Quotes of the Day:

"The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next."

- Ursula K. Le Guin

"A sign of intelligence is an awareness of one's own ignorance."

- Niccolo Machiavelli

"If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have a half century before you die – what makes this any different from a half hour?" 

- Leo Tolstoy.

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 14, 2023

2.  Secretary Antony J. Blinken at a Press Availability (ASEAN)

3. Russians told 'hour of reckoning has come' as TV exposes losses

4. Prigozhin's Other Rebellion

5. How We Can Help Ukraine While Genuinely Prioritizing Asia

6. City of Spies: DC Is the World Capital of Espionage

7. Opinion | Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness.

8. Chinese Scientists Are Leaving the United States

9. To defeat Russia, Ukraine’s top commander pushes to fight on his terms

10. Taylor Swift is boosting the economy with her Eras Tour, Federal Reserve says

11. Hydrogen Is the Future—or a Complete Mirage

12. Brief: Abu Sayyaf Moves Closer to Demise with Shortage of Recruits

13. U.S. Must Change the Game on Taiwan

14. Task Force 99 drone was 'very effective' in secretive spy missions, senior DOD official says

15. Nominee to be next Army chief wants to boost civilian hiring to address cyber shortfalls

16. Air Force Special Ops Wants Runway Independence, More Speed

17. Meta’s Threads Now Has to Keep Its Millions of Users Engaged

18. Retired four-star Army general: Biden ‘entirely correct’ to send cluster munitions to Ukraine

19. CIA No. 2: China sees Russia as 'junior partner,' likely alarmed by Wagner uprising

20. Outlaw Alliance: How China and Chinese Mafias Overseas Protect Each Other’s Interests

21. Would Allies Fight With U.S. for Taiwan? Japan Is Wary

22. Two Videos on SOF cuts and the Army

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 14, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-14-2023

Key Takeaways:

• Russian President Vladimir Putin further indicated he intends to maintain the Wagner Group as a cohesive fighting force rather than breaking it up but seeks to separate Wagner Financier Yevgeny Prigozhin from Wagner leadership and forces.
• Belarusian government and independent sources confirmed on July 14 that Wagner Group instructors previously deployed in Africa previously arrived at training grounds in Belarus.
• Former 58th Combined Arms Army Commander Major General Ivan Popov’s dismissal continues to generate pronounced ire against the Russian military command and the Russian civilian leadership.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the frontline on July 14 and reportedly made gains in some areas.
• Russian forces conducted another series of Shahed drone strikes across Ukraine on July 14.
• Russian authorities detained former Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officer Mikhail Polyakov, who reportedly is the administrator of several popular telegram channels covering internal Kremlin politics.
• Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi acknowledged that Ukrainian forces are waging an interdiction campaign against Russian military targets in Russia.
• Russian and Ukrainian forces continued limited ground attacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
• Ukrainian forces continued ground attacks and reportedly advanced around Bakhmut.
• Ukrainian and Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations along the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizha Oblast border and reportedly made limited gains.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast and reportedly advanced in this direction.
• Russia continues efforts likely aimed at keeping high ranking officers in their positions without needing special exemptions to retirement age limits.
• Russian occupation authorities continue efforts to consolidate administrative control of occupied territories by manipulating residence requirements and forcibly passportizing occupied populations.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JULY 14, 2023

Jul 14, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 14, 2023

Riley Bailey, Karolina Hird, Grace Mappes, Nicole Wolkov, Angelica Evans, Christina Harward, and Mason Clark

July 14, 2023, 4:45pm ET 

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

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

Note: The data cutoff for this product was 12:00pm ET on July 14. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the July 15 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Russian President Vladimir Putin further indicated he intends to maintain the Wagner Group as a cohesive fighting force rather than breaking it up but seeks to separate Wagner Financier Yevgeny Prigozhin from Wagner leadership and forces. Putin confirmed to Russian news outlet Kommersant in an interview published on July 13 that he met with Prigozhin and 35 Wagner commanders on June 29.[1] Putin claimed that he offered Wagner fighters the option to serve under a Wagner commander (callsign “Seda”) who has commanded Wagner forces for the last 16 months, further confirming ISW’s previous assessment that the Kremlin seeks to retain Wagner as a cohesive fighting force while separating it from Prigozhin.[2] Putin claimed that “many [Wagner commanders] nodded” in response to his offer, but that Prigozhin, “who was sitting in front of his personnel and did not see them nodding,” said that the Wagner commanders did not agree with the decision. Putin likely emphasized Prigozhin’s differing response to frame Prigozhin as a problem in contrast to loyal Wagner commanders. Former Russian officer and ardent nationalist Igor Girkin noted that Putin’s retelling of the July 29 meeting portrays Putin as succumbing to Prigozhin’s demands, but the final outcome of the July 29 meeting is unclear.[3] When asked directly by Kommersant about Wagner’s future as a combat unit, Putin continued to maintain the absurd notion that private military companies (PMCs) do not exist in Russia. Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brigadier General Pat Ryder stated on July 14 that Wagner forces are not participating in military operations in Ukraine in any significant support or combat roles.[4] ISW has previously observed Russian sources reporting that Wagner forces are not involved in combat operations in Ukraine.[5]

Belarusian government and independent sources confirmed on July 14 that Wagner Group instructors previously deployed in Africa previously arrived at training grounds in Belarus. The Belarusian Ministry of Defense (MoD) posted footage on July 14 showing Wagner instructors training Belarusian territorial troops near Asipovichy, Mogilev Oblast.[6] A Belarusian insider source claimed that the Wagner instructors from Wagner‘s African contingent (which the source described as the “Wagner Africa Corps,“ though it is unknown if that is a formal designation) arrived in Belarus on July 11 via a convoy from occupied Luhansk Oblast.[7] The Belarusian insider source suggested that Wagner seeks to rotate troops of their African contingent and that the arrival of some instructors to Belarus is part of a wider troop rotation effort.[8] A Russian milblogger claimed that only a part of Wagner’s Africa contingent has left Africa and that sufficient troops remain in African host nations to perform assigned tasks.[9] Wagner’s internationally deployed commanders are likely arriving in Belarus to prepare training infrastructure and set conditions for the arrival of regular Wagner forces, who are reportedly slated to deploy to Belarus in early August after taking leave and undergoing reorganization following Wagner‘s June 24 armed rebellion.[10] Russian milbloggers additionally amplified an image on July 14 reportedly showing Prigozhin himself either in Belarus or en route to Belarus from occupied Luhansk Oblast, but one milblogger noted that Prigozhin’s current role in Wagner remains unclear.[11]

Former 58th Combined Arms Army Commander Major General Ivan Popov’s dismissal continues to generate pronounced ire against the Russian military command and the Russian civilian leadership. Russian milbloggers argued that Popov’s dismissal shows that the Russian military command is detrimentally suppressing the opinions of commanders about the situation at the front and that Russian command has forgotten that their main priority is preserving their personnel.[12] A Russian military correspondent argued that Popov’s dismissal illustrates a dire issue with both the Russian military leadership as well as Russia’s civilian leadership.[13] The military correspondent accused the civilian leadership of routinely suppressing and ignoring reports from the frontline and of failing to properly mobilize Russia’s defense industrial base (DIB) for the war effort.[14] The military correspondent claimed that Russian elites and businessmen have agreements with the Russian military command constraining Russian military action on the ground to avoid damaging economic interests - providing the hypothetical example of Russian forces being denied permission to attack a town to preserve an industrial plant owned by a Russian businessman.[15] Prigozhin previously accused Russia’s oligarchs of deceiving Putin and the Russian public to launch the invasion of Ukraine in order to divide the assets of occupied Ukrainian territories between themselves.[16] The military correspondent also warned that the Russian chain of command in Ukraine is further degrading and that the situation is “beginning to boil.”[17] Popov’s dismissal has exposed a new level of concern about factional dynamics and degraded command structures in the Russian military following Prigozhin’s June 24 rebellion, and will likely serve as a point of neuralgia in the Russian information space for the foreseeable future.[18]

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the frontline on July 14 and reportedly made gains in some areas. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut, Melitopol (western Zaporizhia Oblast), and Berdyansk (Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area) directions.[19] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces achieved partial success in the Bila Hora-Andriivka direction (9-15km southwest of Bakhmut).[20] Ukrainian Deputy Director of the Department of Application Planning of the Main Directorate of the Ukrainian National Guard Colonel Mykola Urshalovych stated that Ukrainian forces have advanced over 1,700 meters in unspecified places in the Melitopol direction.[21] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces achieved a localized breakthrough of Russian defensive lines north of Pryyutne (15km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[22]

Russian forces conducted another series of Shahed drone strikes across Ukraine on July 14. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces launched 17 Shahed-131/136 drones from Krasnodar Krai and an S-300 missile at targets in Ukraine and that Ukrainian air defenses shot down 16 of the launched drones.[23] Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces targeted Odesa, Mykolaiv, and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts.[24] Russian sources claimed that an unspecified number of Russian Shahed-131/136 drones struck Ukrainian military infrastructure in Kryvyi Rih, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.[25]

Russian authorities detained former Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officer Mikhail Polyakov, who reportedly is the administrator of several popular telegram channels covering internal Kremlin politics. Moscow City police detained Polyakov on accusations that he extorted unspecified Russian politicians and businessmen.[26] Russian sources claimed that Polyakov runs the “Kremlin Laundress” channel and is either affiliated with or an administrator of the telegram channels “Brief” and “Siloviki.”[27] “Brief” and “Siloviki” denied that Polyakov is affiliated with their channels, however.[28] These three telegram channels routinely speculate on internal Kremlin politics and dynamics between Russian political factions and have promoted notable rumors within the Russian information space. Channels that speculate about internal Kremlin politics represent a specific niche of the Russian information space, and Polyakov’s detention suggests that the Kremlin may intend to suppress speculations about internal politics following Wagner’s rebellion.

Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi acknowledged that Ukrainian forces are waging an interdiction campaign against Russian military targets in Russia. The Washington Post quoted Zaluzhnyi as saying that Ukraine uses domestically produced weapons to strike Russian military targets in Russia due to Western concerns about Ukrainian forces using Western-provided weapons against Russian territory.[29] Zaluzhnyi also stressed the importance of Ukrainian strikes across the theater in Ukraine. The Washington Post reported that Zaluzhnyi also stated that increased Ukrainian indirect fire can pin down Russian forces and minimize Ukrainian casualties, but that Ukraine is currently dependent on munitions from other countries for this aim. Zaluzhnyi also reiterated Ukraine’s intent to liberate Crimea.

Key Takeaways:

• Russian President Vladimir Putin further indicated he intends to maintain the Wagner Group as a cohesive fighting force rather than breaking it up but seeks to separate Wagner Financier Yevgeny Prigozhin from Wagner leadership and forces.
• Belarusian government and independent sources confirmed on July 14 that Wagner Group instructors previously deployed in Africa previously arrived at training grounds in Belarus.
• Former 58th Combined Arms Army Commander Major General Ivan Popov’s dismissal continues to generate pronounced ire against the Russian military command and the Russian civilian leadership.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the frontline on July 14 and reportedly made gains in some areas.
• Russian forces conducted another series of Shahed drone strikes across Ukraine on July 14.
• Russian authorities detained former Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officer Mikhail Polyakov, who reportedly is the administrator of several popular telegram channels covering internal Kremlin politics.
• Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi acknowledged that Ukrainian forces are waging an interdiction campaign against Russian military targets in Russia.
• Russian and Ukrainian forces continued limited ground attacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
• Ukrainian forces continued ground attacks and reportedly advanced around Bakhmut.
• Ukrainian and Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations along the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizha Oblast border and reportedly made limited gains.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast and reportedly advanced in this direction.
• Russia continues efforts likely aimed at keeping high ranking officers in their positions without needing special exemptions to retirement age limits.
• Russian occupation authorities continue efforts to consolidate administrative control of occupied territories by manipulating residence requirements and forcibly passportizing occupied populations.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian and Ukrainian forces continued limited ground attacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line on July 14. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations east of Nevske (18km northwest of Kreminna) and Terny (16km west of Kreminna), near Novosadove (17km northwest of Kreminna), and west of Dibrova (6km southwest of Kreminna).[30] A Russian milblogger claimed on July 13 that Russian forces continued successful ground attacks near Torske (15km west of Kreminna) and partially control the settlement, although ISW has not observed visual confirmation that Russian forces are in Torske.[31] The milblogger also claimed that Russian elements of the 80th Guards Tank Regiment (90th Guards Tank Division, Central Military District) conducted assaults in forest areas near Kreminna on July 13.[32] Another Russian milblogger amplified footage on July 14 purporting to show elements of the 2nd Battalion of the 74th Motorized Rifle Brigade (41st Combined Arms Army, Central Military District) attacking Ukrainian positions in the Serebryanske forest area south of Kreminna.[33] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed on July 14 that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Nevske and Bilohorivka (12km south of Kreminna) as well as in other unspecified areas in the Svatove direction.[34] Some Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces captured Novoselivske (16km northwest of Svatove) on July 13 after Ukrainian forces withdrew from the settlement, although other milbloggers claimed that Russian forces are continuing offensive operations to capture the settlement as of July 14.[35] ISW has not observed visual confirmation that Russian forces have made further gains in Novoselivske or that they completely captured the settlement.

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

Ukrainian forces continued ground attacks and reportedly advanced around Bakhmut on July 14. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces achieved partial success in the Bila Hora-Andriivka direction (9-15km southwest of Bakhmut).[36] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty reported that Ukrainian forces are advancing near Bakhmut itself and maintaining the initiative around Bakhmut.[37] Cherevaty also reported that Ukrainian forces continue efforts to maximize Russian casualties while conserving Ukrainian forces’ combat capabilities. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian attack near Hryhorivka (8km northwest of Bakhmut).[38] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted attacks near Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut) and near Berkhivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut).[39] Russian milbloggers claimed on July 13 that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks from heights near Klishchiivka, the canal and dam area near Kurdyumivka (13km southwest of Bakhmut), and near Yahidne (2km north of Bakhmut).[40] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks near Berkhivka.[41] Footage published on July 13 purportedly shows elements of the 200th Motorized Rifle Brigade (14th Army Corps, Northern Fleet) operating in the Bakhmut direction and elements of the 4th Motorized Rifle Brigade (2nd Luhansk People’s Republic Army Corps) operating near Klishchiivka.[42]

Ukrainian and Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on July 14. Russian sources claimed on July 13 that Ukrainian forces hold a previously Russian-occupied “Zverinets” area southeast of Marinka (on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City).[43] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces have been repelling Russian attacks in the ”Zverinets” area for a week.[44] Russian milbloggers claimed on July 13 that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Krasnohorivka (9km north of Avdiivka) and Sieverne (6km west of Avdiivka).[45] Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces Spokesperson Major Valerii Shershen reported that Russians continue to focus their offensive operations in the Avdiivka and Marinka directions.[46] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiivka), Marinka, and Novomykhailivka (36km southwest of Avdiivka).[47] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted attacks southwest of Avdiivka and near Novokalynove (11km northwest of Avdiivka).[48] Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov claimed on July 13 that Chechen “Akhmat” forces are transferring from Marinka to an unspecified “more difficult” area of the frontline.[49] A Russian milblogger claimed on July 13 that elements of the 150th Motorized Rifle Division (8th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) are operating near Marinka.[50]

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

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations along the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizha Oblast border and reportedly made limited gains on July 14. Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces broke through Russian defensive lines north of Pryyutne (15km southwest of Velyka Novosilka) along the Hrusheva gully and are attacking along the Pryyutne—Staromayorske line.[51] Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) “Vostok” Battalion Commander Alexander Khodakovsky also claimed that Ukrainian forces are trying to break through Russian lines near Urozhaine (9km due south of Velyka Novosilka).[52] Russian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Oleg Chekhov claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance attempts near Novodonetske (12km southeast of Velyka Novosilka) and Rivnopil (10km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[53] Ukrainian Tavriisk Forces Spokesperson Major Valerii Shershen also reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian counterattack near Rivnopil.[54]

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast and reportedly advanced in this direction on July 14. Ukrainian Deputy Director of the Department of Application Planning of the Main Directorate of the Ukrainian National Guard Colonel Mykola Urshalovych noted that Ukrainian forces are conducting offensive actions in the Melitopol (western Zaporizhia Oblast) direction and have advanced over 1,700 meters to the south and southeast of an unspecified location in this direction.[55] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces advanced towards Robotyne (10km south of Orikhiv) and are within one kilometer of the outskirts of the settlement, and other Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces are continuing attacks towards Robotyne.[56] The Russian MoD emphasized that the heaviest battles in this sector occur near Robotyne during the night.[57] Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov claimed that elements of the Chechen “Vostok-Akhmat” battalion (291st Motorized Rifle Regiment, 58th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) are defending in the Orikhiv area.[58] Russian milbloggers additionally claimed that Ukrainian forces continued limited reconnaissance efforts and ground attacks along the Pyatykhatky-Zherebryanky line, about 25km southwest of Orikhiv.[59]

Russian forces continued routine shelling and reconnaissance activity in Kherson Oblast on July 14. Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast Administration reported that Russian forces shelled the west (right) bank of Kherson Oblast 76 times with 487 shells over the past day.[60] Ukrainian sources reported Russian artillery strikes on several settlements in Beryslav Raion.[61] Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Ukrainian counterbattery fire destroyed four Russian electronic warfare (EW) systems and three sabotage and reconnaissance groups on the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast and that Russian forces continue attempts to restore positions lost during the flooding following the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (KHPP) dam explosion.[62] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces destroyed several Ukrainian boats near the Antonivsky Bridge on the east bank, but that the situation near the bridge otherwise remains unchanged.[63]

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

The Kremlin advanced efforts likely aimed at keeping high ranking officers in their positions without needing to obtain special exemptions for retirement age limits. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on July 14 increasing the age limitations for all reservists by five years: personnel with “first class” ranks from 35 to 40 years, “second class” ranks from 40 to 45 years, “third class” ranks from 50 to 55 years, junior officers from 55 to 60 years, and senior officers from 60 to 65 years.[64] The decree stipulates that the age limitations for each category will increase by one year annually from January 2024 to January 2028. The Russian federal government recently adopted a law similarly extending the retirement ages for senior military officers, as ISW has previously reported.[65]

Russia continues extending social benefits for participants in the war in Ukraine. Putin signed a decree authorizing death and injury payments to Russian fortification builders in Ukraine and their families.[66] The decree stipulates that the payments – five million rubles ($55,401) for death and three million rubles ($33,240) for injury – will come from the Russian federal budget and are retroactive for all deaths and injuries since the start of the full-scale invasion in Ukraine.

Ukraine continues to indicate that Russia is evading international sanctions and acquiring dual-use components for domestic weapons manufacturing. The head of the Ukrainian General Staff’s Center for the Research of Trophy and Prospective Weapons and Military Equipment’s Information and Analytical Department, Oleksandr Zaruba, reported that Ukrainian forces continue to find dual use products, including plug connectors from a Swiss company, in Russian weapons captured by Ukrainian forces.[67] Zaruba reported that Russian companies import sanctioned high-tech goods through Armenia and Kazakhstan.

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

Russian occupation authorities continue efforts to consolidate administrative control of occupied territories by manipulating residence requirements and forcibly passportizing occupied populations. The Kherson Oblast Occupation Ministry of Internal Affairs announced on July 14 that “foreigners” and “stateless people” who have resided in Russian-occupied territories since September 30, 2022, can apply for residence permits from the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs by supplying fingerprints, photographs, and Russian language documents.[68] Russian President Vladimir Putin previously signed a decree that defines foreigners and stateless persons as essentially subject to deportation from occupied areas of Ukraine in the absence of such residence documents, and occupation authorities are likely pushing for residents of occupied areas to register for residence permits to collect personal data for future use. The Ukrainian Resistance Center similarly reported on July 14 that Russian occupation authorities are forcing employees of state-owned enterprises who refused Russian passports to fill out ”migration cards” and register for “temporary residence permits” and are threatening residents with deportation after 90 to 180 days if they fail to obtain the permits[69] Ukrainian Kherson Oblast Administration Advisor Serhiy Khlan stated on July 14 that Russian occupation authorities are increasing inspections on Ukrainian civilians without Russian passports and that Ukrainian civilians without Russian passports will be deported starting in December.[70] A Ukrainian source stated on July 13 that Russian occupation authorities have already begun forcibly evicting Ukrainian citizens in the Henichesk Raion that do not have Russian passports and are repopulating the residences of ousted Ukrainian citizens with Russian citizens of underprivileged ethnic minorities.[71]

Russian occupation authorities continue efforts to prepare for regional elections in occupied areas. Russian opposition media outlet Verstka reported on July 14 that Russian authorities are attempting to minimize representation of opposition parties in elections in occupied Ukrainian territories but are struggling to find candidates due to widespread fear that those who run in elections under the occupation administration will be criminally charged as collaborators by Ukrainian authorities.[72] Verstka also reported that Russian authorities are offering financial incentives to political consultants to coordinate elections in the occupied territories but are struggling to fill these roles.[73]

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

A Ukrainian military source reported that the number of Russian troops stationed in Belarus and at Belarusian training grounds has recently decreased. Ukrainian State Border Service Spokesperson Andriy Demchenko stated that there were 2,000 Russian forces stationed in Belarus until recently but that this number has recently decreased, possibly due to troop rotations.[74] Demchenko noted that Russian and Belarusian authorities may have re-established regular Russian units in Belarus.[75]

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

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

2. Secretary Antony J. Blinken at a Press Availability (ASEAN)

Secretary Antony J. Blinken at a Press Availability - United States Department of State

REMARKS

ANTONY J. BLINKEN, SECRETARY OF STATE

ST. REGIS HOTEL

JAKARTA, INDONESIA

JULY 14, 2023

state.gov · by Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, good evening, everyone. Let me start by saying how good it is to be back in Indonesia.

I came here from the NATO Summit in Vilnius, where our Alliance emerged stronger, larger, more united than ever – including in our support for Ukraine. Allies enthusiastically welcomed President Erdogan’s commitment to submit Sweden’s NATO accession protocols to the Turkish Parliament. I have been in constant communication with Turkish Foreign Minister Fidan, including here in Jakarta, as well as our friends in Sweden to help drive this forward both in the lead-up to Vilnius and in the days since, and we continue to encourage Türkiye to complete the accession process as swiftly as possible.

This is my fourth visit to Indonesia as Secretary of State, and I want to begin by thanking President Jokowi and my friend, Foreign Minister Retno, for their incredibly warm hospitality. Indonesia is a vital U.S. partner, and a regional and global leader.

Earlier today, we had a very productive U.S.-Indonesia Strategic Dialogue, focused on everything from advancing economic cooperation through the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, to collaborating on regional issues, to advancing shared priorities on public health, on climate, on cyber, and maritime security.

As we prepare next year to mark 75 years of diplomatic relations, our strategic partnership with Indonesia is stronger than ever, and I want to thank especially our ambassador here, Ambassador Sung Kim and his team, for their work to strengthen that partnership.

Today, I joined ministers from ASEAN and the region at the East Asia Summit Ministerial, the U.S.-ASEAN Ministerial Meeting, and the ASEAN Regional Forum, where we discussed deepening cooperation to realize our shared vision: a free, open, prosperous, secure, interconnected, and resilient Indo-Pacific. And what does that mean? That means a region where countries are free to choose their own path and their own partners; where problems are dealt with openly; where rules are reached transparently and applied fairly; where goods, where ideas, where people flow lawfully and freely.

At the heart of that approach is our Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with ASEAN, ASEAN centrality, and the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific.

We’ve launched what President Biden calls “a new era in U.S.-ASEAN relations” – defined by greater scope, greater collaboration, greater ambition.

Already in 2023, we’ve had high-level engagements on everything from transportation to transnational crime. Next month, the U.S. will join ASEAN ministers for economic, energy, and climate meetings, in addition to convening the inaugural ASEAN-U.S. Dialogue on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. I’m grateful to our Ambassador Yohannes Abraham and his team for elevating our partnership with ASEAN.

In today’s meetings, we discussed how we can leverage our combined strength through the U.S.-ASEAN partnership to deliver on the issues that matter most to our people.

The United States is ASEAN’s largest source of foreign direct investment, and over 6,200 American companies operate within ASEAN countries, generating inclusive and broad-based growth that will benefit all our people. Last year, U.S. trade with ASEAN totaled more than half a trillion dollars, and that supported more than 625,000 jobs in the United States. To make that trade faster, cheaper, more dependable, we’ve invested significantly in the ASEAN Single Window. That’s an automated system for clearing customs across the region.

We’re partnering to address the climate crisis and to accelerate the clean energy transition. That includes working to launch the U.S.-ASEAN Climate Solutions Hub – which will help ASEAN countries build greater resilience and meet their ambitious emissions reduction targets – and as well our collaboration on renewable battery storage and electricity transmission. This was a subject of some discussion today.

We’re deepening the bonds between our combined one billion people. Earlier today, I had a chance to meet with some of our Young Southeast Asian Leaders. Since we launched YSEALI a decade ago, we’ve provided fellowships and in-person training to more than 6,000 trailblazers who are literally transforming their communities, and we’re going to double the size of YSEALI in the next three years.

As we work to advance this affirmative vision, this affirmative agenda for the region, we’re responding to challenges to our shared security and prosperity – and to the broader international order.

As the military regime in Myanmar continues to commit atrocities and undermine regional stability, there was broad support in today’s meetings for continuing to press the regime to end the violence and to fulfill its commitments under ASEAN’s Five-Point Consensus.

The DPRK’s unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs – including its latest ballistic missile launch just this week – also threaten the region and the global nonproliferation regime. We remain committed to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, to countering the DPRK’s malicious cyber activities, to addressing its systematic human rights violations. And as we’ve consistently said – both publicly and to Pyongyang – we are prepared to engage in dialogue without preconditions. Unfortunately, to date, Pyongyang’s answer to that proposal has been to launch more missiles.

Like many countries in the region, we’re concerned by the PRC’s increasing assertiveness in the South and East China Seas and in the Taiwan Strait. We remain committed to upholding freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea – a critical throughway for global commerce and connectivity – and we support ASEAN’s negotiation of a code of conduct consistent with international law.

The United States also seeks to maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, which is in the interest of all nations. Fifty percent of global commerce goes through that strait every single day. Some 70 percent of the semiconductors made for the world are made in Taiwan. We continue to oppose unilateral changes to the status quo by either side.

The United States will continue to responsibly manage our relationship with China, including by strengthening channels of communication to make clear our positions and intentions around these and other issues, as well as to explore areas where the U.S. and the PRC might cooperate on shared challenges.

Yesterday, following up on my trip to China a few weeks ago, Director Wang and I had a candid and constructive conversation on a range of bilateral, regional, and global issues. These included Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and cross-strait relations. Despite very clear areas of disagreement, the United States is also prepared to work with Beijing on challenges that affect people in the United States, the PRC, and around the world.

Finally, Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine continues to harm not only Ukrainians but people across this region. It is essential that we extend and expand the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which Russia is threatening to end once again on July 18. If Moscow follows through on its threat, developing countries – including in the region – will pay the price, including quite literally with higher food prices, as well as greater food scarcity.

As we work to extend the initiative, we also stand ready to support a just and lasting peace to the conflict based on the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence – principles that are at the heart of the United Nations Charter and ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, and that reflect the desire of people and nations in every part of the world to be able to choose their own path free from the use of force, coercion, or aggression.

The U.S. and ASEAN will continue to champion these principles together as we tackle shared challenges and realize the promise of this extraordinarily dynamic region.

With that, I’m happy to take some questions.

MR PATEL: We’ll first go to Abigail Williams with NBC News.

QUESTION: Thanks so much, Mr. Secretary.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Abbie.

QUESTION: What was your message to Director Wang about the recent attack on State Department and Commerce email accounts? Was your own account targeted, or were those of other senior officials at the State Department? And what consequences will Beijing face?

And if I may, one more: What progress has been made on the cases of wrongfully detained Americans Mark Swidan, Kai Li, and David Lin?

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Thank you. Let me start with the second part of the question first. As always, when we engage with our Chinese counterparts, we are raising and working on the cases of detained Americans, and did so again yesterday. This is something we’re working on. It was a subject of some discussion when I was in Beijing as well, and we will continue to work on that until we succeed in bringing people home.

With regard to the cyber incident that you referenced, here’s what I can tell you. First of all, this is something that the State Department actually detected last month, and we took immediate steps to protect our systems, to report the incident – in this case, notifying a company, Microsoft, of the event. I can’t discuss details of our response beyond that, and most critically this incident remains under investigation.

As a general matter, we have consistently made clear to China as well as to other countries that any action that targets the U.S. Government or U.S. companies, American citizens, is of deep concern to us, and we will take appropriate action in response.

MR PATEL: We’ll go to Yvette Tanamal with The Jakarta Post.

QUESTION: Thank you. My first question for you today would be: What is some of the U.S. practical steps to maintain safety and stability in the region, while upkeeping ASEAN centrality? How is the SEANWFZ negotiations going, and how close is the U.S. to possibly acceding to the treaty?

My second question is: What would be your respond to the criticisms saying that the U.S.’s increased military presence in the Pacific will inevitably provoke what it’s trying to deter, which is conflict? Thank you.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Thank you. First, with regard to the SEANWFZ Treaty, the United States is deeply committed to a rules-based nonproliferation regime, and this is true across the board. We very much appreciate ASEAN’s leadership on this issue, and we very much look forward to continuing and in fact intensifying our consultations with ASEAN.

Our engagement in the region is focused intensely on an affirmative agenda, on working collaboratively with countries in the region both individually, bilaterally, and through ASEAN on the issues that are of most concern to the citizens of all of the countries in the region and people in the United States. And I mentioned some of them earlier. If you look at the ASEAN agenda, when it comes to tackling the climate crisis, when it comes to advancing renewable energy, when it comes to global health, when it comes to infrastructure, when it comes to education, science and technology, the digital economy – these are all areas where we are deeply engaged with ASEAN, and that’s really the focus of what we’re doing.

At the same time, if you look at the ASEAN Outlook, and you look at our own strategy, they’re extraordinarily coincident in what we’re trying to achieve together, and that starts with a shared vision for the region: one that is free, open, secure, prosperous, connected, and resilient. And part of that, in order to achieve that vision, is making sure, among other things, that we continue to have freedom of commerce, freedom of navigation, freedom of overflight, that we have a rules-based order and every country plays by the same rules that are established together transparently.

One foundational aspect of that rules-based order for the region is the UNCLOS, the Law of the Sea. And we’re committed to working with countries around the region to uphold it. But I think it’s very instructive that what we see and certainly a big part of the conversation today is a determination of all of the countries in the region independent of the United States to make sure that the Law of the Sea and more broadly freedom of navigation, freedom of commerce, freedom of overflight are all upheld on the basis of international law. So we’ll continue to collaborate there as well. That really is a big part of the basis of ensuring that we have a region that is genuinely free, open, prosperous, secure, connected, and resilient.

MR PATEL: We’ll next go to Shaun Tandon with the AFP.

QUESTION: Thanks, Mr. Secretary.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Shaun.

QUESTION: I was digging the shirt earlier, but —

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, I was tempted to keep it on for you, but —

QUESTION: Something more comfortable. I wanted to ask you about another person who was here. You mentioned your talks with the Chinese foreign minister. Of course, Sergey Lavrov was also here – the Russian foreign minister. The last time you were in a room with him in Delhi in March you did have a conversation. I wanted to see if you had any engagement at all even informally with him. If not, why not? Did you find his use – his appearance here at all constructive? How did that go? And more broadly, Southeast Asia, how do you see them on the invasion? Do you see that they’re largely in line with the U.S. stance on that?

And if you allow me something different, you mentioned on Burma/Myanmar, there’s broad support in ASEAN for pressuring the junta. Thailand recently has been engaging the junta. How do you see that? Do you see that as a step forward? Do you see that as contradicting ASEAN efforts? Thanks.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Thanks, Shaun. So – look, I don’t – I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to speak for the members of ASEAN. I’ll let them speak for themselves. I think it’s fair to say that based on what we heard from Foreign Minister Lavrov today his interventions and engagements were not constructive or productive on any issue. He focused – unlike the United States and unlike many other countries – on a totally negative presentation and agenda in which he effectively ascribed every problem in the world to the United States. We were resolutely focused on the affirmative agenda that we have with ASEAN, including many of the issues that I’ve already had an opportunity to discuss, but I’ll leave it – I’ll leave it to you to see how others heard that. But I think there was a very stark difference in the focus that we brought to this affirmative agenda and this shared vision for the future of the region, and what we heard from Foreign Minister Lavrov.

The countries of Southeast Asia, including by the way in the statement that the foreign ministers released yesterday – the ASEAN statement – but also independently or through the United Nations, other international organizations, have made very clear that they’re committed to the basic principles that underly the United Nations Charter and the ASEAN Treaty of Amity that are being aggressed by Russia in Ukraine along with the Ukrainian people: territorial integrity, sovereignty, independence. I think virtually every country in the region has spoken clearly to that in one way or another – again, either through statements yesterday at the United Nations or independently.

There is no doubt in my mind that the overwhelming majority of global opinion, including in Southeast Asia, stands strongly for these principles, principles that are being violated every single day by Russia in its aggression against Ukraine. And again, I didn’t hear anything from Foreign Minister Lavrov that suggested any change in direction when it comes to what Russia is doing in Ukraine.

I would note also that the effect is being felt profoundly here in the region. I mentioned earlier just the effect on food prices, on energy prices by the Russian aggression. When it comes to food prices, we’ve had over the last years this perfect storm between climate change, COVID, and conflict, including Russia’s aggression – terrible impact on food prices. And in the case of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, as you know, initially they were blockading the port of Odesa and prohibiting Ukraine from exporting its wheat and other food products to the rest of the world – and Ukraine has been one of the breadbaskets of the world – and the result was prices going even higher, supply going even lower.

The Black Sea Grain Initiative, which the United Nations and Türkiye helped produce with the support of many other countries, at least had the effect of getting Ukrainian grain and wheat and other products moving out of Ukraine and back onto world markets. And the result of that initiative has been the delivery of the equivalent of 18 billion – 18 billion – loaves of bread, primarily to developing countries, and also, for everyone, a lowering of prices. The fact that Russia is now once again using that as a weapon and threatening to end it is targeting not just Ukraine but targeting people throughout this region and around the world. So I think it’s everyone’s expectation that Russia extend and, indeed, expand this initiative.

And the last thing I’ll say on this is, of course, it never should have been necessary in the first place. The only reason it proved necessary, the Black Sea Grain Initiative, is because Russia invaded Ukraine and then prohibited it from exporting its food products. So I think there’s a clear demand signal from around the world, including countries in this region, that, at the very least, if Russia is not going to end its horrific war of aggression against Ukraine, at the very least, it extend the Black Sea Grain Initiative so that these food products can get out to the world, keeping prices down, keeping supply up.

And finally, with regard to your last question on Burma, look, we support any effort that can advance the five-point consensus and its implementation and adherence to that consensus by the regime in Myanmar.

MR PATEL: We’ll next go to Iqbal Himawan from Metro TV.

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. Secretary. It might be the follow-up questions from the previous question, is about the Russian war in Ukraine. President Biden emphasized in the NATO Summit in Vilnius that Ukraine cannot enter the Alliance when the war has not ends in – the Russian war in Ukraine has not ends. And it seems like the war has not ends – it’s still far from ends. So what will the U.S. next step toward this situation? Will there be any concrete measures that U.S. take?

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, I think you saw just this week in Vilnius dozens of countries take very concrete measures in continuing support of Ukraine as it tries to defend its territory, as it tries to retake land that was seized from it by Russia, as it works to protect its people, its freedom, and its future. You saw that in the very robust package of support that all of the NATO countries provided to Ukraine, both politically and practically, including measures that will extend over many years to strengthen Ukraine’s defense institutions to help pursue the process of reforming them to make them more interoperable with NATO.

You saw that as well in something that was announced by the G7 countries with some other partners, a commitment to Ukraine’s security and to now negotiating on a bilateral basis – with these countries and Ukraine – security programs, security assurances that will strengthen for years to come Ukraine’s ability to defend itself and to deter aggression. And that’s important for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons it’s important is that it may be the best way to disabuse Vladimir Putin of the idea that he can somehow outlast Ukraine and outlast the dozens of countries that are supporting Ukraine in defense of its freedom and its future.

And that’s the quickest way probably to bring this war to an end, because as long as Putin believes he can just continue this indefinitely despite the horrific costs that he’s incurred on Russia itself – the damage that he’s done to his own country is extraordinary across the board. It is militarily, economically much weaker than it was. Its standing in the world has plummeted. A million Russians have left the country. So many have been killed on the battlefield in a meat grinder of Putin’s own making. Europe has moved away from energy dependence on Russia. In so many ways, this has been a profound strategic setback for Russia. And again, this is all of Putin’s making.

But as long as he continues to believe that somehow he will prevail, he’s likely to continue. He needs to be disabused of that notion. These long-term commitments to Ukraine’s security but also to its economic well-being, as well as humanitarian assistance, are probably the best way to do that. But fundamentally, as President Biden said yesterday, Putin has already lost in terms of what he was trying to achieve in Ukraine. Remember, this was about, for Putin, erasing Ukraine from the map, ending its independence, subsuming it into Russia. That’s failed and cannot succeed.

The question now is exactly where and how this ends. Fundamentally, these decisions need to be up to Ukraine because it’s about its future, it’s about its people, it’s about its land, its freedom. No one wants the war to end sooner than the Ukrainian people themselves. They’re on the receiving end of this horrific violence day-in, day-out, and we strongly support any country that can find a way to – move forward toward a just and durable solution, one that is consistent with the UN Charter, territorial integrity, independence, and sovereignty. But thus far, as I said earlier, we haven’t seen any signs from Russia that it’s actually willing to engage in meaningful diplomacy and end the war that it started.

MR PATEL: Thanks, everybody.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Thank you.

MR PATEL: Thank you.

state.gov · by Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State

3. Russians told 'hour of reckoning has come' as TV exposes losses

A bold move. The Ukrainians are not afraid of employing the information instrument of power.

​Video and screenshots at the link:​

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1791208/Russia-TV-hack-Ukraine-war-latest

Russians told 'hour of reckoning has come' as TV exposes losses

Millions of ordinary Russians watching TV this week were hit by an extraordinary TV message, warning them that the "hour of reckoning has come".

By OLI SMITH

16:07, Fri, Jul 14, 2023 | UPDATED: 18:22, Fri, Jul 14, 2023

Express · by Oli Smith · July 14, 2023

British missile 'liquidates' Russian General in Ukraine

A pro-Ukranian group is thought to be behind a major hack of Russian state television this week. The hack meant that millions of ordinary Russians watched a Ukraine defence ministry video as they tuned into their usual TV programmes. The infiltration exposed the reality of the war in Ukraine, as the hack broadcast footage of attacks by Ukrainian forces on Russian troops.

The warzone clips also showed Ukrainian forces advancing on the battlefield.

This was then followed with a message in Ukrainian, accompanied by the crest of its defence ministry, warning: "The hour of reckoning has come."

Following the Ukrainian military footage, ballet clips of Swan Lake appeared on the screen.

This appears to be a historical Russian reference, as Swan Lake was played on a loop after the deaths of Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko.

The hack meant that millions of ordinary Russians watched a Ukraine defence ministry video (Image: SOCIAL MEDIA)

It was also broadcast on state television again during the attempted overthrow of Mikhail Gorbachev, which hastened the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.

The sabotage hit mainstream state TV channels in multiple time zones across the Urals and Siberia.

Channel One, the biggest television station in Russia, as well as Zvezda, which is owned by the Russian defence ministry, were both affected.

Ren TV, a channel run by President Vladimir Putin’s long-rumoured lover Alina Kabaeva, was also hacked.

Rishi Sunak responds to Ben Wallace's Ukraine comments

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The footage followed with a message in Ukrainian, accompanied by the crest of its defence ministry (Image: SOCIAL MEDIA)

This is not the first state television hack to hit Russia during the war in Ukraine.

A previous hack in June hit Krasnoyarsk and Tyumen regions in Siberia, plus Kursk and Kaliningrad in western Russia.

This sabotage saw television channels broadcast an 'emergency' broadcast from a 'deepfake' President Putin.

In the fake message, the tyrant appeared to impose martial law across the regions - while declaring a full-scale mass mobilisation in response to an "incursion" from Ukrainian forces.

Meanwhile, Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign affairs minister, has warned today that US and NATO satellites are creating risks of a “direct armed clash with Russia”.

Lavrov also warned of the potential 'catastrophic consequences' of direct conflict (Image: GETTY)

Mr Lavrov also warned of the potential “catastrophic consequences” of direct conflict.

On Thursday, the US Pentagon suggested that Wagner mercenaries are no longer participating in “any significant capacity” in combat operations in Ukraine.

This comes more than two weeks after the group’s botched mutiny in Russia.

Pentagon press secretary Pat Ryder said: “At this stage, we do not see Wagner forces participating in any significant capacity in support of combat operations in Ukraine.”

Express · by Oli Smith · July 14, 2023

4. Prigozhin's Other Rebellion

Excerpts:

Like Zhirinovsky in 2002 and Prigozhin in 2023, Girkin contradicted a central Kremlin propaganda tenet in November 2014 by publicly assuming responsibility for having triggered the Russian-Ukrainian war seven months earlier. Some non-Russian commentators around the world nevertheless continue to maintain that Russia merely “intervened” in August 2014, in an intra-Ukrainian armed conflict that had already been ongoing for several months. Girkin, on the other hand, has admitted that his irregular force, that had invaded from Russia and that was supervised by Russian state organs, had triggered the allegedly civil war in Ukraine's Donets Basin in April 2014.

The particular explosiveness of Zhirinovsky, Girkin, and Prigozhin's admissions is that none of these men are liberal Muscovites or Western critics of Putin. Rather, the men are known at home and abroad as aggressive Russian imperialists. And in Prigozhin's case, there is the added fact that he is a creature of Putin. The Wagner boss owes his illustrious career entirely to his Kremlin patron.

Given these and other memorable revelations by prominent Russian ultra-nationalists, some non-Russian debates in support of Russia are surprising. In media, parliaments, ministries, universities, institutes, and political parties around the world, the Kremlin's apologetics of Russian military expansion continue to find naive takers to this day—despite many self-revealing admissions such as those of a Zhirinovsky, a Girkin, and a Prigozhin.

Prigozhin's Other Rebellion​

The Wagner leader joins a notable group of Kremlin henchmen who have undermined the state’s rationale.

Andreas Umland

14 Jul 2023, 12:19 pm​

americanpurpose.com · by Andreas Umland · July 14, 2023

Known until recently only among Eastern Europe experts, the sixty-two-year-old leader of the Kremlin-affiliated private military company Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has become world famous. The one-day, unsuccessful but nonetheless spectacular violent show of force by the mercenary chief and his heavily armed group revealed the fragility of the Putin system. It has abruptly been proven that the Russian emperor has no clothes.

What has received less attention within the context of the uprising is Prigozhin's questioning of a central Kremlin justification for Russia's ongoing attack on Ukraine. Since February 2022, Putin and other Kremlin spokesmen have repeatedly claimed that Russia's aggression against Ukraine is a preemptive and defensive war. Even some Western observers consider Putin's claim that NATO is threatening Russia to be a legitimate argument.

In contrast, Prigozhin announced in a video message on June 23, 2023, shortly before the start of his "March for Justice" on Moscow:

Nothing extraordinary had happened on February 24, 2022. The Russian Defense Ministry is fooling the public, now pretending that Ukraine behaved insanely aggressively, as if Ukraine and all of NATO wanted to attack us. The special operation that began on February 24 has a completely different background.

Prigozhin then attacked the Russian military leadership. The latter, he said, had been bent on a quick victory in Ukraine and subsequent promotions in Moscow:

What was the war necessary for? The war took place for a bunch of crap to simply triumph, to present themselves in public and show what a strong army they are. […] The war was not necessary for bringing back to our area de facto Russian citizens. Not for demilitarizing and denazifying Ukraine. The war was necessary for a star [on the epaulette of Sergei Shoygu]. [...]

And secondly, the war was necessary for the oligarchs, it was necessary for that clan which today de facto rules Russia. This oligarchic clan receives everything possible. When foreign companies of this clan are closed, the state immediately splits up domestic companies and hands them over to this clan. That's why businessmen are imprisoned, banks are closed, so that this clan doesn't lose the volume of its funds.

Although Prigozhin here inflates secondary actors within Russian leadership to influential decision-makers in Moscow, his statement was in principle correct. Putin's escalation of war against Ukraine in February 2022 had domestic rather than foreign policy reasons.

In another provocative video message released a month earlier, Prigozhin questioned a second key item of Kremlin propaganda. On May 23, 2023, he commented via his Telegram channel about Russia's alleged "denazification" of Ukraine: "We came in rowdily and walked all over Ukraine with our boots looking for Nazis. While we were looking for Nazis, we spoiled it with all of them."

Such statements are not extraordinary by themselves, but they are unusual to hear coming from the lips of a pivotal implementer of Russia's war on Ukraine. The mercenary leader is effectively disavowing Moscow's official justifications for Russian aggression. Paradoxically, this also touches on the reason for the deployment of Prigozhin's Wagner Group–although it admittedly consists of fighters who wage war for money or to shorten their prison sentences rather than for some larger aim.

As a major Russian imperialist actor, Prigozhin continues an older tradition of post-Soviet nationalist politicians with his attacks against Putin. Vladimir Zhirinovsky (1946-2022) and Igor Girkin (b. 1970), for example, years earlier had already attracted attention with similarly embarrassing statements for the Kremlin. Critics of Putin’s regime from the far Right have repeatedly, publicly accused the Kremlin of lying.

In mid-September 1999, a memorable incident occurred in the Russian State Duma, later made public by Zhirinovsky. A series of terrorist attacks in Russia in 1999, attributed to Chechen terrorists, served as the Kremlin’s pretext to launch the Second Chechen War. Moscow's new war in the Caucasus was popular among the frightened Russian population. And the Russian army's campaign of mass murder in the Chechen Republic provided an important impetus for the meteoric rise of the then newly minted head of government and not yet president, Vladimir Putin.

However, the blowing up of an apartment building in the southern Russian provincial city of Volgodonsk on September 16, 1999—allegedly by Caucasian terrorists—occurred under bizarre circumstances. Three days prior, the attack had already been announced at a State Duma meeting in Moscow. Apparently, there had been a lapse in the secret planning of the building demolition in Volgodonsk and its subsequent political instrumentalization by the Federal Security Service (FSB). (Putin had headed the FSB until he became prime minister in August 1999, after which his St. Petersburg henchman Nikolai Patrushev headed the domestic intelligence service.)

In 2002, Zhirinovsky reported on the September 13, 1999 events in the Russian parliament:

A note was brought by someone from the secretariat [of the State Duma]. Apparently, they had been called to warn the Duma speaker about this turn of events [i.e., the terrorist attack]. [Parliament Speaker Gennady] Zeleznev read us the news about the explosion. Then we waited for the television news to report on the incident in Volgodonsk.

It took three days for that explosion to happen. It occurred on September 16, 1999.

Like Prigozhin in 2023, Zhirinovsky must have been aware of the explosive nature (for the Putin regime) of his statement in 2002. His assertion called into question the legitimacy, authority, and integrity of the new Russian president. Prigozhin's video messages in recent months similarly undermine Putin's rationale for Russia's 2022 large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Barely nine years earlier, there was another revelation by the notorious Russian paramilitary leader and one-time "defense minister" of the so-called Donetsk People's Republic, Igor Girkin, about the 2014-2015 pseudo-civil war in Eastern Ukraine. Since the beginning of the alleged Donbas rebellion in spring 2014, there has been a controversial discussion about the start of the war in both Russian and non-Russian media and conferences. Even some Western analysts see the main sources of the armed conflict in the Donets Basin not in Russian policies, but—as also claimed by Kremlin propaganda—in Ukrainian politics.

However, in an interview for the Russian far-right weekly "Zavtra" (Tomorrow) in November 2014, Girkin revealed: "I pulled the trigger for the war. If our [armed] unit had not crossed the border [from Russia into Ukraine], everything would have turned out the way it did in [northeastern Ukraine's] Kharkiv and [southern Ukraine's] Odesa." In the latter and other Russian-speaking cities of Ukraine, unlike in the Donbas, only unarmed agents of Moscow had been active at that time. Girkin further said, "the impetus for the war, which is still going on today, was given by our [armed] unit. We shuffled all the cards that were on the table. All of them!"

What is significant about Girkin's admission is not just that, as a leader of an irregular battalion and a Russian citizen, he has no biographical or family ties to the Donets Basin. As a former Russian intelligence officer, he was in constant contact with Russian governmental bodies during his paramilitary advance in eastern Ukraine in April 2014. As detailed in Dr. Jakob Hauter's forthcoming book, Russia's Overlooked Invasion, Girkin and company acted as unofficial agents of the Russian government in its "delegated inter-state war" against Ukraine in 2014.

Like Zhirinovsky in 2002 and Prigozhin in 2023, Girkin contradicted a central Kremlin propaganda tenet in November 2014 by publicly assuming responsibility for having triggered the Russian-Ukrainian war seven months earlier. Some non-Russian commentators around the world nevertheless continue to maintain that Russia merely “intervened” in August 2014, in an intra-Ukrainian armed conflict that had already been ongoing for several months. Girkin, on the other hand, has admitted that his irregular force, that had invaded from Russia and that was supervised by Russian state organs, had triggered the allegedly civil war in Ukraine's Donets Basin in April 2014.

The particular explosiveness of Zhirinovsky, Girkin, and Prigozhin's admissions is that none of these men are liberal Muscovites or Western critics of Putin. Rather, the men are known at home and abroad as aggressive Russian imperialists. And in Prigozhin's case, there is the added fact that he is a creature of Putin. The Wagner boss owes his illustrious career entirely to his Kremlin patron.

Given these and other memorable revelations by prominent Russian ultra-nationalists, some non-Russian debates in support of Russia are surprising. In media, parliaments, ministries, universities, institutes, and political parties around the world, the Kremlin's apologetics of Russian military expansion continue to find naive takers to this day—despite many self-revealing admissions such as those of a Zhirinovsky, a Girkin, and a Prigozhin.

Andreas Umland is an analyst at the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies (SCEEUS) of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI).

Image: Yevgeny Prigozhin in a video message. (Telegram: @ConcordGroup_Official)

americanpurpose.com · by Andreas Umland · July 14, 2023

5. How We Can Help Ukraine While Genuinely Prioritizing Asia

Excerpts:

First and foremost, the U.S. must act to incentivize European nations to take the lead in supporting Ukraine. Europe clearly has the capacity to do just that – what key states, especially but not exclusively Germany, have lacked thus far is the will to spend the money and political capital to both rearm themselves and arm Ukraine consistent with what strategic reality requires. Washington can help to alter those allies’ calculus by changing their incentives to shoulder more of the burden, both by elevating and supporting the efforts of leaders like Poland and by intensifying pressure on laggards like Germany. Making clear and credible that America will in fact focus on the Pacific could help this effort. This approach would require a sharp shift in policy from Washington, which has effectively undercut European incentives to greater self-reliance over the last year, but it is urgently necessary that Europe move toward assuming the bulk of its own defense, including in supporting Ukraine.

At the same time, the U.S. can still play an important, albeit more focused, role in directly aiding Ukraine. At root, this is because there are significant military resources in the U.S. arsenal that are ill-suited for an Asia-Pacific conflict but that would be useful for Ukraine and could thus be made available to Kyiv.

How We Can Help Ukraine While Genuinely Prioritizing Asia

BY ELBRIDGE A. COLBY JULY 14, 2023 5:00 AM EDT

Colby is a principal at The Marathon Initiative. He is the author of The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict from Yale University Press.

TIME · by Elbridge A. Colby · July 14, 2023

It seems increasingly clear that the demands of sustaining Ukraine’s defense against Russia will be enduring. We can hope that there will soon be a just and durable end to this conflict, but predicating our strategy on such a hope would be imprudent. Rather, we must assume that Russia will remain a threat to Ukraine and NATO for the foreseeable future. This means America and Europe need to prepare for the long-haul in addressing European security, even as America must urgently shift to prioritizing readying for a conflict with China in the Western Pacific.

It is critical to think clearly and realistically through this prism about how to prevent Russia from subordinating Ukraine. Crucially, this must be done with a forthright, clear-eyed recognition that China and Asia must be the priority for our military, geopolitical, and economic efforts. A war in the Western Pacific is distinctly possible in this decade, losing it would be catastrophic, and we are not preparing for it with the urgency, scale, or focus needed.

Rectifying this must be the absolute overriding priority of U.S. efforts in every respect. Any resources that could be useful for defeating a Chinese attack along the first island chain should be reserved to that end. This includes strike weapons like HIMARS, ATACMS, GMLRS, and tactical UAVs as well as defensive systems such as Patriot, NASAMS, Harpoons, Stingers, and Javelins that Taiwanese or U.S. defenders could use to degrade an invasion force. Importantly, it also includes things other than weapons, including money, political capital, intelligence resources, and defense industrial base attention and capacity.

But that is by no means the same as saying the U.S. should stop helping Ukraine. To the contrary, the U.S. has an important interest in Ukraine’s survival. Most significantly, if Russia subsumed Ukraine or so weakened it as to be able to use it as a basis for attacks against NATO, then a Moscow that appears to be mobilizing for long-term confrontation with the West would pose a more significant and direct threat to Europe. It is in America’s interest to avoid that outcome by ensuring Ukraine can defend itself effectively, but we must pursue that interest in a manner consistent with our highest priority of restoring a formidable denial defense along Asia’s first island chain. There is a way to do that.

First and foremost, the U.S. must act to incentivize European nations to take the lead in supporting Ukraine. Europe clearly has the capacity to do just that – what key states, especially but not exclusively Germany, have lacked thus far is the will to spend the money and political capital to both rearm themselves and arm Ukraine consistent with what strategic reality requires. Washington can help to alter those allies’ calculus by changing their incentives to shoulder more of the burden, both by elevating and supporting the efforts of leaders like Poland and by intensifying pressure on laggards like Germany. Making clear and credible that America will in fact focus on the Pacific could help this effort. This approach would require a sharp shift in policy from Washington, which has effectively undercut European incentives to greater self-reliance over the last year, but it is urgently necessary that Europe move toward assuming the bulk of its own defense, including in supporting Ukraine.

At the same time, the U.S. can still play an important, albeit more focused, role in directly aiding Ukraine. At root, this is because there are significant military resources in the U.S. arsenal that are ill-suited for an Asia-Pacific conflict but that would be useful for Ukraine and could thus be made available to Kyiv.

Most significantly, there are substantial quantities of capable systems that the Pentagon plans to retire but that would be useful for Ukraine. This includes aircraft such as A-10s, F-16s, and earlier variants of the F-15 and F/A-18, all of which could have a significant impact on the battlefield. Certain types of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles also fall in this category, as do some kinds of engineering equipment, especially for mobility and counter-mobility operations like breaching, mine clearance, and bridging. A variety of munitions, including short-range air-delivered munitions, cannon artillery, and small arms, can also be made available to Ukraine without compromising our ability to genuinely prioritize preparing for a fight against China. The U.S. can continue to provide “softer” but important assistance like intelligence support and training using resources not

More can be done in addition as Europe steps up and takes primary responsibility for its conventional defense. As this happens, the U.S. can provide to Ukraine many of the capabilities it currently keeps in or reserved for the European theater. Such systems include a variety of ground combat systems that are ideal for the European theater and neither necessary nor even useful for a China contingency, such as more advanced types of main battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers, and self-propelled cannon artillery. Furthermore, over time the U.S. can and should resuscitate its defense industrial base to rapidly produce a wide variety of weapons and platforms at a much larger scale. Restoring America’s defense industrial strength will help ameliorate many of the difficult tradeoffs we currently face, enabling us not only to ensure our own forces are better armed but also to arm allies to carry a greater share of the burden of defending themselves.

It is in America’s interest to aid Ukraine in preventing its subordination by Moscow, but we have to do that in a way that is consistent with our highest and urgent priority of preparing for a conflict in the Pacific. This approach would provide a prudent and effective way to do so.

Contact us at letters@time.com.

TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

TIME · by Elbridge A. Colby · July 14, 2023

6. City of Spies: DC Is the World Capital of Espionage

​Read the entire (very long) article with a lot of detail and history and interesting facts (and speculation) at this link:

https://www.washingtonian.com/2023/07/13/city-of-spies-dc-is-the-world-capital-of-espionage/

​I bet this excerpt will be upsetting to a number of people and organizations. I do know our adversaries are doing this - When I was at Georgetown a GRU major told me that he liked to use the library because it was open to the public and he visited there often to do "research."

Excerpt:

Campuses are also popular with Agency officials looking to identify foreign students who might be willing to serve as intelligence assets when they return to their home countries, says Daniel Golden, author of Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America’s Universities. “A lot of American intelligence agents—FBI and CIA—if they have a day with nothing to do, they’ll head over to [a nearby] university and see who they might be able to speak to and get to know among the actual students,” Golden says. Such recruitment activity is likely taking place at area universities, he notes, given their proximity to CIA and FBI headquarters.

​

CITY OF SPIES: DC IS THE WORLD CAPITAL OF ESPIONAGE

From spy attractions around town to intelligence recruitment at local colleges, the city is a hot bed for spy activity.

WRITTEN BY ANDREW BEAUJON   , PATRICK HRUBY  , LUKE MULLINS   AND SYLVIE MCNAMARA  | PUBLISHED ON JULY 13, 2023

Is Washington the world capital of espionage? Officially speaking, that’s top-secret—after all, our resident spies, foreign and domestic, aren’t about to raise their hands. Still, you can make a strong case that when it comes to the shadowy world of intelligence, our city stands alone.

The area is home to an alphabet soup of federal intelligence agencies: the CIA and DIA, NSA and NRO, INR and FBI. (In case you were wondering: The NRO does spy satellites, and the INR analyzes intel for the State Department.) Our government is a prime espionage target for international foes and friends alike, often working out of their embassies. The city’s very namesake, George Washington, wasn’t only the nation’s first President—he was its first spymaster, skillfully managing covert operations to outfox the British and win the Revolutionary War.

In an era of unprecedented electronic surveillance, spying largely remains a people profession: that is, convincing others to share their secrets. As such, is it any wonder the International Spy Museum—which, naturally, is located here—estimates that there are more than 10,000 spies in Washington, working and living among us?

Your softball teammate might be a sleeper agent. Your favorite coffee shop might be a place for passing classified documents. You might wake up one morning, as I once did, and discover that the group of serious-looking men in nondescript suits huddled in your building the previous night were FBI agents raiding the apartment of Russian foreign agent Maria Butina—whose American boyfriend you also recognize, because he always stopped to pet your dog.

In Washington, you can never be sure what’s on the level—and what’s undercover. And that, more than anything else, is what makes us a city of spies. “I’ll see someone step out of a building, get in a car, the car turns into an alley, and think, ‘Maybe something is up,’ ” says a retired senior CIA officer who still lives in the area. “Or I’ll see a sticker on a park bench and wonder, ‘Is it a [spy] signal being put down or just from a kid with a sticker?’ You look around your neighborhood and think, Some of these people could be spies. Because you never really know.”

—Patrick Hruby

7. Opinion | Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness.

A national security issue? Not mentioned in this but my thought immediately went to this: does this help contribute some to explaining our recruiting woes?

I listened to the author this morning. She is quite impressive.

Opinion | Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness.

The Washington Post · by Christine Emba · July 10, 2023

The Opinions Essay

Opinion Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness.

By

Columnist|

July 10, 2023 at 7:14 a.m. EDT

I started noticing it a few years ago. Men, especially young men, were getting weird.

It might have been the “incels” who first caught my attention, spewing self-pitying venom online, sometimes venturing out to attack the women they believed had done them wrong.

It might have been the complaints from the women around me. “Men are in their flop era,” one lamented, sick of trying to date in a pool that seemed shallower than it should be.

It might have been the new ways companies were trying to reach men. “The average hoodie made these days is weak, flimsy … ” growled a YouTube ad for a “tactical hoodie.” “You’re not a child. You’re a man. So stop wearing so many layers to go outside.”

Once my curiosity was piqued, I could see a bit of curdling in some of the men around me, too.

They struggled to relate to women. They didn’t have enough friends. They lacked long-term goals. Some guys — including ones I once knew — just quietly disappeared, subsumed into video games and porn or sucked into the alt-right and the web of misogynistic communities known as the “manosphere.”

The weirdness manifested in the national political scene, too: in the 4chan-fueled 2016 Trump campaign, in the backlash to #MeToo, in amateur militias during the Black Lives Matter protests. Misogynistic text-thread chatter took physical form in the Proud Boys, some of whom attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Young men everywhere were trying on new identities, many of them ugly, all gesturing toward a desire to belong.

It felt like a widespread identity crisis — as if they didn’t know how to be.

“This is such an ongoing thing,” Taylor Reynolds sighs. “I had this kid show up — well, I say ‘kid,’ but he’s an undergraduate here. I mentor them sometimes. He came over to my house and asked me if we could speak privately.”

Reynolds, 28, is a doctoral student at an Ivy League university. With his full beard, mustache and penchant for tweed sport coats — plus a winsome Southern accent, courtesy of a childhood spent in rural Georgia — he reads as more mature than many of the professors roaming the campus.

“And the first question this kid asked me is just … ‘What the heck does good masculinity look like?’”

He grimaced.

“And I’ll be honest with you: I did not have an answer for that.”

Anxieties around masculinity aren’t unique to this moment.

As early as 1835, Washington Irving lamented the new American upper class’s tendency to “send our youth abroad to grow luxurious and effeminate in Europe.” His alternative? “A previous tour on the prairies would be more likely to produce that manliness … most in unison with our political institutions.”

Skip ahead a few decades, and new worries about faltering masculinity turned into an obsession with fitness. An October 1920 issue of Physical Culture magazine advertised to men instructions on “How to Square Your Shoulders” (and to women, some advice: “Shall I Marry Him? A Lesson in Eugenics”).

Still, by 1958, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned that “the male role has plainly lost its rugged clarity of outline.” Writing in Esquire magazine, he added, “The ways by which American men affirm their masculinity are uncertain and obscure. There are multiplying signs, indeed, that something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.”

Worrying about the state of our men is an American tradition. But today’s problems are real and well documented. Deindustrialization, automation, free trade and peacetime have shifted the labor market dramatically, and not in men’s favor — the need for physical labor has declined, while soft skills and academic credentials are increasingly rewarded. Growing numbers of working-age men have detached from the labor market, with the biggest drop in employment among men ages 25 to 34. For those in a job, wages have stagnated everywhere except the top.

Meanwhile, women are surging ahead in school and in the workplace, putting a further dent in the “provider” model that has long been ingrained in our conception of masculinity. Men now receive about 74 bachelor’s degrees for every 100 awarded to women, and men account for more than 70 percent of the decline in college enrollment overall. In 2020, nearly half of women reported in a TD Ameritrade survey that they out-earn or make the same amount as their husbands or partners — a huge jump from fewer than 4 percent of women in 1960.

Then there’s the domestic sphere. Last summer, a Psychology Today article caused a stir online by pointing out that “dating opportunities for heterosexual men are diminishing as relationship standards rise.” No longer dependent on marriage as a means to financial security or even motherhood (a growing number of women are choosing to create families by themselves, with the help of reproductive technology), women are “increasingly selective,” leading to a rise in lonely, single young men — more of whom now live with their parents than a romantic partner. Men also account for almost 3 of every 4 “deaths of despair,” either from a suicide, alcohol abuse or an overdose.

And while the past 50 years have been revolutionary for women — the feminist movement championed their power, and an entire academic discipline emerged to theorize about gender and excavate women’s history — there hasn’t been a corresponding conversation about what role men should play in a changing world. At the same time, the increasing visibility of the LGBTQ+ movement has made the gender dynamic seem less stable, less defined.

Because men still dominate leadership positions in government and corporations, many assume they’re doing fine and bristle at male complaint. After all, all 45 U.S. presidents have been male, and men still make up more than two-thirds of Congress. A 2020 analysis of the S&P 500 found that there were more CEOs named Michael or James than there were female CEOs, period. Women are still dealing with historical discrimination and centuries of male domination that haven’t been fully accounted for or rectified. Are we really worrying that men feel a little emasculated because their female classmates are doing well?

But millions of men lack access to that kind of power and success — and, downstream, cut loose from a stable identity as patriarchs deserving of respect, they feel demoralized and adrift. The data show it, but so does the general mood: Men find themselves lonely, depressed, anxious and directionless.

“It’s kind of terrifying that he thought I was the best person to come ask this,” Reynolds went on to tell me about his underclassman visitor. “I’m not even a parent. It seems like there’s been a breakdown, right? But there’s a very real way in which, at this moment, a lot of guys don’t know — they have no sense of what it means to be them, particularly. They have no idea what it means to be a man.”

Past models of masculinity feel unreachable or socially unacceptable; new ones have yet to crystallize. What are men for in the modern world? What do they look like? Where do they fit? These are social questions but also ones with major political ramifications. Whatever self-definition men settle on will have an enormous impact on society. Yet many people, like Taylor, hesitate to be the one to try to outline a new standard of manliness. Who are they to set the rules?

Only one group seems to have no such doubts about offering men a plan.

A manly appeal from the right

In 2018, curious about a YouTube personality who had seemingly become famous overnight, I got tickets to a sold-out lecture in D.C. by Jordan Peterson. It was one of dozens of stops on the Canadian psychology professor turned anti-“woke” juggernaut’s book tour for his surprise bestseller “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.” The crowd was at least 85 percent male — the remainder seemed to be made up of long-suffering girlfriends, plus moms who had brought their sons in hope that they’d shape up.

Surrounded by men on a Tuesday night, I wondered aloud what the fuss was about. In my opinion, Peterson served up fairly banal advice: “Stand up straight,” “delay gratification.” His evolutionary-biology-informed takes ranged from amusingly weird to mildly insulting. (Female lobsters are irresistibly attracted to the top lobster, as are human women.) His three-piece suits seemed gimmicky.

Suddenly, the 20-something guy in front of me swung around. “Jordan Peterson,” he told me without a hint of irony in his voice, “taught me how to live.”

If there’s a vacuum in modeling manhood today, Peterson has been one of the boldest in stepping up to fill it. He has gained fame, notoriety and millions of book sales in the process. And he’s only one of many right-aligned masculinity gurus — of better and worse quality — who have amassed huge audiences over the past decade.

There are more straightforwardly political options: Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) attracted significant notice for a 2021 speech railing against the left’s supposed attacks on traditional masculinity and translated the idea into a book that blames “the tribunes of elite opinion” for the collapse of American manhood and masculine strength. Hawley’s “Manhood” (the jokes do, rather unfortunately, write themselves) went on sale in May.

There are fringier individuals, such as the pseudonymous online figure “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP for short, real name Costin Alamariu), who became cult-famous for his Twitter feed, a stream of far-right culture-war takes interspersed with homoerotic photos of bodybuilders. BAP’s self-published 2018 manifesto, “Bronze Age Mindset,” teaches readers how to, in the words of its Amazon description, “escape gynocracy and ascend to fresh mountain air” through a mix of Nietzsche, questionable readings of antiquity and a regimen of “sun and steel” (that is, weightlifting and, uh, going outside). A positive review from Trump administration official Michael Anton turned it into assigned reading for young conservative elites.

Some right-wing models tip over into the obviously unsavory. 2022 saw the rise of Andrew Tate, the kickboxer and failed “Big Brother” contestant turned massive social influencer, whose extreme misogyny got him booted from TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. He’s a caricature of masculinity — constantly shouting about his sports cars and women (multiple of each, naturally), a cigar surgically attached to his hand. But his advice about how to become an “alpha male” attracted an enormous following of teenage boys, to the point that schools were circulating information about how to counteract his messages in the classroom.

I went to that 2018 Peterson appearance as a skeptic. But his appeal — along with that of his fellow “manfluencers” — has become clearer since.

What’s notable, first, is their empathy. For all Peterson’s barking and, lately, unhinged tweeting, he’s clearly on young men’s side. He validates his followers’ struggles and confusion. He also tells them why they’re still needed and why they matter. No, it’s not just you — school is tailored to girls. Yes, it does suck that a house and a family feel so out of reach! You’re right: It is harder to be a man today.

This is especially compelling in a moment when many young men feel their difficulties are often dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they don’t feel part of. For young men in particular, the assumption of a world built to serve their sex doesn’t align with their lived experience, where girls out-achieve them from pre-K to post-graduate studies and “men are trash” is an acceptable joke.

Then there’s the point-by-point advice. If young men are looking for direction, these influencers give them a clear script to follow — hours of video, thousands of book pages, a torrent of social media posts — in a moment when uncertainty abounds. The rules aren’t particularly unique: get fit, pick up a skill, talk to women instead of watching porn all day. But if instruction is lacking elsewhere, even basic tips (“Clean your room!” Peterson famously advises) feel like a revelation. Plus, the community that comes with joining a fandom can feel like a buffer against an increasingly atomized world.

As one therapist told me: “I have used Jordan Peterson to turn a boy into a man. I used him to turn this guy without a strong father figure into someone who, yes, makes his bed and stands up straight and now is successful.” The books, she said, “do provide a structure that was clearly missing.”

It’s also important that the approach of these male models is both particular and aspirational. The BAPs and Hawleys find ways to celebrate aspects of the male experience — from physical strength to competitiveness to sex as a motivator — that other parts of modern society have either derided as “toxic” or attempted to explain aren’t specific to men at all. At their best, these influencers highlight positive traits that were traditionally associated with maleness — protectiveness, leadership, emotional stability — and encourage them, making “masculinity” out to be a real and necessary thing, and its acquisition something honorable and desirable. And the fact that they’re willing to define it outright feels bravely countercultural.

Take BAP’s laughable yet weirdly compelling depiction of the masculine ideal, attractive in part because of its transgressiveness: “Imagine a Mitt Romney, but different … a Romney who was actually capable of acting like he looks.” This Übermensch is a modern-day Alcibiades, as one admiring reviewer of BAP’s “Bronze Age Mindset” puts it: “a piratical man of adventure who attempts to engineer a coup in the United States, sleeps with Vladimir Putin’s wife, and then dies fighting the U.S. empire alongside wild tribesmen in Afghanistan.”

A similar energy infused a documentary called “The End of Men” by (now former) Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, a trailer for which captivated the internet in the spring of 2022. Bathed in soft lighting and accompanied by a military-esque soundtrack, ripped, shirtless figures flipped massive tires, shot guns, wrestled each other and chugged raw eggs. A fully nude man stood on a mountaintop, head tipped back and arms outstretched, his genitals obscured by what looked like a giant USB stick emitting red light.

“Once a society collapses, then you’re in hard times,” a British-inflected voice-over intoned. “Those hard times inevitably produce men who are tough, men who are resourceful, men who are strong enough to survive. They go on to reestablish order, and so the cycle begins again.”

The imagery might be ridiculous, but the message is clear. Even as masculinity comes under attack, real men still exist, and this — blond, chiseled, violent — is what they look like. Despite what “woke” (and, presumably, clothed) society might tell you, male dominance is the natural order of things. Without it, the world will fall apart.

This is where the right-wing vision of masculinity runs off the rails.

Much of the content in the online men’s space is misogyny masquerading as being simply pro-male, advocating a return to a strict hierarchy in which a particular kind of man deserves to rule over everyone else. Decent advice becomes an on-ramp to darker viewpoints: You can get from Tate urging his followers to work hard to his announcing that women are property within seconds.

Meanwhile, politicians such as Hawley are eager to ascribe men’s increasing dysfunction to malice on the part of women, progressives and “elites,” instead of the true cause: major social, economic and cultural changes that in some cases (North American Free Trade Agreement, anyone?) began with conservatives and in others (the Equal Pay Act) were long-overdue moves toward justice. And for all the overheated rhetoric deployed to engage men’s sympathies, what’s mainly on offer is the impossible suggestion that they reenact the lives their grandfathers led, followed by encouragement to blame society when that inevitably fails.

Social identity theory says people inherently protect their identities, and when their identities are maligned in public, the natural response is to stand up for what they see as fundamental to their being. Is your masculinity being challenged? Act even more masculine; defend masculinity more aggressively than ever before; glorify its stereotypes, even the worst ones.

Of course, a masculinity defined solely in opposition to women — or to the gains of feminism, more specifically — doesn’t provide a true road map to the future. Perhaps most alarmingly, many of the visions of masculinity these figures are pushing are wildly antisocial, untethered to any idea of good. Men are urged to situate themselves in a mythic story in which the world was always meant to be under their control. The fact that it no longer is becomes fuel for defensiveness and a victim complex, one that has corrosive and tragic effects.

For all its humor, “Bronze Age Mindset” is unquestionably racist, violent and homophobic. Its definition of masculinity is predicated on nihilism, barbarism and the subjugation of others. And Tate’s proud misogyny and disdain for social norms, it turns out, weren’t just harmless playacting. Last month, he was indicted in Romania on charges of human trafficking, rape and forming an organized criminal group.

A mainstream reluctance to define or speak up for men

Ronan Bray was swigging directly from a half-gallon of apple cider as we sat outside in Gainesville, Fla., last autumn. “It’s seasonal, right?”

A baby-faced, 19-year-old University of Florida freshman with short, white-blond hair, Bray was wearing a hoodie despite the heat. (He grew up in Sarasota, so he was used to it.) He had agreed to talk to me about how he saw uncertainties about masculinity playing out on his campus.

First, he laid out his liberal, Gen Z bona fides — he’s in a fraternity, but many of his close friends are LGBTQ+. He feels that old versions of masculinity might be dissolving for the better. “There’s a lot more of an effort now to broaden the idea of what masculinity really can be,” he said, “and how there can be strength in doing some things that ordinarily would be considered feminine — like talking about your feelings or crying in front of others.”

But then he got candid. He doesn’t really identify with the manosphere, he told me, but can understand why others might. “I feel like there’s a lot of room to be proudly feminine, but there’s not, in my opinion, the same room to be proudly masculine.”

Men were constantly told to be “better” and less “toxic,” he said, but what that “better” might look like seemed hard to pin down. “You pretty much have to figure it out yourself. But yet society still has the expectation that, you know, you have to be a certain way.”

Then he turned wistful. “I don’t feel like men in general have the same types of role models that women do, even in their own personal lives. … Just because you’re in the majority doesn’t mean you don’t need support.”

Technically, men are slightly in the minority in the United States. But apart from that, Bray had a point — and what he said explained a lot about why the left and the mainstream are losing men.

In 2018, the American Psychological Association released its “Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men,” which it described in a news release as declaring that “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful.” The guidelines suggest that “there is a particular constellation of standards that have held sway over large segments of the population, including: anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence,” and that these standards are damaging to mental and physical health.

Conservatives raged. But progressives mainly shrugged. That’s because the mid-2010s were the high-water mark of anti-male sentiment in progressive spaces. As the #MeToo movement rose, with its tales of horrendous male behavior and ensuing corporate coverups, “ban men” became a rallying cry. The word “masculinity” seemed to rarely appear without the descriptor “toxic” accompanying it, blamed for everything from rape culture to climate change.

Even today, some progressives react touchily to any efforts to help men as a group.

In 2014, President Barack Obama announced the My Brother’s Keeper initiative, a $200 million program meant to improve the lives of at-risk boys and men of color. The pushback came immediately: More than 1,000 women signed an open letter criticizing the program for not including girls. More recently, when news circulated in 2022 that President Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure act would likely create thousands of jobs for working-class men, MSNBC pundit Joy Reid dismissively called it a “White guy employment act.”

As a result, there’s a temptation to minimize men’s problems or erase references to masculinity altogether. One Democratic strategist told me about how specific references to men in political speeches are often stripped out for fear of offense or to signal broader “inclusivity.” A father staying up late worrying about losing his job, for instance, used as an illustrative example in a speech about health care, is turned into a nonspecific “parent.”

The strategist described his party as having almost an allergy to admitting that some men might, in fact, be struggling in a unique way and could benefit from their own tailored attention and aid.

“But when you strip out the specificity, people feel less seen,” he said. “There’s less of a resonance. If the question is what scripts we have for men, how are we appealing to men, then being willing and able to talk about men is a pretty key component of that.”

What ends up happening is that, if women are still seen as needing tools to overcome disadvantage, men are often expected to just shape up by themselves. For a group that can be focused to a fault on addressing microaggressions, it’s surprisingly acceptable for those on the left to victim-blame men who are struggling themselves. “So we just let men off the hook? Maybe we should give them electroshock therapy for their hysteria,” a progressive female friend of mine joked when I told her about this essay.

To the extent that any vision of “nontoxic” masculinity is proposed, it ends up sounding more like stereotypical femininity than anything else: Guys should learn to be more sensitive, quiet and socially apt, seemingly overnight. It’s the equivalent of “learn to code!” as a solution for those struggling to adjust to a new economy: simultaneously hectoring, dismissive and jejune.

The thing is, I get it. I understand the reluctance to spend time worrying about men. And I say that as someone who loves them: as friends, romantic partners and members of my family.

Justifiably, progressives want to preserve the major gains made for women over the past several decades — gains that are still fragile. It’s easy to mistake attention as zero-sum, to fear that putting effort toward helping men might mean we won’t have space for women anymore.

There is something appealing, too, in the idea of gender neutrality — or at least rejecting gender essentialism — as a social ethos. After all, attaching specific traits to men will redound to women, too. If we say “real” men are strong, does that mean real women must be weak? If men are leaders, are women destined to follow?

I’m convinced that men are in a crisis. And I strongly suspect that ending it will require a positive vision of what masculinity entails that is particular — that is, neither neutral nor interchangeable with femininity. Still, I find myself reluctant to fully articulate one. There’s a reason a lot of the writing on the crisis in masculinity ends at the diagnosis stage.

Take Richard Reeves’s book “Of Boys and Men,” omnipresent in the discourse since its 2022 release. The Brookings Institution scholar has offered wonky potential solutions — “redshirting” boys by delaying kindergarten entry one year, creating scholarships for men in HEAL (health, education, administration and literacy) jobs. But even he acknowledges he has felt pressure to shy away from some of the harder questions his subject matter raises.

Reeves told me that in his writing, he tried to stay descriptive, only going so far as saying there are some differences between the sexes that need to be taken into account to create the most viable solutions. He frames the biological differences between the sexes not as a binary but as overlapping distributions of traits — aggression, risk appetite, sex drive — with clusters of one sex or the other at the extremes.

But when it came to writing any kind of script for how men should be, the self-possessed expert scholar faltered.

“That’s a question I basically dodged in the book,” Reeves told me. “Because, candidly, it’s outside of my comfort zone. It’s more personal. It’s harder to empirically justify. There are no charts I can brandish.” After all, as he said, he’s a think-tank guy, a wonk.

“But I think I’m now trying to articulate more prescriptively, less descriptively, some of these discussions about masculinity and trying to send some messages around it” — here, his speech became emphatic — “because, honestly, nobody else is f---ing doing it except the right.”

Reeves, who is launching his own institute focused on men and boys, knows there’s a danger inherent in seeming too eager to help men or too intent on promoting a particular vision of masculinity.

“As soon as you start articulating virtues, advantages, good things about being male … then you’ve just dialed up the risk factor of the conversation,” he said. “But I’m also acutely aware that the risk of not doing it is much greater. Because without it, there’s a vacuum. And along comes Andrew Tate to make Jordan Peterson look like a cuddly old uncle.”

A new script for men

If the right has overcorrected to an old-fashioned (and somewhat hostile) vision of masculinity, many progressives have ignored the opportunity to sell men on a better vision of what they can be.

In the conversations I had with men for this essay, I kept hearing that many would still find some kind of normative standard of masculinity meaningful and useful, if only to give them a starting point from which to expand.

Scott Galloway agrees. On his podcast and in his newsletter, the author, entrepreneur and professor at New York University’s Stern Business School has made a specialty of talking about the crisis of unattached, rudderless young men and helping them aspire to more. On a Zoom call with me from his home in London, “Prof G,” as he’s known on his eponymous show, reclined, biceps bulging from his fitted shirt as he clasped his hands behind his shaven head. Periodically, he unfolded to push the snout of his large dog out of the frame.

“I mean, there are certain attributes around masculinity that we should embrace. Men think about sex more than women. Use that as motivation to be successful and meet women. Men are more impulsive. Men will run out into a field and get shot up to think they’re saving their buddies.”

He was careful to point out that he doesn’t believe that women wouldn’t do as much but that the distributions are different.

“Where I think this conversation has come off the tracks is where being a man is essentially trying to ignore all masculinity and act more like a woman. And even some women who say that — they don’t want to have sex with those guys. They may believe they’re right, and think it’s a good narrative, but they don’t want to partner with them.”

I, a heterosexual woman, cringed in recognition.

“And so men should think, ‘I want to take advantage of my maleness. I want to be aggressive, I want to set goals, go hard at it. I want to be physically really strong. I want to take care of myself.’”

Galloway leaned into the screen. “My view is that, for masculinity, a decent place to start is garnering the skills and strength that you can advocate for and protect others with. If you’re really strong and smart, you will garner enough power, influence, kindness to begin protecting others. That is it. Full stop. Real men protect other people.”

Richard Reeves, in our earlier conversation, had put it somewhat more subtly. “I try to raise my boys” — he has three — “to have the confidence to ask a girl out, if that’s their inclination; the grace to accept no for an answer; and the responsibility to make sure that, either way, she gets home safely.” His recipe for masculine success echoed Galloway’s: proactiveness, agency, risk-taking and courage, but with a pro-social cast.

This tracked with my intuitions about what “good masculinity” might look like — the sort that I actually admire, the sort that women I know find attractive but often can’t seem to find at all. It also aligns with what the many young men I spoke with would describe as aspirational, once they finally felt safe enough to admit they did in fact carry an ideal of manhood with its own particular features.

Physical strength came up frequently, as did a desire for personal mastery. They cited adventurousness, leadership, problem-solving, dignity and sexual drive. None of these are negative traits, but many men I spoke with felt that these archetypes were unfairly stigmatized: Men were too assertive, too boisterous, too horny.

But, in fact, most of these features are scaffolded by biology — all are associated with testosterone, the male sex hormone. It’s not an excuse for “boys will be boys”-style bad behavior, but, realistically, these traits would be better acknowledged and harnessed for pro-social aims than stifled or downplayed. Ignoring obvious truths about human nature, even general ones, fosters the idea that progressives are out of touch with reality.

The essentialist view — that it’s in men’s nature to be brave, stoic and in charge while women remain docile, nurturing and submissive — would be dire news for social equality and for the vast numbers of individuals who don’t fit those stereotypes. Biology isn’t destiny — there is no one script for how to be a woman or a man. But despite a push by some advocates to make everything from bathrooms to birthing gender-neutral, most people don’t actually want a completely androgynous society. And if a new model for masculinity is going to find popular appeal, it will depend on putting the distinctiveness of men to good use in whatever form it comes in.

“Femininity or masculinity are a social construct that we get to define,” Galloway concluded. “They are, loosely speaking, behaviors we associate with people born as men or born as women, or attributes more common among people born as men or as women. But the key is that we still get to fill that vessel and define what those attributes are, and then try and reinforce them with our behavior and our views and our media.”

What would creating a positive vision of masculinity look like? Recognizing distinctiveness but not pathologizing it. Finding new ways to valorize it and tell a story that is appealing to young men and socially beneficial, rather than ceding ground to those who would warp a perceived difference into something ugly and destructive.

A bit more than 20 years ago, anthropologist David D. Gilmore published “Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity,” a cross-cultural study of manliness around the world. He found that almost all societies had a concept of “real,” “true” or “adult” manhood that was seen as a valuable and indispensable ideal. But masculinity had to be earned — and proved.

Men achieved it by providing for their families and broader society, by protecting their tribe and others, and by successfully procreating. In the modern moment, however, all three of these goals seem less celebrated and further from reach. Young men who disappear into online forums, video games or pornography see none of the social or personal rewards of meeting these goals, and their loneliness and despair suggest how painful it has been to lose track of this ideal.

The other feature of Gilmore’s findings was that boys generally had to be ushered into manhood and masculinity by other men. And that seems to be a key link missing today.

“When I talk to my friends, I can literally count on one hand the number of friends I have who have a good relationship with their dad and actually have learned things from him,” said Reynolds, the Ivy League grad student, mulling the reasons students were turning to him for advice. “Part of the thing is that that’s just an ongoing societal problem.”

Many of the young men I talked to for this essay told me they had troubled relationships with their fathers, or no father figure in their lives at all. The data bears this out: Since 1960, the percentage of boys living apart from their biological fathers has nearly doubled, from 17 percent to 32 percent.

As Reeves told me: “If you’re growing up in a single-parent household, and you go to a typical public school and typical medical system, there’s a decent chance that you will not encounter a male figure of authority until middle school or later. Not your doctor, not your teachers. No one else around you. What does that feel like?”

And while progressives have embraced the rise of single-parent and female-led homes — or at least assume them to be inevitable as a new status quo — it’s still clear that male role models help boys especially to thrive.

In 2018, Harvard economist Raj Chetty published a groundbreaking study on race and economic opportunity. Among the findings was that persistent income inequality between Black and White people was disproportionately driven by poor outcomes among Black boys. However, those boys who grew up in neighborhoods where there were more fathers present — even if not their own — had significantly higher chances of upward mobility.

“Ultimately,” Reynolds mused, “it’s about relationships and finding older men who, you know — they’re not flashy, they’re not ‘important,’ necessarily, but they actually are living virtuous lives as men. And then being able to then learn from them.”

This cultural shift is one reason why the crisis of masculinity might take time to fix: because fostering positive representations of manhood requires relationships and mentorship on an individual level, in a way that can’t be mandated. Even aspirational public representations of men are scarce on the ground. Political figures who in the past might have been obvious models — Barack Obama, say, or Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) — are, in our moment, polarizing. Fathers in popular culture are still often stereotyped as ineffective or idiots. New archetypes are forming — the “soft daddies” of cartoons such as “Big Mouth” and “Bob’s Burgers,” any role actor Nick Offerman takes on — but they’re still rarities. And the everyday men most secure in their masculinity usually aren’t the ones pronouncing it in the public square.

Some policy interventions can increase the number of role models within communities, according to experts. Programs such as the Boys2Men Community Foundation in Chicago offer one-on-one mentorship. And nearly every thinker on the masculinity problem advocates getting more men into classrooms, from kindergarten up — not just for their effects as teachers but also because they’re more likely to serve as coaches, especially of boys’ sports.

But as Galloway put it, the change will need to come from the bottom up — from everyday men who notice the crisis of identity hitting their younger counterparts and can put themselves forward to help. “Ninety percent of this, if not 95, is on us, is on older men, is on society,” Galloway said. “To realize this is a problem that warrants investment and attention. And it’s on young men themselves to take responsibility and embrace masculinity and redefine it.”

A path forward

For all their problems, the strict gender roles of the past did give boys a script for how to be a man. But if trying to smash the patriarchy has left a vacuum in our ideal of masculinity, it also gives us a chance at a fresh start: an opportunity to take what is useful from models of the past and repurpose it for boys and men today.

We can find ways to work with the distinctive traits and powerful stories that already exist — risk-taking, strength, self-mastery, protecting, providing, procreating. We can recognize how real and important they are. And we can attempt to make them pro-social — to help not just men but also women, and to support the common good.

Influencers on the right have found an audience by recognizing and exaggerating these tropes. What else is an incel but a stymied procreator building an identity out of his failures? Who are Tucker Carlson’s tire-flipping civilizational guards but the protector, made absurd? Right-wing political figures such as Josh Hawley have clearly latched on to many men’s desire to provide, but their solutions are often 1950s throwbacks that depend on castigating women for providing for themselves.

What critics miss is that if there were nothing valid at the core of these constructs, they wouldn’t command this sort of popularity. People need codes for how to be human. And when those aren’t easily found, they’ll take whatever is offered, no matter what else is attached.

For the left, there’s room to elaborate on visions of these qualities that are expansive, not reductive, that allow for many varieties of masculinity and don’t deny female value and agency.

In my ideal, the mainstream could embrace a model that acknowledges male particularity and difference but doesn’t denigrate women to do so. It’s a vision of gender that’s not androgynous but still equal, and relies on character, not just biology. And it acknowledges that certain themes — protector, provider, even procreator — still resonate with many men and should be worked with, not against.

But how to implement it? Frankly, it will be slow. A new masculinity will be a norm shift, and that takes time. The women’s movement succeeded in changing structures and aspirations, but the social transformation didn’t take place overnight. And empathy will be required, as grating as that might feel.

It is harder to be a man today, and in many ways, that is a good thing: Finally, the freer sex is being held to a higher standard.

Even so, not all of the changes that have led us to this moment are unequivocally positive. And if left unaddressed, the current confusion of men and boys will have destructive social outcomes, in the form of resentment and radicalization.

In the end, the sexes rise and fall together. The truth is that most women still want to have intimate relationships with good men. And even those who don’t still want their sons, brothers, fathers and friends to live good lives.

The old script for masculinity might be on its way out. It’s time we replaced it with something better.

The Washington Post · by Christine Emba · July 10, 2023

8. Chinese Scientists Are Leaving the United States

Excerpts:

Just as some Chinese scientists are looking abroad, these challenges are pushing a growing number of international students to turn elsewhere for academic opportunities. Students are increasingly heading to countries like Canada, Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom, all of which are opening their doors to high-skilled workers and researchers. To attract more talent, the United Kingdom has issued “Global Talent” and “High Potential Individual” visas, which allow scholars from top universities to work there for 2-3 years and 1-5 years, respectively.

Universities are being impacted “by geopolitical tensions, by political agendas, and so it’s certainly inhibiting U.S. universities’ ability to attract the best and brightest,” Lee said.

Chinese Scientists Are Leaving the United States

Here’s why that spells bad news for Washington.

By Christina Lu and Anusha Rathi

FP subscribers can now receive digests of new stories written by this author. Subscribe now | Sign in

Foreign Policy · by Christina Lu, Anusha Rathi · July 13, 2023

Facing an increasingly suspicious research climate, a growing number of Chinese scientists are leaving the United States for positions abroad, the latest indicator of how worsening U.S.-China relations are complicating academic collaboration and could hamstring Washington’s tech ambitions.

Chinese scientists living in the United States have for decades contributed to research efforts driving developments in advanced technology and science. But a growing number of them may now be looking elsewhere for work, as deteriorating geopolitical relations fuel extra scrutiny of Chinese researchers and Beijing ramps up efforts to recruit and retain talent. Between 2010 and 2021, the number of Chinese scientists leaving the United States has steadily increased, according to new research published last month. If the trend continues, experts warn that the brain drain could deal a major blow to U.S. research efforts in the long run.

“It’s absolutely devastating,” said David Bier, the associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. “So many of the researchers that the United States depends on in [the] advanced technology field are from China, or are foreign students, and this phenomenon is certainly going to negatively impact U.S. firms and U.S. research going forward.”

From semiconductor chips to artificial intelligence, technology has been at the forefront of U.S.-China competition, with both Washington and Beijing maneuvering to strangle each other’s sectors. Cooperation, even in key sectors like combating climate change, has been rare.

From 2010 to 2021, the number of scientists of Chinese descent who left the United States for another country has surged from 900 to 2,621, with scientists leaving at an expedited rate between 2018 and 2021, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Nearly half of this group moved to China and Hong Kong in 2010, the study said, and a growing percentage of Chinese scientists have relocated to China over the years.

While this number represents a small fraction of the Chinese scientists in the United States, the uptick reflects researchers’ growing concerns and broader apprehension amid a tense geopolitical climate. After surveying 1,304 Chinese American researchers, the report found that 89 percent of respondents wanted to contribute to U.S. science and technology leadership. Yet 72 percent also reported feeling unsafe as researchers in the United States, while 61 percent had previously considered seeking opportunities outside of the country.

“Scientists of Chinese descent in the United States now face higher incentives to leave the United States and lower incentives to apply for federal grants,” the report said. There are “general feelings of fear and anxiety that lead them to consider leaving the United States and/or stop applying for federal grants.”

The incentives to leave are twofold. Beijing has funneled resources into research and development programs and has long attempted to recruit scientists, even its own, from around the world. For one of its initiatives, the Thousand Talents Plan, Beijing harnessed at least 600 recruitment stations worldwide to acquire new talent. “China has been really trying to lure back scientists for a long time,” said Eric Fish, the author of China’s Millennials.

But this latest outflow of Chinese scientists accelerated in 2018, the same year that then-U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled the China Initiative, a controversial program that was aimed at countering IP theft—and cast a chill over researchers of Chinese descent and collaborations with Chinese institutions. In 2020, he also issued a proclamation denying visas for graduate students and researchers affiliated with Chinese universities associated with the military.

Although the Biden administration shut down the China Initiative, experts warn that its shadow still looms over Chinese scientists. More than one-third of respondents in the PNAS survey reported feeling unwelcome in the United States, while nearly two-thirds expressed concerns about research collaboration with China.

“There is this chilling effect that we’re still witnessing now, where there is a stigma attached to collaboration with China,” said Jenny Lee, a professor at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona.

The challenges are emblematic of how the breakdown in U.S.-China relations has thrown universities into a geopolitical firestorm, particularly as some states’ lawmakers pressure them to sever ties with Chinese counterparts. On the U.S. side, interest in Mandarin language studies and study abroad has plummeted over the years, largely the result of worsening ties, Beijing’s growing repression, and the coronavirus pandemic. Today, while there are roughly 300,000 Chinese students in America, only 350 Americans studied in China in the most recent academic year. If interest continues to recede, experts warn of spillover effects that could hamper Washington’s understanding of Beijing.

“We’re losing a generation of people who are knowledgeable about China,” said Daniel Murphy, the former director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. “I’m concerned that the United States is going about this issue in a way that excessively focuses on risks of the academic relationship, without due consideration for the benefits. And I think we see this in a whole host of arenas, and that it’s bipartisan.”

At the same time as a growing number of Chinese scientists exit the United States, new students appear to be facing higher barriers to entry as student visa denials and backlogs reach record high levels. According to a blog post by the Cato Institute, student visa denials peaked at about 35 percent in 2022—the highest rate recorded in two decades.

Student visa denial data is not available by nationality, but Bier, the Cato Institute expert who wrote the piece, said that there is a high degree of correlation between denial rates for B-visas, or tourist visas, and student visas. “Having reviewed the B-visa denials in China, it’s pretty clear that the Chinese overall visa denial rate has increased significantly over the last few years and is at a level now where it’s the highest it’s been in decades,” he said.

Just as some Chinese scientists are looking abroad, these challenges are pushing a growing number of international students to turn elsewhere for academic opportunities. Students are increasingly heading to countries like Canada, Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom, all of which are opening their doors to high-skilled workers and researchers. To attract more talent, the United Kingdom has issued “Global Talent” and “High Potential Individual” visas, which allow scholars from top universities to work there for 2-3 years and 1-5 years, respectively.

Universities are being impacted “by geopolitical tensions, by political agendas, and so it’s certainly inhibiting U.S. universities’ ability to attract the best and brightest,” Lee said.

Foreign Policy · by Christina Lu, Anusha Rathi · July 13, 2023

9. To defeat Russia, Ukraine’s top commander pushes to fight on his terms

Excerpts:

But if it were up to Zaluzhny alone, this is not how he would get the job done. He would fight with air superiority. He would fire back at least as many shells as the Russians are firing at his troops. And he would have cruise missiles that could match Moscow’s. Instead, modern fighter jets, such as the U.S.-made F-16, are not expected on the battlefield until next year. Ukraine’s ammunition supply is constrained, with the Russians often shooting three times as much in a day.

And Western allies, citing fears of escalating the war with Russia, have placed a condition on the longer-range missiles and other materiel they’ve so far provided: They can’t be used to strike Russian soil.

So, Zaluzhny said, he uses weapons made in Ukraine for the frequent strikes across the border that Kyiv never officially acknowledges as its own.

To defeat Russia, Ukraine’s top commander pushes to fight on his terms

The Washington Post · by Isabelle Khurshudyan · July 14, 2023

Europe

By

July 14, 2023 at 12:25 p.m. EDT

KYIV, Ukraine — A career military man, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny long ago confronted three questions: Am I ready to die? Am I ready to kill? Am I willing to send people to die and kill?

Now, Ukraine’s top commander in a war with a Russian force larger and better-equipped than his own is asking himself a new question: How can I reduce the loss of life? He starts each morning by learning how many soldiers were killed or wounded following his orders the day before. Sometimes he stumbles across a contact in his cellphone who is dead. He refuses to delete them.

Zaluzhny said he’s saving the grieving for later. Mourning now would distract him from his important work as the man Ukrainians trust to keep them safe and Western partners trust with billions in security assistance. Both expect him to re-create Ukraine’s earlier underdog success on the battlefield.

But if it were up to Zaluzhny alone, this is not how he would get the job done. He would fight with air superiority. He would fire back at least as many shells as the Russians are firing at his troops. And he would have cruise missiles that could match Moscow’s. Instead, modern fighter jets, such as the U.S.-made F-16, are not expected on the battlefield until next year. Ukraine’s ammunition supply is constrained, with the Russians often shooting three times as much in a day.

And Western allies, citing fears of escalating the war with Russia, have placed a condition on the longer-range missiles and other materiel they’ve so far provided: They can’t be used to strike Russian soil.

So, Zaluzhny said, he uses weapons made in Ukraine for the frequent strikes across the border that Kyiv never officially acknowledges as its own.

“To save my people, why do I have to ask someone for permission what to do on enemy territory?” Zaluzhny recently told The Washington Post in a rare interview. “For some reason, I have to think that I’m not allowed to do anything there. Why? Because [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will … use nuclear weapons? The kids who are dying don’t care.

“This is our problem, and it is up to us to decide how to kill this enemy. It is possible and necessary to kill on his territory in a war. If our partners are afraid to use their weapons, we will kill with our own. But only as much as is necessary.”

The challenges facing Zaluzhny and his forces are significant. Even after he orchestrated a series of military feats — a defensive stand that forced the Russians to retreat from around Kyiv and counteroffensives that expelled the invading troops from the northeast Kharkiv region and the southern regional capital of Kherson last year — large swaths of Ukraine’s east and south, about a fifth of the country, remain occupied.

Carrying out a counteroffensive to reclaim that territory, defeat Russia and minimize Ukraine’s casualties requires resources that Zaluzhny said he’s still lacking. Western officials have said Ukraine has enough to succeed, but Zaluzhny was sharply critical of counterparts who have argued that Kyiv doesn’t need F-16s. Their own militaries would never fight like this, he said in the interview.

Despite criticism that progress in the counteroffensive has been slow, Zaluzhny remains a popular if somewhat paradoxical figure in Ukraine. He has sought to be a driver of change in the military, eliminating legacies from the Soviet era and transforming it into a more Western, NATO-like force. Off the battlefield, the 50-year-old’s smiling face is painted on walls across the country, along with his hand in a peace sign. He has a Baby Yoda patch on his bulletproof vest and a patch with cartoon cats holding guns on the back of his helmet.

But behind the scenes, the worries and responsibility weigh on him.

“One question I get asked is, ‘How can you stand it?’” Zaluzhny said.

“I have to live with it,” he said. “Every day, it’s those who were killed. Every day, it’s the maimed, the missing. It’s tears.”

‘No longer a Soviet army’

Seven months before columns of Russian tanks streaked across Ukraine’s northern, southern and eastern borders, Zaluzhny was considering a transition to civilian life.

But the military was all he’d ever known; he was born while his father was stationed at a garrison in the country’s north, and he later attended a military academy. When President Volodymyr Zelensky called and offered Zaluzhny the top post in Ukraine’s armed forces, Zaluzhny quickly ditched the idea of retirement.

Among the first things he did was renovate his new office. Zaluzhny had always dreaded visiting previous commanders there. Each time reminded him of the thing he despised most about the Soviet army legacy — “that any commander who took his position was in fact a feudal lord over his subordinates,” he said. It represented exactly what he wanted to change about Ukraine’s military.

“These walls were soaked in this,” Zaluzhny said. “When you came in here, you immediately understood that it was a mistake to be born, it was a mistake to come here.”

In a General Staff headquarters building built in the 19th century, Zaluzhny’s office now stands apart — simplistic and modern with a large bookshelf where Zaluzhny stashes his collection, including Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “The Governance of China.”

The change wasn’t for aesthetics, but rather for the place, and the person in it, to feel more accessible. Rather than rule with an iron fist, Zaluzhny said, he frequently asks for input — and not just from his own circle of generals. Even now, soldiers on the front line can often directly reach out to Zaluzhny through social media.

Zaluzhny’s attempt at culture change can be seen on the battlefield, too. Years of training and deepening ties with NATO forces have made Ukraine’s forces more nimble than Russia’s in this war. Lower-level commanders on the ground often feel empowered to make decisions quickly rather than run each call up the chain of command — a Soviet mind-set.

“The assumption that this would be a war between a big Soviet army and a small Soviet army was wrong in many countries,” Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said. “That’s why they told us that Kyiv would fall in three days and Ukraine in three weeks. But this is no longer a Soviet army.”

After Reznikov learned that Russia had launched a full-scale attack on Feb. 24, 2022, he arrived at Zaluzhny’s office to find the general standing over large maps and answering multiple phones. Zaluzhny was receiving information from the battlefield and then responding with curt orders, Reznikov said. But Zaluzhny would also add a small term of endearment each time, calling his subordinate a “beauty” or telling him “good job.”

“This is humanity,” Reznikov said. “The guy is in a general’s uniform, but his humanity is what makes him special.”

The military still demands strict order and discipline, Zaluzhny said. He can be stern and demanding, but “I do not mock people, I do not oppress them, I do not humiliate them.”

The turn away from the Ukrainian military’s Soviet legacy is far from complete. More offices must be changed, Zaluzhny said. And more change will come with the new generation — soldiers Zaluzhny proudly described as knowing English and being well-read. “It’s a pity we’re losing them,” he said.

After fighting an internal Soviet ideological enemy, he now faces an external one that lauds the very heritage Zaluzhny wanted eradicated. But he still has respect for his adversary’s doctrine. He eagerly read everything Gen. Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s military chief, has ever written, describing it as “very, very interesting” and lamenting that he hasn’t published anything lately.

“He is an enemy — an enemy who is very smart,” Zaluzhny said. “Smart and therefore devious. He is still strong. So you have to respect him as such and look for ways to kill him. Because that is the only way to win.”

Beyond victory

Years before Zaluzhny could start shaping Ukraine’s military into his vision, a few hours in a jail cell motivated him to learn more about the world order.

It was 2019, and Zaluzhny, as one of Ukraine’s top commanders directing Kyiv’s forces against Russian proxies in eastern Ukraine, traveled to Brussels for a meeting with NATO counterparts.

As soon as he stepped off the plane, he said, he was surrounded by law enforcement. With their guns pointed at him, he was instructed to lie facedown on the floor and was handcuffed. Zaluzhny said he had just enough roaming minutes on his phone to call Ukraine’s ambassador to NATO, who eventually helped secure his release.

Russian authorities had placed Zaluzhny’s name on the Interpol wanted list without his knowing — a regular practice that has led to other Ukrainian commanders being briefly imprisoned. He was angry at himself for not knowing his legal rights in such a situation.

“I was in a bad mood, but then I realized that hypothetically I was a war criminal and most likely would remain one,” Zaluzhny said. “So I decided I should study international relations and international law.”

The episode inspired him to pursue a master’s degree, which he received in December 2020. He puts it to use in his current job, which calls on him not only to be a military strategist but also to regularly confront geopolitical considerations, such as allies’ fear of crossing Russian red lines by providing weapons such as longer-range missiles or modern fighter jets.

Zaluzhny, however, isn’t shy about his intent to reclaim Crimea, the peninsula Russia illegally annexed in 2014, even as some Western officials privately worry about what Putin’s response would be if Ukrainian troops ever reached the territory. “As soon as I have the means, I’ll do something. I don’t give a damn — nobody will stop me,” Zaluzhny said.

The figurative Western handcuffs on his military operations have prompted Zaluzhny to think more about Ukraine’s future — beyond this counteroffensive and this war — and how to make the country so strong that no one will dare attack it again. To accomplish that means producing weapons for defense rather than being reliant on others to provide them.

He lamented that Ukraine is dependent on other countries for ammunition as partners struggle to meet the demand. The more Ukraine can fire, pinning down Russian forces, the fewer casualties it will suffer, Zaluzhny said. But what happens if the precious resource becomes scarcer the longer the war lasts?

“I’ve been asking myself that since last March — and not just myself; I ask it everywhere I can ask it,” Zaluzhny said.

His vision for a formidable Ukraine is why he struggles to consider his own future after the war. Maybe he’ll take some time off. “But as my wife says: ‘Okay, three days. What’s next?’” he said with a laugh. He might write a book, he said. He’d like to travel, though his Brussels airport experience left him wary.

But Zaluzhny expects that even after the war, he’ll be busy. His concept of victory is more than just Ukraine restoring its full territorial integrity.

“Victory will be when we will have an army — maybe even a not-insignificant one — that will guarantee the safety of children who are now riding in baby carriages, so that they grow up knowing that this won’t happen again,” Zaluzhny said. “And that’s a tremendous amount of work. It has to start now.”

Kostiantyn Khudov, Serhiy Morgunov and Kamila Hrabchuk contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Isabelle Khurshudyan · July 14, 2023

10. Taylor Swift is boosting the economy with her Eras Tour, Federal Reserve says

The headline might be a little over the top. (but it worked as clickbait for me)

So to improve the economic instrument we just need more Taylor Swift concerts? What does it say about our economy (and ourselves) when an entertainer has such influence over the economy?

Taylor Swift is boosting the economy with her Eras Tour, Federal Reserve says

USA Today · by Kate Perez

USA TODAY

Since its start on March 17, Taylor Swift's Eras Tour has taken cities across the country by storm. Now, the Federal Reserve has found that Swift's tour is helping boost the economy.

The Philadelphia Federal Reserve office announced Wednesday that Swift's tour has helped boost hotel revenues in the city. The announcement came in the central bank's Beige Book, which summarizes how different parts of the economy are doing in cities across the U.S.

“Despite the slowing recovery in tourism in the region overall, one contact highlighted that May was the strongest month for hotel revenue in Philadelphia since the onset of the pandemic, in large part due to an influx of guests for the Taylor Swift concerts in the city,” Philadelphia Federal Reserve officials reported.

Swift occupied the Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia with her tour earlier this year, performing on May 12, 13 and 14 with her 44-song set list.

Taylor Swift setlist: Here are all the songs on her epic Eras tour

Chicago sets record for total hotel rooms occupied

Other cities have recognized Swift's contributions to the economy, including Chicago, who's tourism and marketing organization Choose Chicago stated that Swift's tour run in the city in early June helped set an all-time hotel record.

This just in!

Chicago set its new all-time record for total hotel rooms occupied!

Thanks to three nights of Taylor Swift, the ASCO Annual Meeting, the James Beard Awards and more.

This isn’t just post-pandemic–we had more rooms filled than ever in Chicago’s history! pic.twitter.com/OqEGB3ZB2C

— Choose Chicago (@ChooseChicago) June 7, 2023

More than 44,000 hotel rooms were used each night of the concert, which ran from June 2-4, and $39 million was generated in hotel revenue for Chicago, according to Choose Chicago. The organization also stated that other events that weekend, including the James Beard Awards and the ASCO Annual Meeting, contributed to the tremendous number of occupied rooms.

Taylor Swift's Eras Tour extended

Swift recently extended the tour, announcing dates at locations in South America, Asia, Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia and more.

EXCUSE ME HI I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY I can’t wait to see so many of you on The Eras Tour next year at these new international dates! Visit https://t.co/EYBevxhQzH for more information on your registrations, pre-sales and on-sales!! pic.twitter.com/G8zx8QUUAV

— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) June 20, 2023

With the extension of the tour with international dates, Swift is now expected to end the Eras Tour on Aug. 17, 2024, in London.

Denver, Colorado, is the next city that Swift will appear in, with her shows happening on Friday, July 14 and Saturday, July 15.

'Their Wildest Dreams': Governors send messages to Taylor Swift during Eras Tour

Kate Perez covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. You can reach her at kperez@gannett.com or on Twitter @katecperez_.

USA Today · by Kate Perez

11. Hydrogen Is the Future—or a Complete Mirage

Excerpts:

Right now, we face a similar dilemma, a dilemma of huge proportions not with regard to H2O but one of its components, H2—hydrogen. Is hydrogen a key part of the world’s energy future or a dangerous fata morgana? It is a question on which tens of trillions of dollars in investment may end up hinging. And scale matters.

...

Nevertheless, in the last six years a huge coalition of national governments and industrial interests has assembled around the promise of a hydrogen-based economy.

...

As this brief tour suggests, there is every reason to fear that tens of billions of dollars in subsidies, vast amounts of political capital, and precious time are being invested in “green” energy investments, the main attraction of which is that they minimize change and perpetuate as far as possible the existing patterns of the hydrocarbon energy system. This is not greenwashing in the simple sense of rebadging or mislabeling. If carried through, it is far more substantial than that. It will build ships and put pipes in the ground. It will consume huge amounts of desperately scarce green electricity. And this faces us with a dilemma.

...

It is not by accident that America’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, targeted its most generous subsidies—the most generous ever offered for green energy in the United States—on hydrogen production. The hydrogen lobby is hard at work, and it has turned Texas into the lowest-cost site for H2 production in the Western world. It is not a model one would want to see emulated anywhere else, but it may serve as a technology incubator that charts what is viable and what is not.

There is very good reason to suspect the motives of every player in the energy transition. Distinguishing true innovation from self-serving conservatism is going to be a key challenge in the new era in which we have to pick winners. We need to develop a culture of vigilance. But there are also good reasons to expect certain key features of the new to grow out of the old. Innovation is miraculous but it rarely falls like mana from heaven. As Sabel and Victor argue in their book, it grows from within expert technical communities with powerful vested interests in change. The petrochemical complex of the Gulf of Mexico may seem an unlikely venue for the birth of a green new future, but it is only logical that the test of whether the hydrogen economy is a real possibility will be run at the heart of the existing hydrocarbon economy.

Hydrogen Is the Future—or a Complete Mirage

The green-hydrogen industry is a case study in the potential—for better and worse—of our new economic era.

JULY 14, 2023, 12:38 PM

Tooze-Adam-foreign-policy-columnist16

Adam Tooze

By Adam Tooze, a columnist at Foreign Policy and director of the European Institute at Columbia University. Sign up for Adam’s Chartbook newsletter here.

Foreign Policy · by Adam Tooze · July 14, 2023

With the vast majority of the world’s governments committed to decarbonizing their economies in the next two generations, we are embarked on a voyage into the unknown. What was once an argument over carbon pricing and emissions trading has turned into an industrial policy race. Along the way there will be resistance and denial. There will also be breakthroughs and unexpected wins. The cost of solar and wind power has fallen spectacularly in the last 20 years. Battery-powered electric vehicles (EVs) have moved from fantasy to ubiquitous reality.

But alongside outright opposition and clear wins, we will also have to contend with situations that are murkier, with wishful thinking and motivated reasoning. As we search for technical solutions to the puzzle of decarbonization, we must beware the mirages of the energy transition.

On a desert trek a mirage can be fatal. Walk too far in the wrong direction, and there may be no way back. You succumb to exhaustion before you can find real water. On the other hand, if you don’t head toward what looks like an oasis, you cannot be sure that you will find another one in time.

Right now, we face a similar dilemma, a dilemma of huge proportions not with regard to H2O but one of its components, H2—hydrogen. Is hydrogen a key part of the world’s energy future or a dangerous fata morgana? It is a question on which tens of trillions of dollars in investment may end up hinging. And scale matters.

For decades, economists warned of the dangers of trying through industrial policy to pick winners. The risk is not just that you might fail, but that in doing so you incur costs. You commit real resources that foreclose other options. The lesson was once that we should leave it to the market. But that was a recipe for a less urgent time. The climate crisis gives us no time. We cannot avoid the challenge of choosing our energy future. As Chuck Sabel and David Victor argue in their important new book Fixing the Climate: Strategies for an Uncertain World, it is through local partnership and experimentation that we are most likely to find answers to these technical dilemmas. But, as the case of hydrogen demonstrates, we must beware the efforts of powerful vested interests to use radical technological visions to channel us towards what are in fact conservative and ruinously expensive options.

A green hydrogen plant built by Spanish company Iberdrola in Puertollano, Spain.

A green hydrogen plant built by Spanish company Iberdrola in Puertollano, Spain, on April 18. Valentin Bontemps/AFP via Getty Images

In the energy future there are certain elements that seem clear. Electricity is going to play a much bigger role than ever before in our energy mix. But some very knotty problems remain. Can electricity suffice? How do you unleash the chemical reactions necessary to produce essential building blocks of modern life like fertilizer and cement without employing hydrocarbons and applying great heat? To smelt the 1.8 billion tons of steel we use every year, you need temperatures of almost 2,000 degrees Celsius. Can we get there without combustion? How do you power aircraft flying thousands of miles, tens of thousands of feet in the air? How do you propel giant container ships around the world? Electric motors and batteries can hardly suffice.

Hydrogen recommends itself as a solution because it burns very hot. And when it does, it releases only water. We know how to make hydrogen by running electric current through water. And we know how to generate electricity cleanly. Green hydrogen thus seems easily within reach. Alternatively, if hydrogen is manufactured using natural gas rather than electrolysis, the industrial facilities can be adapted to allow immediate, at-source CO2 capture. This kind of hydrogen is known as blue hydrogen.

Following this engineering logic, H2 is presented by its advocates as a Swiss army knife of the energy transition, a versatile adjunct to the basic strategy of electrifying everything. The question is whether H2 solutions, though they may be technically viable, make any sense from the point of view of the broader strategy of energy transition, or whether they might in fact be an expensive wrong turn.

Using hydrogen as an energy store is hugely inefficient. With current technology producing hydrogen from water by way of electrolysis consumes vastly more energy than will be stored and ultimately released by burning the hydrogen. Why not use the same electricity to generate the heat or drive a motor directly? The necessary electrolysis equipment is expensive. And though hydrogen may burn cleanly, as a fuel it is inconvenient because of its corrosive properties, its low energy per unit of volume, and its tendency to explode. Storing and moving hydrogen around will require huge investment in shipping facilities, pipelines, filling stations, or facilities to convert hydrogen into the more stable form of ammonia.

The kind of schemes pushed by hydrogen’s lobbyists foresee annual consumption rising by 2050 to more than 600 million tons per annum, compared to 100 million tons today. This would consume a huge share of green electricity production. In a scenario favored by the Hydrogen Council, of the United States’ 2,900 gigawatts of renewable energy production, 650 gigawatts would be consumed by hydrogen electrolysis. That is almost three times the total capacity of renewable power installed today.

The costs will be gigantic. The cost for a hydrogen build-out over coming decades could run into the tens of trillions of dollars. Added to which, to work as a system, the investment in hydrogen production, transport, and consumption will have to be undertaken simultaneously.

Little wonder, perhaps, that though the vision of the “hydrogen economy” as an integrated economic and technical system has been around for half a century, we have precious little actual experience with hydrogen fuel. Indeed, there is an entire cottage industry of hydrogen skeptics. The most vocal of these is Michael Liebreich, whose consultancy has popularized the so-called hydrogen ladder, designed to highlight how unrealistic many of them are. If one follows the Liebreich analysis, the vast majority of proposed hydrogen uses in transport and industrial heating are, in fact, unrealistic due to their sheer inefficiency. In each case there is an obvious alternative, most of them including the direct application of electricity.

Technicians work on the construction of a hydrogen bus at a plant in Albi, France.

Technicians work on the construction of a hydrogen bus at a plant in Albi, France, on March 4, 2021. Georges Gobet/AFP via Getty Images

Nevertheless, in the last six years a huge coalition of national governments and industrial interests has assembled around the promise of a hydrogen-based economy.

The Hydrogen Council boasts corporate sponsors ranging from Airbus and Aramco to BMW, Daimler Truck, Honda, Toyota and Hyundai, Siemens, Shell, and Microsoft. The national governments of Japan, South Korea, the EU, the U.K., the U.S., and China all have hydrogen strategies. There are new project announcements regularly. Experimental shipments of ammonia have docked in Japan. The EU is planning an elaborate network of pipelines, known as the hydrogen backbone. All told, the Hydrogen Council counts $320 billion in hydrogen projects announced around the world.

Given the fact that many new uses of hydrogen are untested, and given the skepticism among many influential energy economists and engineers, it is reasonable to ask what motivates this wave of commitments to the hydrogen vision.

In technological terms, hydrogen may represent a shimmering image of possibility on a distant horizon, but in political economy terms, it has a more immediate role. It is a route through which existing fossil fuel interests can imagine a place for themselves in the new energy future. The presence of oil majors and energy companies in the ranks of the Hydrogen Council is not coincidental. Hydrogen enables natural gas suppliers to imagine that they can transition their facilities to green fuels. Makers of combustion engines and gas turbines can conceive of burning hydrogen instead. Storing hydrogen or ammonia like gas or oil promises a solution to the issues of intermittency in renewable power generation and may extend the life of gas turbine power stations. For governments around the world, a more familiar technology than one largely based on solar panels, windmills, and batteries is a way of calming nerves about the transformation they have notionally signed up for.

Looking at several key geographies in which hydrogen projects are currently being discussed offers a compound psychological portrait of the common moment of global uncertainty.

A worker at the Fukushima Hydrogen Energy Research Field, a test facility that produces hydrogen from renewable energy, in Fukushima, Japan.

A worker at the Fukushima Hydrogen Energy Research Field, a test facility that produces hydrogen from renewable energy, in Fukushima, Japan, on Feb. 15. Richard A. Brooks/AFP via Getty Images

The first country to formulate a national hydrogen strategy was Japan. Japan has long pioneered exotic energy solutions. Since undersea pipelines to Japan are impractical, it was Japanese demand that gave life to the seaborne market for liquefied natural gas (LNG). What motivated the hydrogen turn in 2017 was a combination of post-Fukushima shock, perennial anxiety about energy security, and a long-standing commitment to hydrogen by key Japanese car manufacturers. Though Toyota, the world’s no. 1 car producer, pioneered the hybrid in the form of the ubiquitous Prius, it has been slow to commit to full electric. The same is true for the other East Asian car producers—Honda, Nissan, and South Korea’s Hyundai. In the face of fierce competition from cheap Chinese electric vehicles, they embrace a government commitment to hydrogen, which in the view of many experts concentrates on precisely the wrong areas i.e. transport and electricity generation, rather than industrial applications.

The prospect of a substantial East Asian import demand for hydrogen encourages the economists at the Hydrogen Council to imagine a global trade in hydrogen that essentially mirrors the existing oil and gas markets. These have historically centered on flows of hydrocarbons from key producing regions such as North Africa, the Middle East, and North America to importers in Europe and Asia. Fracked natural gas converted into LNG is following this same route. And it seems possible that hydrogen and ammonia derived from hydrogen may do the same.

CF Industries, the United States’ largest producer ammonia, has finalized a deal to ship blue ammonia to Japan’s largest power utility for use alongside oil and gas in power generation. The CO2 storage that makes the ammonia blue rather than gray has been contracted between CF Industries and U.S. oil giant Exxon. A highly defensive strategy in Japan thus serves to provide a market for a conservative vision of the energy transition in the United Sates as well. Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco, by far the world’s largest oil company, is touting shipments of blue ammonia, which it hopes to deliver to Japan or East Asia. Though the cost in terms of energy content is the equivalent of around $250 per barrel of oil, Aramco hopes to ship 11 million tons of blue ammonia to world markets by 2030.

To get through the current gas crisis, EU nations have concluded LNG deals with both the Gulf states and the United States. Beyond LNG, it is also fully committed to the hydrogen bandwagon. And again, this follows a defensive logic. The aim is to use green or blue hydrogen or ammonia to find a new niche for European heavy industry, which is otherwise at risk of being entirely knocked out of world markets by high energy prices and Europe’s carbon levy.

The European steel industry today accounts for less than ten percent of global production. It is a leader in green innovation. And the world will need technological first-movers to shake up the fossil-fuel dependent incumbents, notably in China. But whether this justifies Europe’s enormous commitment to hydrogen is another question. It seems motivated more by the desire to hold up the process of deindustrialization and worries about working-class voters drifting into the arms of populists, than by a forward looking strategic calculus.

In the Netherlands, regions that have hitherto served as hubs for global natural gas trading are now competing for designation as Europe’s “hydrogen valley.” In June, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni inked the contract on the SoutH2 Corridor, a pipeline that will carry H2 up the Italian peninsula to Austria and southern Germany. Meanwhile, France has pushed Spain into agreeing to a subsea hydrogen connection rather than a natural gas pipeline over the Pyrenees. Spain and Portugal have ample LNG terminal capacity. But Spain’s solar and wind potential also make it Europe’s natural site for green hydrogen production and a “green hydrogen” pipe, regardless of its eventual uses, looks in the words of one commentator looks “less pharaonic and fossil-filled” than the original natural gas proposal.

A hydrogen-powered train is refilled by a mobile hydrogen filling station at the Siemens test site in Wegberg, Germany.

A hydrogen-powered train is refilled by a mobile hydrogen filling station at the Siemens test site in Wegberg, Germany, on Sept. 9, 2022. Bernd/AFP via Getty Images

How much hydrogen will actually be produced in Europe remains an open question. Proximity to the point of consumption and the low capital costs of investment in Europe speak in favor of local production. But one of the reasons that hydrogen projects appeal to European strategists is that they offer a new vision of European-African cooperation. Given demographic trends and migration pressure, Europe desperately needs to believe that it has a promising African strategy. Africa’s potential for renewable electricity generation is spectacular. Germany has recently entered into a hydrogen partnership with Namibia. But this raises new questions.

First and foremost, where will a largely desert country source the water for electrolysis? Secondly, will Namibia export only hydrogen, ammonia, or some of the industrial products made with the green inputs? It would be advantageous for Namibia to develop a heavy-chemicals and iron-smelting industry. But from Germany’s point of view, that might well defeat the object, which is precisely to provide affordable green energy with which to keep industrial jobs in Europe.

A variety of conservative motives thus converge in the hydrogen coalition. Most explicit of all is the case of post-Brexit Britain. Once a leader in the exit from coal, enabled by a “dash for gas” and offshore wind, the U.K. has recently hit an impasse. Hard-to-abate sectors like household heating, which in the U.K. is heavily dependent on natural gas, require massive investments in electrification, notably in heat pumps. These are expensive. In the United Kingdom, the beleaguered Tory government, which has presided over a decade of stagnating real incomes, is considering as an alternative the widespread introduction of hydrogen for domestic heating. Among energy experts this idea is widely regarded as an impractical boondoggle for the gas industry that defers the eventual and inevitable electrification at the expense of prolonged household emissions. But from the point of view of politics, it has the attraction that it costs relatively less per household to replace natural gas with hydrogen.

Employees work on the assembly line of fuel cell electric vehicles powered by hydrogen at a factory in Qingdao, Shandong province, China.

Employees work on the assembly line of fuel cell electric vehicles powered by hydrogen at a factory in Qingdao, Shandong province, China, on March 29, 2022.VCG via Getty Images

As this brief tour suggests, there is every reason to fear that tens of billions of dollars in subsidies, vast amounts of political capital, and precious time are being invested in “green” energy investments, the main attraction of which is that they minimize change and perpetuate as far as possible the existing patterns of the hydrocarbon energy system. This is not greenwashing in the simple sense of rebadging or mislabeling. If carried through, it is far more substantial than that. It will build ships and put pipes in the ground. It will consume huge amounts of desperately scarce green electricity. And this faces us with a dilemma.

In confronting the challenge of the energy transition, we need a bias for action. We need to experiment. There is every reason to trust in learning-curve effects. Electrolyzers, for instance, will get more affordable, reducing the costs of hydrogen production. At certain times and in certain places, green power may well become so abundant that pouring it into electrolysis makes sense. And even if many hydrogen projects do not succeed, that may be a risk worth taking. We will likely learn new techniques in the process. In facing the uncertainties of the energy transition, we need to cultivate a tolerance for failure. Furthermore, even if hydrogen is a prime example of corporate log-rolling, we should presumably welcome the broadening of the green coalition to include powerful fossil fuel interests.

The real and inescapable tradeoff arises when we commit scarce resources—both real and political—to the hydrogen dream. The limits of public tolerance for the costs of the energy transition are already abundantly apparent, in Asia and Europe as well as in the United States. Pumping money into subsidies that generate huge economies of scale and cost reductions is one thing. Wasting money on lame-duck projects with little prospect of success is quite another. What is at stake is ultimately the legitimacy of the energy transition as such.

In the end, there is no patented method distinguishing self-serving hype from real opportunity. There is no alternative but to subject competing claims to intense public, scientific, and technical scrutiny. And if the ship has already sailed and subsidies are already on the table, then retrospective cost-benefit assessment is called for.

Ideally, the approach should be piecemeal and stepwise, and in this regard the crucial thing to note about hydrogen is that to regard it as a futuristic fantasy is itself misguided. We already live in a hydrogen-based world. Two key sectors of modern industry could not operate without it. Oil refining relies on hydrogen, as does the production of fertilizer by the Haber-Bosch process on which we depend for roughly half of our food production. These two sectors generate the bulk of the demand for the masses of hydrogen we currently consume.

We may not need 600 million, 500 million, or even 300 million tons of green and blue hydrogen by 2050. But we currently use about 100 million, and of that total, barely 1 million is clean. It is around that core that hydrogen experimentation should be concentrated, in places where an infrastructure already exists. This is challenging because transporting hydrogen is expensive, and many of the current points of use of hydrogen, notably in Europe, are not awash in cheap green power. But there are two places where the conditions for experimentation within the existing hydrogen economy seem most propitious.

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A view of Building 7 on the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Chinese Scientists Are Leaving the United States

Here’s why that spells bad news for Washington.

One is China, and specifically northern China and Inner Mongolia, where China currently concentrates a large part of its immense production of fertilizer, cement, and much of its steel industry. China is leading the world in the installation of solar and wind power and is pioneering ultra-high-voltage transmission. Unlike Japan and South Korea, China has shown no particular enthusiasm for hydrogen. It is placing the biggest bet in the world on the more direct route to electrification by way of renewable generation and batteries. But China is already the largest and lowest-cost producer of electrolysis equipment. In 2022, China launched a modestly proportioned hydrogen strategy. In cooperation with the United Nations it has iniated an experiment with green fertilizer production, and who would bet against its chances of establishing a large-scale hydrogen energy system?

The other key player is the United States. After years of delay, the U.S. lags far behind in photovoltaics batteries, and offshore wind. But in hydrogen, and specifically in the adjoining states of Texas and Louisiana on the Gulf of Mexico, it has obvious advantages over any other location in the West. The United States is home to a giant petrochemicals complex. It is the only Western economy that can compete with India and China in fertilizer production. In Texas, there are actually more than 2500 kilometers of hardened hydrogen pipelines. And insofar as players like Exxon have a green energy strategy, it is carbon sequestration, which will be the technology needed for blue hydrogen production.

It is not by accident that America’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, targeted its most generous subsidies—the most generous ever offered for green energy in the United States—on hydrogen production. The hydrogen lobby is hard at work, and it has turned Texas into the lowest-cost site for H2 production in the Western world. It is not a model one would want to see emulated anywhere else, but it may serve as a technology incubator that charts what is viable and what is not.

There is very good reason to suspect the motives of every player in the energy transition. Distinguishing true innovation from self-serving conservatism is going to be a key challenge in the new era in which we have to pick winners. We need to develop a culture of vigilance. But there are also good reasons to expect certain key features of the new to grow out of the old. Innovation is miraculous but it rarely falls like mana from heaven. As Sabel and Victor argue in their book, it grows from within expert technical communities with powerful vested interests in change. The petrochemical complex of the Gulf of Mexico may seem an unlikely venue for the birth of a green new future, but it is only logical that the test of whether the hydrogen economy is a real possibility will be run at the heart of the existing hydrocarbon economy.

Foreign Policy · by Adam Tooze · July 14, 2023

12. Brief: Abu Sayyaf Moves Closer to Demise with Shortage of Recruits

For all those who served in the Philippines. As our commander said in 2001 when he briefed CINCPAC, a small commitment can achieve effects over time - more than a decade. It remains a work in progress for the Philippine government and the Armed Forces of the Philippines but there are positive trends.

Conclusion:

More broadly, as early as the start of this year, Marine Brigadier General Arturo Rojas, who had led the Western Mindanao Command (WESMINCO), stated that Mudzrimar Sawadjaan’s fighters now travel in small groups because of their “dwindling numbers” (mindanews.com, January 1). Moreover, two areas that had once hosted Abu Sayyaf bases, according to Rojas, including Zamboanga Peninsula and Tawi-Tawi, had by 2023 become “Abu Sayyaf-free.” The latest WESMINCOM statements and disruption of key contributing Abu Sayyaf families further substantiates the trend that Abu Sayyaf is closer to its demise than potential resurgence.

Brief: Abu Sayyaf Moves Closer to Demise with Shortage of Recruits

jamestown.org · by Jacob Zenn · July 11, 2023

On June 7, Philippine security forces on Basilan Island (off of Mindanao) claimed to have “rescued” an Indonesian boy who was being trained to carry out bombings (philstar.com, June 7). The boy was in a hideout of two Islamic State (IS)-loyal sub-commanders, Mudzrimar Sawadjaan (alias Mundi) and Pasil Bayali (alias Kera). He was also the son of Rullie Rian Zeke (alias Abbang Rullie), who conducted a suicide bombing at Jolo Cathedral in January 2019 that killed 23 people and wounded more than 100 others.

Rullie Rian Zeke’s daughter, Siti Aisyah Rullie (alias Maryam Israni), had also been recruited and raised in Abu Sayyaf’s ranks, but was found by the Philippine security forces in Sulu in January 2021 (arabnews.com, June 25, 2021). By the time that they found Siti, they learned that Rullie and his wife, Ulfah Handayani Saleh, had been members of Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD) in Indonesia before traveling to the Philippines to join Abu Sayyaf. Siti, meanwhile, had been married to another Abu Sayyaf member, Rudymar Habib Jihiiran (alias Gulam), who indoctrinated and trained her to become a suicide bomber.

The security forces also learned when Siti was arrested that her brother had been taken to another camp to be trained to conduct his own suicide bombing. Their other sister, Rezky Fantasya Rullie (alias Cici), was already in prison at that time for planning a suicide attack to avenge the death of her husband, Andi Baso; Baso was killed in battle with the Philippine security forces in Sulu in 2020. He had been a militant recruiter in Indonesia and Malaysia before becoming a combatant in the Philippines (inquirer.net, October 12, 2020).

Moreover, in the same operation that led to Baso’s death, another Abu Sayyaf bomb-maker, Samir Nani, was killed. Intelligence obtained from the operation also led the security forces to track down another bomb-maker, Arsibar Sawadjaan, who was a nephew of Abu Sayyaf commander Hatib Hajan Sawadjaan. Arsibar Sawadjaan was killed in September 2020, several weeks after Baso and Nani (manilastandard.net, September 29, 2020).

The incestuous nature of the Rullie and Sawadjaan families’ involvement in Abu Sayyaf reflects how the group is likely no longer able to recruit en masse across wide swathes of southern Mindanao. Rather, the group depends on families to contribute their children to the cause, especially after the parents themselves are killed in battle or conduct suicide bombings. The recruitment of children and the marrying off of daughters to commanders suggests that the group, therefore, does not enjoy the broader appeal that it once had. Moreover, once the main contributing families to Abu Sayyaf—such as the Rullies and Sawadjaans—are disrupted from carrying out more attacks or see most of their members detained or deceased, Abu Sayyaf operations will experience drawdowns.

More broadly, as early as the start of this year, Marine Brigadier General Arturo Rojas, who had led the Western Mindanao Command (WESMINCO), stated that Mudzrimar Sawadjaan’s fighters now travel in small groups because of their “dwindling numbers” (mindanews.com, January 1). Moreover, two areas that had once hosted Abu Sayyaf bases, according to Rojas, including Zamboanga Peninsula and Tawi-Tawi, had by 2023 become “Abu Sayyaf-free.” The latest WESMINCOM statements and disruption of key contributing Abu Sayyaf families further substantiates the trend that Abu Sayyaf is closer to its demise than potential resurgence.

jamestown.org · by Jacob Zenn · July 11, 2023

13. U.S. Must Change the Game on Taiwan

Excerpts:

In June, the outgoing CNO, Admiral Michael Gilday, said: “With respect to the PRC, we are operating in accordance with international law. We are not looking to be provocative. We want things to remain stable and predictable.” While that is a lofty sentiment, China does not want “things to remain stable and predictable.”

Given that reality, the new CNO, Admiral Paparo, must restore the Navy’s image of sea-control dominance. To do so is not “looking to be provocative”; instead, it is looking to strengthen an unstable deterrence. Our admirals should display confidence in defeating a Chinese invasion and/or imposing a blockade. As in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the CNO should hold ecumenical war games. Invite all services, Congress, and the White House to participate. The central trend will clearly emerge. An invasion of Taiwan triggers a conflict for global sea control that the U.S. Navy wins, leaving China impoverished. By controlling the global seas, the U.S. Navy holds a trump card that is not publicly appreciated. Change the naval frame of reference for addressing Taiwan.

Admiral Paparo should reprise Paul Newman’s quip: “Xi, I have one question: How are you getting down that hill?”

U.S. Must Change the Game on Taiwan

By Bing West 

July 15,2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/07/u-s-must-change-the-game-on-taiwan/

A ‘limited’-invasion scenario is one China could win. We have to think bigger.

In the western movie Hombre, villain Richard Boone swaggers up a hill to order an outgunned Paul Newman to hand over the cash. Rifle in hand, Newman replies, “I have one question: How are you getting down that hill?” Newman then shoots him.

That’s called changing the frame of reference. Similarly, it’s time to change the frame of reference about Taiwan. Chairman Xi Jinping intends to control that island of 24 million people by 2027. The U.S. has said it may defend Taiwan, or it may not. For half a century, that “strategic ambiguity” has served America well. U.S. policy recognizes neither China’s sovereignty over Taiwan nor Taiwan as a sovereign country. China’s bellicosity has increased, however, while the U.S. response has been tractable. Obviously, Xi is pushing for the U.S. to treat Taiwan as a local conflict between two feuding Chinese neighbors and stay out of the fight.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has recommended Admiral Sam Paparo to be the new chief of naval operations (CNO). Admiral Sam Paparo should disabuse both Xi and the U.S. foreign-policy community of the notion that a fight for Taiwan is local. In so doing, there is a strong naval precedent for the new CNO to follow. In the late ’70s, the U.S. foreign-policy community was focused on the threat of a Soviet blitzkrieg against Western Europe. In that context, our Navy was seen as largely irrelevant. This concerned Admiral Jimmy Holloway, the chief of naval operations at the time. According to a history of that period, “Holloway initiated a rigorous study at the Naval War College in 1977. Called Sea Plan 2000, the study proposed an aggressive approach to the use of naval forces in the Cold War.”

As the director of Sea Plan 2000, I met with Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, who doubted that a NATO war would leap to other theaters or heavily involve the U.S. Navy. He approved, as a test, war games with hundreds of participants. War games, while a limited tool that cannot predict war’s outcome, do indicate trends. Year after year, the NATO-versus-Warsaw Pact/USSR game went global, with the U.S. Navy attacking Russia’s flanks and eliminating its surface fleet and submarines. Gradually, the consensus of the foreign-policy community changed. Under President Reagan, an aggressive secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, conducted naval exercises near key Russian bases. Gorbachev later remarked that the demands of his admirals for more resources for defense were a factor in his conclusion that the Soviet Union could not compete with America. The U.S. Navy had upset the Soviet hope to restrict the concept of battle to the European landmass, where the Soviets enjoyed a numerical advantage.

Similarly, the Chinese military is advantaged if a Taiwan invasion is viewed as a local, limited conflict, where close quarters favor the aggressor. Inside those confines, unclassified war games project heavy losses to both American and Chinese forces, as well as the destruction of Taiwan. Plus, the U.S. use of air bases in Japan has emerged as both crucial to a successful defense and a political wild card. Japan, like the U.S., may or may not choose to fight. Given these uncertainties, Chinese generals could advise Xi that a battle limited to Taiwan could succeed and would end America’s hegemonic reign in Asia and the Pacific.

American resolve in this matter is admittedly problematic. According to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, “President Biden does not see the relationship between the U.S. and China through the frame of great-power conflict.” If reelected, he may prefer not to fight for Taiwan. Former president Trump is equally unpredictable. In 2027, Xi could conclude that America probably won’t fight and that, even if it does, Japan well might stay neutral, increasing the odds that China would prevail in a limited war.

“Limited.” That’s the prevailing frame of reference the CNO and other admirals should correct by employing war games, as in the late ’70s, to educate the foreign-policy community. A U.S. president may want to stay out of the battle. But even if he seeks to avoid battle in the Taiwan Straits, POTUS is still obliged to take strong action. He knows he must avoid historians labeling him as the Neville Chamberlain of the 21st century. Congress would be certain to pass resolutions restricting the scope, if not the entirety, of Chinese aggression. At a minimum, while Taiwan was convulsing, it would be militarily rash to permit Chinese warships or military aircraft to move wherever they chose in the world. Economic sanctions against China would be a certainty.

The crux for Congress and for POTUS would be the declaration of a full seaborne quarantine of China. China cannot survive as a modern country without massive, continuous seaborne imports. More than 60 percent of its crude oil comes from seaborne imports, estimated at 11 million barrels per day. Its food self-sufficiency is less than 80 percent. Its deepwater fishing fleet of 6,000 vessels — the world’s largest — would be stranded. China could not break a blockade of its ports. Within a year, its economy and production would wither.

Nor could China apply countervailing leverage. Chinese submarines, aircraft, and missiles could not credibly retaliate. Once they sortied from their homeland bases, they would not be the hunters; they would be the prey. America could continue to trade with Japan, East Asia, the Middle East, South America, and Europe. While American (and global) productivity would be severely curtailed, China could not prevent America’s seaborne trade, while its own would be crushed.

In June, the outgoing CNO, Admiral Michael Gilday, said: “With respect to the PRC, we are operating in accordance with international law. We are not looking to be provocative. We want things to remain stable and predictable.” While that is a lofty sentiment, China does not want “things to remain stable and predictable.”

Given that reality, the new CNO, Admiral Paparo, must restore the Navy’s image of sea-control dominance. To do so is not “looking to be provocative”; instead, it is looking to strengthen an unstable deterrence. Our admirals should display confidence in defeating a Chinese invasion and/or imposing a blockade. As in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the CNO should hold ecumenical war games. Invite all services, Congress, and the White House to participate. The central trend will clearly emerge. An invasion of Taiwan triggers a conflict for global sea control that the U.S. Navy wins, leaving China impoverished. By controlling the global seas, the U.S. Navy holds a trump card that is not publicly appreciated. Change the naval frame of reference for addressing Taiwan.

Admiral Paparo should reprise Paul Newman’s quip: “Xi, I have one question: How are you getting down that hill?”

Bing West, a former assistant secretary of defense for international security, is a military historian and the author of a dozen books about America’s recent wars. @BingWest

​14. Task Force 99 drone was 'very effective' in secretive spy missions, senior DOD official says

Task Force 99 drone was 'very effective' in secretive spy missions, senior DOD official says

An unmanned aerial system from U.S. Air Forces Central's newly formed Task Force 99 was deployed to conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions against a U.S. adversary in the Middle East, according to a senior Department of Defense official.

BY

JON HARPER

JULY 14, 2023

defensescoop.com · by Jon Harper · July 14, 2023

An unmanned aerial system from U.S. Air Forces Central’s newly formed Task Force 99 was deployed to conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions against a U.S. adversary in the Middle East — and its performance was “very effective,” according to a senior Department of Defense official.

The task force was stood up in October at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, as the Pentagon looks for new ways to operationally evaluate robotic platforms and supporting technologies.

During a meeting with reporters at the Pentagon on Friday, the senior DOD official identified Russia, China and Iran as competitors in the region that the U.S. military is concerned about, noting that the Pentagon is also combating the ISIS terrorist group in Syria.

“We have used a drone capability from Task Force 99 to do ISR. I won’t tell you what we were doing it against. But we have used a drone from Task Force 99 to do ISR. We have plans to do others in the future. I don’t want to give up too much detail on it so that they can figure out where we were using it and who were using it against. But it was very effective. A very different mode of doing ISR than a, you know, an MQ-9 [large Reaper drone] that’s parked overhead constantly looking at things. But Task Force 99 does have actual operational capability that we’re putting into the field, absolutely,” the official told DefenseScoop during the meeting on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the DOD.

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Earlier this year, Col. Rob Smoker, commander of the task force, told DefenseScoop in an interview that the unit was mostly experimenting with smaller systems that fall into the Group 1 and Group 2 part of the UAS spectrum.

However, the organization has “a fairly broad inventory right now,” a senior DOD official told reporters during Friday’s meeting.

“We’re up to probably a dozen-and-a-half drones or so that they have in their inventory. And they range everything from small, short-range UAS to slightly larger, you know, large Group 2 to small Group 3 with, you know, 500-kilometer range type UAS. So there’s a wide variety of platforms and a wide variety of payloads that you could put on those from ISR to kinetic payloads, etc.,” they said.

The official clarified that the the task force has about one-and-half dozen drones, but he didn’t disclose which model or models have been used operationally.

“Some of them they actually 3D print, so they could be halfway through 3D printing one now,” the official added.

defensescoop.com · by Jon Harper · July 14, 2023

15. Nominee to be next Army chief wants to boost civilian hiring to address cyber shortfalls

Nominee to be next Army chief wants to boost civilian hiring to address cyber shortfalls

Gen. Randy George, the nominee to be the next Army chief of staff, wants to use the Cyber Excepted Service and increase tour lengths to address shortfalls within the cyber mission force.

BY

MARK POMERLEAU

JULY 12, 2023

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · July 12, 2023

The Army’s pick to be its next top officer wants to address shortfalls and readiness issues with its uniformed cyber warriors by supplementing them with civilian personnel and increasing the length of their tours of duty.

Gen. Randy George testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday during a confirmation hearing to be the next Army chief of staff. During the hearing — and in a prepared questionnaire beforehand — senators pressed George on the state of the cyber mission force.

The U.S. cyber mission force — the 133 teams the military services staff for U.S. Cyber Command to conduct cyber operations — has faced significant issues in recent years. This is, in part, due to the fact that each service has its own identity, culture, and way of classifying and providing forces to Cybercom.

“The readiness of the Cyber Mission Forces assigned to U.S. Cyber Command is substantially below acceptable levels. This shortfall is due primarily to the lack of sufficient numbers of personnel in each of the services in three critical work roles that are especially demanding: tool developers, exploitation analysts, and interactive on-net operators,” senators wrote in the questionnaire accompanying George’s confirmation.

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Senators asked George how the Army plans to correct the shortfall.

“While an [Office of the Secretary of Defense]-led force-generation study is ongoing to recommend cross-[Department of Defense] opportunities to correct readiness shortfalls across the Cyber Mission Force, the Army is looking to expand the application of the Cyber Excepted Service to provide expedited recruiting and more flexible retention options for civilians,” he wrote in response. “The Army will also assess the length of tours to ensure the Army realizes the full return on its investment in those personnel who have been through the most rigorous training. Finally, the Army will always look to expand and offer other broadening retention opportunities.”

Last year’s annual defense policy called for the DOD to conduct the force generation study and asked the department to examine the current cyber enterprise; how the services should man, train and equip for cyber; if a single military service should be responsible for basic, intermediate and advanced cyber training of the cyber mission force; and if the DOD should create a separate service.

The Cyber Excepted Service is a mechanism that allows enhanced authorities and flexibilities to enhance the recruiting, retention and development of cybersecurity talent across the civilian force.

While the cyber mission force teams are typically thought of in terms of uniformed members, there are also civilians who serve and contribute to the teams — though due to rules of international war, those civilians can’t be the so-called “trigger pullers,” which in the cyber parlance means they can’t lead cyber mission force teams.

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In 2019, the Army created Career Program 71 for cyberspace effects, a specific work role for civilians that provides a centralized approach for civilian training, education and professional development in the cyber discipline.

And last year, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said the service wants to boost its use of Cyber Excepted Service to help it keep pace in the race for top talent.

On the uniformed side, George pointed to increasing tour lengths as an option to address challenges. An ongoing concern is that military personnel change out of their positions too quickly — as is commonplace across service structures — despite the lengthy investment needed to train them for their highly technical roles.

For example, training to be an Interactive On-Net Operator (ION) — the role largely associated with offensive operations that break into adversaries’ systems for either effects or reconnaissance — can take between one to three years to complete and can cost between $220,000 to $500,000 per service member.

Extending tour lengths could be a way to ensure greater continuity of work roles on mission while gaining better return on investment for training.

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The Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2024 calls for a more standard approach to how the military services present forces to Cybercom, to include a plan to require common enlistment and general tour lengths across the services for the cyber mission force, and enlistment terms that are appropriate given the training required and sufficient enough to meet readiness requirements.

The Army was the first service to create a branch and military occupational specialty for cyber in 2014, in part, to address this very issue.

George, in response to senators, also noted the Army’s — and wider DOD’s — issues competing for top talent in the cyber field with the private sector.

“In this field, competition for top talent with the private sector will be an enduring challenge. The Army must balance both quantitative goals, in the number of developers, analysts, and operators, as well as qualitative goals to ensure these individuals are highly trained and experienced to conduct challenging defensive and offensive cyber assignments,” he said.

This sentiment was shared by President Joe Biden’s pick to be the military’s top officer a day prior.

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“One of the key areas is, one, to meet the needs of Cyber Command, but at the same time align some of our policies and processes so we’re not competing amongst ourselves for talent,” Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown, nominee to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at his confirmation hearing Tuesday in response to how he’d work with the service chiefs to better align the needs of Cybercom. “If we have similar approaches, it helps us to bring in all talent across the nation and then also help to retain that talent within the services as well.”

Brown, in his own questionnaire, said he supports the DOD’s cyber workforce strategy to address the persistent readiness problem of the cyber mission force.

“I fully support the 2023-2027 DoD Cyber Workforce (CWF) Strategy … which sets the foundation for how the Department will foster a cyber workforce capable of executing the Department’s complex and varied cyber missions. The strategy enables the Department to prioritize retaining highly skilled cyber talent by closing workforce development gaps,” he wrote.

Brown continued: “If confirmed, I will support implementation of the CWF Strategy in coordination with the DoD Chief Information Officer (CIO), the Joint Staff, United States Cyber Command, and the Services to focus Department efforts on cyber-related human capital initiatives in support of the 2022 National Defense Strategy. This would include surging capabilities through our reserve components and an initiative to maintain connections with service members and DoD civilians who have separated allowing them to retain their security clearance gain access to additional professional development opportunities. Additionally, I would support USCYBERCOM’s execution of its service-like authorities and roles, such as enhanced budgetary control, and acquisition authorities.”

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · July 12, 2023

16. Air Force Special Ops Wants Runway Independence, More Speed

Air Force Special Ops Wants Runway Independence, More Speed

nationaldefensemagazine.org · by Stew Magnuson

7/14/2023

By

Air Force photo

TAMPA, Florida — Air Force Special Operations Command has a long technology wish list.

The command is tasked with transporting commandos covertly, quickly and across long distances and to penetrate where other aircraft can’t normally go. Naturally, it wants to improve its performance in all these categories, especially the latter, taking personnel to locations where there are no runways — a job best carried out by rotary-wing aircraft.

But what if almost three-fourths of the planet could serve as a runway by allowing fixed-wing aircraft to land on water? The entire Indo-Pacific could be considered a runway, SOCOM Acquisitions Executive James Smith told reporters recently.

That’s the reasoning behind the idea to bolt pontoons onto a MC-130J airlifter to convert it into a float plane, a concept the command has been studying for more than two years.

Air Force Col. Ken Kuebler, program executive officer for fixed-wing aircraft at SOCOM, said: “We continue to push forward with some of that technology [but] it’s a really hard engineering problem,” he said during a presentation at the SOF Week conference.

The office is carrying out hydro- and sub-scale testing, studying how it would perform in various sea states, and is moving toward a critical design review, he said.

In addition, the command is looking at more mundane day-to-day operations such as maintenance and support, equipment needs, training and “how do we go with this whole systems of systems approach to be able to do that,” he said.

The command is working with several organizations to carry out the studies and tests. “We are looking at two to three years to go do a demonstration of the full capability,” he said.

Kuebler was asked if the command would consider acquiring the ShinMaywa US-2 fixed-wing amphibious aircraft — which is flown by the Japan Self-Defense Force — as a stopgap solution.

Nothing has been ruled out, Kuebler said. The program executive office has had talks with Japan about its float plane capabilities, especially as it works out concepts of operation and training, he said.

“We are looking across the globe at these capabilities,” he said. “I think everything in the acquisition strategy is still on the table as we look at different lines of efforts to make sure that we can have a runway independent and amphibious capability,” he said.

The ShinMaywa US-2 can land on runways or water and is primarily used for search-and-rescue missions. It can carry a crew of 11 plus 20 passengers, or 12 on stretchers. It is driven by six Rolls-Royce AE 2100 engines, has a 108-foot wingspan and cruises at about 300 miles per hour. It can operate in sea states of up to nine feet and on land only requires about one-quarter of the distance of a typical commercial airliner to take off and land, making it practical for many of Japan’s remote and austere runways.

It has a range of 2,980 miles, which is roughly five and a half times farther than a typical search-and-rescue helicopter, according to information from its manufacturer ShinMaywa Industries Ltd.

Japan currently has eight of the aircraft with plans to build six more. The company said the aircraft has saved more than 1,000 lives so far. ShinMaywa Industries is actively seeking export opportunities but has yet to find an overseas buyer for the aircraft.

Former AFSOC deputy commander Maj. Gen. Eric Hill before he retired visited Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Japan in April 2022 to check out the US-2 and flew in it to observe the crew carrying out exercises, according to Stars and Stripes. The amphibious aircraft is “an incredible platform,” he said.

“Flying an airplane that can land on water isn’t a new concept, but few aviators have the experience of amphibious aviation,” Hill told the newspaper. “Gaining lessons from our partners will help us learn what to anticipate as we begin to build our own tactics and techniques moving forward.”

The purpose of the visit was to gather facts as SOCOM explores its own amphib program, he said. “We think partnering with our allies here and learning from them, seeing that they’re on their second variant of a seaplane, and I think there is a lot of education we can share back and forth,” Hill added.

Smith, while not specifically addressing the US-2, said not every country has what it takes to partner with SOCOM when it comes to developing new technologies, but Japan does check off all the boxes.

“We’re always looking for what I refer to as the ‘Goldilocks partnership,’” he said.

First, Japan has invested heavily in its own special operations forces. Not every nation does, Smith noted.

A potential partner should also have a robust industrial base capable of producing advanced technology. Obviously, Japan fits that description.

Finally, they must have strong cybersecurity protocols in place to protect any information SOCOM shares with them, he said.

“When we find a country that hits all three of those marks, we are interested in working with them,” he said.

Meanwhile, Kuebler shared details on another new program being developed in partnership with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that has “runway independence” near the top of its requirements list.

The agency in March revealed the Speed and Runway Independent Technologies, or SPRINT, X-plane demonstration project. Its Tactical Technology Office is soliciting proposals to design, build, certify and fly an X-plane to demonstrate speed and runway independence for a next generation of air mobility platforms, an agency statement said.

The announcement said runway independence was “envisioned as the ability to operate and hover near unprepared surfaces, such as sections of damaged runways, remote highways/roadways, unprepared fields with dry grass, parking lots, etc.”

The broad agency announcement released March 9 did not mention whether the aircraft should be crewed, uncrewed, or optionally piloted. The announcement also did not mention whether it should use conventional or hybrid engines, only that it “must demonstrate the ability to generate and distribute power in all modes of flight and during transition between these modes of flight.”

The announcement did, however, specify that the aircraft be scalable, cruise at speeds from 400 to 450 knots and at relevant altitudes between 15,000 and 30,000 feet. It should carry a payload of 5,000 pounds, with a substantial 30-foot-long, eight-foot-wide cargo bay capable of carrying a small vehicle or two and a half pallets, it said. The initial requirement for endurance is one and a half hours and 200 nautical miles.

While the announcement stressed runway independence, the most important capability AFSOC is looking for in the new X-plane is high speed, Kuebler said. What is the definition of “high-speed?” It’s whatever the program can provide, he said.

“If I tell you 400 knots, then tomorrow I’ll be asking for 450 knots and the next day I’ll ask for 500, but we’re really trying to get after that win,” he added.

It will be a three-phase project, with the first phase seeking proposals. The entities selected will share $15 million to refine their concepts. The second part includes a downselect with $75 million for risk reduction work and air certification approvals, then a further downselect to build and fly the aircraft. That amount was undisclosed.

“The goal of SPRINT is to reach first flight of the demonstrator no more than 42 months from contract award,” the announcement said.

The artist’s concept that accompanied the post portrayed an aircraft that looked much like the next-generation, autonomous hybrid-electric commuter aircraft that several companies are currently developing.

Geoffrey Downer, SOCOM’s program executive officer for rotary wing, said a host of established aircraft makers and startups are offering so-called “flying cars” — all electric or electric-hybrid, runway independent vertical takeoff and landing vehicles that may appear to be a perfect fit for special operations missions — but so far, none impress.

The PEO has studied many of the nascent industry’s commuter aircraft offerings but found that they are all lacking the requirements needed for special ops missions.

“All these electric configurations don’t meet our helicopter missions based on the studies that we’re looking at,” he said.

Special operations helicopters need to hover for long periods of time, and the new wave of electric aircraft don’t do that, he said. The amount of downwash is also problematic, as is the ability to get the crew in and out of the aircraft quickly, he said.

PEO Rotary Wing will also start a program in 2024 with DARPA to look at hybrid-electric aircraft with the goal of increasing speed.

“The studies that we’ve done [have] shown that you can get anywhere from 25 percent to 100 percent increase in speed,” he said. That could take it from 90 knots to 170 to 180 knots, he said. Or it could result in a 25 to 75 percent increase in range. “That’s huge,” he added. ND

Topics: Acquisition, Aviation

nationaldefensemagazine.org · by Stew Magnuson

17. Meta’s Threads Now Has to Keep Its Millions of Users Engaged

​I am seeing some improvement. I continue to build up the list I am following so I am seeing more and more quality posts although there is still a bit of garbage coming theough to my feed.

​

Meta’s Threads Now Has to Keep Its Millions of Users Engaged

Text-based app has proven easy to join, thanks to its Instagram sibling, but faces several challenges

https://www.wsj.com/articles/metas-threads-now-has-to-keep-its-millions-of-users-engaged-343e345b?utm

By​ ​Meghan Bobrowsky​ ​and​ ​Lindsey Choo

July 13, 2023 5:30 am ET

Threads, the new text-first social app from Meta Platforms META -1.45%decrease; red down pointing triangle, made a splash after its release last week. Now the Instagram-dependent platform has to prove it can carve out a unique identity and persuade users to stay.

Threads hit 100 million users within the first five days. Twitter has roughly 500 million, by one measure, and it has been around for more than a decade.

Threads’ early success was buoyed in part by turmoil at rival Twitter and some structural advantages: Threads requires users to have an Instagram account, which makes signing up somewhat seamless, and Instagram has more than two billion users to draw from.

Still, it’s early days for the new app, and Threads can expect to face some of the same challenges other platforms have, including Twitter.

“As more people get to the platform, as they have to enforce moderation policies, as they start to roll out branded content partnership features and ads, the platform gets more and more familiar to what we already know,” said Lia Haberman, who teaches social-media marketing at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The big social-media apps, including YouTube, Twitter and TikTok, all have faced scrutiny from Congress over how they handle user data, content moderation and more. Last month, senators asked Meta for information after The Wall Street Journal reported that Instagram helps connect a vast network of pedophiles.

Additionally, Twitter has struggled to turn a profit for most of its history.

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Facebook parent company Meta has launched Threads, a stand-alone microblogging app that rivals Elon Musk’s Twitter. Within seven hours of its launch, the app gained 10 million sign-ups, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: Yui Mok/Zuma Press

Visually, Threads and Twitter look similar, and they function in similar ways. Both are text-focused, one-to-many platforms that allow users to post photos and videos, too.

A Twitter spokesman responded to a request for comment with four tweets from Twitter Chief Executive Linda Yaccarino. “We’re often imitated—but the Twitter community can never be duplicated,” one said. Meta didn’t provide a comment for this article.

Meta has made initial efforts to differentiate the app, positioning it as a platform with a different ethos from Twitter, which has seen significant changes since billionaire Elon Musk acquired it in October.

“The goal isn’t to replace Twitter,” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said in a post on Threads on Friday. “The goal is to create a public square for communities on Instagram that never really embraced Twitter and for communities on Twitter (and other platforms) that are interested in a less angry place for conversations.”

Mosseri also said Threads isn’t going to encourage politics or hard news, citing what he called scrutiny, negativity and integrity risks.

Some users have already noticed the different tone of Threads.

“It feels almost like a big group chat,” said Ellen V Lora, a fashion content creator with more than 460,000 followers on Instagram. She said the ability to quickly transfer followers over to Threads made it feel as if it was a “natural addition,” as opposed to Twitter, where she never gained traction.

The leaders of each company have publicly reinforced the contrast. Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, 39, framed his new offering as “an open and friendly public space” and has been responding with positive comments to people joining the app.

Musk, 52, responded with a typical barb, tweeting: “It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram.” Musk’s frequent tweets on politics have been known to arouse strong reactions from both fans and critics.

And there’s the rub: Twitter’s status as an influential platform has included engagement by public figures, celebrities and politicians. That setting conferred a sense that notable conversations were happening in real time that users didn’t want to miss—and sometimes the equivalent of a public meltdown they didn’t want to miss.

Meta thinks the audience for Threads could far exceed Twitter’s. Instagram has more than two billion users, Zuckerberg said on an earnings call in October—that is nearly four times as many monthly active users as Twitter, according to a presentation the company gave to advertisers in June.

Threads has passed the initial test: capturing the attention of social-media users. But the real test will be whether they stay on the app long-term, says Rich Greenfield, co-founder at Lightshed Partners, a tech and research firm.

“It is wholly irrelevant how many people sign up,” he said. “What matters is the level of engagement and interaction.”

Haberman, the UCLA lecturer, said: “It’s not actually a town square. It’s a for-profit business.​"​Write to Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com and Lindsey Choo at lindsey.choo@wsj.com

Appeared in the July 14, 2023, print edition as 'Meta’s Threads Faces Challenge of Keeping Its Users Engaged'.

18. Retired four-star Army general: Biden ‘entirely correct’ to send cluster munitions to Ukraine

Retired four-star Army general: Biden ‘entirely correct’ to send cluster munitions to Ukraine

BY NICK ROBERTSON - 07/14/23 4:09 PM ET

The Hill · · July 14, 2023

... More

A firefighter walks with of a resident through smoke coming from a house on fire, after cluster rockets hit a residential area, in Konstantinovka, eastern Ukraine, Saturday, July 9, 2022. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)

A retired four-star Army general had high praise for President Biden’s decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine last week.

“I think President Biden, Lloyd Austin, and Blinken were entirely correct to send them these munitions — not just as a stopgap for unitary warheads, but because they are a very effective tool, and Ukraine is fighting for its survival,” Gen. Barry McCaffrey said in an MSNBC interview on Friday.

Biden’s decision has received mixed reactions from both sides of the aisle as some Republicans have praised the additional military support for Ukraine, while some Democrats criticized the munitions’ history of causing civilian casualties.

On Tuesday, former President Trump said that Biden’s decision could be “dragging” the U.S. “into World War III.”

Cluster munitions are artillery shells wthat shatter into dozens of small bomblets on the ground. Some of these bomblets do not explode, up to 40 percent in older munitions, leaving minefield-like debris behind. Pentagon officials pledged to only send Ukraine cluster munitions with an unexploded ordinance rate of less than 3 percent in an effort to minimize civilian impact.

Iowa 6-week abortion ban signed into law These lawmakers bucked their party on an unusually partisan defense bill

Due to civilian casualty concerns, more than 120 countries have banned the use of cluster munitions. The U.S., Ukraine and Russia have not signed that international agreement.

The munitions are being sent to Ukraine as part of a new $800 million military aid package announced last week. The shells first arrived in Ukraine on Thursday.

19. CIA No. 2: China sees Russia as 'junior partner,' likely alarmed by Wagner uprising

CIA No. 2: China sees Russia as 'junior partner,' likely alarmed by Wagner uprising - Breaking Defense

"I think one of the things we've seen with the Chinese in particular is that they are not eager to be viewed in the world as so joined at the hip with Russia in this war in Ukraine... " said CIA Deputy Director David Cohen.

breakingdefense.com · by Lee Ferran · July 13, 2023

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, attend the Tsinghua University, before the meeting, at Friendship Palace on April 26, 2019 in Beijing, China. (Photo by Kenzaburo Fukuhara – Pool/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The CIA’s number two official said today that “clearly” Chinese President Xi Jinping regards Russia as China’s “junior partner,” that Beijing is wary of being too closely tied to Moscow and that Chinese leadership was likely alarmed by the uprising of the Wagner mercenary group.

“The relationship between Russia and China is strong; they declared a partnership without limits. That has been tested in the course of this war,” CIA Deputy Director David Cohen said at a Intelligence & National Security Alliance event.

Cohen said that as the war “unfolded” and Russia’s invasion stagnated, Moscow began casting around for support and found some economically and “on the battlefield” from Beijing. But Cohen said Xi has been “reasonably cautious” about how much China goes out on a limb for its western neighbor.

“I think one of the things we’ve seen with the Chinese in particular is that they are not eager to be viewed in the world as so joined at the hip with Russia in this war in Ukraine, and that includes providing lethal aid to Russia,” he said.

And Beijing certainly is keeping an eye on events on the battlefield, with Cohen saying There’s “no question” Xi has been watching events unfold in Ukraine “very carefully” and “probably watched with some alarm the Prigozhin rebellion.”

Yevgeny Prigozhin is the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, which on June 23 and 24 marched towards Moscow, downing Russian aircraft, in an apparent attempt to take down Russia’s military leadership. Although Prigozhin backed down hours later, the rebellion represented the most serious threat to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s control over his military in recent memory.

The relationship between China and Russia, as well as Xi and Putin personally, has come under intense scrutiny since the war began, with Beijing offering Moscow both a geopolitical and an economic lifeline. Earlier this week a top Japanese diplomat warned that despite battlefield reversals, the “deepening” relationship between China and Russia would be a fact of life “for the foreseeable future.”

Echoing Cohen, Meia Nouwens of the Institute for International Strategic Studies previously told Breaking Defense that above all, China “would like to see stability” in Russia.

“It’s becoming increasingly apparent that China would like this war to end as soon as possible, but instability in Russia would not be to China’s advantage,” she said, when asked about China’s view of the Wagner uprising.

After the uprising, China’s foreign ministry released a statement saying, “The Chinese side expressed support for the efforts of the leadership of the Russian Federation to stabilize the situation in the country in connection with the events of June 24, and reaffirmed its interest in strengthening the unity and further prosperity of Russia.”

breakingdefense.com · by Lee Ferran · July 13, 2023

20. Outlaw Alliance: How China and Chinese Mafias Overseas Protect Each Other’s Interests

Outlaw Alliance: How China and Chinese Mafias Overseas Protect Each Other’s Interests

by Sebastian Rotella

July 12, 6 a.m. EDT

The rise of Chinese organized crime in Europe highlights its ties to the Chinese state, national security officials say. Recent cases show the suspected role of mobsters in Beijing’s campaign to repress diaspora communities and amass influence.

ProPublica · by Sebastian Rotella

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

PRATO, Italy — On a rainy June afternoon, six Chinese mobsters hurried across the plaza of a drab apartment complex near the medieval gates of this Tuscan textile capital.

Their targets, two gang rivals in their early 20s, were eating in a small Chinese diner. Drawing machetes, the attackers stormed in.

They hacked one man to death, splattering tables and walls with gore. The second victim fought his way out. Trailing blood in the rain, he staggered through the plaza pursued by his killers, who finished him off on the sidewalk around the corner.

The slaughter on Via Strozzi in 2010 was part of a startling escalation of mob violence in Prato, which has one of Europe’s biggest Chinese immigrant communities. The ensuing police investigation was long and difficult, leading as far as China. For the first time, Italian police mapped the rapid spread of the Chinese mafias that were terrorizing immigrant enclaves and leaving a trail of casualties across Europe.

As the investigation culminated in 2017, detectives made another ominous discovery: The kingpins in Italy had high-placed friends in Beijing. Telephone intercepts detected a meeting between an accused crime boss in Rome, Zhang Naizhong, and a member of a high-level Chinese government delegation on a diplomatic visit to Italy, senior Italian law enforcement officials say.

“A guy like Zhang does what the consulate doesn’t do, or does it better,” a senior Italian national security official said. “If you want in-depth street information, intelligence, you go to a guy like Zhang. He has a network, power, resources. He knows the diaspora. He is feared and respected.”

As the regime of President Xi Jinping expands its international power, it has intensified its alliance with Chinese organized crime overseas. The Italian investigation and other cases in Europe show the underworld’s front-line role in a campaign to infiltrate the West, amass wealth and influence, and control diaspora communities as if they were colonies of Beijing’s police state.

Around the world, China’s shadow war of espionage, long-distance repression, political interference and predatory capitalism is drawing attention and alarm. Governments and human rights groups have denounced in recent months a global network of covert Chinese police stations that spy on Chinese migrant communities and persecute dissidents — wherever they live. As ProPublica has reported, the Chinese state has sent illegal undercover teams to chase down fugitives in wealthy U.S. suburbs, surveilled and silenced Chinese students on foreign campuses, and allegedly supported the Chinese money laundering underworld that fortifies cartels inundating the Americas with deadly drugs.

But the rise of Chinese organized crime in Europe has caught authorities largely off-guard. An examination of it offers an unusually vivid look at a covert alliance in action. ProPublica has documented a pattern of cases, some of them unreported and others little-noticed internationally, in which suspected underworld figures in Europe have teamed up with Chinese security forces and other state entities.

The partnership appears to mix geopolitics and corruption for mutual benefit. Gangsters help monitor and intimidate immigrant communities for the regime in Beijing, sometimes as leaders of cultural associations that are key players in China’s political influence operations and long-distance repression, Western security officials say. ProPublica has learned that suspected underworld figures in Italy and Spain took part in launching several of the secret Chinese police stations that caused an uproar when their existence became public last year.

A Chinese police station in Prato was launched by leaders of the Fujianese community including Zheng Wenhua. He is one of the top defendants accused in the China Truck case, in which Italian anti-mafia authorities charged dozens of people in 2018. Credit: Steve Bisgrove, special to ProPublica

The Chinese Communist Party “takes the most powerful, richest, most successful figures overseas and recognizes them as the nobility of the diaspora,” said Emmanuel Jourda, a French scholar on Chinese organized crime. “And it doesn’t matter how they made their money. The deal, spoken or not, is: ‘You gather intelligence on the community, we let you do business. Whether legal or illegal.’”

In exchange for their services as overseas enforcers and agents of influence, the Chinese state protects the mobsters, Western national security officials say. Although supposedly wanted in China, a top figure in the Italian case traveled freely to his homeland and oversaw his European rackets from China without interference from authorities there, according to court documents and law enforcement officials. And in Europe — as in the United States — national security chiefs say the Chinese government refuses to cooperate with their investigations of Chinese organized crime.

Money is another driving force in the alliance. Diplomatically delicate prosecutions in Italy, Spain and France have resulted in convictions and fines against Chinese state banks that worked with Chinese criminals to launder the proceeds of widespread tax evasion, customs fraud and contraband. Chinese mafias have also become the preferred money launderers for the Continent’s drug traffickers, whose onslaught poses an unprecedented threat to several governments.

Stretching across Europe, the underground Chinese money networks pump billions of illicit dollars into China’s economy. During one recent year, police at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport arrested 16 couriers carrying a total of more than $41 million bound for China.

“It is hard to imagine that this activity is not welcomed by the Chinese authorities,” said the chief prosecutor in Prato, Giuseppe Nicolosi. “Large amounts of money are returning to China.”

The implications for the United States are urgent, authorities say, because the same tactics and networks plague Chinese American communities. U.S. law enforcement has tracked interactions between Chinese government operatives and Chinese American mobsters who harass dissidents, engage in political interference and move offshore funds for the Communist Party elite, U.S. national security officials say.

“Organized crime is doing services for the Chinese government” on both sides of the Atlantic, a veteran U.S. national security official said. “There are deals between organized crime and the Chinese government. The government tasks them to expand influence and become eyes and ears overseas. Once they get themselves established, there are locals they can corrupt. It’s a classic modus operandi.”

U.S. national security officials are also concerned because Europe is a vulnerable front in China’s offensive to divide and weaken the West. Until recently, Chinese malign activities were not a priority in Europe. Although U.S. intelligence agencies warned European counterparts about intensified contacts between the Chinese state and underworld, most security forces were busy with Islamist terrorists and Russian spies during the past decade, Western national security veterans said.

“When they started recognizing the threat, they didn’t have the resources,” said Frank Montoya, a former FBI counterintelligence chief.

Today, governments are scrambling to respond to what Europol, the agency that coordinates police cooperation on the Continent, has called “an increasing threat to Europe.” They have realized that the problem reverberates beyond Chinese immigrant neighborhoods and challenges national security and the rule of law.

“There was a lack of awareness of the danger,” said the chief anti-mafia prosecutor in Florence, Luca Tescaroli, whose jurisdiction includes Prato. He has created a unit to fight Chinese mafias. But, he said: “We cannot criminalize the Chinese community. We know they are also victims of intimidation, extortion and violence.”

The Chinese embassies in Italy, Spain and France did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. In the past, Chinese diplomats have denied involvement in transnational repression and other illegal activities abroad.

To assemble a picture of the intertwined agendas of the Chinese regime and its expatriate mafia groups, ProPublica interviewed more than two dozen current and former national security officials in Europe and the United States, as well as Chinese immigrants, human rights advocates and others. ProPublica granted anonymity to some sources because of safety concerns or because they were not authorized to speak publicly. In addition, ProPublica reviewed court documents, reports by governments and nongovernmental organizations, academic papers, press reports and social media posts.

The Boss From Beijing

Prato’s Chinatown starts just outside the stone ramparts, narrow lanes and Romanesque cathedral of the city’s historic center.

Its immigrant energy extends to the Macrolotto industrial park on the edge of town, where signs on warehouses and workshops mix Chinese words with names like Flora, Kitty and Style. More than 6,000 Chinese-owned businesses give Prato an outsized role in the diaspora.

Numbers like that tell the story of the second-biggest city in Tuscany.

Via Pistoiese in Prato’s Chinatown Credit: Steve Bisgrove, special to ProPublica

Via Antonio Marini in Prato’s Chinatown Credit: Steve Bisgrove, special to ProPublica

In 1990, there were 520 residents of Chinese origin, according to an Italian government study. Today, officials say Prato has one of the largest Chinese communities in proportion to the city’s size in Europe: close to 40,000 out of a total population of about 200,000. That includes as many as 10,000 undocumented immigrants. Italy has Europe’s third-largest Chinese population after the United Kingdom and France.

The immigrants came initially to work in the mills and factories of this longtime hub of the textile and garment industries. Gradually, they became owners and employers. In 2019, voters elected two Chinese Italians to the City Council — a first.

Chinese employees at work in a textile company in the Macrolotto industrial park on the edge of Prato. The city has been a longtime hub of the textile and garment industries. Credit: Marco Bulgarelli/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Still, life for many Chinese residents feels like a crossfire. Although the newcomers have invigorated the economy, some Italians accuse Chinese merchants of evading taxes, paying low wages and other shady practices. Non-Chinese robbers and thieves prey on them because of the belief that they carry large amounts of cash.

And Chinese immigrants, of course, were the prime victims of the rise of Chinese organized crime in the 2000s. As mobsters established themselves, unprecedented violence broke out among warring factions from Fujian, a coastal province known for smuggling and migration. Police in Prato started calling Fujian the Calabria of China, likening it to the mafia hotbed located in the toe of the Italian boot.

After the double murder on Via Strozzi in 2010, the half-dozen detectives of the local anti-mafia squad began an investigation christened China Truck. Despite the daunting language barrier and a lack of expertise on Asian mafias, it evolved into an all-out, eight-year effort to dismantle a criminal organization.

In 2011, witnesses told police about Lin Guochun, aka Laolin, the reputed boss of Prato, court documents say.

Lin had made his way from Fujian to Italy via Portugal and the Czech Republic, where he had allegedly ordered the murder of a rival smuggler of migrants, according to Italian court documents and Italian law enforcement officials. His empire encompassed extortion, gambling, contraband, prostitution and drugs. In Prato, he held court in his nightclub, a grim locale with dark glass walls that offered package deals of prostitutes and ketamine. His swaggering crew ruled Chinatown, court documents say.

In 2013, the father of a massage parlor owner told prosecutors that two of Lin’s thugs had demanded 100,000 euros and given him a beating that put him in the hospital with skull trauma and a broken nose, court documents say.

“My countrymen are afraid of them,” the battered extortion victim said, according to court documents. “They are part of an organization of cruel people who threaten and demand money ... if someone challenges them, they beat and wound and use other violent methods.”

Surveillance led to another breakthrough even higher in the criminal hierarchy. Police identified the alleged boss of bosses in Rome: Zhang Naizhong.

Zhang, a trim and dapper trucking executive, was from Zhejiang, a more prosperous province next to Fujian that sends many immigrants to Europe. After the slaying of one of Zhang’s rivals in Naples in 2006, a court convicted him of helping the accused killers escape, but appellate judges overturned the verdict, court documents say.

During conversations intercepted on the phone and in his BMW, Zhang described himself as a ruthless “madman” and ordered henchmen to threaten people, court documents say. Expounding on the “rules of the mafia,” he told a subordinate in 2013 that true loyalty meant being “ready to go to prison and to kill people,” court documents say.

“I’m the most powerful boss in Europe,” Zhang declared, according to court documents. “Ask anyone ... if you’re not a friend, you’re an enemy ... if you’re an enemy, then you’re finished! ... A guy can point a pistol at me and because of my personality ... I’ll tell him: ‘Pull the trigger!’ You understand, brother? ... I am the boss and so the boss can decide anything.”

Zhang teamed with Lin to conquer the market for the distribution of goods among Chinese business enclaves in Europe, court documents say. Working with police in other countries, Italian detectives charted the kingpins’ alleged war on competing transport companies, court documents say: murders in Italy; shootings and stabbings in Spain, France, Germany and Portugal; a litany of arson attacks, assaults and threats.

Back in Prato, though, the accused gangsters did not keep a low profile. In fact, some of them were active in the array of Chinese cultural associations that shape the social landscape in diaspora communities. The associations, often named for the province immigrants came from, do good works: sponsoring cultural and sports activities, distributing protective equipment during the pandemic, raising money for charity causes in their home provinces.

But suspected underworld figures and their associates held posts in the Fujian Overseas Chinese Association in Italy that enhanced their power on the street and at a political level, according to court documents, Italian law enforcement officials and Chinese media. Lin, the alleged Fujianese boss of Prato, appeared on a list of “consultants” to the association in 2016. Wiretaps, surveillance cameras and media reports documented meals, events and phone conversations in which Lin and other targets in the China Truck case interacted with prominent leaders of the Chinese community, Italian politicians, Chinese diplomats and visiting Chinese government officials.

In 2012, the president of the Fujian association in Prato intervened to resolve an underworld conflict involving Lin’s son, according to court documents and law enforcement officials. That same leader of the association later attended a conference in Beijing with top officials of the United Front Work Department, the arm of the Chinese Communist Party dedicated to political spying and interference overseas, according to photos and media reports. The United Front has become a dominant force in the diaspora, which it exploits to gain political and economic influence.

Such well-placed homeland connections appeared to pay off. Although Lin was wanted by Chinese police for past extortion offenses in China, he spent long periods there unmolested by authorities while he supervised his criminal enterprises in Italy by phone, according to Italian court documents and senior Italian law enforcement officials. He also enriched himself with investments in the Chinese mining sector, court documents and senior Italian law enforcement officials say.

Lin “succeeded in resolving the judicial cases in which he was charged, and was thus able to resume thriving economic activities” in China, a court document says.

As the investigation peaked in late 2017, detectives stumbled onto startling evidence of Lin’s influence in high places.

In interviews with ProPublica, Italian law enforcement officials said a series of intercepted phone calls revealed how close the Prato mob chief was to Chinese political figures. According to the Italian officials, on the morning of Dec. 11, Lin placed a call from Beijing to Zhang in Rome. Lin said an important friend, whom he described as a “boss from Beijing,” was visiting Rome. The boss had a busy schedule of meetings with Italian politicians, Lin said. But it would be good if Zhang could take him to dinner, see the sights, maybe a soccer game. Zhang then called his secretary and driver to organize excursions to the Vatican and the Colosseum for the VIP visitor. That evening, Zhang had dinner with him, Italian officials said.

Analyzing translations of the calls afterward, detectives came to an alarming conclusion: The “boss from Beijing” was a member of a Chinese delegation that had met with Italy’s prime minister at the time, Paolo Gentiloni, and his cabinet ministers. Led by China’s Vice Premier Ma Kai, the delegation included senior officials in China’s ministries of foreign affairs, development, industry and commerce.

“It’s very probable that Zhang hosted and dined with a senior official from the delegation,” a senior Italian law enforcement official said. “We suspect that it was a prominent member of the delegation.”

Police reconstructed the episode based on the translated conversations rather than physical surveillance, law enforcement officials told ProPublica, and could not identify the visitor or the reason for the sit-down. But the analysis indicated he was a government official, national security sources said.

Italian and Chinese diplomats declined to comment on the episode, which was first reported in Italian media.

Chinese state-mafia contacts like the one that allegedly took place in Rome are not unusual, Western national security officials said.

“China uses a range of proxies and cutouts, and organized crime is one of those proxies,” a U.S. intelligence official said. “We see a growing brazenness in [Chinese] malign influence operations.”

Sometimes, expatriate gangsters even set themselves up in foreign countries with the blessing and support of corrupt allies in the Communist Party elite back home, a veteran U.S. national security official said.

“The gangsters are told to go establish themselves in a certain country, given different business opportunities,” the veteran U.S. national security official said. “Transportation help, getting consumer goods out of China, the government helps organized crime there. Chinese corrupt officials can make it easy to move goods out of China.”

The Chinese politicians who meet with Chinese gangsters overseas “represent their government as well as their own self-interest,” he said.

Weeks after the mysterious encounter in Rome, Italian investigators rounded up dozens of suspects on mafia-related charges resulting from the China Truck investigation.

A police team swarmed a discreet hotel in Prato where Zhang was staying and arrested him and his adult son, Zhang Di, rousting them from their beds at dawn. The son got agitated and shouted at the officers, police said.

But his father, the accused boss of bosses, stayed cool while officers took him into custody.

Zhang Naizhong, a trucking magnate and accused mafia boss who is a top defendant in the China Truck case. “If you want in-depth street information, intelligence, you go to a guy like Zhang,” a senior Italian national security official said. “He has a network, power, resources. He knows the diaspora. He is feared and respected.” Credit: Via YouTube

Zhang and his son have pleaded not guilty. Their lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. Prosecutors also charged Lin, but he remains at large. Lin’s son was not charged.

The China Truck prosecution painted the first detailed picture of alleged mob activity among Chinese immigrants in Italy. Soon, even more evidence would emerge of a brazen alliance between accused expatriate gangsters and the Chinese security forces.

Outlaw Police

The headquarters of the Fujian Overseas Chinese Association in Italy occupies a corner building on Via Orti del Pero in the heart of Prato’s Chinatown.

The two-story structure looks bedraggled. It has blue steel doors, barred windows and fading sand-colored walls.

But in March of last year, the place made headlines. Chinese media announced “good news” from Prato: the inauguration of the Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station in the Fujian association’s headquarters. Leaders of the association would work with officers of the Municipal Public Security Bureau in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province, to enable immigrants to renew Chinese driver’s licenses and do other bureaucratic tasks in Prato, a Chinese media report said.

The inauguration of the Fuzhou police station in Prato in March 2022. Among those at the opening was Zheng, also known as Franco, second from left.

Among six community leaders pictured beneath the station’s blue banner was the association’s executive vice president at the time: Zheng Wenhua.

Zheng, also known as Franco, seemed a puzzling choice to open a police station. Four years earlier, Italian authorities had accused him of being a top figure in the Prato underworld.

Investigators first identified him in 2011 when police stopped him in his Jaguar accompanied by an alleged enforcer for Lin, the reputed Fujianese mob boss, court documents say. Officers found a clasp knife and a marijuana cigarette in the car and confiscated Zheng’s license, court documents say.

In 2013, Zheng allegedly became involved in the aftermath of the incident in which two thugs beat up the father of a massage parlor owner. Zheng tried to silence the battered extortion victim by sending a “volunteer” interpreter into a police interview to control what he said, court documents say. In a phone call recorded by police, Zheng warned the victim not to implicate bosses, court documents say.

“Come on ... this could have consequences for Laolin...,” he said, according to the documents. “...And that would not be a good thing.”

During the China Truck raids in 2018, authorities charged Zheng with “a prominent role” in Lin’s crew overseeing the “management of clandestine gambling dens and exploitation of prostitution,” court documents say.

Yet Zheng remains a civic leader. He has met with visiting Chinese dignitaries including the mayor of Fuzhou, spoken at community events and attended a gala in February featuring the mayor of Florence and the Chinese consul, according to media reports and photos. In March, he was elected president of the Fujian association. (Zheng has pleaded not guilty and is free awaiting trial. He and other representatives of the Fujian association did not respond to requests for comment.)

And Zheng wasn’t the only one with alleged ties to both the underworld and the new Fuzhou police station in Prato. China Truck prosecutors charged another vice president of the association with helping Lin obtain fraudulent immigration papers. Photos at the Fuzhou police station show three more community leaders whose personal and business links to gangsters surfaced during the investigation, according to court documents and senior law enforcement officials. None of them were charged, though authorities seized five bank accounts belonging to one man.

Despite the celebratory Chinese media reports, the station was part of a global campaign of repression, according to Western officials and human rights advocates.

“You have criminals who terrify the community involved in a police station that further terrifies the community,” a senior law enforcement official said.

Safeguard Defenders, a human rights group, has revealed a network of more than 100 covert stations overseen by Chinese provincial police forces in more than 50 countries. Based in cultural associations, businesses and homes, the outposts help persecute dissidents and support Operation Fox Hunt, which deploys undercover police and prosecutors illegally across borders to track down people accused of crimes — justifiably and not — and take them back to China, according to Western officials and human rights advocates.

In Madrid, a video showed community leaders at a covert station of the Zhejiang provincial police talking via videolink with a fugitive in Spain and law enforcement officials in Zhejiang. In a typical pressure tactic, Chinese police and prosecutors back in Qingtian County sat with a relative of the fugitive, who eventually returned home and accepted a plea deal, according to Chinese media reports cited by the human rights group.

In Aubervilliers, a gritty Paris suburb, a Chinese French garment executive who managed a station admitted in a published interview to helping Chinese police “persuade” a fugitive to return to China in 2019, Safeguard Defenders found. Although no further details about the case were available, a senior French national security official told ProPublica that undercover Chinese police came to France and illegally repatriated two people during that time. The senior official did not say whether the head of the Aubervilliers station was involved.

After Safeguard Defenders issued its report last year, at least 12 countries began investigations. The U.S. reaction was the strongest. Targeting an illegal station in New York, federal prosecutors charged two Chinese American leaders with stalking and harassing dissidents for Chinese authorities including the Fuzhou police — the same force involved in the Prato station. (United Front officials also helped set up the New York station, U.S. authorities say.)

First image: Federal prosecutors say Chinese police used office space in this building in lower Manhattan’s Chinatown as a secret station in order to monitor and repress dissidents living in the United States. Second image: The exterior of the building, center. Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

“It is simply outrageous that China’s Ministry of Public Security thinks it can get away with establishing a secret, illegal police station on U.S. soil to aid its efforts to export repression and subvert our rule of law,” the acting head of FBI counterintelligence, Kurt Ronnow, said at the time of the arrests in April.

In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin accused U.S. authorities of making “groundless accusations.”

“There are simply no so-called ‘overseas police stations,’” Wang said. “China adheres to the principle of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs, strictly observes international laws and respects the judicial sovereignty of all countries.”

The Chinese Embassy in Rome did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.

Some European national security officials downplayed the disclosures about the stations, echoing the Chinese government’s line that the outposts offer convenient consular-type services. The response to the problem in Europe has often been handled quietly by counterintelligence agencies rather than law enforcement. But most European officials interviewed by ProPublica said the stations aid spying.

“The suspicion is that the goal of these stations is to enable Chinese authorities to control and monitor the Chinese diaspora community,” Tescaroli, the Florence prosecutor, said.

There are 11 Chinese police outposts in Italy, more than any other country, and three in Prato. They multiplied during past Italian governments, which had notably close relationships with Beijing.

In 2016, Italy began a program that allowed visiting Chinese police officers to conduct joint uniformed patrols with Italian police. The stated goal was to improve protection of Chinese tourists and immigrants, but the patrol program fomented the spread of the unofficial stations, said Laura Harth, the campaign director of Safeguard Defenders. Photos show Chinese officers at the stations, sometimes joined by Italian police.

“They used the joint patrols to launch pilot stations,” Harth said. “China described it as one of its biggest achievements.”

Italian and Chinese police on a joint patrol in Milan in 2018. Italian national security officials said the patrols were largely symbolic, but they added that they have caught Chinese officers using visits as a cover to pursue people in the diaspora. Credit: Emanuele Cremaschi/Getty Images

Although Italian national security officials told ProPublica the patrols were largely symbolic, they said they have caught Chinese police officers using authorized visits as a cover to pursue people in the diaspora.

“But when they tried to do anything more than patrol, they were warned to stop,” a senior Italian national security official said.

The policing alliance was “a bad idea” because it “reinforced the fear” in the Chinese Italian community, a senior Italian law enforcement official said.

Across the Mediterranean, Spain is another place where the secret Chinese stations allegedly converge with the criminal underworld.

In Barcelona, two covert stations operate a mile apart in a translation agency and a restaurant, according to human rights activists and Spanish security officials. The stations are based in the Eixample, a central area of tree-lined avenues, stately modernist architecture and octagonal intersections.

As in Prato, the Fuzhou police administrate the Barcelona facilities from afar, and the staff are mostly Fujianese members of groups including the Association of Fujianese Entrepreneurs in Catalunya, according to Spanish officials and human rights advocates.

And as in Prato, community leaders affiliated with the stations appear in the organized crime files of law enforcement, according to the police of the Catalan autonomous region, a force known as the Mossos d’Esquadra.

At least five of those community leaders have records in Spain for crimes including human smuggling, falsification of documents, receiving stolen property, labor law violations and fraud, Catalan police officials told ProPublica. Police have detected at least two of those people at meetings with suspected Chinese mob figures, the police officials said.

The leaders involved in running the stations interact frequently with Chinese diplomats as well as Spanish politicians, according to police officials.

“These are people of great relevance in the Chinese community,” a police official said. “The local politicians may not always realize who they are meeting with.”

Representatives of associations and businesses tied to the Barcelona stations did not respond to requests for comment. The Chinese Embassy in Madrid also did not respond to a request for comment.

In France, authorities already knew about the Chinese stations and monitored them for intelligence purposes, a French national security official said.

After the revelations last year, French officials met with representatives of the Chinese Embassy and the Chinese community and told them to curtail the covert activities, a senior French national security official said. The senior official said a Chinese police attaché insisted he knew nothing about the matter — until French officials showed him a photo of himself at one of the stations.

China’s embassy in Paris did not respond to a request for comment.

Across Europe, investigators have discovered that the Chinese underworld makes itself useful to the Chinese state in another, crucially important arena: money.

River of Money

Imagine a vast river of cash flowing from Europe to China.

It flows from the booming marijuana industry in and around Barcelona, where Chinese mobsters are players in illegal growing and international trafficking.

It flows from the garment industry in the Aubervilliers area (the site of a covert Chinese police station and the French branch of Zhang’s trucking empire), where merchants have been charged with laundering money for drug lords.

Italian police count cash confiscated during a China Truck raid in Prato. Credit: Via YouTube

And it flows from shops, nightspots and warehouses in Prato and other Italian cities where the Guardia di Finanza, the agency that fights financial crime, has discovered a veritable underground banking system based on tax evasion, customs fraud and contraband.

This illegal machinery has pumped billions of dollars into the Chinese economy, authorities say. Although China has the most formidable police state in the world, law enforcement chiefs in Europe complain about its steadfast resistance to helping their investigations into organized criminal activity by Chinese migrants.

“We get no cooperation from the Chinese government,” said Tescaroli, the chief anti-mafia prosecutor in Florence.

Worsening suspicions of official complicity, Chinese state banks in Europe have emerged as active partners of money laundering organizations.

Exhibit A: the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, a state-owned institution, the biggest bank in the world based on total assets.

In 2011, ICBC opened a branch in Madrid on a thriving downtown boulevard filled with museums, luxury hotels and cafe terraces. The bank’s visiting global chairman marked the occasion with Spain’s economy minister, who said the new branch would be a bridge to emerging markets.

A branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China opened in Madrid in 2011. Spain’s economy minister said the new branch would be a bridge to emerging markets. Credit: Juan Medina/Reuters

Five years later, a dramatic scene played out when Spanish police officers raided the bank, seized piles of documents and arrested executives, escorting suspects out with their heads covered.

Spanish officers carried out a raid at the ICBC branch in Madrid in 2016. Credit: Juan Medina/Reuters

The bank had surfaced during investigations of Chinese criminal groups that smuggle contraband and evade taxes and customs duties — activities that generate stockpiles of cash. Surveillance of suspects moving cash led police to the ICBC branch in Madrid.

Thanks to wiretaps and an inside witness, police learned that bank executives set up an audacious system in which criminals delivered suitcases and boxes full of euros to the bank day and night, court documents say. The bank sent hundreds of millions to China through illegal mechanisms such as fake identities and fraudulent invoices. Managers advised crime bosses about how to transfer funds to China covertly. The Madrid branch did not issue a single alert about suspicious financial operations to Spanish authorities between 2011 and 2016, court documents say.

During the investigation, the top ICBC executive in Madrid became general manager at the bank’s European headquarters, indicating potentially wider corruption, prosecutors said.

“The close connection between this Spanish branch and the headquarters in Luxembourg indicates that this illicit conduct could repeat itself in other European branches,” prosecutors warned in court documents.

Chinese diplomats complained publicly and in talks with Spanish leaders about the case, according to Spanish national security officials. But in 2020, the general manager in Luxembourg and three Madrid executives pleaded guilty to money laundering charges. The Spanish court imposed sentences of three to five months and a $25 million fine. ICBC issued a statement saying the bank was law-abiding and had cooperated with authorities.

It was not an isolated case.

In France, the Bank of China paid a $4 million fine in 2020 to settle a prosecution for aggravated money laundering. Authorities charged that the state bank failed to notify French tax authorities about more than $40 million sent from 168 accounts during a two-year period. The money came from fraud, tax evasion and other illicit activities by Chinese entrepreneurs based in France, prosecutors said. Bank of China officials said in a statement that the settlement was not an admission of guilt.

In Italy, the Bank of China paid $22 million in 2017 to settle a case in which a whopping $4.7 billion went illegally to China. Executives aided and concealed transfers of cash from Prato and Florence during a four-year period, authorities said. The former director general in Milan and three other employees received two-year suspended sentences in the aptly named “River of Money” prosecution.

The bank said the settlement was not an admission of guilt.

The river of money has many tributaries, law enforcement experts say. Italian investigators have detected bulk cash loads smuggled to China in maritime containers, express mail packages and the luggage of airline passengers.

And police forces across Western Europe track couriers driving shipments of criminal proceeds east to Turkey, Bulgaria and especially Hungary, where it is easier to deposit and repatriate the funds in banks with little interference on either end, according to Italian prosecutors and other European officials. In a Spanish case, a jailed Chinese suspect told interrogators that a network smuggled cash “hidden in goods transported in vans” and used “passports of Chinese citizens to send the money as immigrant remittances” from the “Chinese Bank in Budapest, Hungary” to China, court documents say.

Italian investigators identified another bank in Hungary, China’s closest ally in Europe, that received more than $1.2 billion in clandestine cash deliveries from across the Continent and wired the money to China between 2017 and 2018.

Chinese financial crime networks pose “an elevated threat” in Europe, according to a recent French law enforcement report. They have become the preferred money launderers of the drug trade and act as brokers for international deals, delivering cash on demand so that cartels don’t have to transport funds across borders, European security officials say.

The clients are top drug traffickers: Italians, Albanians, Latin Americans and a violent Morocco-connected cartel, the Mocro Maffia, that has become a national security threat in the Netherlands and Belgium.

The trend resembles the rise of Chinese money laundering groups that have transformed the U.S. drug trade by giving fast and cheap service to Latin American cartels. As ProPublica has reported, U.S. national security officials say the Chinese state supports that activity.

European authorities have similar suspicions.

“It is a kind of state criminality,” a senior Italian law enforcement official said.

Striking Back

Five years after Italian police rounded up the accused gangsters in 2018, the continuing saga of the China Truck case illustrates progress and setbacks in the response to a threat that caught Europe largely unawares.

A total of 79 defendants are still awaiting trial in Prato. The proceedings have been slow because of the sheer scope of the case, the labyrinthine justice system and the laborious demands of translation. An acute lack of interpreters continues to plague the case. During the investigation, police at one point had to suspend wiretaps because taped conversations in the Fujianese dialect were piling up untranslated.

It is also Italy’s first prosecution of a Chinese organization for mafia-level conspiracy, which is a complex offense to prove. Appellate panels have questioned the evidence for the mafia-related charges, releasing defendants from pre-trial custody.

Last September, a court convicted some defendants for individual offenses and acquitted others such as Zhang, the alleged boss in Rome. In the case of Zheng, the community leader involved in the Prato station, the statute of limitations ran out on some charges against him. Lin is no longer facing trial because his whereabouts are unknown.

But Zhang, Zheng and the others still face trial on the mafia conspiracy charges.

Although it has been an uphill battle, authorities say they have disrupted the underworld.

“Like the Italian mafias, the Chinese mafia has understood, or is coming to understand, that if you are too violent, the police react,” a senior Italian law enforcement official said. “It is bad for business. Violence attracts attention. It has happened less since the China Truck prosecution.”

Europe is hurrying to respond to China-related threats. After an investigation, the United Kingdom’s minister of state security recently announced that the government had ordered China to shut down unauthorized police stations, calling them “unacceptable.”

Officials of the municipal police in Fuzhou, China, (top center panel) hold a videoconference with leaders of Chinese immigrant communities who operate stations for the Fuzhou police force in five cities including Barcelona, Spain, (bottom left panel) and New York City (top left panel). Credit: Via Fuzhou Public Security Bureau

The new Italian government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has taken a tough line. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies have created units focused on Chinese organized crime and malign influence. A parliamentary anti-mafia commission will examine alleged wrongdoing in Prato’s Chinese manufacturing sector and illicit money flows to China. Public attention has led to the shuttering of the Fuzhou station in Prato.

As for the double homicide on Via Strozzi, the case opened a door into a secret world. Prosecutors charged 20 people in the murder and related crimes, winning convictions in the latter cases.

But the accused killers remain out of reach, authorities say, in China.

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

ProPublica · by Sebastian Rotella

21. Would Allies Fight With U.S. for Taiwan? Japan Is Wary

Would Allies Fight With U.S. for Taiwan? Japan Is Wary

By​ A​lastair Gale

July 15, 2023 12:01 am ET

Washington and Tokyo are making plans to defend Taiwan against a potential attack by China, but Japan won’t commit its military

https://www.wsj.com/articles/would-allies-fight-with-u-s-for-taiwan-japan-is-wary-d90dd924?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

TOKYO—American and Japanese military officials have been working on a plan for a conflict over Taiwan for more than a year, but the talks have yet to resolve a central question: Would Japan join the fight?

Washington has nudged Tokyo to consider roles for the Japanese military such as hunting for Chinese submarines around Taiwan, said people familiar with the discussions, without getting any commitment.

The planning is one of the most important aspects of the U.S. response to Beijing’s threats to capture Taiwan by force. At its closest, Japan is just 70 miles from the democratically self-governing island, and it hosts some 54,000 U.S. troops, concentrated on the southern island of Okinawa.

If China moves to seize Taiwan and the U.S. intervenes, as President Biden has said it would, the first response would likely come from those U.S. bases. Under an agreement dating from the 1960s, the U.S. would need Japan’s approval—but Tokyo would feel pressure to provide that, as refusing would jeopardize the alliance that ensures its security.

Getting Japan to engage in the fight directly would be harder. Japanese leaders publicly shun discussion of a role in any Taiwan war, in part because public opinion is generally against getting ensnared in a conflict.

A combat-training exercise by the Taiwanese military last year. PHOTO: RITCHIE B. TONGO/SHUTTERSTOCK

“If you ask the question of whether you are willing to risk your life to defend Taiwan, I think 90% of Japanese people would say ‘no’ at this point,” said Satoru Mori, a professor of politics at Keio University in Tokyo.

Tokyo is investing heavily in long-range cruise missiles and other hardware in response to China’s growing arsenal, but it says the buildup is strictly for self-defense. “We have to spend more on military deterrence and response capabilities to reduce the risk we would be attacked,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on a recent visit to Okinawa.

Japan’s Constitution, written by the U.S. after World War II, renounces the use of force to settle disputes. But under a law approved in 2015 under then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan can respond militarily if a close ally is under attack nearby and its own survival is at stake.

Simulations conducted earlier this year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, found the U.S. could likely block a Chinese takeover of Taiwan with the support of allies such as Japan and Australia.

In most of the center’s wargame scenarios, Japan joins the U.S. in the fight after China attacks U.S. bases on Japanese soil, destroying hundreds of American and Japanese aircraft—a modern-day version of Pearl Harbor. Surviving Japanese ships and planes attack the Chinese to the north and east of Taiwan and help intercept Chinese amphibious invasion craft before they overwhelm the island, with Japan’s hard-to-detect submarines playing a vital role in sinking Chinese ships.

Gaming a U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington last year. PHOTO: ELIZABETH FRANTZ FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

While a Chinese attack on U.S. bases in Japan would likely end Tokyo’s hesitancy, some American and Japanese security analysts said, there is no guarantee a conflict would play out that way. What worries Tokyo most about getting involved in fighting is the risk of escalation—for example, of China’s encouraging allies Russia and North Korea to attack Japan, or threatening to use nuclear weapons.

The U.S. is seeking more clarity from Japan as the two sides try to develop a combined operational plan for a Taiwan conflict. Subjects include supply routes, missile-launcher sites and refugee-evacuation plans, people familiar with the talks say. Japan is willing to support the U.S. military by providing fuel and other supplies, these people say.

A Pentagon spokesman said the U.S. and Japan share a commitment to peace in the Taiwan Strait and that the U.S. welcomes Japan’s interest in “expanding its roles, missions, and capabilities. This will enhance deterrence.” Asked about planning for a conflict over Taiwan, a Japanese government spokesman said Japan and the U.S. maintain joint defense plans but declined to go into further detail.

Missiles deployed on a Japanese island east of Taiwan in June. PHOTO: KYODO NEWS/ZUMA PRESS

Japan’s military, known as the Self-Defense Forces, currently operates 50 destroyers and 22 attack submarines, as well as more than 300 jet fighters. Late last year, Tokyo said it would raise military spending around 60% over the next five years to 2% of gross domestic product.

Japan plans to have Tomahawk missiles obtained from the U.S. and its own long-range cruise missiles ready for use some time after spring 2026. Its fleet of F-35 stealth fighters is set to grow from around 30 to 147, the largest contingent outside the U.S.

“We are building up our army, navy and air force, as well as space and cyber capabilities. Maybe in five years when our new shape is clearer, we will have to talk about new roles and missions in the region,” said Nobukatsu Kanehara, a former national-security official and adviser to Abe, the former prime minister.

In a 2021 fundraising speech, then-Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso said that a war over Taiwan could risk Japan’s survival, which would justify Japan’s helping defend the island.

Marines from four countries—the U.S., Japan, South Korea and the Philippines—at the opening ceremony of the joint military exercises in Manila last year. PHOTO: LISA MARIE DAVID/REUTERS

But Keio University’s Mori said the lack of meaningful public discussion in Japan about why Tokyo should support Taiwan’s defense could lead to political chaos if the worst comes to pass. Without a clear position, the government would struggle to manage the U.S. alliance while dealing with public concern, he said.

Kishida is sensitive about suggestions he is just following Washington’s direction. In a speech last month, Biden took credit for Japan’s military buildup, saying of Kishida, “I convinced him.” Kishida’s government said it complained to Washington, and Biden later said the prime minister had already decided to raise military spending.

At a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit this week, Biden praised Kishida for increasing Japan’s defense budget and supporting Ukraine.

Tight civilian controls on Japan’s military, imposed after World War II to prevent a return to the country’s militaristic past, could slow decision-making at a time when a few lost days could determine Taiwan’s fate, experts warn.

“Most likely when we can fight together, we will,” said Rui Matsukawa, a former Japanese vice defense minister. But Japan wouldn’t look to be on the front lines, she added.

Chieko Tsuneoka contributed to this article.

Write to Alastair Gale at alastair.gale@wsj.com

22. Two Videos on SOF cuts and the Army

Below are links to two clips that discuss the possibility of Army cuts to Army SOF from recent CSA testimony. No decisions have been made and analysis is ongoing.  

But it seems apparent that Army SOF will take some potentially relatively large cuts. My major criticism from the comments below is that part of the rationale from the CSA-nominee is that we are no longer engaged at the level we were in Afghanistan. Even more troubling is that the Army is using conventional force structure analysis based on force management models that I am not sure take into account the unique SOF mission in support of strategic competition. I think Senator Budd makes an interesting point about the Joint Concept for Competing and supporting the concept. SOF is a force that can make outsize comontrutiont to competition that are not modeled on conventional force structure analysis.

Based on the Senators comments it seems they strongly support SOF and are skeptical of cuts. Just as a reminder that if it was not for Congress (and the Nunn-Cohen Amendment of Goldwater Nichols) we would not have the special operations capabilities we have today. SOF only exists by act of Congress and will probably only continue with support from Congress.

Senator Ernst clip

https://vimeo.com/845121436?share=copy#t=0

Senator Budd Questions Army Chief of Staff Nominee General Randy George during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on 7/12/2023.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rjpqQgCWf8&authuser=0

​

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com