelines or liquefied natural gas terminals, and therefore a shutdown would hurt Russia for longer, but new estimates strongly suggest that Europe would suffer more from a gas shutdown than Russia would. Germany alone, with an economy 2.5 times the size of Russia, is predicted to lose 0.5 to 3 percent of its GDP in the short run from ending Russian gas purchases. Even at the lower end of that range, it is clear that Western Europe as a whole has more to lose. With the clear upper hand here, Russia has been bargaining hard, and has even acted on its threats to shut off gas to Poland and Bulgaria.
These qualitative arguments are backed up by the simulations that I conducted with colleagues at the Gaidar Institute. The approach that we used to model the impact of sanctions is the “overlapping generations computable general equilibrium” framework. This type of analysis goes beyond simple “oil share of GDP” to think about knock-on effects (that’s the “general equilibrium” part of the title). This type of modeling is well-suited to understanding the medium- and long-term distributional and generational impact of a country being cut off from international trade. That said, these models are less good at predicting short-term consequences — say over a period of one to two years — or effects on a particular sector such as the defense industry, which has been an explicit target of Western sanctions. Our research, published in 2017, considered the impact of extremely strong and long-lasting sanctions under several scenarios, and likely informed Russian decision-making.
The most severe scenario that we simulated entailed Russia not being able to export its oil and gas while foreign capital completely exited the country (or was destroyed). This was projected to lead to a 43 percent decline in Russian GDP (versus baseline projections) after a year of sanctions, with the damage being very slowly repaired over time. GDP was projected to return to 81 percent of its no-sanction baseline projection after 25 years. This slow repair of the damage from sanctions is something that we saw in all of our scenarios. It would occur, in large part, due to the re-accumulation of capital over time from domestic Russian savings. An important silver lining of sanctions for Putin is that they force Russian oligarchs, who had previously reinvested their profits abroad or hid them in safe havens, to reinvest domestically — something that seems to be happening already. This has been a long-running goal for Putin. In fact, it might be exactly what he had in mind when he suggested that Russia might emerge stronger from sanctions.
The other scenario variations that we simulated help to isolate the impact of various factors. If the government were to seize all foreign-owned capital, we predicted that this would reduce the short-term impact of sanctions on GDP by 33 percentage points, and reduce the time until Russia catches up with baseline GDP projections by over 30 years. Being able to continue exporting oil and natural gas to the West were also seen to be important, but less so: versus our most severe scenario, being able to continue exports limited the impact of sanctions on GDP by only 3 to 7 percentage points, depending on the year. In other words, we estimated that the impact of eliminating foreign investments in Russia was up to ten times more important than ending Western energy sales.
My time in Moscow also revealed some interesting political economy aspects of sanctions that might have important long-term effects through Russia’s human capital accumulation and productivity growth. The Russian Federation’s government under Putin has been described as being dominated by two sorts of bureaucrat: siloviki (“securocrats”) who see all government action through the lens of conflict with the West, and technocrats who wish to focus on Russia’s modernization and economic development. It is the technocrats who were responsible for Russia’s economic rise from 2000 through 2008, which put the country in position to be able to invade Ukraine. These highly educated policymakers are a manifestation of a concession made by Putin because of his economic ambitions: The autocrat would allow and even cultivate a cadre of intellectuals with cosmopolitan lifestyles and somewhat liberal beliefs to run the economy efficiently, so long as these individuals didn’t rock the political boat.
However, technocrats have been increasingly marginalized from power. My last trip to Moscow was in 2015, just after the seizure of Crimea. I was there to present our projections of Russian long-term economic development for the Gaidar Forum. The mood among my Gaidar Institute colleagues was glum. They regretted the invasion, which they pointed out made Russia poorer on average (Crimean GDP per capita was lower than Russia’s and money would have to be spent on a solution after Ukraine cut the water supply), though were resigned to it given its popularity. On a personal level they were frustrated by a lack of cheese (a shortage that took years to rectify) and what it foretold: a greater disconnection from the rest of the world. They felt increasingly alienated and disempowered by the country they were supposed to be leading into prosperity. Some contemplated emigrating.
Young, highly skilled Muscovites leaving the country is a very bad potential outcome for Russia. Many have already left since the start of the current invasion. While we did not consider an explicit “brain drain” scenario in our simulations, we did find that even a small slowdown in Russian productivity growth due to sanctions could have large negative consequences. That said, we did find some interesting intergenerational consequences of sanctions that might help to insulate the regime. Older generations tend to suffer more from sanctions than younger ones. This is in part because an isolated Russia will face inflation and lower rates of returns on equity, effects that are more pronounced for those who have already accumulated assets to be affected. In addition, we calculated that 62 percent of Russia’s tax revenue comes from consumption (e.g., sales) taxes. (This doesn’t count the 38 percent of general government revenues that come from fossil fuel industry rents.) If Russia were to proportionately finance any government revenue losses using the same ratio of consumption and income taxes, the costs would fall harder on older Russians with fixed incomes versus younger Russians who would suffer more from increased wage taxation. Older Russians are more likely to support Putin, meaning that he has political capital to spend with this economically less-important group. In fact, rather than lowering consumption taxes to help older citizens, Russia has doubled down on trying to insulate talented young people from sanctions, lowering taxes on and providing other benefits to some critical groups of mobile young people.
In the weeks since the invasion of Ukraine, I’ve been in touch with colleagues in Russia again. One former colleague reports using Global Vector Autoregressive models — a data-driven short- and medium-term forecasting approach — to project the economic damage from sanctions. As of a few weeks ago he anticipated a 7 percent downturn in GDP this year. More recently these estimates have been revised negatively to 9 percent in the medium scenario and 11 percent in the worst one.
Comparing what has occurred in reality to the models that we simulated in 2017, he thinks that foreign-capital seizure, combined with a long-term productivity growth slowdown, best captures what has manifested. He agrees that our calculation of a 16 percent decrease in lifetime welfare for high-skilled Russians born around 1980 seems correct if the sanctions continue for a long time (while acknowledging there are wide confidence intervals). He is personally upset about complicity in the war but sees no better way to help his country (as well as calm himself) than to continue in his work. Those who contemplate leaving are offended by Putin’s characterization of them as “national traitors … those who earn money here, with us, but live there. And ‘live’ not even in the geographical sense of the word, but in their thoughts, in their slave-like consciousness.” My former colleague doubts that educated young people who are on the fence will be significantly influenced by Putin’s income-tax tweaks.
Where does this leave us? First, so long as the West can’t physically evacuate the projects that it has built in Russia or otherwise render them unavailable, the Russian economy will continue to plug along, and sanctions can only do so much. While it might come as a blow to Western companies, the West should apply pressure on firms operating in Russia to evacuate or destroy their assets rather than allow them to be seized or sell them at fire-sale discounts.
Second, the longer the war goes on, the more the Russian government can react to and ameliorate the lack of foreign investment. One important mechanism for this might be oligarchs reshoring their wealth and investing it domestically. By going after wealthy Russians, the West may actually be accelerating this process, and thus undermining the goals of sanctions. The aim should be to weaken Russia’s capacity to wage war, not to impoverish oligarchs, and every penny that they repatriate runs counter to that goal. Rather than viewing Russians who want to move their money and lives abroad with suspicion (a policy that will inevitably place burdens on the innocent), the West should work to encourage this ongoing drain of Russian money and capital. While obviously any corruption should be investigated and reported, outright bans on Russian visas, such as that recently applied by the Netherlands, are completely counterproductive. The argument that placing pressure on oligarchs, who will then place pressure domestically, could help destabilize Putin’s regime is wishful thinking that ignores the fact that current oligarchs aren’t independent titans of industry but rather spineless survivors and lackeys. Instead, the West should be doing what it can to accelerate the emigration of Russia’s best and brightest. Things are bad for Russia’s economy now, but it would be in even worse shape without the disgruntled but technically sophisticated Muscovites who Putin despises.
Seth Gordon Benzell is an assistant professor of management science at Chapman University, Argyros School of Business and Economics. He is a fellow of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and the Stanford HAI Digital Economics Lab. His research has appeared in prestigious economics and general science outlets, including AEJ: Applied Economics, the National Tax Journal, and PNAS. He can be followed on Twitter at @SBenzell.
21. Japan's push to double defense spending ties directly back to Ukraine
Will we see conflict in Kurils?
Japan's push to double defense spending ties directly back to Ukraine - Breaking Defense
"What this document says is, we have to anticipate this (Ukraine) emergency. Don't wait till it's upon us," said Rikki Kersten, honorary professor at the Australian National University.
The flags of Japan and the U.S. are flown during an honor guard ceremony attended by U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Japan Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi ahead of a bilateral meeting in Tokyo, Japan, on Tuesday, March 16, 2021. (David Mareuil/Anadolu/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
SYDNEY: Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party has taken the extraordinary step of proposing to double the country’s defense spending over the next five years, with the goal of moving from the historic level of less than 1 percent of GDP spent on defense up to 2 percent.
The same document also called for the development of a “counterattack” capability that can target enemy military bases or command and control systems. If the ruling government does act on this recommendation — and it should be noted the LDP appears unlikely to lose power anytime soon — it would continue a push by the LDP away from Japan’s post World War II reluctance towards having a military capable of projecting power.
It is hard to ignore that the LDP plan comes as Germany is also moving away from its own post-WWII reluctance for military use. Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Berlin began providing lethal aid to Kyiv, and also approved a massive increase of roughly $113 billion to its defense budget, something almost unthinkable just months ago.
Now the LDP appears ready to have Japan make a parallel commitment, for many of the same reasons. In a sign of how much Japan has shifted from its earlier focus on protecting its islands to collective self defense. The document says that Ukraine has shown that no country can defend itself on its own in this current global geopolitical environment, said Rikki Kersten, honorary professor at the Australian National University’s Australia-Japan Research Center, in an interview.
“Look at how Germany, in particular, had to respond to this emergency in their backyard. They have had to, with very short notice, dramatically increase their budgets to meet the emergency. We would be irresponsible not to anticipate a similar emergency and act sooner,” said Kersten, who has reviewed the LDP document.
“The thing that leapt out at me in this document was the extent to which Ukraine is invoked to justify the need for dramatic changes in policy. So, if you just look at a few of those justifications, it’s not only does Japan face an unprecedented threat environment in its own regions, but now we can see the liberal international order is under threat,” she said.
The LDP plan gets fairly specific about at least one area of weaponry that will need to be the target of this increased spending — missile defense, particularly systems aimed at tackling the difficult threat of hypersonics, Kersten said.
“What we’ve seen unfolding in Russia’s attack on Ukraine is the emergence of types of technology that require different means of meeting the threat. And what that means, in the main, that’s hypersonic weaponry, but also other types of missile technology that can’t be intercepted through conventional means,” she said.
That will have implications for Japan’s alliance with the US “because that’s where the technology is going to come from.” In addition to missile defense, the LDP document talks about drones, artificial intelligence, cyber, human intelligence and space.
In broader national security terms, this LDP document was released in anticipation of a coming strategy document Japan is expected to release in December, Kersten said.
There is a chance that the LDP plan will be criticized during the upcoming elections for the Japanese upper house, Kersten noted, but the fact that this spending boost is being bruited before the election may indicate that the ruling party is confident the people will support this major shift in Japanese politics and strategy.
22. Exclusive: Putin 'has recognized he has no victory to celebrate,' US ambassador to UN says
In addition to all the other Russian abuses and malign behavior, this is the action of a desperate country.
Excerpts:
Thomas-Greenfield also told CNN her Ukrainian counterpart at the UN told her about Russians stealing grain from Ukraine, and although the United States has not confirmed the details, "there is some evidence that Russia, not only have they been attacking farmers' fields, they've been taking equipment, but also that they have removed grain from silos and taken that grain into Russia."
"I absolutely think it's credible," she said.
Concerns have loomed about the potential impact the war in Ukraine will have on its role as the "breadbasket of Europe." Multiple sources have told CNN that Russian forces are stealing farm equipment and thousands of tons of grain from Ukrainian farmers in areas they have occupied, as well as targeting food storage sites with artillery.
Ukraine's Defense Ministry said last week that an estimated 400,000 tons of grain had been stolen to date.
Exclusive: Putin 'has recognized he has no victory to celebrate,' US ambassador to UN says
CNN · by Kylie Atwood and Jennifer Hansler, CNN
But the Russian leader also gave no indication that he plans to end the war in Ukraine, she cautioned.
In the first reaction from a Biden administration official to Putin's speech, Thomas-Greenfield noted to CNN that Putin did not use his remarks to announce a withdrawal from Ukraine -- which would have been welcomed by the United States -- which signals that Putin's war will continue.
"There was no reason for (Putin) to either declare victory or declare a war that he has already been carrying on for more than two months," Thomas-Greenfield said.
"His efforts in Ukraine have not succeeded," she added. "He was not able to go into Ukraine and bring them to their knees in a few days and have them surrender."
During a speech commemorating Russia's defeat of Nazi Germany at the end of World War II, Putin reiterated his baseless accusation that the West left him no choice but to invade Ukraine. Planned Victory Day air shows across Russia were canceled, raising questions as to why.
In a separate interview on CNN's "Connect the World" Monday, US Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith said Putin's speech "wasn't that surprising" and "completely detached from reality."
"It's sad that on this day, on Victory Day, that he's celebrating aggression and oppression at the same time," she added.
'The conflict is not over'
Putin's speech provided little detail on how Russia plans to proceed in Ukraine. It followed days of speculation that the Russian leader would use the event to formally declare war on Ukraine, or order a mass mobilization of Russian forces to prosecute a war that has now stretched into its third month, with heavy Russian losses.
Although Putin did not announce the speculated escalation plans, Thomas-Greenfield noted that the "the conflict is not over, for sure."
"He didn't announce a withdrawal. He didn't announce a deal with the Ukrainians," she told CNN. "So I suspect and we all assess that this could be a long-term conflict that could carry on for additional months."
Moreover, it would be too strong to say the United States "welcomed" Putin's remarks on Monday, Thomas-Greenfield told CNN, because the "unconscionable war on the Ukrainian people" continues.
"So what we would see as a positive sign is for Putin to pull his troops out of Ukraine and bring this unconscionable war to an end," she said.
Thomas-Greenfield, who was in Brussels for a major conference to support Syria, said Moscow's appointment of the "Butcher of Syria" Alexander Dvornikov to command Russia's offensive in Ukraine is "just another example of Russian brutality, Russia's lack of consciousness about humanity, the human rights violations and atrocities that they have committed and they are prepared to continue to carry out in Ukraine."
"It just shows to the world that there are no limits, as far as the Russians are concerned, to their willingness to use every single tool to bring the Ukrainian people down," she told CNN.
The fact that Dvornikov oversaw Russia forces accused of committing atrocities in Syria and still remains in power to command forces accused of committing war crimes in Ukraine "is certainly something that the world has to address moving forward," Thomas-Greenfield acknowledged.
"We can't continue to allow individuals like this individual to carry out these acts and they absolutely can expect to be held accountable," she said, noting that the United States is working with Ukraine, the International Criminal Court, and the International Court of Justice "to ensure those responsible are held accountable."
'Demeanor changed significantly'
Thomas-Greenfield is among the Biden administration officials who has had the most interaction with Russia officials in the wake of the war given their seat on the UN Security Council.
She told CNN the behavior of the Russian diplomats she works with in New York has "absolutely" changed since Russia began its war in Ukraine, and that the seem "uncomfortable" in "the way they carry themselves, the demeanor."
She said she sees her Russian counterpart appear at the UN Security Council less frequently than before the war -- now he often sends his deputy or his experts in his place.
"From day one, the 24th of February, when we were sitting in an emergency meeting of Security Council and the Russians were president of the Security Council, we saw their demeanor changed significantly in the council," Thomas-Greenfield said, adding that she believes the Russians at the meeting "were taken by surprise by the attack" that evening that launched Russia's war in Ukraine.
Thomas-Greenfield said the Russian diplomats at the United Nations "certainly" are "reading off of prepared remarks."
"We know and expect when they will respond to things we say, but I suspect that everything is very much laid out for them and scripted," she said.
Thomas-Greenfield also told CNN her Ukrainian counterpart at the UN told her about Russians stealing grain from Ukraine, and although the United States has not confirmed the details, "there is some evidence that Russia, not only have they been attacking farmers' fields, they've been taking equipment, but also that they have removed grain from silos and taken that grain into Russia."
"I absolutely think it's credible," she said.
Concerns have loomed about the potential impact the war in Ukraine will have on its role as the "breadbasket of Europe." Multiple sources have told CNN that Russian forces are stealing farm equipment and thousands of tons of grain from Ukrainian farmers in areas they have occupied, as well as targeting food storage sites with artillery.
Ukraine's Defense Ministry said last week that an estimated 400,000 tons of grain had been stolen to date.
CNN's Tim Lister and Sanyo Fylyppov contributed to this report.
CNN · by Kylie Atwood and Jennifer Hansler, CNN
23. The Coup in the Kremlin
Excerpts:
The journalist and writer Masha Gessen once dubbed Putin “the man without a face.” Today, however, his is the only face, sitting atop an anonymous security bureaucracy that does his bidding. Another coup, either in the Kremlin corridors or on the streets of Moscow, is not likely. The only group that could conceivably unseat the president is the FSB, which is still technically run by nationalist siloviki who understand that some foreign policy flexibility is necessary for internal development. But such officials are no longer the FSB’s future. The indistinct body of security technocrats now in charge is obsessed with total control, no matter the national or international consequences.
The last time the Kremlin built such an all-controlling state, under Andropov’s leadership in the early 1980s, it unraveled when the security forces relaxed their grip and allowed reform. Putin knows that story well and is unlikely to risk the same outcome. And even without him, the system he built would remain in place, sustained by the new security cohort—unless a 1980s Afghanistan-style debacle in Ukraine destroys it all. With this bureaucracy holding tight to power, Moscow’s foreign adventurism might abate. But as long as the structure holds steady, Russia will remain oppressed, isolated, and unfree.
The Coup in the Kremlin
How Putin and the Security Services Captured the Russian State
May 10, 2022
On December 20, 1999, Vladimir Putin addressed senior officials of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) at its Lubyanka headquarters near Moscow’s Red Square. The recently appointed 47-year-old prime minister, who had held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the FSB, was visiting to mark the holiday honoring the Russian security services. “The task of infiltrating the highest level of government is accomplished,” Putin quipped.
His former colleagues chuckled. But the joke was on Russia.
Putin became interim president less than two weeks later. From the start of his rule, he has worked to strengthen the state to counteract the chaos of post-Soviet capitalism and unsteady democratization. To achieve that end, he saw it necessary to elevate the country’s security services and put former security officials in charge of critical government organs.
In recent years, however, Putin’s approach has changed. More and more, bureaucracy has displaced the high-profile personalities that previously dominated. And as the Russian president has come to rely on these bureaucratic institutions to further his consolidation of control, their power has grown relative to other organs of the state. But it was not until February, when Putin gave the orders first to recognize the independence of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and then, a few days later, to send Russian troops into Ukraine, that the complete takeover by the new security apparatus became apparent.
In the early days of the war, most branches of the Russian state seemed blindsided by Putin’s determination to invade, and some prominent officials even seemed to question the wisdom of the decision, however timidly. But in the weeks since, government and society alike have lined up behind the Kremlin. Dissent is now a crime, and individuals who once held decision-making power—even if circumscribed—have found themselves hostages of institutions whose single-minded purpose is security and control. What has happened is, in effect, an FSB-on-FSB coup: Russia used to be a state dominated by security forces, but now a faceless security bureaucracy has become the state, with Putin sitting on top.
THE SURVIVAL OF THE CHEKISTS
The modern FSB traces its beginnings to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, when the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, also known as the Cheka, hunted down enemies of the new Soviet state under the fierce leadership of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Its subsequent iterations, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and the Ministry of State Security (MGB), evolved under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s rule and were led most notoriously by Genrikh Yagoda in the 1930s and Lavrenty Beria in the 1940s and 1950s. The KGB became the Soviet Union’s primary security agency in 1954 under Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor. Over the following decade, Khrushchev expanded the Communist Party’s oversight of the Soviet state’s institutions of control, limiting their influence. But after Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, Yuri Andropov, the longtime head of the KGB, reclaimed the organization’s lost authority, bringing the security service to the height of its power in the 1970s.
Andropov went on to lead the Soviet Union as general secretary of the Communist Party from 1982 to 1984. He was merciless in imposing ideological control. Any “diversion”—such as covert disagreement with Soviet politics—was grounds for prosecution. Some dissenters were imprisoned or placed in psychiatric wards for “retraining,” while others were forced to emigrate. Living in Moscow at the time, I remember police raids to catch indolent citizens and plain-clothes KGB officers—operating like Orwellian “thought police”—surreptitiously roaming city streets, detaining people suspected of skipping work or having too much leisure time. It was an atmosphere of total control, with Andropov’s KGB fully in charge.
By the late 1980s, reforms introduced by Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev loosened the grip of the security forces. Perestroika was supposed to renew the Soviet Union—some scholars even allege Andropov had a hand in the program—but it ended up threatening the survival of the regime. The last Soviet leader turned against his KGB masters, exposing the crimes of Stalinism and proceeding with an opening to the West. When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 and Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe left Moscow’s sphere of influence, the KGB turned on Gorbachev, two years later launching a failed coup that hastened the Soviet collapse.
The security apparatus was humiliated—but it was not disbanded. Boris Yeltsin, the first president of post-Soviet Russia, considered communism, not the KGB, to be the greater evil. He thought that simply changing the name of the KGB to the FSB would change the organization, too, allowing it to become more benevolent and less controlling. This was wishful thinking. Russia’s security services trace their origins all the way back to Ivan the Terrible’s brutal bodyguard corps, the oprichniki, in the sixteenth century and Peter the Great’s Secret Chancellery in the eighteenth century. Yeltsin’s attempt at reform could not permanently suppress a system with such deep historical roots any more than Khrushchev’s could four decades earlier.
Russia used to be a state dominated by security forces, but now the security bureaucracy has become the state.
In fact, KGB officers were relatively well equipped to endure the collapse of communism and the transition to capitalism. To the security services, the Soviet-era call for a classless society of proletarians had always been merely a slogan; ideology was a tool for controlling the public and strengthening the hand of the state. Former members applied that pragmatic approach as they rose to elite positions in post-Soviet Russia. As Leonid Shebarshin, a former high-level KGB operative, has explained, it was only natural that those who trained under Andropov for a secret war against external and internal enemies—NATO, the CIA, dissidents, and political opposition—should become the new Russian bourgeoisie. They could handle irregular working hours, succeed in hostile environments, and use interrogation and manipulation tactics when called for. They squeezed every last drop of labor out of their employees and subordinates.
One of their number, Putin, was himself lauded as a pragmatist by Western diplomats after he rose from obscurity to become president of Russia in 2000. Even then, he made no secret of his intention to establish Andropov-style absolute authority, quickly moving to limit the power of the capitalist barons who had flourished in the 1990s under Yeltsin’s frenzied presidency. In Putin’s mind, an independent oligarchy in control of strategic industries, such as oil and gas, threatened the stability of the state. He ensured that business decisions relevant to the national interest were made instead by a handful of trusted people—the so-called siloviki, or affiliates of the state’s military and security agencies. These individuals effectively became managers or guardians of state-controlled assets. Many were from Putin’s native Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg) and most had served alongside him in the KGB. On the corporate side, their ranks include Igor Sechin (Rosneft), Sergey Chemezov (Rostec), and Alexey Miller (Gazprom), while matters of state protection are handled by Nikolai Patrushev (secretary of the Security Council), Alexander Bortnikov (director of the FSB), Sergei Naryshkin (director of the Foreign Intelligence Service), and Alexander Bastrykin (head of the Investigative Committee), among others.
Putin has been convinced that strengthening the state’s “extraordinary organs” would prevent upheaval of the kind that led to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Putting former KGB operatives in charge seemed to offer some economic and political stability. In an effort to maintain that stability, Putin acted in 2020 to extend his presidency, proposing constitutional amendments to circumvent the term limits that would remove him from office in 2024.
Since their ratification, the constitutional changes have given the state broad latitude to address problems ranging from COVID-19 to mass protests in Belarus to Russian opposition lawyer Alexei Navalny’s return to Moscow. As was the case in the Andropov era, all matters are now run through central regulatory bodies—federal organizations that oversee everything from taxation to science (the word nadzor, meaning “supervision,” in many of their Russian names makes them easy to recognize). Criminal prosecutions are an increasingly common tactic used against Russian citizens who complain about abuses of power, request better services, or express support for Navalny, who himself was convicted based on false accusations of fraud and other supposed crimes. A punitive apparatus of control has tightened its grip, led by the technocratic Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, a former tax official, and an assortment of midlevel managers inside the regime bureaucracy.
THE FSB COUP
Putin’s decision to recognize the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, and subsequently to launch a “special military operation” to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, followed a similar pattern of punishment for political deviation: he sought to penalize an entire country for what he deemed its “anti-Russian” choice to align with the West. But within Russia, the events leading up to and following the invasion also marked the completion of a political shift that has been years in the making. They exposed the waning power of the siloviki who dominated the early Putin era—and their replacement by a faceless security-and-control bureaucracy.
On February 21, during a nationally broadcast Security Council session, the president’s closest confidants seemed completely in the dark as to what the Donetsk and Luhansk recognition would entail. Naryshkin, of the Foreign Intelligence Service, stumbled over his words as Putin demanded an affirmation of support for the decision. By the end of this exchange, Naryshkin appeared to be trembling with fear. Even Patrushev, a hardcore conservative Chekist, wanted to inform the United States of Russia’s plans to send troops to Ukraine—a suggestion that went unanswered.
For a decision as consequential as the invasion of a neighboring country, it is remarkable how many organs of the state were out of the loop. Economic institutions were caught by surprise—when Elvira Nabiullina, head of the Russian central bank, tried to resign in early March, she was told to just buckle up and deal with the economic fallout. The military didn’t seem to be aware of the entire plan either, and spent months moving tens of thousands of troops around the border without knowing whether they would be asked to attack.
Putin with members of the Security Council in Moscow, February 2022
Sputnik Photo Agency / Reuters
Putin’s clandestine operation was even hidden from other clandestine operatives. Leaders of the FSB department responsible for providing the Kremlin with intelligence about Ukraine’s political situation, for instance, didn’t fully believe that an invasion would happen. Many analysts had confidently argued it would be against Russia’s national interests. Comfortable in the assumption that a large-scale attack was off the table, officials kept feeding Putin the story he wanted to hear: Ukrainians were Slavic brothers ready to be liberated from Nazi-collaborating, Western-controlled stooges in Kyiv. A source in the Kremlin told me that many officials now envision a disaster akin to the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which ended in a disgraceful withdrawal and helped precipitate the dissolution of the Soviet empire. But in a government that has become increasingly technocratic, institutionalized, and impersonal, such opinions are no longer permissible.
As the conflict continues into its third month and evidence of war crimes mounts, most officials and politicians continue to back Putin. Big business is largely silent. Economic elites, cut off from the West, have rallied around the flag. Even though some may be grumbling in private, very few are vocal in public. Rare exceptions include the billionaire industrialist Oleg Deripaska, who has repeatedly called for peace; the former Putin associate Anatoly Chubais, known for leading Russia’s privatization under Yeltsin, who has fled to Turkey; the oligarch and former Chelsea soccer club owner, Roman Abramovich, who has tried to facilitate a negotiated settlement; and the entrepreneur Oleg Tinkov, who was forced to sell his shares in his hugely successful online bank, Tinkoff, for kopeks after speaking out against the “operation.”
Putin has never made a secret of his intention to establish absolute authority.
The rest of Russia’s 145 million citizens—except for those tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands who have fled abroad—are similarly falling in line. Having lost access to foreign flights, brands, and payment systems, most are forced to accept that their lives are tethered to the Kremlin. In a sharp departure from the early days of the Ukrainian operation, when public shock was palpable and people took to the streets expressing antiwar sentiment, polling shows that around 80 percent now support the war. The actual number is likely lower—when the state exercises total control, people give the answers that the regime wants. Still, my own conversations with relatives and friends across Russia confirm that speaking against the war is increasingly unpopular. An acquaintance in the resort town of Kislovodsk in the Northern Caucasus, for instance, insisted that Putin needs to complete “the mission of ‘de-Nazification,’ take care of the Donbas, and show Americans not to mess with Russia.”
As the shock wears off, fear has taken its place. In a televised address in mid-March, Putin insisted that Western countries “will try to bet on the so-called fifth column, on national traitors,” implying that all opponents of his “operation” are the unpatriotic enemies. The government’s security branches had previously announced a new law: spreading “fake information,” or any narrative that contradicts the Ministry of Defense’s official story, is a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Independent media outlets were blocked or disbanded, including the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, liberal radio Ekho Moskvy, and Dozhd TV, all of which regularly criticized the government until two months ago. The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, and other foreign media packed up and left the country. Since the end of February, more than 16,000 people have been detained, including 400 teenagers. People have been arrested for just being near a protest. For one Muscovite, merely showing up at Red Square holding a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace was enough to warrant detention.
In this atmosphere of complete repression, even political figures who once seemed to offer alternative ideas now echo Putin’s uncompromising words. Former President Dmitry Medvedev has insisted that criticism of the operation amounts to treason. Even Naryshkin, a skeptic in February, has found his war footing and now faithfully parrots the government line. People no longer speak with their own voices; the shadow of Putinist Chekism now covers the entire country.
THE NEW SECURITY STATE
The journalist and writer Masha Gessen once dubbed Putin “the man without a face.” Today, however, his is the only face, sitting atop an anonymous security bureaucracy that does his bidding. Another coup, either in the Kremlin corridors or on the streets of Moscow, is not likely. The only group that could conceivably unseat the president is the FSB, which is still technically run by nationalist siloviki who understand that some foreign policy flexibility is necessary for internal development. But such officials are no longer the FSB’s future. The indistinct body of security technocrats now in charge is obsessed with total control, no matter the national or international consequences.
The last time the Kremlin built such an all-controlling state, under Andropov’s leadership in the early 1980s, it unraveled when the security forces relaxed their grip and allowed reform. Putin knows that story well and is unlikely to risk the same outcome. And even without him, the system he built would remain in place, sustained by the new security cohort—unless a 1980s Afghanistan-style debacle in Ukraine destroys it all. With this bureaucracy holding tight to power, Moscow’s foreign adventurism might abate. But as long as the structure holds steady, Russia will remain oppressed, isolated, and unfree.
NINA KHRUSHCHEVA is Professor of International Affairs at the New School.
24. Opinion | Ukraine’s soldiers are inspiring. Their bodies and families are devastated.
Opinion | Ukraine’s soldiers are inspiring. Their bodies and families are devastated.
Iuliia Mendel is a journalist and former press secretary for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
LVIV, Ukraine — When we meet, 40-year-old Danylo Voronov holds out his left fist, as has become popular during the pandemic. But it’s not covid-19 that is worrying the Ukrainian soldier.
“I haven’t learned how to shake hands firmly with my left hand yet,” he explains. His jacket’s right sleeve hangs loosely after his arm was torn off during a retreat in Donbas on March 3.
He says he is lucky, as the comrade on his left in the armored personnel carrier and the nurse on his right were both killed. In the moment, he saw blood on his shoulder but did not immediately realize he had lost his arm.
Voronov is just one of thousands of soldiers and volunteers wounded in the fighting across Ukraine who have arrived in the western city of Lviv for shelter and care. Under the spring sunshine outside a hospital, I see a few bandaged men in military uniforms, some in wheelchairs. Their faces are exhausted with pain and sadness. The patient flow here is constant.
“I’m not going to get discouraged,” Voronov tells me. “When I was taken out with the other wounded, our soldiers were breaking through the encirclement of the Russians, and some died. They died to get me out. I have no right to be discouraged; they must not die in vain.”
Voronov joined the Ukrainian army in 2016, as Ukraine was defending itself after the Russian invasion of Crimea and occupation of parts of the eastern region of Donbas, where more than 14,000 people have already died. In some ways, his personal story mirrors the broken relations between Russia and Ukraine. He used to be married to a Russian woman. The more he learned in the military, the more his ex-wife watched Russian propaganda, generously distributed in the regions of Ukraine close to Russia. As ideological differences led to misunderstanding, they divorced; Voronov has since lost contact with her.
Voronov had been in the hospital for a week when I met him, as had 22-year-old DJ, Vladyslav Orlov, from the eastern city of Kharkiv. There, he was one of the youngest to enlist in the local territorial defense.
“I had two arms, two legs, so I went,” Orlov says. But he had only served for a day before a Russian missile hit the regional administration building where he was staying.
“At first, we were told we did not need weapons. But at 2 a.m. on March 1, we were woken up to urgently distributed rifles. The rifles could not help us, though, when the missiles started falling in the morning,” Orlov recounts, remembering every minute. After the first explosion near the administration building, he called his girlfriend, 20-year-old Sophia, who was with volunteers and civilians on a different floor. Then, the building was hit by another missile. Orlov was pulled out from under the rubble with his legs completely shattered. Since then, the couple has traveled to hospitals across Ukraine, trying to get him healed.
"Everything became different. Money is no longer important. Because even if I had a million, it wouldn’t help Vladyslav now,” Sophia explains. “Before, I used to plan everything, but now I live the present. We are alive, we are near, and that’s the most important thing.”
“I don’t regret anything. I will recover. It is not the worst that could have happened to me,” says Orlov.
The well-known television journalist Oleksandr Makhov, 36, was among those who did not make it. When the war started, he also volunteered as a soldier, reporting every day on his social media account about the developments and encouraging people to trust the Ukrainian army. On April 5, he proposed to his girlfriend, fellow TV journalist Anastasiia Blyshchyk, with a pull ring from a grenade.
“I do not always know what happens to him. You are killing me every time asking ‘How is Sasha?’ ” she wrote on social media on May 2. The next day, he was slightly wounded. The day after, he was killed in combat.
“Please tell me this is a mistake!!!” Blyshchyk wrote on Facebook, echoing what many others are enduring today in Ukraine.
Many stories of Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers are inspiring, but their bodies and families are devastated. Their scars will continue long into the future, even as their stories become central to the history of the new Ukraine.
“A person agrees to die the moment he decides to go to war,” Roman Kostenko, an officer in Ukraine’s security service and a Ukrainian member of parliament, tells me. “There is no fear or pain in combat. This all exists before and after, but not during the war. If they survive, they are reborn, given a second life.”
On the phone, I hear his words mixed with explosions. Kostenko says goodbye very quickly, explaining that the attack is getting worse. The wounds from this war are deep, but still our brave volunteers and soldiers press on.
25. Analysis | Americans now see both political parties as equally extreme
Analysis | Americans now see both political parties as equally extreme
The Washington Post · by Analysis by Philip BumpNational correspondent Today at 1:15 p.m. EDT · May 9, 2022
Polling released on Friday by CNN indicates that Americans generally view the two main political parties as equivalently extreme in their views and policies. It’s a finding that’s interesting in the context of the recent debate over partisan extremism, prompted by Elon Musk’s meme on the subject — but also one that’s interesting for the question it raises about the inherent subjectivity of “extreme.”
If the extreme becomes normal, is it still extreme?
Since 2000, CNN and its polling partners (most recently the firm SSRS) have occasionally been asking Americans to evaluate the extent to which either party is either mainstream or extreme. If we pick out the last time the question was asked in years for which data is available, the pattern looks like this.
Notice two things. The first is that the trend in perceived extremism for the Democratic Party has been generally upward (after the retraction of the jump just before the 2010 midterm elections). For the Republican Party, there was a big surge between 2010 and 2012 that peaked just after the government shutdown in 2013. Since then, the percentage of people saying that the Republican Party is too extreme has dropped.
Again, we are looking at only sporadic polling, which makes it a bit harder to describe what’s happening. But it does seem to reflect how the parties are perceived in general. That the Democrats were seen as more extreme just before the 2010 election in which they were blown out and that the GOP was seen as more extreme immediately after the 2012 election (a loss attributed at the time to the party’s failure to moderate) and then after the shutdown seems noteworthy.
But also consider how views have changed since October 2013, at which point 56 percent of respondents said the Republican Party was too extreme. Since then, views of the extremism of the GOP have dropped among every partisan group, including Republicans. Views of the extremism of Democrats have increased — with Republicans seeing an 11-point increase in their likelihood of describing the Democrats as too extreme.
At the time of the Musk meme debate, I looked at how people identify their own ideologies. This is an imperfect measure of “extremism,” certainly, given that it, too, is subjective. What that analysis showed is that Democrats in 2021 were more likely to call themselves liberal than they were in 2012. Republicans were also more likely to call themselves conservative, though they moved to the right less than Democrats moved to the left.
(The years 2008 and 2012 are highlighted as they were the focus of Musk’s meme.)
But there’s one hard-to-avoid factor that is likely contributing to this: Republicans were already further from the center.
Again, “too extreme” lacks any objective measurement. It’s an individual assessment of how something compares to what’s expected. In the example of these polls, that’s “the mainstream.”
Consider how the GOP has changed since 2013, however. It ousted one of the members of its House leadership team largely over concerns about his being soft on immigration. (The party’s position on immigration, you may recall, was one of the immoderate positions to which its 2012 presidential loss was attributed.) It elevated Donald Trump to be the party nominee in part thanks to his extreme rhetoric on immigration but, more broadly, on his embrace of the party’s far-right supporters. This was the path to victory outlined by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) (perhaps the central figure in the 2013 shutdown) during the 2016 cycle: move to the right to energize disaffected right-wing voters and trust that more-moderate Republicans would stick around. Most did.
Then there was the Trump administration and its fallout, culminating in the broadly embraced effort to deny the results of the 2020 election. Not to mention another, longer shutdown entirely motivated by Trump’s desire to force Congress to fund a wall on the border.
Is this a party that is less extreme in its positions than it was in 2013? Or has the GOP’s current approach to politics, congealed in the tea party era, simply become the party’s mainstream?
Again, it is the case that the Democratic Party has also moved toward a pole in recent years, as made clear in the graph above and, certainly, anecdotally. Americans seem to think that overlaps with the party being more extreme now than it was in 2013. But is it accurate that the Democratic Party’s move to a partisan extreme came as the GOP was moving away from the other extreme?
Or is the GOP manifesting what is expected of the GOP more than the Democratic Party is manifesting what has been expected of it?
The Washington Post · by Analysis by Philip BumpNational correspondent Today at 1:15 p.m. EDT · May 9, 2022
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.
