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Quotes of the Day:
"I laugh at those who think they can damage me. They do not know who I am, they do not know what I think, they cannot even touch the things which are really mine and with which I live."
– Epictetus
"There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless."
– Chinua Achebe
"Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow."
– Kurt Vonnegut
1. Codifying Irregular Warfare—Inside the Pentagon’s new DoD Instruction 3000.07
2. Maria Ressa at UNGA 80th anniv: 'Information integrity is the mother of all battles'
3. New Peace Push Offers Clues to Fundamental Question: What Does Putin Want?
4. What Taiwan can and can't learn from Ukraine
5. D.C. Ambush Exposes Risks for National Guard on Capital’s Crime Patrols
6. Normalising disinformation: China shifts to overt operations against Japan
7. China and Japan share blame for crisis, but not equally
8. Opinion | Ukraine Corruption and U.S. Interests
9. Make Money Not War: Trump’s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine
10. Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all
11. Russia says leak of Witkoff call recording is unacceptable, amounts to hybrid warfare
12. Zelensky’s Top Aide Resigns as Corruption Probe Deepens
13. Rubio Expected To Skip NATO Talks Next Week: Sources
14. Trump Pauses All Asylum Applications and Halts Visas for Afghans
15. Counterterrorism officials vetted Guard shooting suspect before he entered U.S.
16. Taiwan names US-educated official new vice defence minister as part of reform push
1. Codifying Irregular Warfare—Inside the Pentagon’s new DoD Instruction 3000.07
The 45 minute discussion is at the link below.
MAJ Ben Jebb of West Point/IWI hosts Jonathan Schroden, Mick Crnkovich and me for a pretty thorough discussion of the new IW policy in DODI 3000.07.
https://irregularwarfare.podbean.com/e/codifying-irregular-warfare%e2%80%94inside-the-pentagon-s-new-dod-instruction-300007/
Codifying Irregular Warfare—Inside the Pentagon’s new DoD Instruction 3000.07
Episode 142 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast features Dr. Jonathan Schroden, Mick Crnkovich, and Dave Maxwell for a deep dive into the Pentagon’s new irregular warfare policy instruction—DoD Instruction 3000.07—and what it signals about how the U.S. military understands, organizes for, and competes in irregular conflict.
The discussion opens with why the Department of Defense updated its irregular warfare guidance after two decades of counterterrorism operations and amid renewed strategic competition with state adversaries. The guests explain how the new instruction reflects a shift away from a terrorism-centric framework toward recognizing irregular warfare as a persistent and central feature of great power competition.
The panel then turns to the most contested element of the policy: the definition of irregular warfare itself. Jon, Mick, and Dave debate whether IW should be understood as a method of warfare, a theory of victory, or a distinct form of competition—arguing that while the definition matters, the real test will be whether the joint force changes how it plans, trains, and operates.
The episode closes with a hard look at whether DoDI 3000.07 will translate into meaningful institutional change. The guests assess persistent obstacles to operationalizing IW—including force design, resourcing, and planning culture—and emphasize that success will depend on leadership more than policy language. Influence, not firepower, they argue, will be the most decisive component of competition in today’s security environment.
2. Maria Ressa at UNGA 80th anniv: 'Information integrity is the mother of all battles'
Comment: I should have sent this out sooner. You can watch Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa give her speech at the UN General Assembly here. She is a powerful leader and speaker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cll7gqE3Tlg
You can read the transcript of her remarks below.
We must heed this powerful conclusion. accept the call to action.
Conclusion
Information integrity is the mother of all battles. Win this, and we can win the rest. Lose this, and we lose everything.
Please choose courage over comfort, facts over fiction, hope over fear.
A lot has changed since the UN was created 80 years ago, but its values – peace, human rights, justice, rule of law – are more essential today than ever.
It’s time to create again: to build better. Together.
And ACT. NOW.
Before it’s too late.
Thank you.
Maria Ressa at UNGA 80th anniv: 'Information integrity is the mother of all battles'
rappler.com · Bea Cupin · September 23, 2025
https://www.rappler.com/world/global-affairs/video-maria-ressa-speech-united-nations-general-assembly-2025/
MANILA, Philippines – In a hall full of top officials and diplomats from all around the world, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Rappler co-founder Maria Ressa called on the United Nations to win the battle for information integrity.
“Information integrity is the mother of all battles. Win this, and we can win the rest. Lose this, and we lose everything,” said Ressa.
“Please choose courage over comfort, facts over fiction, hope over fear. A lot has changed since the UN was created 80 years ago, but its values – peace, human rights, justice, rule of law – are more essential today than ever. It’s time to create again: to build better,” she added.
The United Nations celebrates the 80th year of its existence at a tumultuous time.
“The biggest battle we face today is impunity – and it leads to our dehumanization: in both the physical world, where wars rage from Ukraine to Gaza; and in the virtual world, where our minds and emotions are manipulated by surveillance capitalism for profit. To fight that, we need information integrity,” said Ressa.
Ressa is one of five speakers — alongside Secretary-General António Guterres, President of General Assembly Annalena Baerbock, former Liberia president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and former World Health Organization (WHO) director-general of the Gro H. Brundtland — to have addressed the commemoration of the multilateral body’s anniversary.
Read the transcript of Ressa’s speech here:
President Baerbock, Secretary-General Guterres, distinguished delegates, 80 years ago, this institution was born to prevent humanity from destroying itself. Its promise: “Never again” – after fascism manipulated information, eroded truth, and dehumanized entire populations to enable genocide and global war.
Today, we stand on the rubble of the world that was and the challenge is to rebuild the United Nations for now, for this moment … when similar forces that led to those atrocities 80 years ago are now surging through digital platforms, insidiously manipulating us for power and profit.
The Crisis of Impunity
The biggest battle we face today is impunity – and it leads to our dehumanization: in both the physical world, where wars rage from Ukraine to Gaza; and in the virtual world, where our minds and emotions are manipulated by surveillance capitalism for profit.
To fight that, we need information integrity.
I became a journalist because information is power, but news groups lost our gatekeeping powers when an atom bomb exploded in our information ecosystem – a technological one that’s silently destroying the very foundations the UN was built to protect.
This is the deadliest period for journalists in recorded history: more than 240 journalists killed in Gaza alone – more than died in World War I, World War II, Vietnam, and the former Yugoslavia combined. This is unprecedented. Journalists are being targeted and killed. There must be accountability.
We’re living through an information armageddon where lies spread six times faster than facts on social media. That’s a 2018 MIT study. It’s so much worse today with generative AI.
Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without these three, we have no shared reality. We can’t begin to solve any problem, let alone existential ones like climate change. We can’t have journalism or electoral integrity. And democracy dies.
This is manipulation of human behavior at the cellular levels of our democracies. Algorithms reward outrage over empathy, spreading fear, anger & hate, pumping us full of toxic sludge.
Regulating technology isn’t a free speech issue – it’s about public safety. Because as has been proven time and again: online violence is real-world violence.
From the Trenches
As a Filipino, I’m proud that my country was a Charter member of the United Nations – one of only three Asian founding nations. Our commitment to multilateralism and peace runs deep. But that legacy was tested under the Duterte administration, which filed eleven criminal charges against me in fourteen months. Until today, I still need Supreme Court permission to travel.
But … I’m here! And Duterte? He was arrested in March for alleged crimes against humanity, and is detained at the Hague, waiting for trial. Impunity ends.
The rule of law – championed now by the Philippines as it chairs the 6th Committee on legal questions—ultimately prevailed.
The Global Reality
The trends are clear: we are electing illiberal leaders democratically. As of March this year, V-Dem said that 72% of the world is now under authoritarian rule.
So we turn to the UN, which isn’t moving fast enough. Security Council votes paralyze action on major crises. Outdated representation excludes rising powers. Bureaucratic processes respond too slowly to urgent threats. But the solution isn’t to abandon multilateralism – it’s to strengthen it by addressing the very impunity that undermines international law.
Three Solutions
At a time of creative destruction, it’s time to create. Here are three solutions.
First: End Big Tech impunity through global accountability. We need binding international standards for information integrity, just as we have for nuclear weapons and climate change. Here are two new initiatives: first from the Vatican, created last weekend with His Holiness Pope Leo XIV – a declaration demanding artificial intelligence remain under human control with clear accountability mechanisms. Second: a Global Call for AI Red Lines, which more than 200 of us will launch later today. We urge governments to establish clear international boundaries to prevent universally unacceptable risks from AI – at the very least, defining what AI should never be allowed to do.
Second: Build alternative infrastructure for trust. It isn’t just Big Tech that failed to protect the public in the virtual world; it’s also governments. At Rappler, we built a chat app using open-source protocols that allow real people to communicate without manipulation. The vision is a global federation of trusted news organizations. This is how journalism survives – and how we build our infrastructure for truth.
Third: Create and invest in comprehensive solutions. Here are 3 examples: more than three-quarters of UN members now recognize Palestinian statehood, showing international law can advance despite impunity. On gender – the Nobel Women’s Initiative demonstrates that in nearly every conflict around the world, women are leading efforts for peace – defying displacement, patriarchy, gender apartheid, and militarized violence every day. And finally, on Wednesday, 20 nations will pledge to strengthen democratic institutions and fight for information integrity. More than 40 of us Nobel laureates support this multilateral initiative led by the global south.
Conclusion
Information integrity is the mother of all battles. Win this, and we can win the rest. Lose this, and we lose everything.
Please choose courage over comfort, facts over fiction, hope over fear.
A lot has changed since the UN was created 80 years ago, but its values – peace, human rights, justice, rule of law – are more essential today than ever.
It’s time to create again: to build better. Together.
And ACT. NOW.
Before it’s too late.
Thank you.
– Rappler.com
rappler.com · Bea Cupin · September 23, 2025
3. New Peace Push Offers Clues to Fundamental Question: What Does Putin Want?
Summary:
Putin treats the 28-point plan as a tool to codify Ukrainian defeat, not end the war. He seeks more than Donbas: a neutered, non-NATO, “neutral” Ukraine with a capped military, no foreign troops, restored Russian cultural-religious influence, and de facto loss of sovereignty. His end-state resembles integration of Ukraine into a Russian sphere of influence, validated in a U.S.-Russia bargain over European heads. Battlefield momentum will drive his price higher. Any settlement that trades territory and constraints on Ukraine’s forces for a pause in fighting is likely only an operational pause before renewed aggression. Deterrence, sustained support, and alliance unity remain decisive.
Comment: Is there an acceptable durable political arrangement and security order that can satisfy Russia, Ukraine, NATO, and the US?
New Peace Push Offers Clues to Fundamental Question: What Does Putin Want?
WSJ
Russia’s leader wants far more than just the conquest of eastern Ukraine
By Matthew Luxmoore
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Nov. 28, 2025 3:36 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/new-peace-push-offers-clues-to-fundamental-question-what-does-putin-want-649df63d
Russian President Vladimir Putin Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Associated Press
- A 28-point peace plan, revised after U.S. and European officials met, aims to limit Ukraine’s military and block its NATO membership bid.
- President Putin said fighting will cease only when Ukrainian troops withdraw from eastern territories.
- Putin’s longstanding views suggest he seeks to deprive Ukraine of sovereignty and restore Moscow’s influence, viewing Ukraine as part of Russia.
An artificial-intelligence tool created this summary, which was based on the text of the article and checked by an editor. Read more about how we use artificial intelligence in our journalism.
- A 28-point peace plan, revised after U.S. and European officials met, aims to limit Ukraine’s military and block its NATO membership bid.
A 28-point plan and President Vladimir Putin’s response to it have offered some of the best clues yet to a fundamental question bedeviling peace talks: What does the Russian leader want?
The plan, which has been revised since it was leaked last week, drew pushback from Ukraine and its supporters in Congress and Europe for hewing to Moscow’s uncompromising vision for a postwar settlement. Still, Putin has shown little interest in signing it.
On Thursday, he described the proposal as a list of questions—each one requiring hard work to resolve—and he made one of his most explicit demands yet for the territory that has been at the center of negotiations.
“When Ukrainian troops leave the territories they hold, then the fighting will stop,” Putin said. “If they don’t, then we’ll achieve that through military means.”
Ukraine has vowed to never cede territory to Russia. But the problem for Ukraine and many of its Western backers is that Russia’s stated goals extend far beyond conquering eastern Ukraine—an impression that was only reinforced by elements of the 28-point plan.
Putin’s statements suggest that ultimately the Russian leader wants to deprive Ukraine of its sovereignty, restore Moscow’s influence over Kyiv and roll back the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s encroachment into a region that Russia sees as its sphere of influence. That would mean any agreement that doesn’t satisfy Putin’s core objectives would likely be a prelude to a new invasion aimed at securing them.
“Anything that prevents a future war is unacceptable for Putin,” said Russian economist Konstantin Sonin, a professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. “There is no future for Russia which does not involve continuing to fight for Ukraine until Ukraine is fully integrated into Russia.”
A Ukrainian antiaircraft machine-gunner readies for a patrol against Russian drones in Dnipro Oblast in eastern Ukraine. Manu Brabo for WSJ
The 28-point plan was revised this week after senior Trump administration officials met with Ukrainian and European officials in Geneva. White House special envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to travel to Moscow next week for another round of negotiations.
Witkoff drafted the plan with input from Kremlin confidant Kirill Dmitriev. A transcript of a call published by Bloomberg News this week showed Witkoff advised a top Kremlin aide, Yuri Ushakov, on how Putin should approach a conversation with Trump.
In the call, Witkoff suggested to Ushakov that territory in eastern Ukraine might be the key to unlocking a peace deal. “Me to you, I know what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done. Donetsk and maybe a land swap somewhere,” he said.
The plan Witkoff drafted called for limiting the size of Ukraine’s military, blocking its path to joining NATO and prohibiting the alliance’s troops from stepping foot on Kyiv’s territory. But Putin’s own words indicate Moscow is interested in much more.
Putin has often referred to the “root causes” of the conflict. He invokes centurieslong historical grievances to justify the invasion and advance claims that any moves by Kyiv toward the West are a historical aberration.
President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met for a summit in Alaska in August. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Associated Press
In essays and speeches throughout his quarter-century rule, Putin has described modern Ukraine as an artificial construct created by early Soviet leaders and said Ukrainians and Russians are one people. In an essay he published in July 2021, which was made mandatory reading for all Russian soldiers and is now seen as the prelude to his invasion of Ukraine the following year, he lamented Ukraine’s drift away from Russia and promised to reverse it.
“The formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive toward Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us,” he wrote.
Putin describes Ukraine as part of a single “historical and spiritual space” with Russia. In a February 2022 speech announcing the invasion, he said Ukraine had been hijacked by hostile forces intent on wiping out the Russian speakers living in its eastern provinces. He singled out the diminishing influence of the Russian-backed Orthodox Church in Ukraine.
The 28-point plan would oblige Ukraine to adopt rules on the protection of linguistic minorities and religious tolerance, a clear nod to Putin’s complaints. It would also compel Kyiv to roll back many restrictions placed on the use of Russian in public spaces.
Prominent Russian figures have helped broadcast Putin’s narrative, among them Alexander Dugin, whom some call “Putin’s brain” because he long promoted ideas Putin ultimately adopted.
In a recent post on Telegram, Dugin described work under way for “mass treatment and psychological rehabilitation” of Ukrainians. “Ukraine will be entirely ours within at most two years—quite possibly much sooner,” Dugin wrote on Telegram on Sunday. “There will no longer be even the slightest trace of sovereignty there, since Ukrainians are absolutely incapable of using it.”
A draft treaty the Kremlin drew up with Ukrainian officials in Istanbul in the spring of 2022, which was ultimately not agreed upon, provided a clue to the concessions Russia might try to force from Ukraine if Western military support dries up and Moscow’s forces continue to make significant territorial gains.
That draft treaty, which Putin has cited as a starting point for talks, included a ban on heavy weaponry for Ukraine and would render it a “permanently neutral state that doesn’t participate in military blocs.” It capped its armed forces at 85,000 troops, less than 10% of its current strength, and set limits on its long-range weapons. The newly modified U.S. initiative caps the military at 800,000 and includes no restriction on missiles.
There are provisions in the U.S.-backed proposal—such as ceding all of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine and assurances that Ukraine won’t host foreign troops on its soil—that could make the deal palatable to Putin.
A damaged building in Kramatorsk, in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, on Wednesday. Anatolii Stepanov/Reuters
Putin is signaling that if Russia’s battlefield advance continues, he won’t need to win Ukrainian-held territory through diplomacy because his forces will eventually seize it. His generals have been inflating their successes on the battlefield in Ukraine’s east, where they now appear poised to take two large cities. Armed-forces chief Valery Gerasimov told Putin during a meeting with top officers last week that Russia is advancing across all fronts and has seized the city of Kupyansk, even though Ukraine still partially controls it.
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“If the developments we witnessed in Kupyansk unfold in other areas, the collapse of the front will be inevitable,” Putin said in comments about the U.S. peace plan on Thursday, arguing that Ukraine and Europe were hobbling the efforts.
Western officials say more than 250,000 Russian soldiers have died fighting in Ukraine, but generous army salaries and a pervasive narrative of sacrifice have blunted the societal impact of those losses.
Ultimately, analysts say, Putin is hoping to clinch a grand geopolitical bargain that secures his control over Ukraine—dealing with the U.S. over the heads of European and Ukrainian officials. Sergey Radchenko, a Russian historian and professor of history at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, compares the current moment with the post-World War II period when Joseph Stalin, in Yalta, sought U.S. agreement to divide Europe into spheres of influence.
“If you think of the future of Ukraine as being decided effectively by the United States and Russia, bypassing the Europeans, you can see the outlines of Yalta in that,” Radchenko said.
Write to Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com
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WSJ
4. What Taiwan can and can't learn from Ukraine
Summary:
Ukraine shows Taiwan a war of rapid adaptation, drones, and long-range strikes where unmanned systems extend, not replace, soldiers and logistics. Yet Taiwan cannot rely on Ukraine-style resupply and faces a stronger, less isolatable China. Its best course is asymmetric “porcupine” defenses, resilient training, and adaptive leadership to raise invasion costs.
Excerpt:
But there is one constant in war: Technology changes. People do not.
What Taiwan can and can't learn from Ukraine
Washington Examiner · November 28, 2025
By Sean Durns
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/beltway-confidential/3898727/what-taiwan-can-learn-from-ukraine/
In some ways, the war in Ukraine resembles World War I. The latter was infamous for its static front lines, trench warfare, and the use of new battlefield weapons, from airplanes to mustard gas to advancements in artillery and small arms. It took time for many of the powers to adapt their 19th-century tactics to the new, and more monstrous, terrain of the 20th.
At war’s end, both winners and losers sought to imbibe its lessons. Some, notably France with its Maginot Line fortifications, learned all of the wrong ones. Many expected the next war to also be primarily static. Others recognized that new technologies would allow for wars of maneuver and offense. Militarily, World War II bore scant resemblance to its predecessor. Those who clung to old tactics and outdated technologies paid a heavy price.
The war in Ukraine has been marked by constant evolution. In a recent report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mick Ryan, a retired major general in the Australian army, offered some takeaways from the conflict. One inescapable conclusion: Warfare by drone and other unmanned aerial vehicles is here, and it is here to stay. Both sides have attempted to adapt, with varying levels of success. Yet, as Ryan observes, “Ukraine is not a drone war, it is a war where drones have gained prominence. … Drones do not replace human capacity — they extend it.” Drones are not replacing soldiers on the ground, nor are they a substitute for war’s other basic commodities: artillery, tanks, logisticians, infantry, and engineers.
Long-range strike operations and advanced targeting are also hallmarks. Still, future success will depend on investments in training and technology and, most importantly, adaptive leadership. More than any single thing, rapid adaptation has been the cornerstone of the war. But some factors, such as Russia’s significant manpower advantage, can’t be easily overcome.
Taiwan will face many of the same challenges. China has significant advantages industrially, militarily, and economically. To be sure, an amphibious invasion is not easy to pull off. And a blockade would be risky. But as the “factory of the world,” Beijing will be much harder than Moscow to isolate economically and diplomatically. China will have leverage over Taiwan’s allies that Russia simply does not possess. Ukraine has also benefited from lines of resupply that Taiwan cannot call upon. Should China invade Taiwan, resupplying the island will be extremely difficult.
WHY ISN’T TRUMP TAKING ON MEXICO’S CJNG CARTEL?
In all likelihood, Taiwan will have to utilize what it has at the war’s onset. Taiwan’s best bet is to focus on asymmetrical warfare, turning the island into a “porcupine,” and making an invasion costly enough to shore up deterrence. Some lessons, such as small-unit tactics and UAVs, will be useful. Others, such as long-range targeting, probably less so.
But there is one constant in war: Technology changes. People do not.
The writer is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.
Washington Examiner · November 28, 2025
5. D.C. Ambush Exposes Risks for National Guard on Capital’s Crime Patrols
Summary:
The ambush that killed West Virginia Guardsman Spc. Sarah Beckstrom and critically wounded another exposes the risks of POTUS-directed National Guard presence patrols in D.C. Despite a federal judge ruling the deployment unlawful (order stayed), POTUS is adding 500 troops to an open-ended, non law enforcement mission under Posse Comitatus. Rules of engagement and force protection have already escalated from unarmed patrols to Green Status, yet troops remain soft targets whose patrols now require police escorts. The operation’s claimed crime-reduction benefits are contested, while political fallout over the Afghan shooter, migration rhetoric, and plans for nationwide quick reaction forces signal growing mission creep.
Excerpts:
Wednesday’s shooting has already punctured the normalcy of seeing groups of Guard members moving along the city streets. The troops are now patrolling the capital in larger groups and will be accompanied by police from the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, according to a person familiar with the security arrangement.
Trump officials say that by maintaining a presence at Metro stations and public areas like Farragut Square, Guard members make it easier for Washington’s police to concentrate on more crime-prone areas. But the new arrangements mean that Guard patrols themselves would require police protection, soaking up resources.
Comment: Seems to defeat the purpose if we have to have police accompany the NG troops.
D.C. Ambush Exposes Risks for National Guard on Capital’s Crime Patrols
A fatal attack on a routine patrol has intensified questions over the administration’s open-ended military deployments in American cities
WSJ
By Michael R. Gordon
Follow and Vera Bergengruen
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Nov. 29, 2025 5:00 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/d-c-ambush-exposes-risks-for-national-guard-on-capitals-crime-patrols-306289a6
- President Trump vowed to send 500 more troops to Washington, D.C., after a shooting killed one National Guard member and critically injured another.
- The attack has raised fresh questions about the need for the open-ended mission the National Guard has been asked to perform.
- A federal judge ruled the National Guard deployment unlawful, but the administration is adding reinforcements while the court debate continues.
An artificial-intelligence tool created this summary, which was based on the text of the article and checked by an editor. Read more about how we use artificial intelligence in our journalism.
- President Trump vowed to send 500 more troops to Washington, D.C., after a shooting killed one National Guard member and critically injured another.
Soon after a gunman shot two National Guard members in downtown Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, President Trump vowed to send 500 more troops to the capital.
“We will not be deterred from the mission these servicemembers were so nobly fulfilling,” Trump said.
The attack left 20-year-old West Virginia National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom dead, and another in critical condition. It also exposed the growing security risks for the more than 2,200 troops deployed to the nation’s capital since mid-August under what the president has described as a “crime emergency.”
The ambush has also raised fresh questions about the need for the open-ended mission the National Guard has been asked to perform: placing highly visible troops on the streets to carry out “presence patrols,” discourage crime and even undertake routine beautification tasks.
The Pentagon says crime across the district decreased 40% compared with the same period last year, including carjackings, robberies and violent crime. Trump has called the operation “the most successful public safety and national security mission in the history of our nation’s capital,” and earlier this week he said, “We haven’t had a murder in six months.” Data from the local police shows at least two dozen homicides since the Guard was deployed to the city.
While administration officials say the National Guard is helping to deter crime, others say that sending hundreds of additional Guard members, who have no authority to carry out law enforcement, will merely expand the number of personnel that could be exposed to future attacks.
Members of the South Carolina National Guard at a Metro station in August. jose luis gonzalez/Reuters
Wednesday’s shooting has already punctured the normalcy of seeing groups of Guard members moving along the city streets. The troops are now patrolling the capital in larger groups and will be accompanied by police from the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, according to a person familiar with the security arrangement.
Trump officials say that by maintaining a presence at Metro stations and public areas like Farragut Square, Guard members make it easier for Washington’s police to concentrate on more crime-prone areas. But the new arrangements mean that Guard patrols themselves would require police protection, soaking up resources.
Even so, the Guard insists it isn’t changing its mission.
“Going forward we remain committed to keeping the capital safe. The mission does not change,” Brig. Gen. Leland D. Blanchard II, the commanding general of the District of Columbia National Guard, said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal.
“Obviously, there’s a new threat, and we’re implementing risk-mitigation measures, like increasing the size of presence patrol teams,” Blanchard added. “The additional Guardsmen will arrive over the next few weeks, and we will ensure they are prepared to continue making a positive impact here.”
Even with new force-protection measures, some former National Guard officials warn that sending additional troops to D.C. could fuel tensions in the city over their role.
“The military is not and should not be trained for law enforcement,” said retired Army Maj. Gen. Randy Manner, a former senior Guard commander who has been critical of the National Guard deployments. “The solution is to move military forces out of the cities, which they should not be in to begin with, and to enhance law-enforcement capabilities to help local communities achieve increased safety.”
While the Guard won’t discuss its rules of engagement, its preparedness to use force has changed during its deployment. Troops were initially unarmed when they were sent to Washington and also weren’t permitted to have weapons in their vehicles. “Weapons are available if needed but will remain in the armory,” the U.S. Army said a few days into the deployment.
The Guard’s posture then shifted to “Green Status,” meaning they carried unloaded weapons but had ammunition with them. That appears to have been the status many Guard members were observing before the Wednesday shooting.
The next level up is “Amber Status” in which ammunition is loaded in the weapon but not in the firing chamber. “Red Status” means the gun is ready to be fired.
Personnel gather near where National Guard soldiers were shot in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. drew angerer/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Community members at a vigil for West Virginia National Guard Spc. Sarah Beckstrom on Thursday in Webster Springs, W.Va. Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
iPhone photos obtained by the Journal appear to show a Guard member running away from the scene of the shooting as he readied his weapon so it could be fired. That Guard member quickly returned and unleashed a volley of shots at the assailant, according to the photos.
D.C. federal prosecutors said Friday they plan to charge Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who came to the U.S. in 2021 following the U.S. withdrawal from Kabul, with first-degree murder. Trump has blamed former President Joe Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome program for the shooting, although Lakanwal was granted asylum in April, during Trump’s second term.
The president has responded by calling for a suspension of migration from “Third World countries.”
Since arriving in the nation’s capital in August, National Guard troops have become a fixture in Washington’s high-traffic areas, tourist spots and popular restaurant hubs. They have taken photos with visiting families on the National Mall, gathered outside metro stations during rush hour, and walked downtown streets in two- or three-troop clusters.
The National Guard troops are barred from carrying out police duties under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which precludes the military from carrying out domestic law enforcement. Nor are they needed to protect the White House, Pentagon, State Department or Congress, which have their own security forces.
Instead, National Guard members have largely served as a “visible presence” in public areas as part of a larger effort to deter crime, according to Defense officials.
Members of the National Guard posed for photographs with tourists near the Washington Monument in August. Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
The Guard says its troops have been called on to attend to drug-overdose cases, escort anxious citizens to Metro stops, tamp down sidewalk altercations and, once, help an elderly citizen who fell off his bicycle. As their deployment has stretched on, National Guard units have been given beautification missions: removing debris, painting fences and curbs, trimming foliage, picking up trash and spreading mulch—tasks dutifully logged and publicized in the task force’s daily roundups.
There have been a handful of incidents of protest or harassment by locals, including one where a man who followed troops playing the “Imperial March” from “Star Wars” as he filmed their patrols, and another where onlookers shouted, “Traitors, go home!” But many of the capital’s workers and residents have been welcoming or indifferent to the troops.
Neither the White House nor the Guard has stated when their mission would be complete or what criteria need to be met to declare it over.
A federal judge has already ruled the deployment unlawful, finding that the administration overstepped its authority, but stayed her order for 21 days to give officials time to appeal. The reinforcements are being added even as the courts debate whether it should be allowed to continue.
The deployment will continue “until the President determines that conditions of law and order have been restored in the District of Columbia,” Trump wrote in an August executive order.
President Trump on a call with servicemembers from his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Fla., on Thursday. jim watson/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
There are signs the Trump administration is contemplating a more expansive use of the Guard. In October, the Pentagon ordered all states to prepare “quick reaction forces” to be trained and equipped to respond to riots and civil unrest.
As many as 500 National Guard soldiers in each state or territory will be assigned to deploy in the U.S. on short notice and receive nonlethal training in crowd control, handling of detainees and use of batons, stun guns and body shields, according to Pentagon directives viewed by the Journal.
The two West Virginia National Guard members who were shot were part of roughly 160 who had “volunteered to remain in Washington, D.C.,” as Gov. Patrick Morrisey extended the mission until Dec. 31. He described them as having “voluntarily stepped up and risked everything.”
The killing of Beckstrom “is a tragedy that should never have occurred,” said Gary Goodweather, a Democratic candidate in next year’s D.C. mayoral elections and a former U.S. Army captain who served in the National Guard and has opposed its deployment in Washington. “We cannot confuse community policing with military deployment.”
Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@wsj.com
WSJ
6. Normalising disinformation: China shifts to overt operations against Japan
Summary:
China is shifting from covert influence networks to overt, state-linked disinformation campaigns targeting Japan’s role as a key Indo-Pacific security partner. Embassies and state media now push historically framed narratives that portray Japan as remilitarizing and destabilizing, while casting China as peace loving. These campaigns focus on sensitive audiences such as the Philippines and Pacific Islands, exploiting World War II memory and current defense cooperation to isolate partners from Japan and the United States. Overt channels carry greater perceived legitimacy and reach, making disinformation more visible yet harder to counter, and demanding proactive, transparent strategic communications from Japan and its allies.
Comment: Full spectrum disinformation: covert and overt. I am sure the shift to over is additive and does not replace the covert which of course is designed so we do not see it.
Normalising disinformation: China shifts to overt operations against Japan | The Strategist
aspistrategist.org.au · ASPI staff
28 Nov 2025|ASPI staff and Japan Nexus Intelligence
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/normalising-disinformation-china-shifts-to-overt-operations-against-japan/
Chinese state media and diplomatic social media accounts intensified efforts to erode Japan’s standing as an Indo-Pacific defence and security partner in 2025, research by Japan Nexus Intelligence and ASPI shows. Whereas earlier campaigns relied heavily on covert, coordinated and inauthentic networks, the latest findings reveal a shifting threat: Beijing is increasingly using overt, state-linked channels to push destabilising messaging into the regional information environment.
This shift serves several purposes. Overt messaging allows China to project its narratives with greater scale, legitimacy and weight, especially when targeting governments, local elites and media ecosystems in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. It also carries lower operational risk than covert influence campaigns. While covert networks remain active, their exposure by researchers and platforms’ takedown efforts have diminished their operational credibility.
In contrast, official diplomatic and state-media channels benefit from greater legitimacy and can reach larger audiences with fewer barriers, spreading their narratives further and more convincingly.
Indeed, the European Union’s 2023 report on foreign information manipulation and interference found the use of formal diplomatic channels to be the most common content distribution technique. The 2025 EU report noted that Beijing had used social media accounts to increase the reach of Chinese state media.
The latest example of this was a campaign to undermine Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi after she said that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could compel Japan to respond militarily. As part of this campaign, on 19 November the Chinese embassy in Australia posted four videos on X criticising Japan and Takaichi.
The transition from covert to overt operations also signals growing confidence. Pushing narratives through embassies, ambassadors and state media tends to normalise disinformation as an accepted part of diplomatic engagement. It also positions China’s messaging as a direct counter to the influence of Japan, the United States and other regional partners.
For Indo-Pacific governments, the nature of the threat is therefore changing. They now need to contest Chinese narratives which are delivered through official state channels and which blend propaganda and selective framings of history and geopolitics. These overt efforts can be more persuasive because of their apparent authority and amplification through formal diplomatic channels and because of their targeting of specific national sensitivities. The result is an information environment in which malign influence becomes more visible but also more complicated to rebut.
As Beijing asserts itself across the region, it is seeking to weaken relationships that counterbalance its influence. Japan is particularly targeted because it is a US ally, a vocal supporter of Taiwan and the Philippines, and an increasingly active development and security partner in the Pacific.
Throughout 2025, Chinese state-affiliated outlets seeded narratives criticising Japan, which were shared on X by diplomatic channels to audiences across Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
China’s major narrative centred on the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, exploiting Japan’s wartime history to undermine its contemporary role. This underpinned recurring claims that Japan’s defence partnerships had undermined regional peace and that Tokyo was remilitarising the Indo-Pacific.
The Philippines and Fiji were prominent target audiences of these efforts. Chinese propaganda is active in the Philippines as part of Beijing’s campaign against Manila in the South China Sea. In this case, the campaign aimed to isolate the Philippines by framing its partnerships with countries such as Japan as provocative and destabilising. China has also targeted Fiji, a diplomatic hub, using social media to muddy the information environment and promote China’s local influence.
The WWII anniversary provided a focal point for these campaigns. Between January and October, references to ‘the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War’ surged to about 780,100 on X and in news coverage—up from around 16,800 in 2024—with a peak around China’s 3 September Victory Day parade.
Image: mentions of ‘the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War’ on X and in news coverage.
Chinese embassies in Fiji, the Philippines and Australia amplified articles by China Daily, Xinhua and People’s Daily Online respectively, criticising Japan’s historical conduct and portraying China as a peace-loving nation. Some pieces attempted to recast wartime history to align local narratives with Beijing’s, for example through references to the ‘joint resistance of Chinese, Australian peoples against Japanese aggression’. This tries to position China and partner countries on the same page against Japan.
In various X posts, the Chinese embassy in Manila referenced countries ‘in Asia that endured brutal occupation and aggression from Japan, such as China, the Philippines, and Southeast Asian countries’; said the ‘peoples of China and the Philippines, among other Asian nations, fought shoulder to shoulder against the Japanese aggressors during World War II’; and called on Japan to ‘face up to and reflect on its history of aggression’ in order to ‘earn the trust of its Asian neighbors’.
State media reinforced these themes, linking Japan’s contemporary defence activities to alleged historical aggression. When then prime minister Shigeru Ishiba met NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte in April, a foreign ministry spokesperson argued Japan should ‘draw profound lessons from history’. These comments were then cited in NetEase News.
An article in China Military Online described Japan’s release of its space defence guidelines as evidence of a renewed military adventurism, encouraged by Washington. This was linked to the anniversary of WWII, saying the world must remember the lessons of history, remain vigilant against hegemonism and militarism, and safeguard global peace by resisting such forces. Responses such as these are common from Chinese outlets and paint Japanese security engagement as militarisation, creating a juxtaposed image of China as a peace-loving country.
China also targeted bilateral and multilateral defence cooperation. After Australia chose a Japanese design for a frigate program in August, Chinese state-owned outlet Ifeng argued that Japan’s participation in the project reflected multiple strategic intentions. It said, ‘Japan aims to use this opportunity to build alliances, disrupt regional order and stability, and advance its own interests through a patchwork of military partnerships.’
Image: Ifeng article titled ‘Japan has secured its first export of large-scale finished weaponry!’
Similarly, on 29 July the Chinese embassy in Manila posted a statement from a Foreign Affairs Ministry press conference criticising Japan’s reported sale of elderly Abukuma-class destroyer escorts to the Philippines, accusing Manila of ‘colluding’ with extra-regional forces.
Such comments redefine the regional space to exclude extra-regional partners—usually the US but increasingly Japan—isolating countries such as the Philippines and reinforcing China’s position in the region.
In 2025, Japan conducted several joint military exercises, drawing Chinese criticism.
In response to Japan’s participation in exercise Talisman Sabre, conducted mainly in and around Australia, China Military Online said ‘it can be seen that Japan is enhancing its offensive military capabilities through regular participation in military exercises at home and abroad.’ The article argued that such activity undermined peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific and endangered the post-war international order.
Image: Chinese media article titled ‘Japan is actively participating in multinational joint military exercises’.
In an article responding to Bushido Guardian—a Japan-based exercise in which Japan, the US and Australia took part—China Military Online argued that the three countries had built a joint training framework focused on stealth fighter operations, signalling deterrence and offensive intent. So, it asserted, the exercise destabilised the region.
In August 2024, the Chinese embassy in the Philippines shared a Xinhua article denouncing the US and Japan ‘engaging in military activities alongside the Philippines’ in the South China Sea. The article specifically called out a ‘recent joint military exercise between Japan and the Philippines’, accusing Japan of ‘stirring up troubles and muddying the waters’.
And in July, the Chinese embassy in Australia posted a statement by a Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson criticising the US’s deployment of a Typhon medium-range missile system in Japan ‘under the pretext of joint military exercise’. The spokesperson claimed that ‘due to its history of militarist aggression, Japan’s military and security moves always draw close attention from its Asian neighbors’.
This approach reframes the Indo-Pacific security landscape to delegitimise contributions from countries such as Japan, while presenting China as the stabilising alternative.
In the Pacific, China used WWII comparisons to argue that Japan’s development assistance and defence engagement concealed militaristic ambition. Following Tokyo’s announcement of 60 billion yen in aid at the 2024 Pacific Islands Leaders Meeting, Chinese analysts claimed Japan’s actions would ‘not bring true security’ and would only trigger countermeasures. Similar lines appeared in Xinhua commentary on Japan-Pacific defence meetings, which accused Japan and the US of ‘militarising’ the region.
Image: CNR article titled ‘Spending 60 billion yen! Japan is desperately trying to win over South Pacific island nations’.
As China asserts its influence in the region, its efforts to delegitimise and isolate Indo-Pacific partners—including Japan—are likely to intensify and diversify. Covert networks will persist, but Beijing’s growing reliance on overt diplomatic and state-media channels means disinformation is increasingly delivered with official authority and tailored to local political sensitivities. This makes the threat more visible, but also more difficult to counter.
Western governments should anticipate renewed propaganda attacks on joint exercises, defence cooperation and development initiatives. This means that strategic communications highlighting the stabilising purpose of their engagement remain essential. Clear, proactive messaging—grounded in transparency, respect for regional agency and evidence of practical benefits—can help inoculate partners against China’s narratives and highlight the extent to which those narratives seek to erode, rather than enhance, regional stability.
This article is a product of a partnership between ASPI and Japan Nexus Intelligence addressing state-sponsored information operations and hybrid threats in the Indo-Pacific.
aspistrategist.org.au · ASPI staff
7. China and Japan share blame for crisis, but not equally
Summary:
The Taiwan crisis triggered by PM Takaichi’s remarks reflects shared but unequal blame. Takaichi pressed a known Beijing red line by openly tying Japan’s defense to a Taiwan contingency, breaking past ambiguity and feeding Chinese fears of remilitarization. Roy assigns about 20 percent of responsibility to Tokyo. Beijing’s calculated overreaction carries the greater blame, using trade, tourism, diplomatic humiliation, military probes and inflammatory rhetoric to punish Japan and warn others off Taiwan. The article traces this to CCP “pathologies” of selective victimhood and intolerance of dissent, which drive coercive external behavior even as they push Japan toward stronger defense ties.
Comment: 80/20? I think Denny Roy is being generous. I would make it 100% Xi and 0% Japan. The crisis would not occur if it were not for China's policies and hostile intent toward Taiwan.
China and Japan share blame for crisis, but not equally - Asia Times
Takaichi pressed the Taiwan hot button but Beijing deserves 80% of the blame, for reacting with calculated, over-the-top outrage
asiatimes.com · Denny Roy · November 26, 2025
https://asiatimes.com/2025/11/china-and-japan-share-blame-for-crisis-but-not-equally/
Amid the crisis between China and Japan over Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s November 7 statement about Taiwan, most observers are blaming one side or the other – either calling Beijing’s behavior “unprovoked” and “unhinged” or criticizing Takaichi as “reckless.”
Upon closer inspection, however, the situation is more nuanced. Both sides deserve a share of blame, although not equal shares.
It is reasonable for the Chinese to be sensitive about Takaichi. The Japanese invasion of China during the Pacific War killed millions of Chinese. Part of Japanese society downplays Japan’s wartime guilt, and Takaichi is heir to this tradition. She is a frequent visitor at the Yasukuni Shrine (which Chinese equate to worshipping Hitler), has criticized past Japanese government apologies for Japan’s war crimes and has denied that the “comfort women” were coerced.
However unrealistic, the PRC wishes to see the post-World War II restrictions on Japan’s military posture and capabilities last forever. China has worried for decades about Japanese remilitarization in general and about Japanese involvement in the defense of Taiwan in particular.
Takaichi’s ascension to the prime ministership reinforces both fears. She is relatively pro-Taiwan, and she favors a continuation of Japan’s military buildup, which has taken major recent substantive steps under the leadership of Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
Expecting the worst from a protégé of Shinzo Abe, Chinese observers were ready to pounce.
China’s government is, of course, selective in its outrage: making sure every PRC citizen knows about Japanese wartime atrocities, – but hiding past Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies that caused massive Chinese fatalities. Beijing has also done little to recognize Japan’s generous assistance to China’s postwar economic development, which was largely a program of war reparations by another name.
Takaichi did indeed push what Beijing considers a hot button. Recent Japanese governments have decided Japan could legally use military force, even if Japan itself was not under direct attack, if a nearby military conflict put Japan’s survival in danger.
Everyone knows this is a reference to a Taiwan scenario. Past prime ministers, however, left the Taiwan part unsaid. Former Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, like Takaichi a member of the LDP, said Takaichi’s predecessors knew that – because of the “delicate” nature of China-Japan relations – “What we should do in the event of a Taiwan emergency is not something we should discuss in the open.”
It is uncertain whether Takaichi intentionally set out to state more forthrightly that Japan could consider fighting in a Taiwan Strait war.
Her statement was part of a long exchange with former foreign minister and current opposition Diet member Katsuya Okada. Okada, whose brother runs a large number of retail stores in China and who is averse to Japanese intervention in a war over Taiwan, badgered Takaichi with repeated questions about specific scenarios that would qualify as “survival-threatening” and justify Japan using military force.
Okada asked her to comment on the example of a conflict over Taiwan. Takaichi eventually answered that she believed a Chinese attempt to annex Taiwan through “the use of warships and the use of force … would fall under a survival-threatening situation” for Japan.
Whether by design or out of inexperience or indifference, Takaichi did set a minor precedent. Call her 20 percent responsible for the current furor.
That leaves 80 percent for China, which has presented a calculated over-reaction to Takaichi’s statement.
Nothing cute and fuzzy about threatening to decapitate the Japanese prime minister: China’s wolf warrior Osaka Consul General Xue Jian. Photo: Sankei
Beijing’s outrage was multi-dimensional: In addition to China’s Consul-General in Osaka threatening in a social media post to behead Takaichi, the Chinese government also
- halted purchases of Japanese seafood exports,
- discouraged Chinese from going to Japan for tourism or education,
- attempted to publicly humiliate a Japanese envoy sent to defuse the crisis,
- dispatched Chinese Coast Guard vessels to sail near the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, snubbed Takaichi during the G20 meeting in South Africa,
- blasted messages across PRC media organs condemning Takaichi and
-
reiterated the periodic Chinese claim that Japan should not possess the Ryukyu islands.
It certainly appears the Chinese had a punishment plan already in place in case of some misstep by Takaichi’s government.
The content of the Chinese diplomatic counterattack is two-pronged: a demand that Takaichi “retract” her statement and a new attempt to tar Japan as a recrudescent militarist aggressor.
The “retraction” demand is reminiscent of 2016, when Beijing called on Taiwan’s new president Tsai Ing-wen to publicly state that Taiwan is part of China. When she did not, the PRC imposed a campaign of military pressure and harassment that continues to this day.
The Chinese government presumably knows Takaichi will not “retract” her mention of a theoretical Taiwan war scenario during a Diet question and answer session. This suggests Beijing is willing to write off a constructive relationship with Takaichi as an acceptable price for warning her successors – and other foreign leaders – never to set foot on the Taiwan issue again.
Beijing is harking back to World War II as if nothing had changed in the last 80 years. According to the Chinese government’s readout of the November 24 phone call between the US and PRC leaders, Xi Jinping emphasized that during the war “China and the US fought shoulder to shoulder against fascism and militarism.” (Yes, we were allies against Japan – but “China” at that time was the Republic of China, not the PRC.)
Xi tried to spin the PRC getting control over Taiwan as “an integral part of the post-war international order.” China’s ambassador to the United Nations wrote a letter to the secretary-general on November 21 arguing that since Japan was “a defeated country of World War II,” Japanese intervention in a Taiwan Strait war would be an “act of aggression.” Government-controlled Chinese media are warning of a “resurgence of Japanese militarism.”
The root of the problem is that the Chinese government wants the world to accommodate the PRC’s domestic pathologies, and the international community largely acquiesces because of China’s global economic and military heft.
Thus, China can capture control of and influence important global institutions such as UN agencies and the World Health Organization to pursue the CCP’s agenda. Corporations and businesspeople tremblingly comply with Beijing’s positions on political issues lest they lose access to China’s markets.
China gets away with expansionism, bullying and piracy in the South China Sea even in contravention of the Law of the Sea treaty, of which China is a signatory. Majority Muslim countries seeking Chinese investment keep their mouths shut about the treatment of Chinese Muslims.
And, most pertinent here, instead of upholding the principle of self-determination, the world honors the CCP’s claim to ownership over Taiwan, with most countries affirming some form of a one-China policy even though the Republic of China on Taiwan is by any reasonable definition an independent country.
One of China’s domestic pathologies is a victim mentality combined with a self-image as a historically peaceful country. This results in an inability of Chinese to see their own actions as threatening to neighboring countries.
China itself is generating pressure on Japan to strengthen and normalize the Japanese armed forces. China has massively bulked up its own military, challenges Japan’s claim to sovereignty over part of the East China Sea and the Ryukyu Islands and regularly sends naval and air patrols near the Japanese home islands while telling Tokyo to “get used to it.”
A second pathology is intolerance of both domestic and foreign opposition to Beijing’s narratives on important political issues. Failure to fight these dissenting views internationally would make it harder for the Chinese government to fight them at home. Hence the massive effort to “tell China’s story” worldwide, encompassing the Confucius Institutes, United Front work, the China Global Television Network, the thousands of pro-China accounts on social media platforms outside China and so on.
Hu Xijin, former editor of Global Times, called Takaichi an “evil witch” and Japan a “pirate [wokou] neighbor who has disgusted us for centuries.” But even Hu thinks Chinese official media are using overly “harsh” and “exaggerated” commentary that could “create unrealistic expectations” and “misguidance to Chinese society.”
Hu may mean either that the government shouldn’t make it too hard to return to normal relations with Japan or that the government is setting itself up for failure by unrealistically demanding capitulation from Japan.
China insists that Takaichi’s taking this small step toward strategic clarity will increase the chance of war. Alternatively, Japan’s move might bolster deterrence by decreasing China’s expectations of success in a cross-Strait war, thus making Beijing less likely to choose the military option. Either case could prompt China to raise a great hue and cry.
Denny Roy is a senior fellow, East-West Center, Honolulu.
asiatimes.com · Denny Roy · November 26, 2025
8. Opinion | Ukraine Corruption and U.S. Interests
Summary:
Ukraine’s scandals confirm corruption persists but also that Kyiv’s anti-graft bodies work, targeting senior officials and improving rankings. No evidence shows U.S. aid theft, which is heavily monitored. The editorial argues critics exaggerate Ukraine’s flaws as a pretext to cut support, while U.S. security interests require backing Kyiv against Russia.
Comment: The paradox: the more corruption is exposed the more it appears the anti-corruption apparatus appears to be working. This is what officials should be emphasizing. We must not overreact to the reports but surely the reports will be exploited by those conducting disinformation campaigns.
Opinion | Ukraine Corruption and U.S. Interests
WSJ
Kyiv’s critics see an excuse to abandon our strategic partner.
By The Editorial Board
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Nov. 28, 2025 5:38 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ukraine-corruption-and-u-s-interests-80d843d8?mod=hp_opin_pos_1
Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky POU/Zuma Press
Another corruption scandal is roiling Ukraine, and there’s no denying corruption exists there as it does in most of the former Soviet states. The question is whether this should override U.S. strategic interests in supporting Ukraine, especially if there are reasonable safeguards against the theft of U.S. assistance.
President Volodymr Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, resigned Friday after corruption authorities conducted a search at his home.. He said in a Telegram post he is cooperating with investigators, but his resignation comes as the Kremlin and Trump Administration are raising the pressure on Ukraine to cede territory to Russia. Mr. Yermak has been Ukraine’s toughest negotiator in peace talks, holding out against bad ideas.
Ukrainian authorities also issued notices of suspicion this month against senior officials and a former business partner of Mr. Zelensky. The case concerns an alleged $100 million scheme involving the state-owned nuclear power company Energoatom. Participants allegedly capitalized on a martial-law ban on lawsuits against important state entities by demanding kickbacks before contractors received payment for their work.
Yet a probe focused on senior officials is paradoxically a sign that Kyiv is getting better at fighting corruption. In 2024 Ukraine ranked 105 among 180 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, up from 144th in 2013. One reason is the creation of independent institutions such as an anticorruption prosecutor and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which investigates malfeasance involving top officials.
Mr. Zelensky made a bad mistake this summer when he signed legislation to hand control of these bodies to a presidential appointee. But Ukrainians protested until the government repealed the law and restored the anticorruption bodies’ independence. The protests show a cultural shift against tolerance for corruption. The Energoatom probe suggests that “despite very high pressure, Ukrainian anticorruption institutions work,” says Daria Kaleniuk of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, a Ukrainian nonprofit.
The Energoatom scheme allegedly drove up electricity prices as contractors tried to cover kickback costs. Russia continues to attack Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, and another question is whether the graft meant fewer defenses at some sites. In both scenarios Ukrainians are the victims—but there’s no suggestion that Western funds were embezzled.
Much of America’s $187 billion in Ukraine-related funding has been spent within the U.S., including for sanctions enforcement and to replenish U.S. stockpiles after weapons are transferred to Ukraine. Twenty-four federal oversight agencies are part of a working group that conducts audits, evaluations and investigations related to U.S. support for Ukraine. More than 50 oversight efforts are in the works this fiscal year.
U.S. criminal investigators based in Poland, Germany and Ukraine look into any “allegations of fraud, corruption and potential diversion of weapons and technology,” according to a recent Congressional report. As of this month the criminal investigative arm of the Defense Department Office of the Inspector General has reported no instances of corruption involving U.S. support for Ukraine.
***
The world is increasingly dangerous, and the unhappy truth is that the U.S. must work with allies that are far more unsavory than Ukraine. On his trip to Saudi Arabia this year, Mr. Trump told the Saudis he didn’t care how the House of Saud ruled the country. The President seems ready to propose more business deals with Russia, which everyone knows is one of the most corrupt countries on the planet.
Yet anti-Ukraine voices in Congress, the Administration and the pundit class cite Kyiv’s corruption as worthy of unique condemnation. They do so because they view it as one more excuse to abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin’s domination. If zero corruption is the standard for dealing with the world, the U.S. won’t have many, if any, friends. And, by the way, profiting from government power is hardly unknown in Washington these days.
Corruption deserves to be policed and punished. But U.S. support for Ukraine deserves to be judged by overall American interests, and the highest interest is national security.
America is struggling to build ships, missiles and drones, even as war rages in eastern Europe and tensions rise in Asia. Kate Odell speaks with analyst Seth Jones about his new book “The American Edge,” and how the U.S. can still meet the world's threats.
Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the November 29, 2025, print edition as 'Ukraine Corruption and U.S. Interests'.
WSJ
9. Make Money Not War: Trump’s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine
Summary:
Trump’s Ukraine peace push doubles as a business strategy. Envoy Steve Witkoff, working closely with Kirill Dmitriev and Jared Kushner, advances a 28 point plan that pairs territorial concessions and sanctions relief with vast U.S.–Russia commercial ventures, from frozen central bank assets to Arctic energy, rare earths and space projects. The effort sidelines traditional national security channels and attracts U.S. investors positioning for a post sanctions Russia. Supporters frame it as “make money, not war.” Critics, including European officials, see rewards for aggression and a Kremlin strategy to split the West while buying time for Putin to secure victory.
Comment: I will provide my usual refrain: Recognize Putin's strategy, understand it, expose it, and attack it with a superior political warfare strategy. Does factoring in corporate or business interests and opportunities help or hurt a necessary political warfare strategy to defeat Putin's war in Ukraine? Or do we not want to defeat Putin's aggression?
Make Money Not War: Trump’s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine
The Kremlin pitched the White House on peace through business. To Europe’s dismay, the president and his envoy are on board.
WSJ
By Drew Hinshaw
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Nov. 28, 2025 9:00 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-u-s-peace-business-ties-4db9b290?mod=hp_lead_pos7
Three powerful businessmen—two Americans and a Russian—hunched over a laptop in Miami Beach last month, ostensibly to draw up a plan to end Russia’s long and deadly war with Ukraine.
But the full scope of their project went much further, according to people familiar with the talks. They were privately charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold—with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends.
At his waterfront estate, billionaire developer-turned-special envoy Steve Witkoff was hosting Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and Vladimir Putin’s handpicked negotiator, who had largely shaped the document they were revising on the screen. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had arrived from his nearby home on an island known as the “Billionaire Bunker.”
Dmitriev was pushing a plan for U.S. companies to tap the roughly $300 billion of Russian central bank assets, frozen in Europe, for U.S.-Russian investment projects and a U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine. U.S. and Russian companies could join to exploit the vast mineral wealth in the Arctic. There were no limits to what two longtime adversaries could achieve, Dmitriev had argued for months: Their rival space industries, which raced one another during the Cold War, could even pursue a joint mission to Mars with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity, according to Western security officials. By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.
Dmitriev, a Goldman Sachs alumnus, had found receptive partners in Witkoff—Trump’s longtime golfing partner—and Kushner, whose investment fund, Affinity Partners, drew billion-dollar investments from the Arab monarchies whose conflict with Israel he had helped mediate.
The two businessmen shared President Trump’s long-held approach to geopolitics. If generations of diplomats viewed the post-Soviet challenges of Eastern Europe as a Gordian knot to be painstakingly unraveled, the president envisioned an easy fix: The borders matter less than the business. In the 1980s, he had offered to personally negotiate a swift end to the Cold War while building what he told Soviet diplomats would be a Trump Tower across the treet from the Kremlin, with their Communist regime as a business partner.
“Russia has so many vast resources, vast expanses of land,” Witkoff told The Wall Street Journal, describing at length his hopes that Russia, Ukraine and America would all become business partners. “If we do all that, and everybody’s prospering and they’re all a part of it, and there’s upside for everybody, that’s going to naturally be a bulwark against future conflicts there. Because everybody’s thriving.”
When a version of the 28-point plan leaked earlier this month, it drew immediate protests. Leaders in Europe and Ukraine complained it reflected mostly Russian talking points and bulldozed through nearly all of Kyiv’s red lines. They weren’t assuaged even after administration officials assured them that the plan wasn’t set in stone, worried that Russia—after violently redrawing European borders—was being rewarded with commercial opportunities.
Russian President Vladimir Putin leaves the podium during an ill-fated summit with President Trump in Alaska. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
As Western leaders convened this week to digest the plan, Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk offered a pithy summary: “We know this is not about peace. It’s about business.”
For many in the Trump White House, that blurring of business and geopolitics is a feature, not a bug. Key presidential advisers see an opportunity for American investors to snap up lucrative deals in a new postwar Russia and become the commercial guarantors of peace. In conversations with Witkoff and Kushner, Russia has been clear it would prefer U.S. businesses to step in, not rivals from European states whose leaders have “talked a lot of trash” about the peace effforts, one of these people said: “It’s Trump’s ‘Art of the Deal’ to say, ‘Look, I’m settling this thing and there’s huge economic benefits for doing that for America, right?’”
A question for history will be whether Putin entertained this approach in the interest of ending the war, or as a ploy to pacify the U.S. while prolonging a conflict he believes is his place in history to slowly, ineluctably win.
Gas bubbles from the sabotaged Nord Stream 2 pipeline near Bornholm, Denmark, in 2022. DANISH DEFENCE COMMAND/REUTERS
One sign that he may be serious is that some of his most-trusted friends, sanctioned billionaires from his St. Petersburg hometown—Gennady Timchenko, Yuri Kovalchuk and the Rotenberg brothers, Boris and Arkady—have sent representatives to quietly meet American companies to explore rare-earth mining and energy deals, according to people familiar with the meetings and European security officials. That includes reviving the giant Nord Stream pipeline, sabotaged by Ukrainian tactical divers, and under European Union sanctions.
Earlier this year, Exxon Mobil met with Russia’s biggest state energy company, Rosneft, to discuss returning to the massive Sakhalin gas project if Moscow and Washington gave the green light.
Elsewhere, a cast of businessmen close to the Trump administration have been looking to position themselves as new economic links between the U.S. and Russia.
Gentry Beach, a college friend of Donald Trump Jr. and campaign donor to his father, has been in talks to acquire a stake in a Russian Arctic gas project if it is released from sanctions. Another Trump donor, Stephen P. Lynch, paid $600,000 this year to a lobbyist close to Trump Jr. who is helping him seek a Treasury Department license to buy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from a Russian state-owned company.
There is no evidence that Witkoff, the White House or Kushner are briefed on these efforts or coordinating them. A person familiar with Witkoff’s thinking said the envoy is confident that any settlement with Russia would benefit America broadly, not just a handful of investors.
Witkoff, who hasn’t traveled to Ukraine this year, is set to visit Russia for the sixth time next week and will again meet Putin. He insisted he isn’t playing favorites. “Ukrainians have fought heroically for their independence,” said Witkoff, who has tried to inspire Ukrainian officials with the idea of soldiers disarming to earn Silicon Valley-scale salaries operating American built AI data centers. “It is now time to consolidate what they have achieved through diplomacy,” he said.
A Ukrainian house burns after being struck by Russian Army artillery in 2022. Manu Brabo for WSJ
A soldier prepares to send a Ukrainian drone into action earlier this year. Manu Brabo for WSJ
“The Trump administration has gathered input from both the Ukrainians and Russians to formulate a peace deal that can stop the killing and bring this war to a close,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly. “As the President said, his national security team has made great progress over the past week, and the agreement will continue to be fine-tuned following conversations with officials from both sides.”
An administration official said that Kushner and Witkoff also met with Ukraine’s national security adviser, Rustem Umerov, in Miami and spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The official said that while Trump has “done a lot of new, important things regarding economic incentives,” he and his team have also been focused on “geopolitical and military realities.”
As Witkoff pursued talks with Dmitriev over nine months, some agencies inside the Trump administration had a limited view of his dealings with Moscow.
In the lead-up to an August summit in Alaska between Trump and Putin, Witkoff and Dmitriev discussed a prisoner exchange that would have been the largest bilateral swap in their countries’ history. The Central Intelligence Agency, which traditionally manages prisoner trades with Russia, wasn’t fully briefed on that proposed exchange. Nor was the State Department’s office for unjustly imprisoned Americans. The CIA didn’t return requests for comment. The State Department referred questions to the White House.
Career officials in the office overseeing sanctions at the Treasury Department have at times learned details of Witkoff’s meetings with Moscow from their British counterparts.
In the days after Alaska, a European intelligence agency distributed a hard-copy report in a manila envelope to some of the continent’s most senior national security officials, who were shocked by the contents: Inside were details of the commercial and economic plans the Trump administration had been pursuing with Russia, including jointly mining rare earths in the Arctic.
Witkoff has worked closely with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, former Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, has been all but frozen out of serious talks, and last week said he is leaving the government.
To understand the story behind the administration’s Russia negotiations, The Wall Street Journal spoke to dozens of officials, diplomats, and former and current intelligence officers from the U.S., Russia and Europe, and American lobbyists and investors close to the administration.
The picture that emerges is a remarkable story of business leaders working outside the traditional lines of diplomacy to cement a peace agreement with business deals.
A visitor from Moscow
Witkoff was just weeks into his new job as President Trump’s Russia and Ukraine negotiator when his office asked the Treasury Department for help allowing a sanctioned Russian businessman to visit Washington.
Kirill Dmitriev, an investment banker with degrees from Harvard and Stanford, spoke Witkoff’s preferred language: business. He had invited Witkoff to Moscow in February and escorted him into a three-hour meeting with Putin to discuss the Ukraine war. But Dmitriev was persona non grata in the U.S, blocked by the Treasury in 2022 for his role leading his country’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, which it called a “slush fund for Vladimir Putin.”
Kirill Dmitriev needed a waiver to travel to Washington earlier this year. Mehmet Eser/ZUMA Press
Trump had told Witkoff he wanted the war to end and the administration was willing to take the risk of welcoming Putin’s emissary to Washington. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had questions about the unique request, but ultimately signed off.
Dmitriev arrived at the White House on April 2 and presented a list of multibillion-dollar business projects the two governments could pursue together. At one point, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Dmitriev that Putin needed to demonstrate he was serious about peace.
But Dmitriev felt his businesslike rapport was breaking through. “We can transition investment trust into a political role,” he said in an unpublished interview that month.
Witkoff, Putin and Dmitriev meet in St. Petersburg, Russia, in April. Vyacheslav Prokofyev/KREMLIN/Zuma Press
In April, Dmitriev welcomed Witkoff to the St. Petersburg presidential library for another three-hour meeting with Putin. Witkoff took his own notes, relying on a Kremlin translator, then briefed the White House from the U.S. Embassy. That same month, European national security advisers planned to meet Witkoff in London to integrate him into their peace process. But he was busy with his other portfolio—negotiating a cease-fire in Gaza—and couldn’t make it. Afterward, one European official asked Witkoff to start speaking with allies over the secure fixed line Europe’s heads of state use to conduct sensitive diplomatic conversations. Witkoff demurred, as he traveled too much to use the cumbersome system.
Dmitriev and Witkoff meanwhile were chatting regularly by phone about increasingly ambitious proposals. The U.S. and Russia were discussing major agreements on oil-and-gas exploration and Arctic transportation, Dmitriev told the Journal. “We believe that the U.S. and Russia can cooperate basically on everything in the Arctic,” he said. “If a solution is found in Ukraine, U.S. economic cooperation can be a foundation for our relationship going forward.”
Into position
American and Russian business leaders were quietly anticipating that Witkoff and Dmitriev would deliver, positioning their companies to profit from peace.
In secret talks, Exxon Mobil Senior Vice President Neil Chapman met Rosneft boss Igor Sechin, Putin’s former private secretary, in the Qatari capital Doha, to discuss Exxon’s return to the massive Sakhalin project, an investment stranded after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Exxon, billionaire investor Todd Boehly and others have explored buying assets owned by Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest oil producer. The U.S. sanctioned Lukoil in October to increase pressure on Moscow, prompting the company to put its overseas assets up for sale. Elliott Investment Management eyed buying a stake in a pipeline that carries Russian natural gas into Europe.
SpaceX's Starship rocket lifts off from Texas, this August. Ronaldo Schemidt/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Novatek's Arctic LNG 2 project is located some 1,500 miles from Moscow. Natalia Kolesnikova/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
More recently, Kremlin-linked businessmen Timchenko, Kovalchuk and the Rotenbergs have been offering U.S. counterparts gas concessions in the Sea of Okhotsk, as well as potentially four other locations, according to a European security official and a person familiar with the talks. Russia has also mentioned rare-earth mining opportunities near the massive nickel mines of Norilsk and in as many as six other Siberian locations that are still unexploited, these people said.
Beach, Trump Jr.’s college friend, was in talks to acquire 9.9% of an Arctic LNG project with Novatek, Russia’s second-largest natural gas producer—which is partly owned by Timchenko—if the U.S. and U.K. remove sanctions on it, according to drafts of contracts reviewed by the Journal.
In a statement, Beach said that partnering with Novatek would “strongly benefit any company committed to advancing American energy leadership,” and that his company, America First Global, “actively seeks investment opportunities that strengthen American interests around the world.” He said he “has never worked with Steve Witkoff” but is “extremely grateful” for the efforts Witkoff and others are making to end the war in Ukraine. Trump Jr. has told people he isn’t doing business with Beach.
Meanwhile, Lynch, the Miami-based investor, had been asking the U.S. government to allow him to bid on the sabotaged Nord Stream Pipeline 2 if it came up for auction in a Swiss bankruptcy proceeding. Lynch, who in 2022 was given a license by Treasury to complete the acquisition of the Swiss subsidiary of Russia’s Sberbank, had been seeking a license for the pipeline since the Biden administration, but in April dialed up his lobbying efforts by hiring Ches McDowell, a friend of Trump Jr. He would pay McDowell’s firm $600,000 over the next six months. Lynch’s representatives reached out to Witkoff for a meeting.
In late July, Dmitry Bakanov, the head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, visited NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston—the first such visit since 2018—as well as the spacecraft manufacturing facilities of Boeing and SpaceX.
The road to Miami
The chess pieces were moving into position. But all of it hung, to some degree, on whether Witkoff could unlock the conflict his boss had pledged during his campaign to resolve in a single day.
On Aug. 6, Witkoff flew to Moscow, at Putin’s invitation, for a meeting prepared only a few days in advance. Dmitriev walked him through Zaryadye Park overlooking the Moskva River, then escorted him to the Kremlin for another three-hour session with Russia’s leader. Putin mentioned wanting to meet with Trump personally. He gave Witkoff a medal, the Order of Lenin, to pass to a CIA deputy director whose mentally unwell son was killed fighting for Russia in Ukraine.
Witkoff and Dmitriev stroll through a Moscow park in August. KREMLIN/Zuma Press
The next day, Witkoff dialed into a videoconference with officials and heads of state from top European allies, and explained the outlines of what he understood to be Putin’s offer. If Ukraine would surrender the remaining roughly 20% of Donetsk province that Russia had failed to conquer, Moscow would forfeit its claim to Zaporizhzhia and Kherson provinces. The European officials were confused. Did Putin mean he would withdraw his troops from Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, as Witkoff was suggesting? Or, more likely, was Putin merely promising to not conquer the thousands of square miles of those two provinces that, after years of bloody fighting, remained in Ukrainian hands? Either way, Ukraine was skeptical about the value of a promise from Putin.
On Aug. 9, Witkoff retreated to the Spanish island of Ibiza. European leaders were still seeking clarity from him, the White House, and the State Department, on what exactly Putin had offered.
Witkoff wanted to strike while the iron was hot and hold a summit without delay. Dmitriev was optimistic Witkoff had taken Russia’s sensitivities on board: “We believe Steve Witkoff and the Trump team are doing a great job to understand the Russian position to end the conflict,” he told the Journal, a few days before.
Witkoff waits for the start of a press conference between Trump and Putin at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The Aug. 15 summit fell apart almost as soon as it began. Witkoff, Rubio, and Trump arrived on Air Force One, meeting Putin, his longtime adviser Yuri Ushakov, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Putin launched into a 1,000-year history lecture on the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people. The two sides canceled a lunch and an afternoon session where they were meant to check through their other issues, like the exchange of prisoners. Witkoff left uncertain where things stood, but hopeful talks would accelerate soon. “Everyone was working hard, but it was positive,” he said.
In October, President Zelensky flew to Washington, hoping to secure long-range, U.S.-made Tomahawk cruise missiles. His military wanted to cripple Russian refineries, pushing Moscow to negotiate on better terms.
By the time Zelensky arrived, Trump had spoken to Putin a day earlier and decided not to offer the Tomahawks. Instead, Witkoff encouraged Ukrainian officials to try another tack: What good was a handful of missiles going to accomplish? Instead, he encouraged Ukraine to ask Trump for a 10-year tariff exemption. It would supercharge their economy, he said.
“I’m in the deal settlement business. That’s why I’m here,” he told the Journal. “We keep on knocking at the door and coming up with ideas.”
Write to Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com, Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com, Rebecca Ballhaus at rebecca.ballhaus@wsj.com, Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com, Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson@wsj.com and Annie Ng at annie.ng@wsj.com
CREDITS
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images; Serhii Korovayny for WSJ; Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
WSJ
10. Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all
Summary:
Reports say Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the first Caribbean boat strike on 2 September with a verbal directive to “kill everybody,” leading SEAL Team 6 and JSOC to conduct a second missile strike on two wounded survivors in the water to comply. Critics argue the campaign against suspected traffickers, over 80 killed in at least 23 strikes, is unlawful since no true armed conflict or imminent threat exists. Law of war experts call the follow on strike a potential “no quarter” war crime. The Pentagon denies the account, while Congress fumes over partial briefings, gaps in video, and scant transparency.
Comment: Accurate reporting? Pentagon denies. This will become a case study in PME institutions in legal and leadership classes.
Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all
As two men clung to a stricken, burning ship targeted by SEAL Team 6, the Joint Special Operations commander followed the defense secretary’s order to leave no survivors.
Updated
November 28, 2025 at 11:54 p.m. EST
Washington Post · Alex Horton
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/11/28/hegseth-kill-them-all-survivors-boat-strike/
The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.
The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.
Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.
This report is based on interviews with and accounts from seven people with knowledge of the Sept. 2 strike and the overall operation.
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell declined to address questions about Hegseth’s order and other details of the operation, including Special Operations involvement. “This entire narrative is completely false,” he said in a statement. “Ongoing operations to dismantle narcoterrorism and to protect the Homeland from deadly drugs have been a resounding success.”
The elite counterterror group SEAL Team 6 led the attack, according to four people with direct knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing sensitive operations.
The commander overseeing the operation from Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, told people on the secure conference call that the survivors were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo, according to two people. He ordered the second strike to fulfill Hegseth’s directive that everyone must be killed.
Later in the day, President Donald Trump released a redacted 29-second surveillance drone video showing the attack. The video does not include any footage of the subsequent strike on the survivors.
In the weeks following that attack, the Trump administration notified Congress that the U.S. was in a “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations,” supported by an opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that asserted that because the U.S. was in an armed conflict, personnel taking part in military strikes who were following orders consistent with the laws of war would not be exposed to prosecution.
“That’s one of the problems with the law of armed conflict — the state using force is judge, jury and executioner,” Huntley said.
Since that first attack, the Pentagon has hit at least 22 more boats, including one semisubmersible, in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing another 71 alleged drug smugglers, according to officials and internal data seen by The Washington Post.
A clandestine strike
At the time of the Sept. 2 strike, Bradley headed Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, tasked with the military’s most sensitive and dangerous missions, often working with counterparts in the CIA. Since then, Bradley has been promoted to lead U.S. Special Operations Command, JSOC’s parent organization, which oversees elite units across the military.
SEAL Team 6, known formally as Naval Special Warfare Development Group and under JSOC command, conducted the intelligence collection and targeting for this attack and several others, according to two people.
The protocols were changed after the strike to emphasize rescuing suspected smugglers if they survived strikes, according to three people. It is unclear who directed the change in protocol and when exactly it took shape.
In one Oct. 16 strike in the Atlantic Ocean that killed two, another two men were captured and repatriated to Colombia and Ecuador. In a series of strikes on four boats in the eastern Pacific on Oct. 27 that killed 14 men, one apparent survivor was left to the Mexican Coast Guard to retrieve. The body was never found.
If the video of the blast that killed the two survivors on Sept. 2 were made public, people would be horrified, said one person who watched the live feed.
The Intercept first reported that the survivors were killed in a follow-up attack.
In briefing materials provided to the White House, JSOC reported that the “double-tap,” or follow-on strike, was intended to sink the boat and remove a navigation hazard to other vessels — not to kill survivors, according to another person who saw the report.
A similar explanation was given to lawmakers in two closed-door briefings, according to two congressional aides. That explanation has prompted frustration among some members of Congress who say they believe the Pentagon was deceptive in its description of events, the aides said.
“The idea that wreckage from one small boat in a vast ocean is a hazard to marine traffic is patently absurd, and killing survivors is blatantly illegal,” said Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Massachusetts), a Marine Corps veteran and vocal Trump critic who received a classified briefing from Pentagon officials on the strikes in late October with other members of the House Armed Services Committee. “Mark my words: It may take some time, but Americans will be prosecuted for this, either as a war crime or outright murder.”
The boat in the first strike was hit a total of four times, twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it, four people familiar with the operation said.
In subsequent strikes on alleged traffickers that left no survivors, the U.S. military has also fired multiple missiles to remove boats from the waterways, several people familiar with the matter said.
A new lethal modus operandi
The Pentagon’s lethal campaign marks a significant and controversial departure from U.S. counterdrug missions in the Western Hemisphere over the last several decades. Typically, Coast Guard ships and personnel have interdicted and boarded vessels believed to be trafficking, confiscating the narcotics and detaining the suspects for further prosecution.
Other agencies, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration, have relied on informants and court cases to better understand how drugs flow from South America into the United States.
Officials have said the current strikes are carried out after monitoring the movement of boats and people, and target suspects only where there is high confidence they are trafficking drugs.
Speaking a day after the first strike, Hegseth told Fox News, he watched the “live” video feed. “We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented. And that was Tren de Aragua, a narcoterrorist organization designated by the United States, trying to poison our country with illicit drugs.”
But in classified briefings to members of Congress, Pentagon officials have not provided any specific names of traffickers or syndicate leaders they have targeted, lawmakers have said, nor have they publicly released further information beyond surveillance videos of the strikes themselves.
Current and former officials within the U.S. military and DEA have expressed doubt that all 11 people aboard the first vessel were complicit in trafficking.
The boat in question, a go-fast vessel with four motors, is common in the region and would typically be manned by a small crew — perhaps one mechanic, a driver or two, and another person focused on security, one DEA official said.
More people on board means less room for drugs to sell, the official explained. He assessed that the 11 people may have been a mix of drug runners and illegally trafficked migrants. Colombia’s president has accused the U.S. in at least one instance of killing an innocent fisherman.
Dan Kovalik, an attorney for the family, said he will file for damages and injunctive relief against the U.S. government next week, in coordination with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
“There is nothing legal or moral about this,” Kovalik said.
Trump and the Pentagon said the Sept. 2 strike targeted members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua but have not provided evidence to support those claims. In subsequent strikes, the administration has referred to the alleged smugglers as members of “designated terrorist organizations” — a blanket term that lacks detail.
There are also gaps in the videos the administration has released of the strikes. Some show little beyond an initial violent explosion. There has been no public release of a subsequent strike video, and the Pentagon has not fulfilled a bipartisan request from lawmakers to see unedited footage — making it impossible to verify any of the administration’s claims.
The lack of transparency is a major obstacle to government accountability for its use of force, Huntley said. “Really the only oversight,” he said, “is public and political pressure.”
Noah Robertson, Tara Copp, Aaron Schaffer, Meg Kelly and Dan Lamothe contributed to this report, along with Samantha Schmidt in Bogotá and Samuel Oakford in New York.
Washington Post · Alex Horton
11. Russia says leak of Witkoff call recording is unacceptable, amounts to hybrid warfare
Summary:
Russia condemned the leak of Steve Witkoff’s October calls with Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov and RDIF chief Kirill Dmitriev, after Bloomberg published transcripts, calling it unacceptable hybrid warfare aimed at sabotaging Ukraine peace talks and US Russia ties. Moscow denies participants leaked the calls and questions who compromised Witkoff.
Comment: Pot calling the kettle black? Admit nothing. Deny everything. Make counter accusations.
Russia says leak of Witkoff call recording is unacceptable, amounts to hybrid warfare
Reuters
By Reuters
November 27, 20251:53 AM ESTUpdated November 27, 2025
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/kremlin-aide-ushakov-says-he-witkoff-will-be-touch-about-their-leaked-call-2025-11-26/
- Summary
- Witkoff-Ushakov call transcript published by Bloomberg
- Ushakov-Dmitriev call published too
- Ushakov says publication unacceptable, Dmitriev calls it fake
- Russian media ask: who set up Witkoff?
MOSCOW, Nov 26 (Reuters) - Russia said on Wednesday that the leak of a recording of a call between top advisers to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin was an unacceptable attempt to undermine Ukraine peace negotiations and amounted to hybrid warfare.
Bloomberg News published the transcript, opens new tab of an October 14 telephone call in which Trump envoy Steve Witkoff advised Putin's foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov on how to pitch a Ukraine peace plan to Trump.
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Bloomberg said it had reviewed the recording but did not say how it got access to a highly sensitive conversation between top officials of the world's two largest nuclear powers.
Ushakov said that his conversations with Witkoff were not intended for publication and they should not have been leaked.
"This is unacceptable," Ushakov told Russian media. He said the leak was clearly aimed at hindering discussions between Russia and the United States.
In an interview with Kommersant newspaper, Ushakov said that some of his conversations were conducted through encrypted government channels, which are rarely intercepted and leaked unless one of the parties deliberately intends to do so.
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Item 1 of 2 U.S. President Donald Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund Kirill Dmitriev and Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov attend a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Russia, April 25, 2025. Sputnik/Kristina Kormilitsyna/Pool via REUTERS
[1/2]U.S. President Donald Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund Kirill Dmitriev and Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov attend a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Russia, April 25, 2025. Sputnik/Kristina Kormilitsyna/Pool via REUTERS Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
"There are certain conversations on WhatsApp that, generally speaking, someone might somehow be able to listen to," Ushakov said.
He ruled out the possibility that the leak could have come from the participants in the call, and said he would be raising the matter with Witkoff.
Russian Direct Investment Fund CEO Kirill Dmitriev, a Putin investment envoy, said that Bloomberg's report on an October 29 call between him and Ushakov was "fake".
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, said some media organisations were being used as part of a hybrid information war waged by European countries against Russia - and aimed at undermining ties with Washington.
Bloomberg did not respond to a request for comment on the Russian criticism, or on how it obtained the recordings. Reuters competes with Bloomberg News.
Russia's Kommersant newspaper's top Kremlin reporter, who interviewed Ushakov, headlined his story: "Who set up Steve Witkoff?"
Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin in Moscow; Writing by Mark Trevelyan, Gleb Bryanski and Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Andrew Osborn and Mark Trevelyan
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Reuters
12. Zelensky’s Top Aide Resigns as Corruption Probe Deepens
Summary:
Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff and top peace negotiator, resigned after anticorruption investigators searched his home over an alleged $100 million kickback scheme at state nuclear firm Energoatom. He and Zelensky haven’t been accused of wrongdoing, but parliamentarians and activists long criticized Yermak’s vast informal power and suspected enabling of graft. His removal is the biggest wartime shake-up, costing Zelensky his closest operator with Washington and primary manager of talks over the Trump administration’s controversial 28-point peace plan. Supporters call the move proof of transparency; critics fear a skills gap and disruption amid Russian advances and U.S. pressure.
Zelensky’s Top Aide Resigns as Corruption Probe Deepens
WSJ
Departure of Ukraine’s top negotiator—president’s right-hand man Andriy Yermak—comes at pivotal moment for country
By Ian Lovett
Follow, Robbie Gramer
Follow and Laurence Norman
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Updated Nov. 28, 2025 1:29 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/world/pressure-mounts-on-zelensky-over-right-hand-man-7682527b
Neither Ukraine’s top negotiator Andriy Yermak nor President Volodymyr Zelensky have been accused of wrongdoing. sergei gapon/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
- Andriy Yermak, Ukraine’s top negotiator and President Volodymyr Zelensky’s aide, resigned amid a government corruption investigation.
- Yermak’s departure follows allegations of a $100 million corruption scheme at the state nuclear-energy company.
- The resignation is seen as a government shake-up during a critical period for Ukraine, facing Russian advances and U.S. pressure.
An artificial-intelligence tool created this summary, which was based on the text of the article and checked by an editor. Read more about how we use artificial intelligence in our journalism.
- Andriy Yermak, Ukraine’s top negotiator and President Volodymyr Zelensky’s aide, resigned amid a government corruption investigation.
President Volodymyr Zelensky’s right-hand man and top peace negotiator has resigned, as an investigation into alleged corruption in Ukraine’s government widens.
The departure of Andriy Yermak marks the biggest shake-up of Ukraine’s government since the start of the war and deprives Zelensky of a trusted emissary at a pivotal moment, with Russia advancing on the battlefield and the U.S. pressuring Kyiv to make painful concessions to end the conflict.
Calls for Yermak’s ouster had been growing for weeks, following allegations of a $100 million corruption scheme at the state nuclear-energy company. Two cabinet ministers had already been dismissed, and on Friday morning, anticorruption investigators searched Yermak’s home.
Anticorruption authorities have been investigating allegations that Ukrainian officials pressured companies to pay kickbacks for contracts with the state nuclear-energy company, Energoatom. Neither Yermak nor Zelensky has been accused of wrongdoing. Their aides didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“It’s the right decision,” said Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and a former Ukrainian economy minister, of Zelensky’s move to dismiss Yermak. “It shows commitment to transparency, and it also strengthens Zelensky at a critical moment when he’s under pressure from Russia and America.”
He added, however, that it would be difficult to replace Yermak. Last week, the Trump administration presented a 28-point road map to end the war, which included a number of points Ukrainians found alarming. Yermak had led the effort to delicately push back on that plan.
“Yermak is very experienced. He’s been leading the negotiations,” Mylovanov said. Though there are plenty of capable people who could step into the role, he said, “they will face a steep learning curve, and that’s critical during the middle of negotiations.”
Andriy Yermak and President Volodymyr Zelensky listened to a briefing in April. Ukraine Presidency/Ukrainian Pre/Zuma Press
In his video message, Zelensky said that negotiations were continuing and that he would begin looking for a replacement for Yermak this weekend.
“I am grateful to Andriy for ensuring that Ukraine’s position in the negotiation track has always been presented exactly as it should be—it has always been a patriotic position,” Zelensky said. “But I want to avoid any rumors or speculation.”
Yermak has been a confidant and friend of Zelensky since before he entered politics. The two men met in the early 2010s, when they were both in show business. Zelensky, a comedian and TV actor, was the top producer at a Ukrainian TV channel. Yermak was an entertainment lawyer who worked for the country’s first registered law firm.
When Zelensky won the presidency in 2019, he appointed Yermak as a senior adviser and promoted him to chief of staff in February 2020. He usually stood beside Zelensky in photos, towering over the president and often sporting the same dark green military-esque clothing.
For weeks, members of Ukraine’s Parliament—including some from Zelensky’s own party—had been calling on the president to remove Yermak. Many resented the vast power he had accumulated, with a role in everything from appointing ministers to negotiating with foreign governments. They said Yermak either knew about the kickback scheme, or should have known.
But until Friday, Zelensky stuck by his old friend. At a meeting with members of his ruling party in the Rada last week, he said that staffing decisions in his office are up to him, according to one member who was present. In the following days, he sent Yermak to Geneva to meet U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, reaffirming his key role in the administration.
“I think people respect Yermak because they know he is powerful, and they know he has Zelensky’s ear,” said Kurt Volker, who served as Trump’s envoy for Ukraine during his first term. “They don’t necessarily like him, because he can be difficult to work with and very, very demanding, very pushy.”
Yermak has been a confidant and friend of Zelensky’s since before he entered politics. Justyna Mielnikiewicz for WSJ
Early in the war, Yermak established himself as Ukraine’s primary contact with the U.S., muscling rivals out of the way. Internally, the Biden administration called Yermak an “operator,” with his hands in every aspect of Ukrainian governance, according to former Biden officials.
Former Biden administration officials said they viewed Yermak as an obstacle to anticorruption efforts. When Biden aides pushed to remove several members of Zelensky’s circle who they believed were involved in graft, Yermak refused.
European officials said Yermak successfully pushed Zelensky to remove Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, who was widely popular with his Western counterparts. Some Western officials saw the move as part of a troubling pattern: Yermak was narrowing the circle of people who had access to Zelensky, preventing the president from hearing bad news and different viewpoints.
On some issues, Yermak negotiated effectively, according to Western officials. When Biden’s team was reluctant to transfer some weapons—like Abrams tanks—Yermak orchestrated a media campaign to pressure the White House to change course, former Biden administration officials said.
At other times, Western officials viewed his initiatives as unworkable, with U.S. and European aides sometimes rolling their eyes at his plans to force Russia to agree to a peace deal favorable to Ukraine.
Some in Washington lay much of the blame on Yermak for Zelensky’s disastrous February meeting with President Trump. For weeks before the meeting, Ukraine’s supporters in Washington backchanneled with Yermak, offering advice on how to make a good impression.
They said Zelensky’s team ignored that advice, leading to a blowup in the Oval Office, after which Trump briefly suspended aid to Kyiv.
In the months since, however, even Yermak’s detractors in Washington say that he has effectively learned how to work with the Trump administration. As proof, they point to his meeting with Rubio in Geneva, which Rubio called “probably [the] best meeting and day we’ve had so far in this entire process, going back to when we first came to office in January.”
Yermak spoke with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Saudi Arabia in March. Ukrainian presidential press ser/Reuters
“The Trump team is very difficult to work with for Ukraine,” Volker said. “I think Yermak is as good as anybody in managing the world of, ‘OK, this is the United States we’ve got right now, so we have to work with it.’”
Anger in Ukraine over the U.S. peace proposal—and subsequent negotiations to bend it more in Ukraine’s favor—briefly quieted the shouts to remove Yermak. But the search of Yermak’s home on Friday turned the country’s focus back to Yermak, with calls for Zelensky to dismiss him growing louder than ever.
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Lawmakers who had been pushing for an overhaul of Zelensky’s government applauded the president’s decision to cut ties with his closest adviser.
“It was a hard choice, but it was the only choice,” said Mykyta Poturaiev, a member of Zelensky’s party. He admitted there were risks to removing the country’s top negotiator, but added, “on the other side there were other risks.”
Daria Kaleniuk, co-founder of the nongovernmental Anticorruption Action Center, said Yermak’s dismissal was an important step for Zelensky and for Ukraine, as the country worked to move away from a culture of self-dealing that dates back to the Soviet era.
“This is the move from Zelensky that the entire country expected,” Kaleniuk said. “It gives him a chance to run Ukraine in a way that will make us stronger in all these negotiations, but also stronger from the inside.”
Write to Ian Lovett at ian.lovett@wsj.com, Robbie Gramer at robbie.gramer@wsj.com and Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com
Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the November 29, 2025, print edition as 'Zelensky’s Top Aide Resigns Amid Probe'.
WSJ
13. Rubio Expected To Skip NATO Talks Next Week: Sources
Summary:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is expected to skip next week’s NATO foreign ministers’ meeting on Ukraine, sending deputy Christopher Landau instead, while Trump envoy Steve Witkoff heads to Moscow. European allies already distrust Washington’s revised peace plan and now face added uncertainty after Kyiv removed top negotiator Andriy Yermak in a corruption probe.
Rubio Expected To Skip NATO Talks Next Week: Sources
Barron's · Rubio Expected To Skip NATO Talks Next Week: Sources
By AFP - Agence France Presse
Nov 28, 2025, 3:09 pm EST
https://www.barrons.com/news/rubio-expected-to-skip-nato-talks-next-week-sources-ea9fc476
It is highly unusual for the top diplomat of the United States, the linchpin of the transatlantic alliance, to skip the annual December meeting -- and even more striking as the agenda is set to be dominated by discussions about the intensive US diplomacy on the war in Ukraine.
People familiar with Rubio's travel plans, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that at this point he was not planning to attend the meeting in Brussels next Wednesday and Thursday and would instead send his deputy, Christopher Landau.
Also next week, as Rubio stays away from the NATO talks, President Donald Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff is expected in Moscow to discuss Ukraine diplomacy.
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Rubio traveled last weekend to Switzerland for talks with Ukraine on a plan to end the war that has been criticized by European allies as looking like a wishlist for Moscow, which invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Rubio also met European national security advisors in Geneva.
A senior State Department official insisted that the Trump administration has already made progress in NATO by pressing allies to step up defense spending.
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"Secretary Rubio has already attended dozens of meetings with NATO allies and it would be completely impractical to expect him at every meeting," the official said on condition of anonymity.
"The historic foreign policy achievements in just 10 months of this administration speak for themselves," the official said.
Washington's original plan -- drafted without input from Ukraine's European allies -- would have seen Kyiv withdraw from its eastern Donetsk region and the United States de facto recognize the Donetsk, Crimea and Lugansk regions as Russian.
Washington pared back the original plan following criticism from Kyiv and Europe, but the current contents remain unclear.
Throwing additional uncerainty on the diplomacy, Ukraine's top negotiator Andriy Yermak was removed Friday by President Volodymyr Zelensky as his aide came under a corruption probe.
sct/dw
Barron's · Rubio Expected To Skip NATO Talks Next Week: Sources
14. Trump Pauses All Asylum Applications and Halts Visas for Afghans
Summary:
POTUS ordered a sweeping pause of all U.S. asylum decisions and halted visas for Afghans after an Afghan national shot two National Guard members in Washington. USCIS froze decisions pending “maximum” vetting. A State Department cable directed diplomats to stop issuing all visas to Afghan passport holders and even destroy already printed visas. The move effectively shuts down the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program, despite legal protections, and closes the last lawful path for most Afghans. Officials are also reviewing green cards and prior Biden era asylum grants, framing this as correcting “reckless” resettlement as backlogs exceed one million cases.
Comment: Are we going to overreact? So now all Afghans are bad or at leaset suspect? Is that how we want to be? Will this incident be exploited by those who want to halt asylum and immigration beyond Afghans?
Trump Pauses All Asylum Applications and Halts Visas for Afghans
NY Times · Edward Wong · November 28, 2025
They were the latest restrictive changes to the immigration system after this week’s shooting of two National Guard members.
By Hamed Aleaziz and Edward Wong
Nov. 28, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/28/us/politics/trump-affirmative-asylum.htmlListen to this article · 4:27 min Learn more
U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents check migrants’ documents at the Paso del Norte International Bridge in El Paso in January.Credit...Paul Ratje for The New York Times
By Hamed Aleaziz and
Nov. 28, 2025
The United States on Friday paused all asylum decisions and stopped issuing visas to people from Afghanistan as President Trump launched a major review of the country’s immigration system after the shooting of two National Guard members.
Joseph Edlow, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said in a statement that his agency had “halted all asylum decisions until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.”
Mr. Trump cut the number of asylum claims dramatically by moving to seal the southern border when he took office. Friday’s decision affects people who already are in the United States and believe they would face persecution if they returned to their home country.
The State Department also announced on Friday night that it was halting visas for Afghans, including those who had helped the United States during the war in their country.
The decisions come as Mr. Trump steps up his anti-immigration policies after a gunman, identified by the authorities as an Afghan national, shot two members of the National Guard on Wednesday in Washington, just blocks from the White House.
The suspect, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, entered the United States through a temporary program set up to manage the immigration of Afghan nationals fleeing Taliban rule. He obtained asylum in April, according to three people with knowledge of the case who were not authorized to speak publicly.
The State Department formally instructed its diplomats to stop processing all immigrant and nonimmigrant visas for Afghan passport holders, according to a copy of a cable obtained by The New York Times. Diplomats are supposed to conduct any scheduled visa interviews, but not grant the visas. If visas have been approved and printed but not handed to the applicant, diplomats should destroy the printed visas, the cable says.
The order by Secretary of State Marco Rubio freezes the Special Immigrant Visa program for Afghans, which had been set up for people who had helped out the U.S. military and government in the war. All applicants had undergone official vetting. As the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan grew closer in 2021, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers had pushed to expedite Special Immigrant Visas for those who had helped the Americans. Afghans entering the United States under that program or as refugees all went through a rigorous vetting process; the ones with Special Immigrant Visas got green cards after arriving.
“It appears Secretary Rubio is attempting to shut down the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program in direct violation of federal law and standing court orders,” Shawn VanDiver, the head of AfghanEvac, a group that tries to resettle Afghans in the United States, said in a statement. “Our hearts are absolutely broken for our Afghan allies, who have already endured more trauma, loss, and sacrifice than most Americans can imagine.”
Afghan refugee applications had been frozen months earlier, in a blanket refugee ban. Mr. Trump then issued a travel ban in June on 19 countries that included Afghanistan, but there has been an exception for applicants for Special Immigrant Visas. With this latest action, the final legal entrance for Afghans outside the United States has been closed.
In recent days, officials also announced that they were reviewing green cards given to people from countries banned from travel to the United States by the administration, pausing all immigration applications from Afghan immigrants and beginning a review of asylum requests granted during the Biden administration.
“The protection of this country and of the American people remains paramount, and the American people will not bear the cost of the prior administration’s reckless resettlement policies,” Mr. Edlow wrote on social media in announcing the green card review on Thursday. “American safety is non negotiable.”
The asylum system in the United States has long experienced backlogs. As U.S.C.I.S. became overwhelmed by border crossings in recent years, applications for asylum filed inside the United States grew.
A July 2024 report by the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general found that at the end of the 2023 fiscal year, U.S.C.I.S. had more than one million asylum cases pending determination.
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.
NY Times · Edward Wong · November 28, 2025
15. Counterterrorism officials vetted Guard shooting suspect before he entered U.S.
Summary:
Counterterror officials vetted Rahmanullah Lakanwal repeatedly, including for CIA work, before he entered the U.S. via Operation Allies Welcome and later gained asylum. After he allegedly shot two National Guard members near the White House, POTUS ordered a full review of Afghan admissions and USCIS froze all Afghan-related immigration processing. Administration officials publicly claimed Lakanwal was “unvetted,” despite multi-agency screening in Qatar and the United States. Afghan advocates stress entry is already extremely difficult and warn the pause abandons at-risk partners whose parole is expiring. Experts argue one attacker does not invalidate rigorous systems protecting Afghans who aided U.S. forces.
Counterterrorism officials vetted Guard shooting suspect before he entered U.S.
Washington Post · Mariana Alfaro
Individuals with knowledge of the process that Rahmanullah Lakanwal went through contradicted senior Trump officials’ claim that he was not scrutinized.
By Mariana Alfaro, Karen DeYoung, Arelis R. Hernández, Jeremy Roebuck and Warren P. Strobel
November 28, 2025 at 6:21 p.m. EST
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/11/28/dc-shooting-afghan-resettlement-immigration/
The Afghan national accused of shooting two National Guard members near the White House this week underwent thorough vetting by counterterrorism authorities before entering the United States, according to people with direct knowledge of the case.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, arrived in the U.S. through Operation Allies Welcome (OAW), a Biden-era program that helped resettle Afghan nationals after the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
The shooting has brought immediate scrutiny to that and other programs, with President Donald Trump announcing plans for a full review of those admitted and immigration officials halting the processing of requests from anyone from Afghanistan. In addition, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem and other senior Trump officials claimed, without evidence, that Lakanwal was never vetted and laid blame for his presence in the U.S. on former president Joe Biden.
The security of Afghan resettlement programs under the Biden administration has been a politically fraught issue for several years, stemming in part from the hasty and chaotic U.S. evacuation effort after the fall of the Afghan government to the Taliban.
A key question from critics has been whether any evacuees managed to enter the U.S. without proper vetting. Lakanwal, however, would not have been among them, according to the individuals, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation. One of the individuals said Lakanwal was vetted years ago, before working with the CIA in Afghanistan, and then again before he arrived in the U.S. in 2021. Those examinations involved both the National Counterterrorism Center as well as the CIA, the person said.
Lakanwal was also granted asylum earlier this year, a process that would have brought its own scrutiny, according to #AfghanEvac, a coalition that supported the relocation effort — an assertion the White House did not dispute.
Homeland Security officials have said that Lakanwal arrived in the U.S. in September 2021 as part of a Biden administration initiative to resettle vulnerable Afghans, particularly those who worked along U.S. forces in Afghanistan and faced potential persecution from the Taliban. Before being admitted, all OAW applicants underwent “rigorous screening and vetting” to ensure that they were not a national security risk, officials said at the time.
Lakanwal was initially paroled into the U.S. on humanitarian grounds, according to a law enforcement official who has been briefed on the investigation into Lakanwal’s background, along with tens of thousands of other Afghan evacuees admitted to the country on similar grounds after the Taliban takeover in 2021. Each was screened through a multiagency vetting process involving the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA and the National Counterterrorism Center.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, most Afghans who arrived in the U.S. under OAW were given parole for two years following mandatory screening and vetting processes that involved biometric and biographic screenings. The parole is conditional, meaning the Afghan nationals were required to receive medical screenings, critical vaccinations and other reporting requirements.
Still, in the wake of the Wednesday shooting, Trump said his administration will conduct a full review of all Afghan nationals who were admitted to the U.S. under the Biden administration. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service on Wednesday also immediately stopped processing all immigration requests related to Afghan nationals “indefinitely pending further review of security and vetting protocols.”
In an X post, Noem said the suspect “was one of the many unvetted, mass paroled into the United States.” Vice President JD Vance, also in an X post, said Lakanwal and other Afghan refugees like him came into the U.S. “unvetted” and that “they shouldn’t have been in our country.” FBI Director Kash Patel, when asked by reporters if the Biden administration should not have admitted the suspect into the country, claimed that there had been “zero vetting” of the individual.
At the same time, the White House and Department of Homeland Security officials batted away questions of why the Trump administration granted the suspect asylum earlier this year.
A DHS spokesperson said USCIS processed Lakanwal’s asylum claim on an expedited basis under the terms of a 2023 settlement agreement with Afghan evacuees who had complained of lengthy delays in the process.
“Regardless of asylum status, this monster would not have been removed due to his parole status, granted by Joe Biden,” said a White House official, who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
Federal authorities said Lakanwal shot two members of the West Virginia National Guard on Wednesday outside of the Farragut West Metro station in downtown Washington. Army Spec. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, later died of her injuries, while Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, remained in critical condition on Friday. Lakanwal is expected to face murder charges, federal prosecutors said.
One of the several gaps in Lakanwal’s story is what happened to him in the period between his evacuation from Kabul and eventual arrival in Washington state. Despite Trump’s implication that Lakanwal arrived directly in the U.S. on one of the chaotic flights from Kabul during the last days of August 2021, all of those planes landed elsewhere.
While Trump, in remarks Thursday, called them “those infamous flights that everybody was talking about” and claimed that “nobody knew who was coming in,” the vast majority of them went to Qatar, where the Afghans were housed and underwent vetting at the U.S. air base at Al-Udeid.
Lakanwal, who the administration has said did not arrive in this country until September, would have been vetted by both U.S. and a third country, most likely Qatar, before being allowed to depart on a flight to the U.S. and housed on a military base, according to current and former U.S. and foreign officials involved in the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive subject.
“Anybody evacuated by us needed to get approved vetting both from the U.S. and the country that would be hosting them,” said an official with one of those countries. “It had to be that government, asking to get people out, signing documents saying they would host and that they had vetted them.”
Those who had worked for a U.S. government agency or in other sensitive, U.S.-allied jobs in Afghanistan and were eligible to apply for a Special Immigration Visa, or SIV, also went through another round of vetting.
SIV applicants from Afghanistan are required to prove Afghan citizenship and that they worked there “on behalf of the U.S. government for a minimum of 12 months,” along with a letter of recommendation from their U.S. supervisor. A special unit in the State Department validates paperwork and, if warranted, arranges for the required Chief of Mission approval that must also accompany all SIV applications.
At the time of the shooting, Lakanwal had received chief of mission approval but had not yet been approved for a green card, according to a fact sheet distributed by #AfghanEvac.
One person familiar with the program said that in addition, the CIA had its own process for vetting and assisting its former Afghan employees.
“I assume the screening to recruit him for the CIA is much deeper and deep intrusive than any screening just for parole,” said Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. “So the Biden administration could not have known he was a risk.”
And once in the U.S., additional vetting would have taken place before Lakanwal and his family were assigned to a government-approved relocation agency and destination.
“It is so, so hard for folks to get in,” said Shawn VanDiver, president of #AfghanEvac. “It’s just not as easy as JD Vance and Kash Patel and these others want to make [it seem]. It’s just not that easy.”
In one of his first acts on entering office, Trump froze the number of visas available for Afghans, many of whom were far along in the SIV approval process or had already been approved.
VanDiver suggested that Lakanwal eventually submitted a separate asylum application due to the extended wait time and unclear future for SIVs.
“He passed vetting a million times,” VanDiver said. “If he had been a problem, he would have gotten caught when he went to another base … when he applied for SIV, for Chief of Mission approval, when he got asylum.”
The immigration policy changes imposed Wednesday, meanwhile, extend a June rule imposing restrictions and additional scrutiny on foreign nationals seeking entry into the U.S. from 19 countries. Now, the policy is targeting foreign nationals living in the United States. For those not granted asylum or SIV, temporary humanitarian parole status given to most of the Afghans who were admitted to the U.S. has already expired, with the administration not offering any extension.
Many Afghans waiting for resettlement to the U.S. in other countries that agreed to accept them after they were evacuated, and their allies, responded with shock Thursday to the news that USCIS would stop processing their cases.
Andrew Sullivan, the executive director of No One Left Behind, a veteran-led group supporting Afghan evacuees, told The Washington Post on Thursday that while he understands the Trump administration’s imperative to review Afghan resettlement programs in the wake of the shooting, he hopes the administration can find a way to balance the need for rigorous vetting with the imperative to protect Afghans who helped save American lives.
“I have, without a doubt, had my life saved by Afghans that worked on our behalf,” said Sullivan, who served two combat deployments in Iraq and commanded an infantry company in Afghanistan. “I hope that we can work constructively with the administration to ensure that there are no risks for Afghans that have arrived. But, my personal experience has been they’re some of the most dutiful and patriotic people on this planet.”
Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.
Washington Post · Mariana Alfaro
16. Taiwan names US-educated official new vice defence minister as part of reform push
Summary:
Taiwan President Lai Ching-te named U.S.-educated Hsu Szu-chien vice defense minister to drive military reform and help manage an extra $40 billion defense budget. A senior National Security Council advisor with deep U.S. ties, Hsu will support Minister Wellington Koo as Taiwan modernizes against rising Chinese pressure and frequent PLA patrols.
Taiwan names US-educated official new vice defence minister as part of reform push
By Reuters
November 28, 20252:24 AM ESTUpdated November 28, 2025
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/taiwan-appoints-us-educated-official-new-vice-defence-minister-part-reform-push-2025-11-28/
TAIPEI, Nov 28 (Reuters) - Taiwan President Lai Ching-te on Friday promoted a U.S.-educated senior security official as a new vice defence minister to help oversee military reforms and as the government pushes $40 billion in extra spending for the military.
Taiwan, which China views as its own territory, is modernising its armed forces to better deal with a growing threat from Beijing.
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Hsu Szu-chien, a fluent English speaker who is currently an advisor to Taiwan's National Security Council, has strong experience at international affairs, the presidential office said in a statement.
"The president hopes to draw on Dr. Hsu's strong professional background and practical experience in national security and international affairs to assist Defence Minister Wellington Koo in injecting new momentum into the reform and strengthening of our national defence," office spokesperson Karen Kuo added.
Hsu has led delegations to take part in important talks with the United States, maintaining "close and well-established interactions with U.S. political and defence circles", she added.
Hsu, who has a doctorate from Columbia University, has also taken part in international forums like the Halifax International Security Forum, Kuo said.
The defence ministry currently has two vice ministers and two deputy ministers.
The United States is Taiwan's most important international backer and arms supplier despite the lack of formal diplomatic ties.
Taiwan has already held preliminary talks with the United States about what weapons it wants to buy as part of its $40 billion supplementary defence budget, the defence minister said on Thursday.
Taiwan's government rejects Beijing's sovereignty claims, saying only the island's people can decide their future.
China, whose warplanes and warships operate almost daily around the island, has never renounced the use of force to bring Taiwan under its control and this week, it denounced Lai's plans for stepped-up military spending.
Taiwan's defence ministry said that starting mid-morning on Friday it had detected Chinese military aircraft and ships carrying out another "joint combat readiness patrol" in the island's environs, which Taiwan reports China doing several times a month.
Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Stephen Coates
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Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
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