Quotes of the Day:

“The trouble is that most people want to be right. The very best people, however, want to know if they're right.”

-  John Cleese

"The concept of a full-time Army unit dedicated to UW had many opponents after World War II. Many considered UW a task for conventional formations with no need for another school and another elite unit, especially during downsizing of the force. The newly formed Air Force, along with many in the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency, believed their joint capabilities could effectively support, organize, and utilize resistance forces. McClure’s background and contacts in running psychological operations—not only during war, but also during the post-conflict years—built his credibility with the men who would be Army Chiefs of Staffs for years to come. His deep understanding of the inner workings of the War Department, the Pentagon, and (later) the DOD gave him the ability to find and recruit men like Bank, Volckmann, Blackburn, and Fertig, and set the necessary conditions to be in the right place at the right time to stand up a UW capability in the Army."

- FM 3-18 Special Forces Operations, 2014

"If you can’t define a winning exit strategy for the American people, where we somehow come out ahead, then we’re wasting our money, and we’re wasting our strategic resources."

- Jon Huntsman, Jr.

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 27

2. China Primer: The People’s Liberation Army (PLA)

3. U.S. colonel training Zelensky forces accuses soldiers of war "atrocities"

4. Air Force quietly speeds up plans to eliminate spy planes on the front line of America's fentanyl war

5. In Major Step, Space Force Takes Over All Military Satellite Communications

6. Why artificial intelligence needs to be on your mind in 2023

7. China tests America’s will with clashes along India border

8. Ukraine Strikes Back At Bomber Base Deep Inside Russia

9. The Great Lesson of the Cold War: Ideology Matters

10. China’s Afghanistan Strategy May Be In Trouble – Analysis

11. Trapped in the Trenches in Ukraine

12. Ukraine's Zelenskiy seeks India PM Modi's help with 'peace formula'

13. The revenge of history in Ukraine: year of war has shaken up world order

14. Why the U.S. isn’t ready for a fight in the Indo-Pacific

15. The US military is planning for a 'transformative' year in Asia as tensions with China continue to rise

16. Viewpoint: How U.S. Can Compete With China in Latin America

17. What Harry and Meghan Can Teach Us About Information Warfare

18. Strategery 101: When enemy Russia attacks friend Ukraine, back the friend

19. 5 big questions China faces in 2023

20. Ukraine’s Long-Term Road to Recovery

21. The Ghosts of Kennan

22. The Taiwan Long Game

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 27

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-27

Key Takeaways

• Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated that the Kremlin will continue to pursue a military solution to the war until the US accepts its demands and forcing Ukraine to do the same.
• Lavrov stated that Russia is unable to work on any agreements with the West due to its supposed provocative actions.
• The Kremlin will likely continue information operations to seek to compel the West to offer preemptive concessions and pressure Ukraine to negotiate.
• The Kremlin is increasingly integrating select milbloggers into its information campaigns, likely in an effort to regain a dominant narrative within the information space.
• Ukrainian forces have likely made more gains in northeast Ukraine than ISW has previously assessed.
• Russian forces may be nearing culmination in the Bakhmut area amid continuing Russian offensive operations there and in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area.
• Russian forces are maintaining their fortification efforts in southern Ukraine.
• The Kremlin is continuing its efforts to publicly punish deserters and saboteurs.
• Russian officials are intensifying efforts to deport children from occupied territories to Russia.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 27

Dec 27, 2022 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

understandingwar.org

Riley Bailey, Kateryna Stepanenko, George Barros, Madison Williams, and Frederick W. Kagan

December 27, 8:00 pm ET

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

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that the Kremlin will continue to pursue a military solution to the war until the Ukrainian government capitulates to Russia’s demands. Lavrov stated in a December 27 interview with Russian state news wire TASS that Ukraine and the West are “well aware of Russia’s proposals on the demilitarization and denazification” of Ukrainian-controlled territory and that the Russian military will settle these issues if Ukraine refuses to accept these proposals.[1] Russian demands for “demilitarization” aim to eliminate Ukraine’s ability to resist further Russian attacks, while the demands for “denazification” are tantamount to calls for regime change in Ukraine.[2] Lavrov added that Ukraine and the United States must recognize Russia’s seizure of occupied Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts. Lavrov stated that US-controlled Ukraine and the United States are responsible for prolonging the war as they could "put an end to [Ukraine’s] senseless resistance."[3] Lavrov’s invocation of a military settlement for the war in Ukraine that achieves Russia’s original war aims follows Russian President Vladimir Putin’s deliberately vague statements that Russia is open for negotiations on December 25.[4] ISW assessed that Putin’s comments were not an offer to negotiate with Ukraine and indicated that he has not set serious conditions for negotiations.[5]

Lavrov stated that Russia is unable to work on any agreements with the West due to its provocative actions in Ukraine and elsewhere. Lavrov stated that the United States and its NATO allies are pursuing “victory over Russia on the battlefield” in Ukraine “as a mechanism for significantly weakening or even destroying” the Russian Federation.[6] Lavrov nonsensically accused US military officials of planning a decapitation blow against the Kremlin that included killing Russian President Vladimir Putin.[7] Lavrov also accused the United States and NATO members of being de facto parties to the war in Ukraine and of engaging in dangerous nuclear signaling.[8] Lavrov argued that Russian officials are unable to maintain normal communications or work on any proposals or agreements with the United States under these conditions, as the United States seeks to inflict strategic defeat against the Russian Federation.[9] Lavrov stated that Russian officials are ready to discuss security issues in the context of Ukraine and in a broader, strategic plan, but only when American officials "realize the defectiveness of the current course” and return to "building mutually respectful relations on the basis of the obligatory consideration of legitimate Russian interests.”[10]

The Kremlin will likely continue to focus its grievances against the West and ignore Ukraine as a sovereign entity in support of ongoing information operations that seek to compel the West to offer preemptive concessions and pressure Ukraine to negotiate. The Kremlin routinely portrays Ukraine as a Western pawn that lacks any actual sovereignty in order to disqualify Ukrainian officials from future direct negotiations and instead frame negotiations with Russia as being the responsibility of Western officials.[11] The Kremlin routinely highlights its grievances with the West over the war in Ukraine instead of its grievances with Ukraine itself to capitalize on the Western desire for negotiations and create a dynamic in which Western officials feel pressed to make preemptive concessions to lure Russia to the negotiating table.[12] The Kremlin will routinely depict Ukrainian officials as needlessly prolonging the war while reiterating its war aims in an attempt to influence Western officials to pressure Ukraine to negotiate on terms more favorable to Russia.[13] ISW continues to assess that the Kremlin is not interested in serious negotiations that would produce a final settlement to the war in Ukraine, but instead seeks a temporary cessation of hostilities that would allow it to refit and replenish its military for further offensive campaigns against Ukraine.

The Kremlin is increasingly integrating select milbloggers into its information campaigns, likely in an effort to regain a dominant narrative within the information space. A prominent Russian milblogger involved in combat in occupied Donetsk Oblast gave a nearly 20-minute interview to a Russian federal channel pushing key Kremlin narratives on mobilization and support for the war effort.[14] The milblogger explained that Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) forces recruited him out of prison in Horlivka, Donetsk Oblast in 2014, and accused mobilized men who complain to their wives about mobilization and poor conditions on the frontlines of being weak. The milblogger also made a sexist remark that Russian women are making emotional appeals and urged them to refrain from complaining about their husbands’ problems. The milblogger criticized Russians who have left the country in protest of the war, stating that those Russians lacked respect for their society and its interests. The milblogger downplayed reports of poor frontline conditions, noting that these conditions are solely the fault of local commanders. These statements are consistent with recent acknowledgments by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) of problems with mobilization and generating support for the war that likely aim to prepare the Russian society for a protracted war.[15] This milblogger had also previously revealed that the Kremlin is now offering to collaborate with the milbloggers.[16]

The Kremlin has also intensified its efforts to coopt prominent milbloggers by offering them positions of power, which in turn allows them to amplify some elements of official rhetoric. One Russian milblogger who Putin appointed to the Russian Human Rights Council amplified an official statement from the council claiming that it had not received any information about the forcible mobilization of prisoners to participate in the war.[17] A Russian milblogger who has received a place on Putin’s mobilization working group also expressed excitement over the prospect of delivering his concerns directly to Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu during the working group’s first meeting on December 28.[18] By offering these positions within the government, the Kremlin enforces self-censorship and introduces its narratives to some figures within the milblogger space. Putin’s appointment of these milbloggers to official positions also suggests his approval of their extreme and sometimes genocidal statements.

The Kremlin could significantly benefit from the integration of some prominent milbloggers’ voices into its information space, but Putin remains unlikely to domesticate the entire community. The Kremlin had partially integrated at least seven of the most prominent milbloggers into its information sphere who are generally not affiliated with other factions such as the Wagner Group, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, or Russian veteran communities. Russian outlets have started to rank milbloggers and their growing popularity, noting that there are at least 50 extremely influential milbloggers from different factions among thousands of milblogger Telegram channels.[19] A prominent Russian milblogger noted that the milblogger community had been rescuing the Kremlin’s poorly-implemented and outdated information campaign while simultaneously pointing out that it is “impossible to centralize” such a vast community.[20] Another milblogger noted that the Kremlin’s information efforts are so laughable that it had made the milblogger community "the only decent source of information.”[21] The milblogger also stated that some milbloggers still face censorship from the Kremlin, which can ignite tensions within the community.

Key Takeaways

• Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated that the Kremlin will continue to pursue a military solution to the war until the US accepts its demands and forcing Ukraine to do the same.
• Lavrov stated that Russia is unable to work on any agreements with the West due to its supposed provocative actions.
• The Kremlin will likely continue information operations to seek to compel the West to offer preemptive concessions and pressure Ukraine to negotiate.
• The Kremlin is increasingly integrating select milbloggers into its information campaigns, likely in an effort to regain a dominant narrative within the information space.
• Ukrainian forces have likely made more gains in northeast Ukraine than ISW has previously assessed.
• Russian forces may be nearing culmination in the Bakhmut area amid continuing Russian offensive operations there and in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area.
• Russian forces are maintaining their fortification efforts in southern Ukraine.
• The Kremlin is continuing its efforts to publicly punish deserters and saboteurs.
• Russian officials are intensifying efforts to deport children from occupied territories to Russia.

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

• Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Eastern Ukraine
• Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and one supporting effort);
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)

Eastern Ukraine: (Eastern Kharkiv Oblast-Western Luhansk Oblast)

Russian forces reportedly repelled Ukrainian attacks on the Svatove-Kreminna line on December 27. Multiple Russian sources reported on December 27 that Russian forces—including elements of the 144th Motorized Rifle Division and its 254th Motorized Rifle Regiment which previously operated in the Izyum area—repelled Ukrainian attacks on the Svatove-Kreminna sector.[22] One prominent Russian milblogger reported that Ukrainian forces captured a Russian strongpoint near Chervonopopivka (about 5 km northwest of Kreminna), where ISW assesses Ukrainian forces have likely advanced since at least December 23.[23] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces are regrouping and deploying reinforcements from Kharkiv Oblast to resume offensive operations on the Kreminna-Svatove line and Kreminna City, although ISW cannot confirm this report.[24]

Ukrainian forces have likely made larger gains in northeast Ukraine than ISW has previously assessed. Kharkiv Oblast Administration Head Oleh Synehubov stated on December 27 that Russian forces occupy 1.6 percent of Kharkiv Oblast.[25] ISW’s control of terrain assessment as of December 26 had Russian forces occupying about 1.747 percent of Kharkiv Oblast (a difference of about 46 square kilometers). Ukrainian forces likely captured Dvorichna, Novomlynsk, and Tavilzhanka in northeastern Kharkiv Oblast and Kolomiychikha in Luhansk Oblast given that both Russian and Ukrainian sources reported Russian shelling against these settlements on December 27.[26] ISW has updated its maps accordingly.

Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Russian forces in Bakhmut may be nearing culmination as Russian forces in Kherson did in August 2022. Russian combat losses are likely forcing the Russian military in the Bakhmut area to use squad-sized assault groups. Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty reported on December 27 that Russian forces in the Bakhmut area are no longer operating as company and battalion tactical groups and are instead operating in smaller groups of ten to fifteen servicemembers (squad-size organizations).[27] Russian forces similarly degenerated from company and battalion tactical groups to individual squad-sized groups when Russian units in Kherson Oblast became markedly degraded in August 2022.[28] ISW assessed at the time that the Russian military’s use of squad-sized groups in Kherson Oblast indicated that the Russian offensive had culminated as Russian ground forces were degraded so badly that they could no longer operate elements at echelons high enough to make meaningful gains.[29] The Russian military’s rate of advance in the Bakhmut area has recently slowed amidst growing personnel and munitions constraints that will likely prevent it from maintaining a high pace of offensive operations in the area in the near term.[30] The Russian military’s reported use of squad-sized groups is likely a result of prolonged attritional warfare and indicates the degradation of larger doctrinal formations above the platoon level. Russian rate of advances in the Bakhmut area will likely decrease if Russian forces continue advancing at all unless significant new reinforcements and supplies of artillery rounds arrive soon.

Russian sources claimed that Russian forces increased the pace of offensive operations to capture Soledar. Russian sources claimed on December 27 that elements of the Wagner Group intensified offensive operations to capture Soledar and pushed Ukrainian forces out of much of Bakhmutske (3km southeast of Soledar).[31] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are attempting to advance towards Soledar from positions to the southeast and east of Soledar and from positions northeast of Soledar near Yakovlvika (6km northeast of Soledar).[32] Another Russian milblogger claimed that elements of the Wagner Group continued to advance in the eastern outskirts of Soledar.[33] The intensification of offensive operations to capture Soledar will likely further exacerbate the constraints on personnel and equipment that are impacting the Wagner Group’s slowing rate of advance in the Bakhmut area.[34]

Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut on December 27. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian assault near Dyliivka (16km southwest of Bakhmut).[35] Pro-Wagner Russian outlet RIA FAN claimed that there have been heavy battles between Russian and Ukrainian forces in Opytne (4km south of Bakhmut) for more than a month and that assault detachments of the Wagner Group continue to break through Ukrainian defenses in the settlement.[36] A Russian milblogger claimed that elements of the Wagner Group pushed Ukrainian forces out from an unspecified stronghold in Opytne.[37] The Russian milblogger claimed that there was fierce fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces on the outskirts of Klishchiivka (7km south of Bakhmut).[38] The Russian milblogger also claimed that elements of the Wagner Group and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) People’s Militia conducted several assaults near Bakhmut and that there is fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces northeast of Bakhmut near Rozdolivka and Vesele.[39]

Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area on December 27. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults within 32km southwest of Avdiivka near Krasnohorivka, Vodyane, Vesele, Marinka, and Pobieda.[40] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces in Marinka are not making significant progress.[41] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are concentrating efforts to capture Marinka in order to reduce Ukrainian forces’ ability to shell Donetsk City, to launch further offensive operations towards a key Ukrainian transport hub in Kurakhove, and to better encircle Ukrainian fortified positions in Avdiivka.[42] Avdiivka City Head Vitaly Barabash reported that Russian forces have notably decreased the number of artillery strikes in the direction of Avdiivka due to supply issues with artillery munitions.[43] The Russian military’s offensive operations in eastern Ukraine have heavily relied on artillery support to augment ground assaults, and supply issues with artillery munitions may substantially impact Russian forces’ ability to maintain their current pace of offensive operations in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued indirect fire along the line of contact in Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts.[44]

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

Russian forces are maintaining their fortification efforts in southern Ukraine and are continuing to shell Ukrainian positions and civilian infrastructure in Kherson, Mykolaiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhia oblasts.[45] Geolocated satellite imagery showed that Russian forces established defensive lines approximately 70km east of Tokmak and dug trenches around a radar station in Lazurne, southeastern Crimea.[46] Spokesperson for the Ukrainian Southern Defense Forces Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces are continuing to shell right-bank Kherson Oblast but Ukrainians are retaliating by returning fire on Russian positions on the left bank of the Dnipro River.[47] Russian forces continued to strike Ukrainian facilities—namely a factory and private and apartment buildings—in Kherson City, despite reportedly experiencing ammunition shortages in the Donetsk City direction.[48] Russian forces also shelled port areas in Ochakiv and settlements along the right bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts.[49] Russian forces, thus, appear to be prioritizing maintaining artillery fire against densely populated areas in southern Ukraine and holding a stabilized frontline along the Dnipro River over transferring ammunition to Avdiivka and Bakhmut areas that reportedly suffer shortages.[50]

Ukrainian forces continued to target Russian rear areas. Ukrainian social media sources reported that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian base with mobilized men in Tytove (approximately 75km west of Mariupol.[51] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that a Ukrainian strike on December 25 killed and wounded up to 100 Russian servicemen, 15 of whom were personnel from the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), near Novobilozerivka (approximately 57km northwest of Melitopol).[52]

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

The Kremlin continues to intensify its efforts to punish deserters and saboteurs in Russia in the public eye. A Russian media outlet reported that Russian authorities detained eight mobilized men from Kaliningrad Oblast who deserted their positions in Luhansk Oblast and arrived in Moscow to surrender their weapons.[53] The outlet also reported that Russian authorities began sentencing men who refused to participate in the war, sentencing a Kamchatka man to almost two years in prison for ”failure to comply with an order in wartime.”[54] Russian sources also reported that the FSB killed two men on December 26 in Kabardino-Balkarian Republic who were suspected of preparing an attack on a local military recruitment center.[55] Russian officials continue to persecute people for ”discrediting” the Russian Armed Forces.[56] The Kremlin is likely setting conditions for further persecution of protesters, deserters, and saboteurs amidst a protracted war.

Some Russians are continuing to express their dissatisfaction with Russia’s force generation efforts. A retired pensioner couple committed an arson attack against a Russian military recruitment center in Podolsk, Moscow Oblast on December 27.[57] A Russian independent outlet also reported that a young man in Syktyvkar, Komi Republic, committed an act of self-harm in a military recruitment center, likely out of fear of conscription.[58]

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

Russian authorities intensified efforts to deport Ukrainian children to Russia. ISW previously reported that Russian occupation officials require children in occupied territories to undergo mandatory Russian-administered medical examinations that may result in their deportation to Russia.[59] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on December 27 that senior Russian officials have allocated more than 350 million rubles for the program since October 2022.[60] Zaporizhia Occupation Deputy Vladimir Rogov reported that the Russian Cabinet of Ministers is the senior Russian body responsible for funding this medical examination program and has allocated 435 million rubles for its continuation.[61] The Russian Cabinet of Ministers implements its own decrees and directives and operates as the second highest executive entity in the Russian government, second only to the Russian President.[62] Russian President Valdimir Putin can cancel any Russian Cabinet of Ministers decisions that do not have his approval or are contradictory to the Russian Constitution and Russian federal law.[63] ISW maintains that the forced deportation of Ukrainian children represents a possible violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.[64]

Russian occupation authorities continue to intensify deportation efforts in occupied territories. Kherson Oblast Occupation Administration Head Vladimir Saldo stated on December 27 that the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations has “evacuated” 150,000 residents from Kherson Oblast in 2022.[65] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian occupation officials are evacuating residents from Enerhodar, Zaporizhia Oblast with the intention of creating a humanitarian crisis.[66] The report stated that Russian occupation officials aim to distort Ukrainian population demographics and advance information operations about Ukrainians ”fleeing” Ukraine.[67]

Wagner Group mercenaries may have murdered an ethnically Romani family, including three children, in occupied Makiivka, Donetsk Oblast. Ukrainian open-source intelligence aggregators reported that Wagner mercenaries killed a Ukrainian Romani family of eight—including three children aged one, seven, and nine years old—in Makiivka, Donetsk Oblast on December 26.[68] One Ukrainian open-source aggregator claimed that it was unlikely Wagner mercenaries committed this crime.[69] Russian sources claimed that three previously-convicted residents from Kalininskiy Raion, Donetsk City committed the heinous crime to steal valuable property and the family’s car.[70] Another Russian source claimed that there was “a group armed with machine guns” at the location of the shooting.[71] ISW Is unable to independently confirm any of these reports.

Russian officials continue to nationalize private Ukrainian property to support the war effort. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on December 27 that the Kremlin tasked occupation administration officials with seizing Ukrainian industrial facilities in occupied territories to supply the Russian military.[72] Russian occupation authorities reportedly seized unspecified industrial facilities and appointed new Russian management because most workers refused to work with occupation officials.[73] The Ukrainian Resistance Center also reported that Russian occupation officials seized property and real estate in Henichesk, Zapoirzhia Oblast, from Ukrainians who fled occupation and distributed notices announcing that residents are required to bring proof of ownership to Russian occupation officials.[74] The report stated that if residents do not provide proof, then Russian occupation officials will nationalize the property.[75] A Ukrainian source reported that Henichesk occupation officials did not provide an address or phone number for residents to report to and show their proof of ownership.[76]

ISW will continue to report daily observed indicators consistent with the current assessed most dangerous course of action (MDCOA): a renewed invasion of northern Ukraine possibly aimed at Kyiv.

ISW’s December 15 MDCOA warning forecast about a potential Russian offensive against northern Ukraine in winter 2023 remains a worst-case scenario within the forecast cone. ISW currently assesses the risk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine from Belarus as low, but possible, and the risk of Belarusian direct involvement as very low. This new section in the daily update is not in itself a forecast or assessment. It lays out the daily observed indicators we are using to refine our assessments and forecasts, which we expect to update regularly. Our assessment that the MDCOA remains unlikely has not changed. We will update this header if the assessment changes.

Observed indicators for the MDCOA in the past 24 hours:

• The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense reiterated previous reports that elements of the Russian 1st Guards Tank Army are likely in Belarus as of December 27.[77] All maneuver elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army have taken heavy losses near Kharkiv, Sumy, and eastern Kyiv Oblast, making its “elite” status and effective combat power even after reconstitution with mobilized reservists and/or conscripts questionable.

Observed ambiguous indicators for MDCOA in the past 24 hours:

• Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko met on the sidelines of a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) meeting in St. Petersburg on December 27. Both Russian and Belarusian official readouts from this meeting are vague and do not indicate any significant activity.[78] The meeting marked an increased tempo for meetings between the two heads of state over the past year, however.[79] Putin and Lukashenko previously met in Minsk on December 19.[80] Putin additionally gifted the eight CIS heads of state—including Lukashenko - specially made rings made of silver and gold.[81] ISW has previously assessed that Putin seeks to establish Russian suzerainty over CIS member states.[82]
• Geolocated footage posted on December 27 shows a train with at least 13 tanks in transit near Yakutske, Sakha Republic, reportedly heading towards Ukraine.[83] It is unclear whether the tanks are heading to Belarus, Donbas, or elsewhere.

Observed counter-indicators for the MDCOA in the past 24 hours:

• The Ukrainian General Staff reiterated that it has not observed Russian forces in Belarus forming a strike group as of December 27.[84]
• Ukrainian State Border Guard Service Spokesman Andriy Demchenko stated on December 27 that situation on the Belarusian border remains under control and “somewhat tense in the information field.”[85] Demchenko stated that Belarusian elements remain on the Ukrainian-Belarusian border, but that their composition, positions, and sizes are not changing. Demenchenko stated that Belarus and Russia are deliberately causing tensions on the border through demonstrative joint training, equipment deployments, and activity within the Union State’s Regional Grouping of Forces.

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

[1] https://tass dot ru/interviews/16693267

[3] https://tass dot ru/interviews/16693267

[6] https://tass dot ru/interviews/16693267

[7] https://tass dot ru/interviews/16693267

[8] https://tass dot ru/interviews/16693267

[9] https://tass dot ru/interviews/16693267

[10] https://tass dot ru/interviews/16693267

[14] https://www.1tv dot ru/shows/vremya-pokazhet/samoe-vremya/vladlen-tatarskiy-samoe-vremya-fragment-informacionnogo-kanala-ot-26-12-2022; https://t.me/vladlentatarsky/18329

[25] https://suspilne dot media/346962-16-harkivskoi-oblasti-zalisaetsa-pid-okupacieu-rf-sinegubov/

[27] https://armyinform.com dot ua/2022/12/27/bahmut-zalyshayetsya-golovnym-napryamkom-udaru-rosijskyh-vijsk/; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5vvrb1YsqU

[43] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUTHgecoEnM; https://suspilne dot media/346752-9-mln-ukrainciv-bez-svitla-u-genstabi-poperedili-pro-zagrozu-novih-raketnih-udariv-rf-307-den-vijni-onlajn/

Geolocated to 44.640452, 34.382704

[47] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5vvrb1YsqU; https://suspilne dot media/346752-9-mln-ukrainciv-bez-svitla-u-genstabi-poperedili-pro-zagrozu-novih-raketnih-udariv-rf-307-den-vijni-onlajn/

[48] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5vvrb1YsqU; https://suspilne dot media/346752-9-mln-ukrainciv-bez-svitla-u-genstabi-poperedili-pro-zagrozu-novih-raketnih-udariv-rf-307-den-vijni-onlajn/; https://t.me/khersonskaODA/2765 ; https://t.me/hueviyherson/31834

[54] https://t.me/bazabazon/15171; https://meduza [dot] io/news/2022/12/27/na-kamchatke-voennogo-prigovorili-pochti-k-dvum-godam-kolonii-poseleniya-za-otkaz-ot-uchastiya-v-voyne

[56] https://meduza [dot] io/news/2022/12/27/zhitelya-belgoroda-oshtrafovali-po-statie-o-diskreditatsii-armii-iz-za-plakata-obnimi-esli-ty-za-mir

[59] According to this scheme the Russian doctors reportedly falsely claim that the children require medical treatment in Russia, convince the children that Russia is a safer place to live, and – after deportation – delay their return from Russia, consequently forcing Ukrainian parents to leave Ukraine to be with their children. Once the parents arrive in Russia, martial law prohibits both the child and the parent from returning to occupied Ukrainian territories.

https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2022/12/27/vorog-prodovzhyt-praktyku-deportacziyi-ukrayinskyh-ditej-v-nastupnomu-roczi/; https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2022/11/04/prykryvayuchys-likuvannyam-rosiyany-deportuyut-ditej-z-tot-na-terytoriyu-rf/; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign... https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[60] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2022/12/27/vorog-prodovzhyt-praktyku-deportacziyi-ukrayinskyh-ditej-v-nastupnomu-roczi/; https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2022/11/04/prykryvayuchys-likuvannyam-rosiyany-deportuyut-ditej-z-tot-na-terytoriyu-rf/

[62] https://tass dot ru/info/7529869

[63] https://tass dot ru/info/7529869

[66] https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2022/12/26/v-energodari-okupanty-pidgotuvaly-avtobusy-dlya-evakuacziyi-naselennya/; https://t.me/energodar_ukr/3544

[67] https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2022/12/26/v-energodari-okupanty-pidgotuvaly-avtobusy-dlya-evakuacziyi-naselennya/; https://t.me/energodar_ukr/3544

[72] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2022/12/27/rosiyany-planuyut-ekspluatuvaty-zahopleni-promyslovi-obyekty-na-tot-u-svoyih-vlasnyh-czilyah/

[73] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2022/12/27/rosiyany-planuyut-ekspluatuvaty-zahopleni-promyslovi-obyekty-na-tot-u-svoyih-vlasnyh-czilyah/

[74] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2022/12/27/rosiyany-gotuyutsya-vidzhaty-majno-tyh-hto-zalyshyv-genichesk-cherez-okupacziyu/

[75] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2022/12/27/rosiyany-gotuyutsya-vidzhaty-majno-tyh-hto-zalyshyv-genichesk-cherez-okupacziyu/

[78] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70190; https://president.gov dot by/ru/events/poseshchenie-russkogo-muzeya-v-sankt-peterburge

[81] https://suspilne dot media/347274-u-nas-dla-nogo-tilki-pogani-novini-u-sbu-potrolili-putina-akij-podaruvav-8-persniv-glavam-derzav-snd/

understandingwar.org

2. China Primer: The People’s Liberation Army (PLA)

The 3 page primer from the Congressional REsearch Service can be downloaded here: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11719

China Primer: The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) 

Overview The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is the military arm of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’ or China’s) ruling Communist Party. Since 2018, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has referred to China as the “pacing” threat or challenge for the U.S. military. DOD reported in November 2022 that China’s leaders aim to use the PLA, in part, to “restrict the United States from having a presence in China’s immediate periphery and limit U.S. access in the broader Indo-Pacific region.” Members of Congress have responded in part by focusing on resourcing and conducting oversight of U.S.-China security competition.

​3. U.S. colonel training Zelensky forces accuses soldiers of war "atrocities"

​I watched a discussion among chats with my Ukrainian -American friends which culminated with this comment: ​

4 hours from Max Blumenthals tweet to Newsweek to International news.

U.S. colonel training Zelensky forces accuses soldiers of war "atrocities"

Newsweek · by Jon Jackson · December 27, 2022

Andrew Milburn, a retired U.S. Marine colonel who spent months in Ukraine helping to train President Volodymyr Zelensky's forces, said during a recent interview that while most Ukrainian soldiers were professional, he did see some commit "atrocities."

Milburn is the founder and CEO of The Mozart Group, a company composed mainly of former special operations soldiers that has provided services to Ukraine ranging from frontline training to medical evacuation and casualty care. Milburn named the company as a direct counterpoint to the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary outfit named for another famous composer.

Max Blumenthal, founder of The Grayzone website, posted a clip to Twitter on Monday of Milburn speaking last month on The Team House podcast.

After months in Ukraine training soldiers, Ret Col Andrew Milburn of @TheMozartGroup mercenary firm gets sauced on camera & spills the beans:

Ukraine is a "corrupt, fucked-up society" run by "fucked-up people"

Ukrainian soldiers "kill dudes who surrendered," commit "atrocities" pic.twitter.com/MhKljQwQpq

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 26, 2022

The video, which was originally posted in full on the podcast's YouTube channel, shows Milburn continuing to express his support for Ukraine, saying working there has left him with a sense of purpose. However, he also called the country a "corrupt" society.

"I'm not a big fan of Ukraine," he said of the government. "I care deeply about its people. I care deeply about the Ukrainian soldiers."

Milburn seemed to mainly take issue with what he said were Ukrainians filming prisoners of war, though he also suggested he had possibly seen worse offenses.

Volunteers take part in training during courses with The Mozart Group, in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, on September 22, 2022. Andrew Milburn, the founder of The Mozart Group, recently voiced displeasure with some of the Ukrainians he was assisting. Photo by JUAN BARRETO/AFP via Getty Images

"For the most part, they don't commit atrocities," Milburn said. "You shouldn't kill dudes who surrendered...and there was plenty of that. There's all kinds of atrocities to go around."

Before his time in Ukraine, Milburn spent more than 30 years in the Marines and completed tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2020, he published his memoir, When the Tempest Gathers, that chronicles his time on battlefields around the world.

Blumenthal tweeted that during The Team House interview "the craft bourbon flowed" while Milburn spoke with hosts Dave Parke and Jack Murphy. Blumenthal hints that intoxication played a part in Milburn veering "to paint a much darker picture of what he saw in Ukraine."

During the two-hour-plus conversation, Milburn also discussed war tactics and praised the Ukrainians for their knowledge of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), saying they should be provided with "more advanced European and U.S drones."

Milburn also discussed Russian President Vladimir Putin and said Russia isn't suffering from reported battleground setbacks as much as people might think.

"I think it's very easy to dismiss Putin as being insane," Milburn said. "There's a method to his madness."

Newsweek reached out to Milburn for comment.

Newsweek · by Jon Jackson · December 27, 2022

4. Air Force quietly speeds up plans to eliminate spy planes on the front line of America's fentanyl war

The fentanyl epidemic may be one of the worst of the worst acts of subversion against the US in recent history.

Excerpts:

A law enforcement official who previously spoke to CNN under the condition of anonymity said getting rid of the RC-26 would take away the biggest advantage officers have over drug trafficking organizations that are currently “flooding the market” with large quantities of fentanyl and killing swaths of Americans in the process.

“I know the Air Force is trying to say there are other options … but they don’t have the same capabilities,” said the law enforcement official, who has routinely requested assistance from Air National Guard pilots operating the RC-26.

Air Force quietly speeds up plans to eliminate spy planes on the front line of America's fentanyl war | CNN Politics

CNN · by Zachary Cohen · December 27, 2022

CNN —

The US Air Force is moving up its timeline for scrapping a small fleet of surveillance planes used to help take fentanyl pills off the streets, telling National Guard pilots they must fly their aircraft to the boneyard by the end of the month so they can be stripped for parts, according to documents obtained by CNN.

The new plan to eliminate the twin-engine RC-26 aircraft months earlier than anticipated marks an escalation in the service’s quest to phase out the small yet heavily used fleet of planes despite its contributions to counter drug and border missions.

It also comes at a time when the Biden administration is facing increasing scrutiny over its border policies and is grappling with a dramatic rise in fentanyl deaths around the country.

Opioid Crisis Fast Facts

Once it became clear in March that Congress was unlikely to adopt a provision that would have extended funding for the aircraft, the Air Force told pilots who operate the RC-26 that they could continue to fly missions until April 2023, according to internal memos obtained by CNN.

But in November, pilots received new orders, instructing them to take their planes to the boneyard before the end of the year so they could be scrapped for parts, rather than sold to another non-Defense Department entity as originally planned, the memos show.

Multiple sources characterized the shift as a “drastic change” by the Air Force that came without warning. As a result, the force will lose roughly 80 pilots at a time when it is already facing a service-wide shortage, sources say.

“The impact this plane and these operators have had in reducing, disrupting and damaging operations of illegal narcotics has been amazing and I am proud to have served alongside you,” one RC-26 pilot wrote to several others in an email obtained by CNN.

GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who flies the RC-26 as a pilot in the Air National Guard and has pushed to save the plane from extinction, told CNN that the shift appears to be a move by the Air Force to demilitarize the plane as quickly as possible in order to prevent any last-ditch effort to save it.

“That is the only reason I can see that they have decided to speed it up as quickly as they have,” Kinzinger, who is retiring from Congress next month, told CNN in a recent interview. He said he believes the Air Force has little interest in flying counter-drug missions despite the RC-26’s outsize role in helping law enforcement combat the flow of fentanyl into the US.

Courtesy of United States Air Force

Surveillance plane helping take fentanyl pills off the streets faces extinction

Kinzinger also said that he met with Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall this year to make the case for keeping the RC-26 operational but was told in very stark terms that would not be possible.

“He basically made clear that DoD business is not, in essence, domestic drug issues even though DoD is one of the primary people responsible,” Kinzinger said about the meeting.

“We are the only capable border plane. We were pulled from the border under Biden, and they are now killing us,” he added.

Law enforcement officials from around the country and other National Guard pilots who fly the RC-26 have also appealed directly to Air Force leaders in Washington to keep the plane or provide a capable replacement, according to multiple sources familiar with those discussions.

But despite self-imposed limits to the types of operations that can be flown by RC-26 National Guard pilots, Air Force leaders have now decided they no longer want to fund piloted reconnaissance assets for border and counter-drug missions, asserting that unmanned drones can be offered up to fill that need, Kinzinger said.

“Given there is no Air Force specific RC-26B validated requirements nor dedicated funding to support sustainment of the weapons system,” Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek told CNN, “the Air Force is moving forward with the retirement of the aircraft.”

Supporters of the aircraft, including Kinzinger, say that the Air Force does not currently have a plan to replace the capabilities provided by the RC-26 if the program is shuttered.

From U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Washington.

U.S. Attorney Nick Brown

More than 300,000 fentanyl pills seized in federal bust connected to 3 major drug trafficking groups

A law enforcement official who previously spoke to CNN under the condition of anonymity said getting rid of the RC-26 would take away the biggest advantage officers have over drug trafficking organizations that are currently “flooding the market” with large quantities of fentanyl and killing swaths of Americans in the process.

“I know the Air Force is trying to say there are other options … but they don’t have the same capabilities,” said the law enforcement official, who has routinely requested assistance from Air National Guard pilots operating the RC-26.

CNN’s Haley Britzky contributed to this report.

CNN · by Zachary Cohen · December 27, 2022

5. In Major Step, Space Force Takes Over All Military Satellite Communications

In Major Step, Space Force Takes Over All Military Satellite Communications

military.com · by 27 Dec 2022 The Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colo.) | By Mary Shinn · December 27, 2022

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The Space Force has taken over all of the Department of Defense's military satellite communication functions, a major step in building the new service.

The Navy and the Army have transferred major satellite communication operations to the Space Force in an effort to consolidate training, operations, acquisition and other activities, according to a news release. The transfer marks the first time all military satellite communication functions have been consolidated under a single military service.

The Army's transfers were expected to include $78 million in operations, maintenance and 500 positions, the release said. As part of the consolidation, the Army transferred the Wideband Global SATCOM and Defense Satellite Communications System to the Space Force in August. The Wideband Global SATCOM system is considered the "backbone of the U.S. military's global satellite communications," according to the Space Force.

The Colorado Springs area did not see a net gain in jobs although some people did transfer from Fort Carson to Schriever Space Force Base, said Col. David Pheasant, commander of Delta 8. His delta focuses on satellite communications as well as position, navigation and timing, and represents about 10% of the Space Force.

As part of the overall consolidation, Pheasant said he expects those trained in space operations will be able to spend their entire career working on space missions.

"They can build on that knowledge and be able to share it with others," he said.

Previously, a soldier in the Army might spend just a few years working as a satellite operator before moving on to a new job, he said.

The transfer of all new Space Force members as part of the consolidation is still underway and is expected to last through December, he said. However, those people are already working for the Space Force, even though they may still officially be members of other military branches.

As part of growing Space Force capabilities, Pheasant said he expects the service to grow its partnerships with other countries.

For example, the service could put payloads on some of Denmark's satellites, he said.

Expanding capability in space is important because the military is seeing demand for satellite connectivity in the field proliferate, just as demand for data connections has risen in homes. Any resident likely has five devices or more in their home requiring a connection. Similarly one military vehicle in the field likely has five different pieces of equipment that need satellite connectivity.

___

(c)2022 The Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colo.)

Visit The Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colo.) at www.gazette.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

military.com · by 27 Dec 2022 The Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colo.) | By Mary Shinn · December 27, 2022

6.  Why artificial intelligence needs to be on your mind in 2023

Why? I thought the purpose of AI was so that we no longer need to think. (poor attempt at humor or as my daughter would say - a "dad joke.")

Why artificial intelligence needs to be on your mind in 2023

The world is rapidly becoming more reliant on artificial intelligence, and the implications for society are both exciting and worrying.

msnbc.com · December 27, 2022

The best advice I can give you for 2023 is to familiarize yourself with the concept of “artificial intelligence” and its impact on our everyday lives.

Today, so-called machine learning and AI factor prominently in daily activities. And in the wrong hands, this technology can wreak havoc on society.

To me, social media platforms have been the clearest example of this. Twitter and Facebook feeds, powered by artificial intelligence and controlled by some of the world’s wealthiest people, have bombarded users with politically opportunistic conspiracy theories, misinformation, and hatred.

These days, I tend to see the misery evoked by social platforms as an opportunity to highlight the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

But the trouble with AI isn’t limited to social media. Law enforcement agencies use artificial intelligence to “predict” (read: assume) where crimes will occur and who will commit them. Employers use AI to help them determine who they think will be the best fit for their workplace. And medical professionals use AI to help them make diagnoses and prescribe remedies.

But because this AI is built by humans who carry biases, the output can be pretty biased as well, meaning the pitfalls of AI creations often fall heaviest on marginalized people. And the hunger for AI only seems to be growing, with one expert warning of a premature and “shocking” rollout of AI technology in 2023.

This fear about hastiness with AI is the crux of a 2018 paper by tech specialists Timnit Gebru and Joy Buolamwini. The paper, titled “Gender Shades,” focuses on how artificial intelligence such as facial recognition software is often ill-equipped to recognize Black people — particularly, Black women. And in a world increasingly reliant on AI, machine failures like the ones described by Gebru and Buolamwini will have downstream impacts on who is (or isn’t) hired and who is (or isn’t) arrested.

Personally, I’ve looked to Black and brown techies for guidance on this. Routinely, they’re the ones most attuned to the shortcomings of AI, and the most invested in fixing them. Buolamwini and Gebru have both founded organizations focused on ethical AI. Follow them! (Here’s a link to Buolamwini’s Algorithmic Justice League, and one for Gebru’s Distributed AI Research Institute.)

ReidOut Blog readers may recognize Gebru, who was ousted from Google after raising issues about AI bias, from my previous citations of her work. I love how she thinks and talks about tech and artificial intelligence. I share her excitement about AI’s possibilities, and her fears about its misuse.

Earlier this year, I stumbled upon this lecture of hers, hosted by Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute. It’s titled “The Quest for Ethical Artificial Intelligence,” and I highly recommend it. The quest for ethical AI is a worthy one. An essential one, even.

Choose your leaders wisely.

Check out the lecture below.

msnbc.com · December 27, 2022

7. China tests America’s will with clashes along India border

China tests America’s will with clashes along India border

BY HUSAIN HAQQANI AND APARNA PANDE, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 12/27/22 9:00 AM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/3789207-china-tests-americas-will-with-clashes-along-india-border/?utm_campaign=dfn-ebb&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sailthru&SToverlay=2002c2d9-c344-4bbb-8610-e5794efcfa7d

The latest clash between Indian and Chinese soldiers across the Line of Actual Control (LAC) is a reminder that China, under President Xi Jinping, plans to remain aggressive and assertive after the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. With limited and manageable conflict in the Himalayas, the Chinese are testing the will of the United States to check China’s muscle flexing and the strength of burgeoning American partnerships in the Indo-Pacific, especially the one with India.

In China’s reckoning, India is both its most likely Asian rival with a comparable population size and the least likely American military ally in the Indo-Pacific Quad (a loose grouping of U.S., Australia, Japan and India). Given India’s desire to maintain sovereign autonomy, China wants to provoke India into ending its current close relationship with the U.S. — a relationship that is not a military alliance.

Chinese leaders seem to believe that, faced with the prospect of an aggressive China on its land border, India will be further compelled to maintain a more balanced posture towards China and the United States. The U.S. goal, in such circumstances, should be to continue to persuade India to improve its military preparedness, hasten its military modernization and increase interoperability of military equipment in India’s use with American (and allied) systems.

The Biden administration reacted to the latest India-China conflict with a strong statement offering support for India and referring to Chinese actions as provocative. The last time the two sides fought along the India-China border, the U.S. enhanced intelligence sharing with India. This time, in addition to intelligence sharing, the U.S. could fast-track supply of advanced military equipment to India to signal its support for a key partner that is not a formal military ally.

The Dec. 9 clash in the Yangtse area, near Tawang in India’s northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, was the second such clash in slightly over a year between Indian and Chinese troops. The two forces also fought in June 2020, when Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) troops attacked Indian border guards at Galwang in Ladakh, along a disputed border, armed with crudely fashioned spiked clubs. There was another border clash in October 2021.

The two sides have now disengaged after a flag meeting between local commanders. Although 15 Indians and an unknown number of Chinese troops sustained injuries, the casualties were not comparable to the 2020 fighting in Galwang when 20 Indian and 40 Chinese soldiers reportedly died, and many others were injured.

While the 2020 fighting was in Ladakh, this time the Chinese chose Arunachal Pradesh to flex their muscle. Both these Indian states have long been claimed by China, though India and most members of the international community disagree. 

The latest confrontation between Indian and Chinese troops was interestingly timed. It occurred just one month after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi met at the G-20 Summit in Bali and one week after the annual U.S.-India military exercise – “Yudh Abhyas 2022” (War Simulation or Preparation). China had expressed displeasure at the exercise, which was held around 60 miles from the India-China border.

Unlike 2020, when the Indian side limited its response to diplomacy, the Indian army reacted strongly this time and beat back the attackers. A new deployment strategy – with one layer of troops who patrol close to the border and a second layer of troops or Quick Reaction Team who, if need be, can be deployed to match the PLA numbers – made the Indian military reaction possible.

After the 2020 standoff, the two sides undertook 16 rounds of diplomatic and military negotiations, but they were unable to reach a mutually acceptable solution. Beijing lays the blame at Delhi’s door, arguing that China has simply been responding to Indian infrastructure build up along the border. China insists its troops are simply “upholding China’s territorial and sovereignty security” and responding to India’s “trespassing and infringing activities.”

India maintains that it has been upgrading its border infrastructure for over a decade and that China has disturbed three decades of “peace and tranquility.” Unlike in the past when India was willing to continue business as usual with China even without the border being restored to status quo ante, Delhi now insists that restoration of normal relations is contingent on restoring peace along the border.

The regularity of Chinese forays along the Himalayan border with India suggests that these are not local tactical maneuvers but are part of a broader Chinese strategy. China is concerned about India’s closer alignment with the United States and its partners — in the Indo Pacific and through the Quad.

The emerging India-U.S. strategic partnership, and India’s signing of foundational military agreements with the U.S., has meant that both the Trump and Biden administrations were willing to share intelligence with and help India bolster its capabilities on the border. Now, India and the U.S. must identify advanced weapons systems that the U.S. and its allies might be able to deliver to India to deal with the rising Chinese threat.  

The U.S. focus on the Indo-Pacific has convinced China that it would have to face the U.S. and its allies in East and Southeast Asia, and in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. China is, therefore, targeting India’s vulnerabilities on the land border. Through periodic border clashes, China is warning India that its Quad partners will not be able to help India in the Himalayan region and, therefore, India should think twice about becoming part of America’s Indo-Pacific strategy.

Most India-U.S. discussions about security cooperation have been about the maritime arena. The U.S. could upend China’s efforts to scare India out of close ties with the U.S. by showing an interest in improving the capabilities of the Indian army as much as the U.S. seems interested in India’s Air Force and Navy. Washington and New Delhi may also have to settle on some middle ground between India’s insistence on technology transfer and U.S. offers of just selling more military equipment, which has stalled India’s military modernization for years.

Husain Haqqani, former ambassador of Pakistan to the U.S., is director for South and Central Asia at the Hudson Institute. Aparna Pande is director of the Initiative on the Future of India and South Asia at the Washington-based Hudson Institute.

8. Ukraine Strikes Back At Bomber Base Deep Inside Russia

Excerpts:

In the wake of those attacks, other Russian air bases have decided to disperse their aircraft in case of attack. Satellite imagery showed that aircraft at Yeysk Naval Air Station were more spread out across the flight line.

The Russian Air Force apparently took further precautions at its bases. Evergreen Intel (@vcdgf555) and ThreeCalories (@ThreeCalories) found dividers installed between many active aircraft at the Akhtubinsk Flight Test Centre. The dividers are no doubt an attempt to contain any damage to one aircraft in an attack, designed to prevent both fire and shrapnel spreading (which occurred at Saki Air Base in Crimea this summer).

While hardening the airfields is certainly a prudent response to these drone attacks, Russia has apparently yet to find an answer to Ukraine's stock of long-range drones that have struck not only deep inside its borders, but have also hit targets on Crimea proper.

Regardless of whether any aircraft were damaged in this latest attack, the fact that Ukraine could once again fly so far into Russian airspace will no doubt embolden Kyiv to attempt more of these long-range drone attacks. It remains to be seen how Russia can respond.

Ukraine Strikes Back At Bomber Base Deep Inside Russia

This is the second time Ukraine has executed long-range drone strikes on Engels Air Base located hundreds of miles inside Russia.

BY

HOWARD ALTMAN

|

PUBLISHED DEC 26, 2022 3:20 PM

thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · December 26, 2022

A second apparent Ukrainian drone attack this month on Russia’s Engels Air Base in the Saratov region 300 miles from the Ukrainian border has resulted in three people killed and four injured, according to Russian media.

It is claimed that no Russian aircraft were damaged in the incident, according to the Telegram channel of the Russian official TASS news agency. The Russian Defense Ministry (MoD) said the deaths were caused after the drone was shot down before it could cause any damage to the airfield or aircraft.

“The air defense systems of the Russian Aerospace Forces prevented a Ukrainian drone strike on the Engels military airfield in the Saratov region,” TASS reported Monday. “Three people were killed due to falling debris, the planes were not damaged, the Russian Defense Ministry said.”

After the explosion a fire erupted, the Russian Baza news agency's Telegram channel reported. In addition to three people killed, four more were hospitalized, according to Baza.

That Ukrainian drones could again fly so deep into Russian territory raises anew questions about its air defense capabilities. Low and slow-flying drones, especially those made of composite materials, are hard to detect, track and engage. But these larger Soviet-era jet-powered reconnaissance drones should be more vulnerable, depending on the circumstances. Still, one of these that was modified with a warhead first appeared in Croatia not long after the war began. It apparently malfunctioned badly or had improper coordinates uploaded into it. You can read about that bizarre event here.

Tu-141 on its launcher. (Ukraine MoD)

The attack also sends a powerful signal of Ukrainian resolve and of Kyiv’s expanding options for retaliation.

Despite Russian assertions, there are unconfirmed reports of aircraft damaged at Engels in this latest attack, and of Russia moving aircraft out of the airfield.

While Ukraine has typically avoided commenting on attacks inside Russia, Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuri Ignat on Monday hinted at it.

“If the Russians thought that the war would not affect them deep in the rear, they were wrong," he told reporters on Monday, according to the Kyiv Independent.

Ignat also said that Russia's claims about no aircraft being damaged have yet to be proven.

This is the second apparent Ukrainian drone attack on the base this month. On Dec. 5, Engels and Dyagilevo Air Base were struck by what the Russian MoD said were Soviet-made jet-powered unmanned aerial vehicles modified by Ukraine to carry explosives. The Russian MoD was referring to the jet-powered Tu-141 Strizh, originally built as a reconnaissance UAV. Smaller Tu-143s have also likely been used. You can read about that here.

Those attacks resulted in damage to at least one Tu-22M3 Backfire-C bomber and apparently also to a Tu-95MS Bear-H bomber.

The Tu-95MS has been widely used to launch cruise missiles against targets in Ukraine since the start of the war. Engels is home to the 22nd Heavy Bomber Aviation Division, which operates one squadron of Bear-Hs and another squadron of supersonic Tu-160 Blackjack bombers. Both types have been employed in the conflict in Ukraine and especially in recent months as Russia stepped up its standoff strikes on Ukraine's energy infrastructure.

And one day after that attack, Russian authorities blamed a Ukrainian drone strike for the fire that broke out on a Russian airbase in the country’s southern Kursk region, around 60 miles from the Ukrainian border.

The regional governor of Kursk Oblast, Roman Starovoy, said on his Telegram channel that the drone attack on Khalino Air Base on Dec. 6 had ignited what he described as an “oil reservoir” — presumably a fuel storage depot — within the airbase’s perimeter. He added that fire crews were containing the blaze. Multiple videos posted to social media showed flames leaping up into the night sky early this morning; thick black smoke was also indicative of a fuel fire. You can read more about that incident here.

In the wake of those attacks, other Russian air bases have decided to disperse their aircraft in case of attack. Satellite imagery showed that aircraft at Yeysk Naval Air Station were more spread out across the flight line.

The Russian Air Force apparently took further precautions at its bases. Evergreen Intel (@vcdgf555) and ThreeCalories (@ThreeCalories) found dividers installed between many active aircraft at the Akhtubinsk Flight Test Centre. The dividers are no doubt an attempt to contain any damage to one aircraft in an attack, designed to prevent both fire and shrapnel spreading (which occurred at Saki Air Base in Crimea this summer).

While hardening the airfields is certainly a prudent response to these drone attacks, Russia has apparently yet to find an answer to Ukraine's stock of long-range drones that have struck not only deep inside its borders, but have also hit targets on Crimea proper.

Regardless of whether any aircraft were damaged in this latest attack, the fact that Ukraine could once again fly so far into Russian airspace will no doubt embolden Kyiv to attempt more of these long-range drone attacks. It remains to be seen how Russia can respond.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com

thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · December 26, 2022

9. The Great Lesson of the Cold War: Ideology Matters

Yes, it does.

​

The Great Lesson of the Cold War: Ideology Matters

19fortyfive.com · by Sean Durns · December 27, 2022

The United States is in a new Cold War. But this time Washington’s chief opponent is China, with Russia currently serving as a junior partner. The U.S. and its allies would be wise to remember the greatest lesson of the last Cold War: ideology matters.

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The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union spanned the globe and lasted nearly half a century, arguably beginning at the end of World War II in 1945, and ending on Dec. 26, 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet regime. But it was more than a contest between two nuclear armed states, punctuated by hot wars among satellite nations and allies. It was, at its roots, an ideological conflict between the capitalist West and Soviet communism.

From start to finish the Soviet Union was ruled by committed communists. Yet many in the West, from pundits to politicians, often downplayed the role and importance of ideology, preferring to cast the Cold War as purely a rivalry between two great powers.

This line of thinking offered the advantage of making differences seem less intractable and the conflict less Manichean. But it also led the U.S. and others to fundamentally misread Soviet actions. The United States and its allies shouldn’t repeat the same mistake.

As a new book makes clear, Xi Jinping, the president of China and the head of the Chinese Communist Party, is a fervent ideologue. In The Final Struggle: Inside China’s Global Strategy, author Ian Easton highlights Xi’s beliefs and documents their widespread dissemination and adaptation. Easton, a senior director at the Project 2049 Institute, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, spent years poring over source material to discern Beijing’s aims and ambitions.

It was no easy task. The CCP, he notes, “has many policies and ideas that it knows the average thinking person might consider ugly and terrifying.” Accordingly, they’ve “mastered the art of using euphemisms instead of clear language to speak to the people of China and the world.” But just as often, the CCP means what it says.

“Capitalism,” Xi has exhorted, “is bound to die out and socialism is bound to win.” Indeed, Xi and the CCP are committed communists. Xi himself has called Karl Marx “the greatest thinker in human history,” and expressed his “unshakeable belief in the scientific truth of Marxism.”

What lessons has Xi taken from his hero? Marx, Xi has proclaimed, “dedicated his entire life to overthrowing the old world and establishing a new world.” And Marxism itself was “created in order to change the destiny of human history.”

This may sound grandiose to many in the West. And indeed, it is. But so were the delusions of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and other autocrats who sought to remake their societies and export their twisted visions. Their ambitions, while audacious, were all too real. Millions died as a result.

China’s actions match Xi’s words. Beijing has embarked upon a military buildup that is unprecedented in modern history, procuring the means to project power far from its shores.

Importantly, the CCP already sees itself as being at war with the West—a fact that the latter is only belatedly recognizing.

In December 2017, the National Security Strategy of the United States acknowledged that “China…wants to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests.” Beijing, the U.S. warned, “seeks to displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific region, expand the reaches of its state-driven economic model, and reorder the region in its favor.”

Understanding “Xi Jinping Thought,” which is now broadly disseminated in China, is key to understanding the CCP—and to anticipating what it might do next.

Recent CCP policies, such as Xi’s “Zero-COVID” policy, have damaged China economically and sparked precisely what the Middle Kingdom fears most: internal unrest. For many foreign observers, “Zero-COVID” was irrational and guaranteed to weaken China. But for the CCP, which values control above all else, it is in keeping with what is a long history of disastrous decisions, from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution—and beyond.

The CCP’s penchant for irrational decision making should trouble those who are concerned about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Indeed, it warns that ideology is, to a great extent, inseparable from China’s ambitions; one informs the other.

Stephen Kotkin, a Stanford historian and noted biographer of Joseph Stalin, once noted that the “big story” of the Soviet archives was that “behind closed doors they said the same thing as they said in their propaganda.” He clarified: “It turns out that the communists were communists; they believed in their ideas. And it’s only by taking their ideas and their politics seriously that you can understand” them. The U.S. and its allies must take note: understanding the CCP’s ideology is essential to deterring and confronting Beijing’s aggression.

Sean Durns is a Washington DC-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.

19fortyfive.com · by Sean Durns · December 27, 2022

10. China’s Afghanistan Strategy May Be In Trouble – Analysis

Important insights in this concussion. China has some tough challenges (much of its own making).

Conclusion:

With a looming great power competition between US and China, struggles with mammoth, capital-intensive projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, and shaky global post-pandemic economic environment further aggravated by Russia’s war against Ukraine, it will indeed be surprising if China takes up the sole responsibility of keeping Afghanistan afloat.

China’s Afghanistan Strategy May Be In Trouble – Analysis

eurasiareview.com · by Observer Research Foundation · December 26, 2022

By Kabir Taneja

An attack on a hotel in central Kabul housing Chinese visitors and businesses by the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) last week once again brought Beijing to the centre of the ‘new’ Afghanistan’s security problems, one that today is standing on a more precarious ground than it was a few months ago.

The ISKP has been filling in vacuums that, ironically, have been left behind by the Taliban as the latter continues its efforts to metamorphise from an insurgency and terror group to a state and political system seeking global recognition. Pro-ISIS propaganda publications targeting South Asia, such as ‘Voice of Khorasan’ which replaced, or subsumed, more hyper-local propaganda outlets such as ‘Sawt Al Hind (Voice of Hind)’ have upped their ante when it comes to anti-China rhetoric as part of extension of criticising the Taliban’s global outreach and the few developing relations it is trying to keep together. While for 20-years the Taliban built the rhetoric of the US presence in the country as an imperialistic conquest of their land and solidified their Islamist ideology around this war against crusaders, like the way it did against the erstwhile USSR, it today finds itself fighting against the likes of ISKP that see China from a similar lens. But of course, Beijing is not seen from a traditional imperial lens, but from an economic one, despite not yet putting in any notable amount of cash into the Taliban’s coffers.

Interestingly, Afghanistan is not the only country where China is facing a pushback from Islamist militants. Al Qaeda-aligned Islamist group Al Shabaab which holds control over territory in Somalia has also in the recent past become more vocal on its anti-China propaganda, and has previously targeted Chinese interests in countries such as Kenya and Mozambique.

The type of stability in Afghanistan that perhaps China had envisioned in fact may not materialise. Over the past months, China has held almost weekly consultations with the Taliban via its ambassador in Kabul. Many economic and investment opportunities have been discussed, and the Taliban has even alluded to keeping major mining projects reserved for Beijing. In preparation for this, the Taliban has even been working towards preservation of Buddhas in the country, a stark shift from 2001 when then Taliban Chief Mullah Omar led charge and destroyed the famous Bamiyan buddha statues as the world watched in horror. Today, they offer China Afghanistan’s natural wealth in exchange for investments, realising that their own Islamic Emirate may not flourish for too long as a hermit state, and that the current ruling classes such as the Haqqani Network and the Kandahari faction alike will need a strong and independent finance base to secure their respective interests and future both as part of a state, and potentially, against each other as well.

The narrative of China as a pound-for-pound replacement of US power in Afghanistan was always a flimsy one, as was any prevailing opinion in Beijing that it could solidify Kabul politically using money and the combined political will of the Pakistani military and the Taliban. This view was further fractured on two strategic fronts. First, the unwillingness of the Taliban to apprehend, disband or handover members of the East Turkistan Islamic Party (ETIM or TIM) and its tributaries of Uyghur militants to secure Chinese interests. Previously, reports have suggested that the Taliban only moved ETIM and other Uyghur militants away from the Badakhshan province that bordered China, and that Beijing has developed a security outpost in Tajikistan to keep watch. However, anti-China rhetoric from these groups, along with ISKP, has only gone up.

Second, China’s potential use of Pakistan as a proxy in Afghanistan on the security front, or in short, using Pakistani blood at the forefront to secure its economic interests is also looking like a bleak prospect. The recent assassination attempt against Pakistan’s chargé d’affaires in Kabul claimed by ISKP has added another thorn in the Pakistan–Taliban axis. This attack has been preceded by regular attacks on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border, Taliban’s sheltering of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a group that continues to target Pakistan regularly using the strategic depth provided by the Afghan Taliban, and an increasingly more vocal divide between factions within the Taliban as Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, who has only been to Kabul once or twice from Kandahar since August last year, doubling down against offering any ideological discounts from the Taliban’s side to the international community, particularly the West, on issues such as girl’s education. A recent decree by the Taliban’s Ministry of Higher Education to ban all women from attending universityis another example of the Kandaharis stamping further control as internal churn continues to unravel over the future trajectory of the movement.

While there is no doubt that China with its economic heft can be a gamechanger in Afghanistan, it is also important to remember that regional and neighbouring states have a stronger grasp on Kabul and its Islamic politics. While international discourse frets over Beijing’s role in Afghanistan, specifically as ties between US-backed governments led by the likes of Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani were not particularly smooth with China, others have in fact made much more progress in influencing the Taliban politically and economically. Earlier this month, each centre of power and influence in Kabul, past and present, was in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) simultaneously. The UAE hosted Taliban’s acting defence minister Mullah Yaqoob who was accompanied by Anas Haqqani, while Karzai made his first foreign trip with a stopover in the country on the same day. All these visits happened not too far from where Ghani has taken refuge in Abu Dhabi since last year. This was a much more brazen and open show of growing influence, leveraging history, over Afghan affairs than China has ever managed despite the euphoria surrounding Beijing’s role.

Beyond the UAE, other states such as Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, and Qatar along with the West may have a more realistic chance of helping Afghanistan avoid a complete, long-term economic collapse than Beijing, which at the end of the day has narrow strategic and security aims and wider exploitative aims concerning with natural resources, infrastructure development and requirement for investing in foreign lands to feed its own domestic economy at home. This comes with an incredible set of risks as far as allying with the Taliban is concerned.

With a looming great power competition between US and China, struggles with mammoth, capital-intensive projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, and shaky global post-pandemic economic environment further aggravated by Russia’s war against Ukraine, it will indeed be surprising if China takes up the sole responsibility of keeping Afghanistan afloat.

eurasiareview.com · by Observer Research Foundation · December 26, 2022

11. Trapped in the Trenches in Ukraine

It is not all quiet on the eastern front.

Some interesting stories about foreign fighters in Ukraine.

Trapped in the Trenches in Ukraine

Along the country’s seven-hundred-mile front line, constant artillery fire and drone surveillance have made it excruciatingly difficult to maneuver.

By Luke Mogelson

December 26, 2022

The New Yorker · by Luke Mogelson · December 26, 2022

One Sunday in early October, I had lunch at an outdoor restaurant on Andriyivsky Descent, in downtown Kyiv, with a thirty-seven-year-old American who went by the code name Doc. I’d rented an apartment on the same cobblestone street back in March, while the Ukrainian military was repulsing a Russian assault on the city. At the time, the neighborhood had been deserted, and a portentous quiet was broken only by sporadic explosions and whining air-raid sirens. Now Andriyivsky Descent was thronged with couples and families promenading in the autumn sun. Local artists sold oil paintings on the sidewalk. A trumpeter and an accordionist played for tips. Doc sipped a Negroni. Long-bearded, square-jawed, and barrel-chested, he wore a green tactical jacket and a baseball cap embroidered with the Ukrainian national trident. A thick scar spanned his neck, from a bar fight in North Carolina during which someone had sliced his throat with a box cutter. Toward the end of our meal, an older man in a leather fedora approached our table. “International Legion?” he asked, in accented English. I pointed at Doc; the man extended his hand and told him, “I just wanted to say thank you.”

Doc scrutinized his glass, embarrassed. After the man left, I remarked that such recognition must feel good. “It feels weird,” Doc replied. He’d been a marine in his twenties, and had fought, as a machine gunner, in Iraq and Afghanistan. It had always made him uncomfortable when American civilians thanked him for his service. When his contract ended, in 2011, he’d been eager to put war behind him. “It was a hard cut,” he said. “I was never going back.” Shortly after being discharged, he moved from North Carolina to New York City, where he’d been accepted at Columbia University. Using the G.I. Bill, he majored in computer science, with a minor in linguistics. He did two summer internships at Google, and when he graduated the company hired him full time.

While Doc was working as a software engineer, in Manhattan, his view of Big Tech progressively dimmed. He was disillusioned by the Presidency of Donald Trump, and he blamed social media, in part, for the country’s polarization. This past January, he notified Google that he was quitting. He was unsure what he’d do next. “I didn’t really have direction,” he recalled. Then, on February 24th, Russia invaded Ukraine. From Doc’s perspective, “it was pretty serendipitous.”

The next afternoon, he visited the Ukrainian consulate in midtown. The reception area was swarmed with Ukrainian immigrants seeking information, and Doc was asked to come back after the weekend. That Sunday, Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, announced the creation of an International Legion and issued an “appeal to foreign citizens” to join. Volunteers would be defending not only Ukraine, Zelensky insisted: “This is the beginning of a war against Europe, against European structures, against democracy, against basic human rights, against a global order of law, rules, and peaceful coexistence.” When Doc returned to the consulate, an official advised him to go to Poland, giving him a phone number for someone who would guide him from there.

Two weeks later, Doc landed in Warsaw with a duffle bag containing medical supplies and body armor. He texted the number and was directed to a motel near the Ukrainian border. Several groups of men, “obviously military guys,” loitered in the parking lot. A few had unrolled sleeping bags in the lobby. Nobody would talk to Doc. Paranoia about spies and infiltrators was acute. The previous day, Russian cruise missiles had targeted the main training camp for the International Legion, in Yavoriv, a Ukrainian city about an hour’s drive away. Though no foreigners had died, dozens of Ukrainians were killed. A friend of mine—a Canadian Army veteran who’d joined the Legion—had survived the attack. When I’d reached him by phone, he’d described the scene as “a bloodbath.”

Doc had been waiting at the motel for about six hours when a cargo van pulled up. The driver told him to get in. “That’s all he said,” Doc remembered. “I was, like, All right. Fuck it.”

Half a dozen volunteers from South America crowded into the back with him. They were brought to an abandoned school and then, eventually, to the base in Yavoriv. Of the hundreds of foreigners who had been at the facility when it was hit, many had returned to Poland. According to my Canadian friend, this was for the best. Although some of the men had been “legit, values-driven, warrior-mentality” veterans, others were “shit”: “gun nuts,” “right-wing bikers,” “ex-cops who are three hundred pounds.” Two people had accidentally discharged their weapons inside his tent in less than a week. A “chaotic” lack of discipline had been exacerbated by “a fair amount of cocaine.”

The attack functioned as a filter. “It was almost comical to watch all these tough guys just shit themselves and run away,” my friend said. By the time Doc reached Yavoriv, a higher proportion of the volunteers were committed fighters. The main branch of the Legion fell under the purview of the Ukrainian Army, but the G.U.R., the Defense Ministry’s intelligence directorate, was also recruiting foreigners for specialized assignments. After an interview with a G.U.R. officer, Doc was placed on a thirteen-man team composed of Brazilians, Portuguese, Brits, and others. They were deployed to Sumy, in the north, to conduct reconnaissance on armored columns moving toward Kyiv.

Turtle approaches a rocket lodged in the road while driving to the front line in Donetsk.

In April, Russian forces retreated from northern Ukraine in order to concentrate on the Donbas, in the east. The G.U.R. sent Doc and his comrades to a region there called Donetsk. The fighting intensified. Over the spring and summer, two members of Doc’s unit were killed and several injured. Others went home. When we met in Kyiv, his team had dwindled to five men, and the contraction reflected a broader trend. In March, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister had stated that twenty thousand people, from fifty-two countries, had expressed interest in signing up for the International Legion. That month in Kyiv, I’d met numerous Americans and Europeans eager to join the war effort, and a room in the train station had been dedicated to welcoming such new arrivals. The Legion refuses to disclose how many members it now counts, but it is nowhere near twenty thousand.

Many foreigners, no matter how seasoned or élite, were unprepared for the reality of combat in Ukraine: the front line, which extends for roughly seven hundred miles, features relentless, industrial-scale violence of a type unknown in Europe since the Second World War. The ordeal of weathering modern artillery for extended durations is distinct from anything that Western soldiers faced in Iraq or Afghanistan (where they enjoyed a monopoly on such firepower). “Once you’ve been dropped on heavy—ninety per cent of people can’t handle that, even if they’re combat-experienced,” Doc told me.

At our lunch, Doc seemed conflicted himself about whether he would continue fighting. Two weeks later, though, he decided to return to Donetsk. I asked to go with him. The Ukrainian military has been extraordinarily opaque about how it is executing the war, and journalistic embeds are almost nonexistent. Despite the historic magnitude of the conflict, our concept of the battlefield derives largely from brief, edited video clips released by the government or posted by soldiers.

The G.U.R., however, appeared to exercise a degree of independence, and, rather unexpectedly, it allowed me to accompany Doc.

It was a ten-hour drive to the town where Doc’s team was based, not far from Pavlivka, a frontline village about fifty miles north of Mariupol. Most civilians had fled the area, and the landscape was now battered and pocked with craters. In May, the building where the foreigners had been living was struck by cluster munitions; a Portuguese fighter was gravely wounded, and shrapnel was lodged in Doc’s right buttock. Their current quarters, in a quaint brick house on the bank of a stream overgrown with reeds, resembled less a military billet than a communal squat. A salvaged barbecue grill stood in the yard; socks and underwear dried on a line. Logs split by a hatchet fuelled a wood-burning stove.

Doc went into the basement, which was teeming with ammunition boxes, anti-tank weapons, and rocket launchers, and unfolded a mat on the concrete floor. Tai, a former member of the New Zealand Defense Force, and T.Q., a German who had served in the French Foreign Legion, also slept down there. Another Kiwi, called Turtle, and a U.S. Army veteran whose code name was Herring occupied the first floor. Several Ukrainians lived upstairs, and a motley entourage of dogs and cats roamed the property. We’d shown up at dinnertime. In a cramped kitchen decorated with elaborately patterned wallpaper, the men took turns heating instant noodles and washing dishes. Black tarp was taped over every window: even faint traces of light could attract the attention of Russian surveillance drones. Nearby blasts had shattered some of the panes, chipped the walls, and opened gaping holes in an adjacent field. By way of welcome, Turtle cheerfully assured me of the advantage of residing in the basement: if a Russian missile hit the house, the stockpiled ordnance would provide the mercy of an “instant death.”

Turtle was the team’s leader. He’d enlisted in the New Zealand Army in 2002, when he was seventeen, done a tour in Afghanistan, and gone on to work in multiple countries as a private security contractor. An ethnic Maori, he had a forceful, gregarious personality that balanced sober professionalism with bombastic humor. His room had been the homeowner’s study, and later I found him sitting at a desk before a wall of books, writing on a notepad. He was planning the team’s next mission. In 2014, Vladimir Putin had backed a separatist rebellion in the Donbas. After Russia launched a full-scale invasion, in February, its control of the region expanded to Pavlivka; the Ukrainians retook the village in June, and since then a stalemate had prevailed. Because of the rural terrain—open farmland interspersed with occasional towns—a breakthrough from either direction would require troops to traverse sprawling fields exposed to enemy fire. Both Russia and Ukraine had focussed their resources on more strategically vital theatres, so neither was equipped to mount such an offensive.

In lieu of major advances, the two sides vied to extend their presence by exploiting a network of parallel and perpendicular tree lines that divided up the no man’s land, or “gray zone,” between their fortified garrisons. “The tree lines offer concealment,” Turtle explained. “Nothing else here offers that ability to skirt around.” The team’s primary responsibility in Donetsk was reconnaissance: sneaking through the underbrush, probing the gray zone, locating the forwardmost Russian trenches, and establishing new positions for Ukrainian troops to backfill.

But the tactic of using the foliage to obscure their movements, Turtle told me, was expiring: “The leaves are falling. In a month’s time, there won’t be anything left.” Before that happened, he intended to secure one more tree line, which would give the Ukrainians a stronger footing from which to defend any winter assault on Pavlivka.

As Turtle described in granular detail various ridges, valleys, rivers, and roads, I was struck by how thoroughly he’d internalized the local geography. His family had been troubled, he said, when he’d begun referring to the town where we were as “home.” In New Zealand, he’d been “planning out the rest of my life with a girl.” Before coming to Ukraine, he’d ended the relationship, quit his job, and sold his house and car. “In hindsight, it was very selfish,” he acknowledged. Although he may have suggested to his friends and relatives that Russian atrocities—in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha and elsewhere—had instilled in him a sense of obligation, such moral posturing had been disingenuous. “It was just an excuse to be in this environment again,” Turtle said. If the “self-satisfaction” of testing his grit remained a factor, however, the months he’d spent in Ukraine had complicated his motives. “I actually do love these people and I love this country,” he said. “I can’t go home because this is home now. It really does feel that way.”

On one of the bookshelves, Turtle had lined up several hand grenades in front of a row of novels. I also noticed, hanging above the desk, a black tag with a barcode and the word “dead” on it.

I decided not to ask about it yet.

The first phase of the mission was to conduct aerial surveillance of the tree line—a duty that fell to the team’s thirty-year-old drone operator, Herring. After five years in the U.S. Army, Herring had become a deckhand on a purse seiner off the coast of Maine. He had the callused, knotty fingers typical of that trade, along with a shaved head and narrow, dark eyes that glinted with a readiness for mischief or danger. His nose had been slightly crooked since June, when it was broken in a blast in Kyiv.

In 2018, Herring had bought a drone and taught himself to locate schools of fish by tracking the whales and sharks that fed on them. When he realized that drones would play a role in Ukraine, he said, “it was hard to sit on the sidelines, knowing you could help.” He added that he had grown up in Illinois, and, “as a Midwestern dude, I’ve always hated Russia—the whole ‘Red Dawn’ thing.”

Herring, right, and T.Q., left, in the ruins of an abandoned, heavily shelled coal mine whose utility room had been converted into a makeshift command center for the 72nd Mechanized Brigade.

A few days after I arrived at the house, I accompanied Herring to a forward position within drone range of the target tree line. He was joined by Rambo, the leader of the Ukrainians who lived with the foreigners. The Ukrainians belonged to a reconnaissance company in the 72nd Mechanized Brigade, which was responsible for the area around Pavlivka, and to which the foreigners were officially attached. Rambo was thin and scrappy, with a sly grin that seldom broke into laughter. He’d served three years in the Ukrainian Army directly after graduating from high school, in 2005. As a civilian, he’d been a pipe fitter for an engineering company that sent him to Europe, Africa, and the United States, where he’d learned rudimentary English.

Rambo and his men had moved in with Turtle’s team in August, after their own house, next door, was bombed. As we headed to the front in two dilapidated vehicles, we passed one building after another that had also been destroyed. Incinerated cars sat on the roadside. Missiles and rockets had lodged in the fields, their protruding metal tubes resembling strange bionic crops. We parked in the dystopian ruins of a coal mine whose silos, conveyors, and concrete warehouses had been severely shelled. Another soldier from the 72nd then transported us in a van to a wide tree line running toward the gray zone, where an air shaft led into underground tunnels.

Above the shaft, a utility room had been converted into a makeshift command center. A few Ukrainians monitored radio traffic from the trenches. Herring began preparing two compact drones and several improvised munitions: explosive material packed into short metal pipes that had been augmented with fins made on 3-D printers. An inverted nail emerged from the head of each pipe, serving as a firing pin; the fins caused the pipe to spiral vertically, pushing the nail into a blasting cap on impact. Sometimes, Herring weaponized his drones with disposable plastic cups containing hand grenades. “It’s a risky method, but it’s a method,” he said.

All across Ukraine, the proliferation of affordable, user-friendly drones has radically altered the battlefield. Herring had flown drones for hundreds of hours in Donetsk, dropping explosives on Russian positions and identifying enemy coördinates for Ukrainian artillery. Russian forces use commercial drones, too, but to a lesser extent. They rely more heavily on Orlans—military-grade, fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles that can be flown for longer periods of time. The limited battery life and transmission range of commercial drones preclude their pilots from operating them too remotely. Moreover, the pilots must avoid any type of shelter, such as a house or a bunker, where the signal might be obstructed.

This meant that Herring and Rambo needed to move forward from the air shaft. It was preferable to do so at night, both to mitigate their exposure and because one of the drones had a thermal camera, and spotting the heat signatures of bodies and tanks was more difficult during the day. At around 8 p.m., the men departed on foot, wearing night-vision devices. I followed, using a borrowed set.

In the grainy, green world of the phosphor screen, the stars gleamed like bioluminescent plankton. Herring and Rambo moved deliberately between the black silhouettes of trees, many of which had been splintered and contorted by artillery. I was looking at a tilled field to our left when a shimmering tail arced overhead, collided with another streaking light, and radiantly detonated. Herring said that it was a Russian missile intercepted by an anti-aircraft weapon.

We soon stopped advancing through the trees. While Rambo kneeled amid the deadwood, pulling security, Herring stepped out from under the canopy, draping a poncho over his head to hide the glow of his controller’s monitor. The drone’s four miniature rotors whirred into action, lifting it into the sky. Artillery whistled back and forth, over the field. After a while, I heard Herring curse.

“Jammers,” he told Rambo.

The Russians and the Ukrainians employ two main countermeasures against each other’s drones. One is a futuristic-looking contraption, fired like a rifle, whose transmissions force emergency landings. The other is a signal-jamming system that scrambles, over a broad zone, the satellite networks on which drones depend for navigation. Herring had run up against the latter, which had triggered an automatic response in his drone to race in the opposite direction, depleting its battery. He eventually retrieved it—correcting its course with small flicks of the joystick—and we returned to the air shaft. Although multi-rotor drones are relatively inexpensive, thermal ones are not, and Herring could not risk losing his.

Apart from their weapons, the foreigners had acquired much of their equipment on their own. Doc had bought helmets, scopes, binoculars, range finders, ear protection, ammo pouches, and other essential items for the team. Each night-vision device had cost thousands of dollars. T.Q. had traded a bottle of whiskey for American smoke grenades. Their two vehicles—a pickup truck and an S.U.V., both Nissans—had been donated but were forever breaking down, requiring parts and repairs.

Back at the command center, a soft-spoken Ukrainian officer told Rambo the brigade had received information that the Russians were preparing an attack. Rambo nodded, and then the officer turned to Herring. For a moment, they regarded each other uncertainly. At first blush, Herring could seem abrasive. His booming voice was seldom modulated, his sense of humor often lewd. I wondered what the officer thought about this brash American.

He had just one question, it turned out: “You will fight with us?”

“Of course,” Herring said.

The men clasped hands.

Trust between international volunteers and the Ukrainian military was crucial yet precarious. Language was an obvious hurdle. When Doc first rotated to Donetsk, a Portuguese team member whose parents were Ukrainian would translate from Ukrainian to Portuguese, which a Brazilian member would translate to Spanish, which an American member would translate to English. Each link in that chain had since left the country. Turtle had persuaded a Ukrainian friend who spoke English to come to Donetsk, but he was a civilian, and so he mostly stayed at the house.

Another persistent obstacle was the fact that both Ukraine and the Legion were constantly losing and replacing men. The 72nd Mechanized Brigade had assumed control of the area in August. Before that, the foreigners had worked with another brigade, the 53rd, which had fully integrated them into its operations and had furnished them with coveted Javelins. On near-daily missions, the team had pushed forward Ukrainian positions, ambushed enemy tanks, and planted mines behind Russian lines.

The 72nd had shown less interest in collaboration. Before coming to Pavlivka, the brigade had been stationed in Bakhmut, another city in Donetsk, where an enormous number of soldiers had died, and even more had been wounded. The trauma of Bakhmut had unnerved many of the survivors, and they now seemed wary of outsiders.

While the 72nd was settling in, Doc had gone on vacation, to the Spanish party island of Ibiza. Before his return, the team had undertaken to secure a tree line where, Herring’s drone surveillance indicated, Russian soldiers occupied a trench system. The foreigners left Pavlivka late in the evening. Although they had briefed the 72nd on their route, a Ukrainian unit opened fire on them as they approached. The team shot back. “We won, they didn’t,” Turtle told me.

While the Ukrainians evacuated their casualties, the team proceeded with its mission. Turtle and Tai established a machine-gun position in a field; everybody else continued on foot. T.Q. and Herring were there, as were four Americans, a Frenchman called Nick, and a third Kiwi, Dominic Abelen. The men followed a trench until they came upon a complex of dugouts and bunkers full of Russian troops—far more than they had anticipated. Most were asleep or just waking up. A frenzied close-quarters fight ensued. Using rifles and grenades, the team killed at least a dozen soldiers. Turtle and Tai, from across the field, assailed additional Russians with the machine gun.

Herring, braving incoming Russian artillery and tank fire, flies a reconnaissance drone while other members of his unit patrol the front line on foot.

As the sun rose, and the foreigners lost the advantage of their night vision, they became overwhelmed. Abelen was shot in the head while attempting to withdraw from the trench. He died instantly. One of the Americans, a twenty-four-year-old Army veteran named Joshua Jones, was wounded in the thigh. A bullet pierced Nick’s hindside. Another American, a former marine who went by Saint, was struck in his elbow and foot.

Jones, bleeding profusely, screamed for help. But Russian mortars had begun to zero in on the machine-gun position, and any effort to retrieve him or Abelen would have been suicidal. The team retreated, linked up with Turtle and Tai, and delivered Nick and Saint to a hospital. A round had smashed into Turtle’s chest plate, and Herring found a bullet hole in the crotch of his pants. That afternoon, they attempted to return to the trench, but heavy shelling forced them back. When Herring flew a drone over the scene, the bodies were still there. Two days later, the Russians had collected them.

The debacle had further strained the team’s rapport with the 72nd. No Ukrainians had died in the exchange of friendly fire, and Turtle didn’t know how many had been injured, but he allowed, “That might be why some people don’t like us in this area anymore.” The leeriness was mutual. Members of the brigade’s reconnaissance company—with which the team was supposed to coördinate—had followed the foreigners partway through the tree line, and had agreed to provide additional backup if anything went wrong. Yet none of the Ukrainians had joined the battle with the Russians. (One of them later told me that their radio had malfunctioned and they had not heard the team’s call for help.)

“There’s always gonna be some soreness there,” Turtle said. While other Legion members were less restrained about their frustration, Turtle hewed to a philosophical detachment that I came to appreciate as central to his efficacy as a soldier. “Until then, we’d been lucky,” he told me. “And our luck ran out that night.” He was most concerned about the fallout within his team. After Jones and Abelen were killed, fear and trepidation had crept in, eroding the unit’s esprit de corps. Shaking his head at the memory, Turtle said of the trench, “I don’t know if we ever got out of that thing.”

The acting commander of the Ukrainian reconnaissance company, code-named Grek, was a thirty-year-old historian who had written a doctoral thesis on ancient Thebes. He and his men (with the exception of Rambo’s group) were stationed in another house in town, a short drive away. As an undergraduate at Kyiv University, in 2012 and 2013, Grek had spent one day a week attending a reserve-officer-training-corps program. At the time, a year of military service was mandatory in Ukraine, and many young academics opted to earn their commissions rather than be conscripted. When Putin launched his campaign to take Kyiv, Grek was assigned to the reconnaissance company, which was then commanded by an experienced older officer. After the ferocious combat in Bakhmut, the unit was reduced from a hundred and twenty-eight men to eighty-two. Grek and his superior both suffered concussions in an artillery strike, and the latter never fully recovered; shortly after Grek was released from the hospital, he was temporarily put in charge of the company. A month later, when the 72nd rotated to Pavlivka, another experienced officer was sent to relieve Grek. But the day after the officer arrived he was fatally wounded by a Russian shell.

When I noted the irony of Grek’s becoming an officer to avoid military service, only to end up a frontline commander, he said, “Times change, people change.” Nevertheless, he retained the languid demeanor of a scholar. His posture was hunched, his expression one of aloof amusement. “I’m not a professional soldier,” he told me more than once.

Two days after Herring’s drone mission, Turtle and Grek visited the same tree line. Turtle wanted to create new positions there, deeper into the gray zone, which would offer better angles for fire support during the impending operation. Grek was unconvinced that the benefit warranted the risk, and they had agreed to take a look, together, at the forwardmost trench.

On our way to the coal mine, Grek asked Turtle, “You stay the winter?”

Turtle laughed. “Yeah, that’s when all the fun happens.”

“Crazy man. I’ll probably go to New Zealand.”

“We’ll change passports—you go to New Zealand, I’ll stay here.”

We switched to a four-wheel-drive truck at the mine, and Turtle and I rode in the bed as it followed muddy tracks past the air shaft with the command center. When the truck could go no farther, we walked. Rain made the ground a slippery morass. After a while, we reached a Ukrainian encampment with a few soldiers, hand-dug foxholes, and a fire pit under camouflage netting. Grek was talking to an infantryman with gray stubble and glasses when a shell crashed in the fields. We took cover in a shallow bunker reinforced with logs and scrap lumber. A rusty pot sat over dead coals; an archaic telephone was connected to a wire that ran back to the air shaft. The bespectacled man introduced himself as Grandpa. He was a fifty-four-year-old farmer who had not left the encampment for two and a half months.

When the artillery subsided, Grek and Turtle resumed moving up the tree line. The path dropped into a narrow trench, and, after slogging through ankle-deep water for ten minutes or so, we arrived at the terminus. A middle-aged soldier was posted there; as he and Grek spoke in Ukrainian, Turtle filmed them with a GoPro mounted on his helmet. (Later, at the house, his friend would translate the exchange for him.)

“Everything beyond here is mined and booby-trapped with trip wires,” the soldier warned Grek. “Some of our guys were already blown up.”

“We’ll go with de-miners,” Grek said.

“They already tried. That’s who was blown up.”

There were other dangers: the tree line narrowed and thinned significantly, offering scant protection, and it sloped into a defilade, ceding the high ground to Russian snipers. “It’s not a good idea to go down there,” the soldier said. “I’m telling you like it is.”

“A lot of mines,” Grek said, in English.

Turtle shrugged. “We’re going. That’s just happening.”

On our way back, we stopped at another Ukrainian encampment, where a soldier with a digital tablet pulled up drone images and provided a detailed overview of the proximate Russian positions, their likely directions of attack, and how to defend against them.

“You’re the commander of this zone?” Grek asked.

“Me?” the soldier said. “I’m just a dancer.”

His name was Vitaliy, and before the war he’d belonged to a Ukrainian folk-dance ensemble.

Many of the professional soldiers in the 72nd had been killed or injured in Bakhmut. Conscripts had replenished the ranks. Some had attended a three-week basic infantry course in the U.K., with instructors from across Europe, but most had received only minimal training before being given Kalashnikovs and dispatched to the front. I had watched Turtle and the team train several dozen Ukrainians in close-quarters battle, or C.Q.B., a foundational doctrine among Western militaries for urban combat: how to enter rooms, move as a squad, shoot from windows. The Ukrainians were unaccustomed to handling rifles or wearing body armor, and, when Turtle asked if any of them were familiar with C.Q.B., only one raised his hand.

At the same time, the team had learned from the Ukrainians, especially when it came to the historical anachronism of trench warfare. Once, while the foreigners were visiting a trench that came under heavy bombardment, they had scrambled into a foxhole that was eight feet deep, in an L shape, with stairs and a roof of felled timber. For the next five hours, as Russian tank rounds and mortars burst around them, they had shared the shelter with an older infantryman who had been fighting in the Donbas since 2014. T.Q., the German who’d served in the French Foreign Legion, told me, “If he hadn’t had the experience and taken the time to dig out that position—with enough space not only for himself but also for other people—we would have had casualties.”

Staying alive in a Ukrainian trench requires a daunting combination of stamina, vigilance, and luck. The daily misery induces a mental fatigue that dulls alertness and subverts morale. But even the most disciplined soldier, with the most elaborate foxhole, can fall victim to a well-aimed munition, and the menace of sudden death plagues every Ukrainian infantryman charged with the imperative, terrible job of holding the line.

Soldiers take shelter in a staircase alongside a Ukrainian woman named Lena, left. She appeared to be the only remaining tenant in her building in Vuhledar, a town that no longer had electricity, heat, or running water.

Before we left the encampment where Vitaliy, the dancer, was stationed, I gave him my card. He later texted me a photo of himself onstage, brandishing a sword in Cossack garb. It was an image, in more ways than one, of another world and another time. When I checked in on Vitaliy a few weeks later, he was in the hospital: a tank round had landed in his dugout, wounding him and killing a comrade.

I expressed my condolences, and Vitaliy replied, “Yes, but this is war.” He planned to return to the front as soon as possible.

When Turtle and I got back to the house, there was news. The remains of Joshua Jones had been recovered, as part of a prisoner exchange in the southern region of Zaporizhzhia. CNN had aired footage of the handover which showed Ukrainian forensic investigators, in biohazard suits, carrying a body bag and a white flag away from a group of Russian soldiers. The U.S. State Department had announced that Jones would “soon be returned” to his home town, in Tennessee.

The team’s reaction was subdued, which confused me. When I retired to the basement, I found Tai, the former New Zealand Defense Force member, lying on his mat with one of the cats purring on his chest. Since I had arrived, Tai had been the hardest team member to draw out. The twenty-nine-year-old son of Chinese immigrants, he was sleeved in tattoos that included, on his right hand, a five-petal orchid—the symbol of his family’s native Hong Kong. “Tai” was a facetious reference to Taiwan, which many volunteers believed would be attacked by an emboldened China unless Russia was humiliated in Ukraine.

After some stilted small talk, I brought up Jones, and asked Tai whether he felt any sense of closure.

“I’m concerned about my mate,” Tai said. He meant Dominic Abelen, whose body remained in Russian custody. Tai had known Abelen since 2017, when they served together in Iraq. After Tai and Turtle joined the International Legion, in August, Abelen requested that the G.U.R. assign them to Donetsk.

The two Kiwis both spoke of Abelen with reverence, describing him as an expert soldier whose courage and enthusiasm had been a reliable source of inspiration for his comrades. Before the unit had left the house on Abelen’s final mission, he’d given Turtle the black tag, marked “dead,” that I’d noticed in Turtle’s room. It was a digital I.D. that New Zealanders carry with them on deployments. “You’ll need that,” Abelen had joked.

After Abelen was killed, Tai had informed the G.U.R. that he was going home. He spent a week in a hotel in Kyiv and bought a bus ticket to Poland. The morning that he was to leave, however, he returned to Donetsk. He’d joined the Legion to escape his “mundane and boring” life in New Zealand, he told me, where he’d worked as a mail carrier since being discharged from the Army. In the end, the prospect of resuming that existence had been more intimidating than staying in Ukraine. “I knew that, as soon as I got home, there’s nothing there I’d rather do,” he said. “So I came back.”

The contract that international fighters sign with the government in Kyiv makes them Ukrainian soldiers and grants them the same benefits accorded to local troops: medical care, a base salary of about twelve hundred dollars a month (with additional pay for hazardous duty), and legal-combatant status under the Geneva Conventions (though Russia considers them mercenaries ineligible for prisoner-of-war status). The critical difference is that foreigners are free to leave when they want. They can also refuse to carry out specific requests or tasks. Everything they do is voluntary.

To a civilian, this may sound appealing. But any service member knows that such an arrangement not only contradicts the basic premise on which functioning militaries are built; it also imposes an oppressive burden on individual soldiers. On our way to Donetsk, Doc had explained to me, “In the Marines, it didn’t matter what shit you threw at us,” because disobeying orders was never an option. He attributed the Legion’s high attrition rate to the stress of having to constantly choose whether to participate in risky missions: “It’s a cumulative effect. It stacks up in your mind.”

Similarly, whereas Doc’s tours in Iraq and Afghanistan had scheduled end dates, Legion members must decide for themselves when to stop fighting. The fact that Ukrainians like Rambo and Grek lack such agency makes quitting all the more fraught. Doc agreed with President Zelensky’s assertion that the war was about much more than just Ukraine—that no less than the future of democracy might be governed by its outcome. “And this is the problem,” he told me. “Because how am I different from these Ukrainian soldiers, then, if I believe that?”

Five days after the soft-spoken officer at the air shaft warned Herring and Rambo of a looming attack, Russian forces mounted a multi-pronged armored offensive. From the house, we could hear a major spike in artillery, cluster bombs, and tank fire. Ukrainian helicopters shuttled overhead. Rockets dragged contrails across the sky. Turtle received word that the Ukrainians in the trenches we had visited—where I’d met Grandpa and Vitaliy—had destroyed two tanks, using shoulder-fired weapons. A larger Russian contingent, however, had captured a southern neighborhood of Pavlivka.

Turtle gathered the team outside. “It might be a day where nothing happens, it might be a day where everything happens,” he said. Then he turned to Doc. “Are you in this?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Doc said.

Grek, the reconnaissance-company commander, advised the team to report to the battalion headquarters in Vuhledar, the next Ukrainian-held town after Pavlivka. The foreigners left in their two Nissans, while Rambo and his men followed in a Hyundai that a network of friends and relatives had bought for them. The main route was exposed to Russian tanks, so we had to travel off-road. Rockets were clobbering Vuhledar. We parked outside an apartment tower, and the men hustled into the stairwell. Turtle and Rambo went to find the headquarters.

Doc, a former marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, decided to fight in Ukraine after leaving a job at Google.

There was no electricity, heat, or working plumbing in Vuhledar, and the only remaining tenant in the building appeared to be a middle-aged woman in a shabby coat and a tracksuit, named Lena. Alcohol seemed to have enhanced her delight at having guests.

“Where do you want to go?” she asked. “I can tell you the way. I’ve lived here since I was two.” Herring gave her a cigarette, and Lena gestured for him to light it. “I’m a lady,” she said.

An extended salvo shook the building. One shell screamed into a playground across the street, throwing up a splash of flame and dirt. Shrapnel tinked against the concrete walls.

“Well, they found our vehicles,” Herring said.

When Turtle and Rambo reappeared, they informed the team that the battalion commander wanted them to remain in Vuhledar on standby. It was the same story the next day, and the next: driving to Lena’s building and waiting in her stairwell, only to be sent home. By the third night, the team was bitterly demoralized. I found Rambo and Turtle in the kitchen, sharing a bottle of whiskey. “Three days, we just suck fucking Chupa Chups,” Rambo said.

“We’re trying to make something happen,” Turtle replied.

Soldiers in other companies had been sending Rambo videos of dramatic firefights and attacks on Russian tanks. “They kill a lot of guys in this time we sit in fucking Vuhledar,” he lamented.

“We’re stuck,” Turtle agreed. “But we can get out of it.”

The next day, he drove to Vuhledar with only his friend who served as an interpreter. Returning to the house, Turtle summoned Rambo’s men and his. “We have a mission,” he told them.

The 72nd had assessed that six hundred enemy troops and thirty armored vehicles had entered Pavlivka. The village was divided between Russian forces in the southern neighborhoods and Ukrainian forces in the northern ones, though the fronts were fluid and ambiguous. The center of the village could be accessed by a tree line from the east, and the brigade wanted the foreigners to see if it was possible to traverse its length, or how far they could go before encountering Russian positions.

On a whiteboard in the living room, Turtle drew a map. The team would travel by vehicle to a collection of summer cottages, or dachas, across a river from Pavlivka. Once it was dark, Turtle, Doc, T.Q., Rambo, and another Ukrainian would depart from there on foot, pass over a bridge, and enter the tree line. Herring would remain in one of the dachas to provide real-time intelligence from his drone, identifying any Russian soldiers, tanks, or artillery that might attack the team. If all went well, they’d be home before dawn.

Tai’s name did not appear on the whiteboard. When the others visited a firing range to rehearse their movements and practice shooting with night vision and thermal optics, he didn’t participate. “Tai’s out,” Turtle told me. There was no animus in his voice, and indeed the team seemed to be going out of its way to reassure Tai.

I rode back from the range with Doc. During the rehearsal, he’d been the point man, a dangerous and demanding responsibility when navigating hostile, unfamiliar terrain littered with mines. “It’s not what I came here to do, but it’s what needs to be done,” Doc said. When he joined the Legion, he’d assumed that the Ukrainians would use him in an engineering or communications role. It wasn’t just that he had worked at Google. His tours in Iraq and Afghanistan had taken a toll on his body, and in 2021 he had broken both knees and fractured a vertebra during a paramotor accident in the Hudson Valley. “I thought I was too old and too broke to fight,” he said. Nonetheless, he hadn’t protested when the G.U.R. recruited him for the reconnaissance team. Knowing little about such techniques, he’d scoured the Internet for manuals and studied them on his phone. Still, he was not a natural—not like Dominic Abelen, who’d been the point man on every mission until he was killed. “He was so careful,” Doc said. “You want someone who’s obsessive to a fault.” Combat was fast and frenetic, reconnaissance painstaking and slow. You took a few steps, then stopped and listened. You had to diligently suppress a powerful instinct, amplified by adrenaline and nerves, to speed up. “That’s not me,” Doc said.

T.Q. enters the basement bunker where members of the unit sleep. Another fighter on the team said cheerfully that, if a Russian missile hit the house, the stockpiled ordnance would provide the mercy of an “instant death.”

When we’d met in Kyiv, he’d been working on pivoting from frontline operations to safer projects, such as fund-raising. “But, at the end of the day, I’m still a soldier,” he said. In any war, the abstract or ideological reasons that lead someone to take up arms often dissolve in the highly personal crucible of combat, which produces its own logic. A desire for revenge can take hold, or a need for redemption, or an addiction to risk. Doc seemed to be contending with a sense of guilt. “The most shit I’ve ever felt about anything in this war,” he’d told me, was being absent when Abelen and Jones were killed. “When two of your guys die and you’re sitting on a beach in Ibiza . . .” He’d trailed off, grimacing.

The team left the house the following afternoon. A photographer and I rode in the Hyundai with Herring and a Ukrainian soldier called Pan. On the way, Herring stuck his hand in a pocket and brought out a yellow rubber duck. In March, he said, he’d distributed clothing to displaced civilians arriving at the train station in Kyiv. He’d given a jacket to a young boy, who reciprocated with the duck. The boy explained that it had helped him survive the siege of Mariupol. “He said that it would keep me safe,” Herring said, his jokey façade falling away.

We joined the rest of the team in an abandoned dacha riddled with holes. Other soldiers from the 72nd were also staging there, preparing to enter Pavlivka with about a dozen anti-tank weapons. Artillery was landing close; we could hear the clatter of small arms not far off. In a disarrayed living room, Doc tried to lighten the mood, speculating about the calibre of the projectiles outside.

T.Q. reclined on a couch, looking sombre. At twenty-five, he was the team’s youngest member, the only one who neither drank nor smoked, and generally the most serious, with a stereotypical German reserve. After studying chemistry at college for two semesters, he had asked himself, “Do I want to waste four years of my life for a piece of paper that validates an increase of salary?” He’d enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and deployed to Iraq. In Ukraine, T.Q. had preceded Turtle as team leader. Although T.Q. was universally admired for his meticulous pragmatism, after Abelen and Jones were killed everyone had agreed to make a change. Since then, according to Turtle, T.Q. had sometimes chafed at his loss of control. The previous day, he’d posed pointed questions about the plan that Turtle had outlined on the whiteboard. He worried, above all, that the team lacked clear lines of communication with the Ukrainian forces in Pavlivka.

“You all right, man?” Doc asked him in the dacha.

T.Q. shrugged.

The night before, Doc had told me, “If we do our job correctly, they’ll never know we were there.” He’d then qualified the assurance. The trees were almost bare, the roads carpeted with leaves. An Orlan, the Russian fixed-wing drone, would have “perfect observation.” Ultimately, Doc said, it was “a game of chance.”

More and more members of the 72nd were congregating at the dacha, and Herring and Pan, the Ukrainian soldier, decided to station themselves elsewhere. As the photographer and I followed them, along a dirt lane dotted with small homes, all of which had been partially demolished, something whistled toward us—loud and fast. We dove into the mud, then got up and ran. Arriving at a larger, gated property, we entered a foyer, and as Herring shut the door behind us another shell slammed to earth, blasting shrapnel against the walls.

The foyer was full of glass and debris. Floral-patterned drapes hung over a shattered window. A door leading to the next room was barricaded shut by rubble on the other side. I was relieved to see a hole in the floor with a wooden ladder descending to a root cellar. When the photographer and I climbed down, we found that the shelter was too shallow to stand in.

The rest of the team, still at the original dacha, waited for night to fall. Then Turtle radioed that they were heading out. He had substituted himself for Doc as the point man, and had secured a member of the 72nd to guide them around Ukrainian mines.

Herring went into the yard of the gated property, draped a blanket over his head, and launched the drone. Soon, a renewed barrage pounded the neighborhood. The photographer and I hunkered down in the root cellar. After one incoming strike, I could hear Pan, in the foyer, shout, “Herring O.K.?” It seemed insane to me that Herring was still outside. Only after a giant explosion brought chunks of ceiling crashing into the foyer did he and Pan join us under the floor.

“That’s the closest it’s ever come to hitting me,” Herring marvelled. He’d managed to land the drone in the yard, but had sprinted inside before he could retrieve it. He’d also lost his radio. Borrowing Pan’s, Herring said, “Turtle, this is Herring.”

There was a long pause. Then: “This is Doc. Be advised, we’re taking fire.” As soon as the team had crossed the bridge, Ukrainian troops in a dugout on the Pavlivka side of the river had warned them that an Orlan had spotted them. The team had decided to continue the mission but had quickly become pinned down.

“Roger that, Doc,” Herring said. “We’re taking near-direct hits on this house. I had a good visual on you guys. I just landed.”

“Roger. We’re taking what seems like tank fire. Over.”

“Roger that. About the same story here. I got a good scan of that tree line. I saw zero, I repeat zero, signatures along it.”

Doc asked Herring to locate the Russian tank. “It’s coming about ten degrees from the left,” he said.

“I gotta wait for this to subside to run out and grab the drone,” Herring told him.

Another strike near the house made Doc’s response inaudible.

“I gotta get that drone,” Herring said. If he could pinpoint the location of the tank, Rambo could transmit its coördinates to the 72nd Brigade, which could neutralize it with artillery.

It was pitch-black in the cellar. Even when three of us sat with our knees drawn up, the fourth person could fit only by standing next to the ladder. In the claustrophobic space, I could feel Herring debating what to do. He was lighting a cigarette when a loud whooshing noise, like a cascade of water, roared toward us. “Down!” Herring barked, though there was nowhere farther down to go. I bowed my head and pressed my palms into the dirt floor, which quaked as three successive impacts left a ringing in my ears.

“Fucking dildos,” Herring said.

It was unclear whether we, too, were being deliberately targeted. I had recently interviewed an American who was teaching Ukrainians in the south to identify Russian drone pilots by tracing the signal of their controllers. But Herring said that this method worked only on a Chinese brand of drones favored by the Russians; his drone was made by a different company and not susceptible to such tracking.

“I think they’re just hitting the whole area,” he surmised.

The next blast was the biggest yet. Above us, wood and plaster broke and tumbled down; the windows of other houses burst.

“We’ll be all right, boys,” Herring said. He sparked his lighter and held the flame under his face to show us that he was smiling. At first, I was annoyed by what seemed like a juvenile display of bravado. Then I realized that Herring was trying to put the photographer and me at ease. “I feel safe!” he said, as half a dozen more shells detonated outside.

Doc came over the radio. The Russian tank was homing in on them. He said of the rounds, “They’re walking up the tree line. The next one will likely be on us. So please try to find it.”

“We’re getting stuffed up here pretty good right now,” Herring told him. When Doc didn’t answer, Herring said again, “I gotta get that drone.” Another munition rocked the house. Somewhere, a machine gun had begun to fire. I urged Herring not to go outside.

“Yeah, but they need me,” he said. “Like, if I don’t do this . . .” He picked up the radio. “Doc, this is Herring.”

No answer. A few seconds later, thirteen rockets, some landing almost simultaneously, caused more of the house to crumble.

“Fuck!” Herring said.

Finally, Turtle came over the radio. “How much luck have you had with the flying?” he asked. “Are you finding out where the issue is?”

“Every time I try to get up out of this basement, we’re taking rounds pretty much right on top of this house,” Herring told him.

Turtle seemed not to have heard. “We are under pretty heavy shelling,” he said. “Try and find where it’s coming from. I know it’s a hard ask, but if you can it would be good for our counter-battery.”

“Roger that, Turtle. I’m trying.”

“Do your best, mate.”

During a brief lull in the high-pitched whizzing and booming thunderclaps of tank rounds, rockets, and artillery, Herring muttered, as much to himself as to anyone, “All right. I’m gonna get real low, crawl through the house, and make a mad dash for the drone, I guess.” Going up the ladder, he added, “If something happens, don’t come outside. I’ll find my way in.”

The drone was where he’d left it, apparently intact. Herring got it in the air, but before he could spot the tank the camera came loose, rendering it inoperative. Guided only by a digital map on the controller and by the sound of the rotors, he brought the drone back to the yard. When he returned to the house, he discovered that the drone’s camera mount had been damaged in one of the blasts.

“She’s fucked,” he said.

I climbed into the foyer. A fresh layer of debris was strewn across the floor, and when I looked up I saw that all the laths on the ceiling were exposed. On the controller, Herring showed me thermal footage of the team: each man a small black speck in the long gray tree line. They still had a ways to go, and now there was nothing for us to do but wait.

Forty-five minutes later, Doc informed Herring that they were returning to the dacha. It was too soon for them to have completed the mission, and Herring fretted that someone might have stepped on a mine. This wasn’t the case, though: the bombardment had convinced them that the Russians were tracking them, and Turtle had decided to abort.

When we ran back to the Hyundai, we found that its rear window had been blown out. Rambo arrived at the same time as us. It was 10:30 p.m. Headlights would have been like beacons for the Russians, so Herring covered the dashboard with a tarp and Rambo drove through the dark using his night-vision device. The others followed in the pickup. As Rambo turned into a rutted black field, Herring asked if everyone was O.K.

“We’re alive,” Rambo said.

At the house, Doc looked like a different person. His eyes were bright and tense, his face smeared with sweat and grime. Even his speech was unnaturally animated. He emanated a kind of physical energy that, in another context, might have suggested mania or narcotics. “It’s endorphins,” Doc said.

Turtle told me that he’d been “one hundred per cent” certain that they were going to die. I talked to him more about this the next day. Throughout my two weeks with the team, I’d been struck by what seemed to be a fatalistic anticipation of his own death. The “dead” tag that Dominic Abelen had given him was just one example. Turtle regularly made comments such as “When it’s your time, it’s your time,” “I wake up every morning ready to see the big guy in the sky,” and “I’ve had a good life, I can die happy.” When I asked him to relate his mind-set in the tree line, he said, “There was not a thought of regret. I was, like, It’s been a great ride. No tears. It was just acceptance. Like, Wow, here I am.”

He’d once told me that many volunteers who quit the Legion did so because they hadn’t been honest with themselves about their reasons for coming to Ukraine. “Because when you get here your reason will be tested,” Turtle said. “And if it’s something weak, something that’s not real, you’re going to find out.” He was dubious of foreigners who claimed to want to help Ukraine. Turtle wanted to help, too, of course, but that impulse was not enough; it might get you to the front, but it wouldn’t keep you there.

I asked what was keeping him there.

“In the end, it’s just that I love this shit,” he said. “And maybe I can’t escape that—maybe that’s the way it’s always gonna be.”

The photographer and I left for Kyiv the next morning. Tai came with us. So did Doc, who was flying to New York to attend a Veterans Day gala, where he hoped to solicit donations. Herring also caught a ride. He had a girlfriend in Bucha, whom he’d met on a dating app, and he was due for a visit. T.Q. was staying—but not for long. In his logical fashion, he had concluded that he could be more of an asset to the team if he spoke Ukrainian, and, given his linguistic aptitude—he was fluent in German, English, and French—he’d decided to take classes in Kyiv.

We were loading up our bags when Rambo received a call from Grek. A Russian armored unit was pushing on another tree line near the coal mine, and the infantry troops there needed backup. As we left the house, Rambo, Pan, and Turtle were donning their gear. That night, while I was in Kyiv, Turtle texted me a GoPro video: the three of them bounding through a cratered field, emptying their magazines, bullets zinging past them, a shell sending up a shower of dirt. When I called him, he said that they had been forced to pull back from the tree line but that no one had been hurt.

I asked if they would be returning.

“I fucking hope so, mate,” Turtle said.

Three days later, members of a Russian brigade that was leading the Pavlivka offensive published a letter alleging that about three hundred of their troops had been killed, wounded, or captured, and that half their armored vehicles had been destroyed. In an unprecedented public rebuke, the brigade members called the decision to invade Pavlivka “incomprehensible,” denouncing their commanders for treating them like “meat.” Despite the uproar over casualties, Russia plowed ahead with its offensive, and the 72nd Brigade eventually withdrew from the village. The defeat marked the largest loss of territory for Ukraine since the summer. Russian shelling of Vuhledar has subsequently intensified, imperilling it as well. Now that the trees in Donetsk are without leaves, it is unlikely that the Ukrainians will be able to reoccupy any of their surrendered trenches before the spring. Although Ukrainian forces recently liberated Kherson, a major port city on the Black Sea, the trench and artillery warfare being waged in the Donbas shows no sign of relenting. The grinding stalemate in Bakhmut continues to inflict a horrific toll on both sides, with little ground lost or won.

On November 10th, General Mark Milley, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated that Russia and Ukraine had each sustained “well over” a hundred thousand casualties since February—a staggering number, if true. The International Legion declines to say how many foreigners have been killed or wounded. After the prisoner exchange in Zaporizhzhia, the Ukrainian government announced that it was holding Joshua Jones’s remains as part of a war-crimes investigation. Jones’s father, Jeff, a U.S. Army veteran of the Gulf War and a retired police officer, told me that he had identified his son in a photograph, and that the corpse had been “charred.” He was awaiting the results of an autopsy that would indicate whether Jones had been alive when his body was burned. Jeff said that he had spoken to Joshua on the phone in the weeks before his death, and that “he seemed content over there, like he finally found his place in the world.”

A few days after I spoke with Turtle, Rambo sent me a video of himself with a bandage over his face and his right hand bundled in a splint. The Hyundai had come under fire near the coal mine, sending him careering into a ditch. A couple of weeks later, Herring was riding in a truck through the dachas when a shell landed in the road. When he regained consciousness, the truck was on its side and wrapped around a tree. Herring climbed through a shattered window but lacked the strength to stand. The next time he woke up, a Ukrainian was slapping him in the face and he could hear muffled explosions. He was evacuated to a hospital in Dnipro, where he was told that he had four broken ribs and a punctured lung. His face and torso were covered with lacerations. When he called me from his room, which he was sharing with multiple wounded Ukrainians, he credited his rubber duck with having saved his life. “Either the duck or my helmet,” Herring quipped.

Tai, the Kiwi who quit the Legion, did not have a change of heart this time. His only regret, he told me, was leaving Ukraine without Dominic Abelen’s body, which he had hoped to escort to New Zealand. That was why he’d stuck around as long as he had. But, he said, “I realized that if I stay I’ll probably die as well, waiting for him.”

When New Zealand soldiers are killed overseas, their units welcome home their caskets with a haka—the ceremonial Maori dance. Turtle and Tai plan to lobby for Abelen to receive the same honor. If they succeed, the casket will be brought to his former unit’s parade grounds, in Christchurch, through a wooden gate decorated with traditional carvings, called a waharoa. Abelen’s comrades will stomp their feet, beat their chests, and stick out their tongues. Each battalion in the New Zealand Army has its own haka, with its own words that the soldiers hiss and bellow. The name of the haka that Abelen’s unit will perform translates as “We Are Ready.”

After attending the Veterans Day gala in New York, Doc went back to Kyiv, where he plans to buy an apartment. He is currently raising funds to produce and distribute an innovative overhead-protection system for Ukrainian troops deployed in frontline trenches.

More than any other foreign volunteer I met, Doc seemed to be genuinely motivated by a conviction that the conflict was “a clear case of right and wrong.” I sometimes wondered to what extent his desire to participate in such an unambiguously just war was connected to his previous military career. The cause for which he is fighting in Ukraine is righteous because it consists of one country resisting occupation by another. But Doc’s adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan viewed their causes similarly—and, in Afghanistan, that galvanizing sentiment may be why the Taliban prevailed. This is a thorny topic for veterans, and Doc was not willing to concede a moral equivalence between the U.S. and Russian invasions. However, the experience of defending a country against an outside aggressor that was superior in numbers and in firepower had given him a new appreciation for his former enemies. “I used to think, What kind of pussy fights with mines?” he said. “And here I am, laying mines.”

I also suspected another appeal in Ukraine for International Legion members. During my lunch with Doc on Andriyivsky Descent, in October, I’d been unexpectedly moved when the old man in the fedora thanked him for his service. I shared Doc’s discomfort with similar gestures Stateside, but something here was different. Although the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were transformative for those who fought in them, they had no real impact on most Americans and Europeans. Everyone in Ukraine, by contrast, has been affected by the Russian invasion; everyone has sacrificed and suffered. For some foreign veterans, such a country, so thoroughly reshaped and haunted by war, must feel less alien than home.

In a basement bunker in Donetsk, Tai, a New Zealander who joined the Legion unit, rests on a mattress, with a sniper rifle at his feet.

The New Yorker · by Luke Mogelson · December 26, 2022

12. Ukraine's Zelenskiy seeks India PM Modi's help with 'peace formula'

Ukraine's Zelenskiy seeks India PM Modi's help with 'peace formula'

Reuters · by Reuters

NEW DELHI, Dec 26 (Reuters) - Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Monday said he sought India's help with implementing a "peace formula" in a phone call with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The conversation comes at a time when India is seeking to strengthen trade relations with Moscow while Western nations introduce new measures to limit Russia's funding of the war.

"I had a phone call with PM Narendra Modi and wished a successful G20 presidency," Zelenskiy wrote on Twitter. "It was on this platform that I announced the peace formula and now I count on India's participation in its implementation."

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Zelenskiy asked the Group of 20 (G20) major economies last month to adopt Ukraine's 10-point peace formula and to end the war. India holds the G20 presidency for a year.

The Indian government said in statement late on Monday that the two leaders discussed opportunities for strengthening bilateral cooperation.

"The Prime Minister explained the main priorities of India's G20 Presidency, including giving a voice to the concerns of developing nations on issues like food and energy security."

Modi also "strongly reiterated" his call for an immediate end to hostilities in Ukraine and conveyed India's support for any peace efforts.

India, which has not explicitly condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine, has emerged as the largest buyer of Russian oil after China, this month taking barrels of Urals crude at well below a $60 price cap agreed by Western nations.

The country's foreign minister has said that as the world's third-largest consumer of oil and gas, where income levels are not high, India had to look after its own interests and called Russia "a steady and time-tested partner".

Reuters also reported last month that Moscow had sent India a list of more than 500 products for potential delivery, including parts for cars, aircraft and trains, as sanctions squeeze Russia's ability to keep vital industries running.

India, too, has sent Russia a list of Indian products for access to Russian markets, according to the foreign minister, as it seeks to balance bilateral trade that is now tilted towards Russia.

Reporting by Shivam Patel in New Delhi; Editing by Kirsten Donovan

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Reuters

13. The revenge of history in Ukraine: year of war has shaken up world order

The revenge of history in Ukraine: year of war has shaken up world order

A shared sense of national history is proving to be a crucial weapon, spurring on Ukraine resistance and Russian soldiers

by Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor

The Guardian · by Patrick Wintour · December 26, 2022

The Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko recalls a quote attributed to Otto von Bismarck: “Wars are not won by generals, but by schoolteachers and parish priests.” It’s a country’s taught collective memory, its shared sense of its own history, that are the decisive instruments for mobilisation, and are as important on the battlefield as weaponry.

Few conflicts have been so shaped by the chief actors’ sense of their own national story as the Ukrainian war that began in February. It is the competing grand narratives of the past, not just in Russia and Ukraine, but in Germany, France, Poland, the Baltics, the UK, the US, and even the global south, that make this war so hard to resolve.

Indeed, sometimes this war feels less like the end of history and more like the revenge of history.

Georgiy Kasianov, the Ukrainian historian, puts history in the cockpit of a conflict that may create a new world order. “Russian forces have been smashing their way through Ukraine spurred in large part by historical fiction,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs. “But history also propels the fierce Ukrainian resistance. Ukrainians, too, harbour a particular understanding of the past that motivates them to fight. In many ways, this war is the collision of two incompatible historical narratives.”

This video grab taken from a handout footage released by the Russian defence ministry on 7 March 2022 shows a purported Russian tank unit advancement in the Kyiv region. Photograph: Russian Defence Ministry/AFP/Getty Images

Putin is sometimes described not as commander in chief, but as Russia’s historian in chief. The ground for this war was prepared by the Russian president’s pseudo-historical essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, published in July 2021. In this document, Putin argued Ukraine was, historically, indistinguishable from Russia, citing Oleg the prophet’s 10th-century dictum: “Let Kyiv be the mother of all Russian cities.”

Radosław Sikorski, the former Polish foreign minister, said he became sure an invasion would happen when he read that essay and learned Putin had ordered it to be sent to every serving Russian soldier. “The plan was to do again what Russia had repeatedly done to Ukraine in the past: extermination of its elites, Russification of its culture and population and the subjugation of its resources to its own imperial needs. Ukraine could be permitted as peasant folklore but not as a free and democratic nation choosing its own destiny and allies.”

When Putin talked about Ukraine needing to disarm and making Russian its second official language, it was not only about restoring Ukraine as part of Russia, but a staging post to the full reinvention of the Russian empire.

Police officers detain a demonstrator during a protest against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Moscow on 24 February. Vladimir Putin is sometimes described not as commander-in-chief, but as Russia’s historian-in-chief. Photograph: Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images

During his Victory Day speech in Moscow in May 2022, the president told Russian soldiers back from the Ukrainian front they were “fighting for the same thing their fathers and grandfathers did” – for “the motherland” and the defeat of nazism. The Ukrainian revolution of 2013 was a fascist “Banderite coup”, the government in Kyiv a “junta”, Nato enlargement an Anschluss, and the EU a decadent threat to Russian culture. Russia in 2022, according to Putin, was like the USSR in 1941, threatened by an invasion from the west.

A boy looks at a poster with the likeness of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, as he visits an outdoor poster exhibition titled Victory Day at the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the second world war in Kyiv, Ukraine, 9 August. Photograph: Roman Pilipey/EPA

Zabuzkho argues that this deep historical sense of injustice and betrayal drives not just Putin, but the whole of Russian society. “One wants to find Russians who are not preoccupied with self-pity right now. The feeling of injustice is one of the most distinct symptoms of the moral breakdown that characterises so much of Russian society today.”

Ukraine, too, has its own sense of injustice and points its accusatory finger at Russia. Olesya Khromeychuk, director of the Ukrainian Institute in London, argues: “Ukraine’s historical experience – of statelessness and struggle, repressive external rule and hard-won independence – has shaped Ukraine into the nation we see today: opposed to imperialism, united in the face of the enemy, and determined to protect its freedom. For the people of Ukraine, freedom is not some lofty ideal. It is imperative for survival.”

Ukraine’s identity took time to form after it gained independence in 1991. Two narratives competed – one national and nationalist, the other Soviet nostalgic. This was not unique among post-Soviet states, but the process was never more intense or confrontational than in Ukraine.

People gather in Lviv to commemorate the victims of the 1932-33 Holodomor, a human-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians. Photograph: Yuriy Dyachyshyn/AFP/Getty Images

Battles were fought over school textbooks, monuments, the choice of national anniversaries, street names, state archives, or the status of the Holodomor – the human-made famine of 1932-33 that killed millions of Ukrainians – as a genocide. Under the “historical presidency” of Viktor Yuschenko between 2005 and 2010, 159 historical decrees were issued, the vast majority about the de-communisation of Ukraine.

In the process history was often royally misused. The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory for instance between 2014 and 2019 came to be dominated by a narrow group of rightwing nationalists that defined Ukraine in purely ethnic anti-Russian terms.

Unpopular leaders such as Petro Poroshenko relied on increasingly divisive and crude ethnic appeals to patriotism, thinking it was the shortcut to remaining in power. In 2015 the government even issued a set of “memory laws” that made questioning the official, deeply anti-Soviet view of Ukraine’s past punishable with prison terms of up to 10 years.

Putin preparing major offensive in new year, Ukraine defence minister warns

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It was not until the advent of Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the “independence generation” – those who grew up after Ukraine left the Soviet Union – that Ukraine addressed issues of the past, identity and language in a more inclusive way, as Olga Onuch sets out in her book The Zelensky Effect. Zelenskiy, a former comedian and actor elected in 2019, understood the importance of history. Indeed, in the opening series of Servant of the People – the TV show that made his name – Zelenskiy plays a history teacher trying to convince his pupils of the importance of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the historian who, in 1903, first tried to show how Ukrainian history was not merely a part of an overarching Russian story.

An expert of the prosecutor’s office examining collected remnants of shells and missiles used by the Russian army to attack the second largest Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Photograph: Aleksey Filippov/AFP/Getty Images

In his new year address in 2020, Zelenskiy asked Ukrainians to ask themselves, “Who am I?”, and not find an answer by simply excluding others. “Our passports don’t say whether we are the right kind of Ukrainians or a wrong one. There is no entry there, saying ‘patriot’, ‘Maloros’ [a derogatory term used to describe a Ukrainian native with no national identity], ‘vatnik’ [a derogatory term for a pro-Russian citizen] or ‘Banderite’ [a derogatory term for a Ukrainian nationalist]. It says: ‘citizen of Ukraine’, who has rights and obligations. We are all very different.” The idea was to live together with respect.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy speaks during his televised new year message in Kyiv, 1 January 2020. Photograph: AP

Onuch and her co-author, Henry Hale, argue Zelenskiy was critical to giving Ukrainians a chance to “realise they shared a rich common fate that transcended linguistic, national and religious diversity”. This generation did not want just to shed their Russianness, but find a new Ukrainian civic identity linked to a hard-fought idea of common values. As a Russian-speaking Jewish person from south-east Ukraine, Zelenksiy was perfect to demonstrate how Russian-speaking Ukrainians, including those in the east, could fully identify with the Ukrainian state and express their patriotism.

That mattered when the war began. The Polish historian Adam Michnik argues that the future of Ukraine as part of Europe was always going to depend not only on the western cities of Lviv and Kyiv, but also on the cities to the south and east, Kharkiv and Odesa. “There is no doubt, under Putin’s rockets, both Kharkiv and Odesa chose Europe.”

‘Under Putin’s rockets, both Kharkiv and Odesa chose Europe’. A funeral ceremony for a Ukrainian soldier in Odesa, Ukraine, in March 2022. Photograph: Sedat Suna/EPA

In short, Putin was invading a country that very much existed – one he no longer understood.

The FSB told the Russian president that a superior army could capture Kyiv and decapitate its leadership in hours, as it had in Crimea in 2014, since it was invading an artificial and politically apathetic country that distrusted its leaders. Just to make sure, it supposedly spent $1bn fomenting discontent among the Russophone population in Ukraine and promoting pro-Russian politicians. Unfortunately, the FSB’s agents siphoned off some of the money and then fabricated data on pro-Russian attitudes to please Moscow.

As a result, many Russian soldiers, poorly briefed on the invasion, seemed genuinely bewildered by a Ukrainian volunteer defence force determined to protect their homeland. When they reached cities such as Kherson they were greeted with shotguns, and not flowers.

Russian soldier Kulikov Mikhail, 31, sits in a glass enclosure at a war crimes trial in Chernihiv, Ukraine on 30 June 2022. Accused of violating the laws and customs of war, he was the operator-gunner of a T-72b tank and on 26 February received an order to shoot at a residential apartment building using a high-explosive fragmentation projectile. He has admitted guilt and repented. Photograph: Carol Guzy/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

“The Ukraine in your news and the Ukraine of real life are two entirely different places,” Zelenskiy warned Russians on the eve of the invasion, “and the difference is that the latter is real”.

Why Crimea is Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s greatest bargaining chip

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By day three of the invasion it was apparent to Russian commanders that serious mistakes had been made from which the operation has never fully been able to recover. Russia’s hubris and overconfidence led to false assumptions that sabotaged the mission.

The UK defence secretary, Ben Wallace, provided a concise summary of the critical importance of Russia’s initial mistakes. He told a Lords select committee in November: “This war has exposed the whole pitch about ‘night one, day one’. You might translate it as saying, ‘When the balloon goes up, you take out the air defence of your adversary and then you can pick and choose at will and do your targeting.’

A Ukrainian soldier in an artillery unit fires towards Russian positions outside Bakhmut in November. Photograph: Bülent Kılıç/AFP/Getty Images

“What if you do not manage to do that on day one, night one, and it takes three weeks, as the Russians found out? On their day one, night one, the Ukrainians rather cleverly drove out of their barracks, dispersed their arsenals or used deception in their air defence capabilities. Knowing that this was going to happen, the Ukrainians used false trails for where their air defence was so that Russia hit all the wrong places. Suddenly, day one, night one becomes three weeks, four weeks. You run out of your complex weapons and you are now where the Russians are.”

Ten months on from the initial invasion, Ukraine’s extraordinary resilience and courage has staved off defeat, but not guaranteed victory. Europe’s post-cold war security landscape has changed, and yet nothing is settled. This is still a moment of transition.

The Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov describes the war as “more like a game of poker than chess. On a chess board, all the pieces are face up, but poker is essentially a game of incomplete information, a game where you have to guess and act on those guesses.”

The most difficult guess is estimating how long the other side can withstand this level of destruction in terms of manpower, ammunition and morale. Each side has to increase the cost of war for the other in the hope the enemy is close to cracking.

Yet the toll is already massive. The US chief of staff, Mark Milley, claims as many as 100,000 Russian soldiers have died or been injured. Based on open-source references, the Oryx site determined that the Russians had lost a total of 1,491 main battle tanks since 24 February, of which 856 different types were destroyed, 62 damaged and 55 abandoned, and the Ukrainians had taken more than 518. Russia, albeit involuntarily, became Ukraine’s most important arms supplier.

Ukraine 'not afraid of dark', says Zelenskiy as Russian attacks trigger blackouts – video

By one calculation, the US has spent 5.6% of its annual defence budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s military capability.

The successive battlefield defeats have damaged the reputation of the great Russian military. First there had to be the “regrouping” in the north, when Russia realised it could not take Kyiv and Chernihiv. On 6 September came the stunning collapse of the Russian front in the north-east in the Kharkiv region. On 11 November Russia withdrew from the port city of Kherson, retreating from territory it had announced as annexed and part of Russia only 40 days earlier. The goal of establishing a land corridor to Transnistria – a Russian-backed breakaway region of Moldova, one of Ukraine’s western neighbours – is, for now, abandoned. Since September Ukraine says it has reclaimed more than 8,000 sq km (3,089 sq miles) of Russian-occupied territory.

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People stand near a car on a destroyed bridge outside Kherson, southern Ukraine, on 26 November. The Russian army were accused of deliberately destroying critical infrastructure during their withdrawal from the city of Kherson, including electricity and water supplies. Photograph: Roman Pilipey/EPA

Russia has also paid a toll in lost diplomatic prestige. In meetings with Central Asian republics, Putin sometimes find himself humiliated and contradicted, and there is talk of a security vacuum in the Caucasus as Russian prestige withers. Positive diplomatic support for Russia, as opposed to hedging, is confined to Belarus, North Korea, Syria and Eritrea. In one international diplomatic body after another, the “Russia not welcome” sign is going up. The Chinese defence minister, Wei Fenghe, in June said his country would not be providing one bullet to Russia, portraying the relationship as a partnership, not an alliance.

In the annual Anholt-Ipsos Nations Brands index, published in November, Russia has fallen from 27th out of the 60 nations polled to 58. The founder of the index, Simon Anholt, says: “Such a collapse in a country’s national prestige will cripple the ability of its business, its government and most importantly its people to trade and engage with the international community. It will do so for years, if not generations, and will inflict more damage than any economic sanctions”.

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Cumulatively that has left Putin not looking for a way out, but a way to stay in the war. Mark Galeotti, the author of Putin’s Wars, believes Moscow has now clearly moved from winning the war to not losing it, and that requires trying to outsuffer the west. Orlando Figes summarised it recently: “The war is now entering a new phase because winter has arrived and the Russians are going to dig in. That is why they are ceding the western bank of the Dnieper River. The current phase is to destroy Ukrainian infrastructure, to create a refugee problem, and start an economic war against the west. That’s where the war will be played out and everything will be decided. What determines the outcome of the war will be how willing western societies are to continue supporting Ukraine.”

Conscripted men say goodbye to relatives at a recruiting office in Moscow, September 2022. Photograph: Yuri Kochetkov/EPA

Again, national stories will play their part in testing that resolve. Moscow had bet on a return to American isolationism and a Trump triumph in the midterm elections in November. The theory was that in swing districts, Americans would rise up against the cost of gas and the war. It is true a slow erosion of support for the war among Republicans emerged in some polls, but Joe Biden seemed to tell a more compelling story about democracy under threat in the US and in Europe.

As a result, Biden has been left with greater scope than expected to continue to shape his own Ukraine policy in the next two years.

At the start of December, Michael McCaul, the lead Republican on the House foreign affairs committee, defined that scope by saying Republicans would not be advocating an end to US funding, but greater scrutiny and decisiveness. Given Biden has provided Ukraine with more than $18.6bn in security assistance and $13bn in direct economic assistance, it was hardly surprising McCaul demanded more accountability for US spending. But his main point was different. “The problem right now is Iranian drones are going into Crimea, but the Ukrainians can’t hit those Iranian drones unless they have the longer-range artillery called the ATACMS [army tactical missile system]. For some reason … [the Biden administration] will not put those weapons into Ukraine. When we give [Ukraine] what they need, they win. If we don’t, it’s going to be a long and protracted war.” They are not the remarks of a man bent on reviving the American isolationist tradition.

If the US is for the moment closed off as a choke point, Putin’s next best option was Berlin. But the energy blackmail he directed at Germany now looks as likely to explode in his own face as bring about German deindustrialisation.

Cologne Cathedral’s lights are switched off in an effort to reduce dependence on imported natural gas from Russia and impose energy-saving measures in Germany. Photograph: Mesut Zeyrek/Anadolu Agency

Through a mixture of state planning and individual parsimony, Germany has weaned itself off Russian energy, an extraordinary achievement for a country that was dependent on Russia for 55% of its gas. German industry has reduced gas consumption by about 25% since the year’s start, while production has only fallen by 1.4%. The state has found alternative suppliers, including in Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France.

Given the state of German reserves, blackouts this winter seem less likely in Europe, even if next winter is more worrying.

Germany has led the efforts to quell anger about rising bills by constructing hugely expensive subsidy packages. Since the start of the energy crisis in September 2021, according to the Bruegel Institute, a staggering €705.5bn (£614bn) has been allocated or earmarked across European countries to shield consumers from the rising energy costs.

But will it be enough? The nights are longer, the thermometers have dropped and energy bills are landing, so the witching hour is here. The recurring nightmare of Zelenskiy’s young strategic communications team is that Ukraine’s suffering drops out of the news, and the country, once synonymous with freedom, becomes a burden. “Our principle is simple,” says Andriy Yermak, the president’s chief of staff. “If we fall out of focus, we are in danger.” The attention of the world serves as a shield.

A view of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv during a partial blackout on 13 December. Photograph: Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images

So far the drumbeat of rebellion is faint and confined to the fringes on the left and right.

That has forced Putin to switch tactics again and resort to different tools of war to weaken Europe’s resolve. The attacks on civilian energy structure that began in October are not only designed to create misery in Ukraine, but to make neighbourhoods uninhabitable, so creating an exodus from the cities and a second wave of Ukrainian refugees that the west cannot tolerate. The Ukrainian MP Lesia Vasylenko, pointing out 14 million Ukrainians are already displaced, including 7 million abroad, frankly admitted to British politicians she feared the mood towards Ukrainian refugees might be about to change. Alarm bells are already ringing about the bullying of Ukrainians in schools, she said.

But according to the Polish migration expert Prof Maciej Duszczyk from the University of Warsaw, 70% of Ukrainian refugees cross the Polish border, and in Poland, again for historical reasons, there is no sign of a backlash yet. For Poland, Russia is synonymous only with conquest, partitions, genocide, colonialism and communism. Whatever its past or present differences with Ukraine, the two countries know that in Russia they share a common enemy, according to Duszczyk. Poland is now home to approximately 1 million refugees from Ukraine (and as many Ukrainians who lived there before the war). Nearly 60% have found jobs. In elections next year, Duszczyk does not expect the refugee issue will feature.

Helena and her brother Bodia from Lviv, Ukraine, at the Medyka pedestrian border crossing, in eastern Poland in February 2022. Photograph: Wojtek Radwański/AFP/Getty

That is not to say the influx is painless. In Warsaw alone, schools and nurseries have taken 18,000 kids, and Warsaw’s mayor is appealing for European financial support. Duszczyk says so far the position at the border crossing is stable, but admits each morning to getting an update on the weather and status of electricity stations in Kyiv. “Are we, as a state and society, ready for a second wave of refugees from Ukraine?” he asks.

If Poland did decide it is full, or tried to play electoral politics with Germany over the issue, as many as 2 million more refugees could, in theory, move on to countries in western Europe, predominantly Germany. By one estimate that might cost an estimated €48bn a year.

Manfred Weber, the German head of the European People’s party, the pan-European conservative political grouping, says Germany may be sleepwalking into a crisis. “Due to Putin’s reign of terror, I’m afraid we are going to have a dramatic winter of flight. The reception centres in Germany are full, the municipalities are groaning, also in countries like the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria. It looks like we will have to open more gyms in Germany in a few months and restrict school and sports operations because they could be full. Germany is not prepared for this situation.”

A woman is comforted by a friend after arriving on a train from Ukraine’s border at Berlin’s main train station on 2 March. Photograph: Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images

More than any other European country, Germany will determine whether the continent stays the course with Ukraine. Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German diplomat, says Germany has been the European country most willing to change its foreign policy and shed its worship of the status quo. At one level Germany has spent the past 12 months shedding its postwar mindset. Olaf Scholz’s zeitenwende signalled €100bn investment in its depleted army. Germany agreed to send anti-tank missiles and Stinger missiles into a war zone. The country’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, for years the country’s most vocal proponent of compromise with Russia, went to Kyiv to apologise. He said Germany’s dependency on Russian gas had been a strategic error, born of a stubborn misreading of Putin. “In the face of evil, goodwill was not enough.”

Annalena Baerbock, the Green foreign minister, went further, arguing the Social Democrats’ Ostpolitik had been based on a false historical analysis. Germany’s moral debt of “special responsibility” bound Germany not to Russia, but primarily to Jews and Poles, Belarusians and Ukrainians, and only then to the Russians. She argues, in a formula that Scholz avoids: “We will achieve security only without, not with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.”

People from Ukraine, most of them refugees fleeing the war, wait in front of the consular department of the Ukrainian embassy in Berlin, Germany, 1 April. Photograph: Markus Schreiber/AP

In so doing she comes closer than Biden, Macron or indeed Scholz in siding with those who say the war must end with Putin being seen to have been defeated, an articulation that raises hard questions about Europe’s future relations with Russia. But Baerbock is not ultimately in charge. “Zeitenwende is a catchphrase and we do not really have a mental and strategic shift. Yes, more money is being spent, but it is the same people with the same bureaucratic cautious mindset running German foreign policy. It is all about processes,” says Dr Stefan Meister at the German Council for Foreign Relations.

A family sits in a train during an evacuation from Pokrovsk, Donetsk region, 30 November. Photograph: Anatolii Stepanov/AFP/Getty Images

One senior Baltic diplomat promises there will be a reckoning when the war is over that will see a shift away from the Franco-German centre of gravity. He says “Everyone understands the reasons for Germany’s pacifism and, yes, often in the end they do the right thing, but only after they have exhausted every other possibility and in the process completely damaged their own reputation.”

A Ukrainian diplomat concurs. “We have to get rid of this constant fear of escalation in certain capitals. It is what holds us back, and it misunderstands the nature of Russian and the existential conflict we are fighting.”

That returns the conflict to Putin’s view of what he described as Russia’s historical future.

A destroyed Russian tank by the side of the road in Kupiansk, which was occupied by Russian forces days after the 24 February invasion – hastened by the surrender of Kupiansk’s Russia-friendly mayor. Photograph: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Jade McGlynn, an Oxford academic and author of the forthcoming Russia’s War, explains why it is so hard for Russia to relinquish Ukraine. “Sergei Lavrov [the Russian foreign minister], for instance, says that without Russia, Ukraine does not have any history. But it is actually the opposite. Without Ukraine, Russia’s understanding of its own identity – this third Rome, based on Orthodoxy, this gathering of all the lands of Rus – does not really work. You cannot espouse this state messianic role if you cannot convince ethnic Russians to join you in cultural communion and you to have bomb them.

“That is why it is going to be very hard for Russia ever to accept this war has failed.”

This article was amended on 27 December 2022. An earlier version said that the US chief of staff, Mark Milley, claimed that as many as 100,000 Russian soldiers had been killed in the war. This should have been killed or wounded.

The Guardian · by Patrick Wintour · December 26, 2022

14. Why the U.S. isn’t ready for a fight in the Indo-Pacific

Excerpts:

But GOP lawmakers say the Pentagon faces a stiff challenge in delivering on that pledge. That’s because Beijing now wields a navy large enough — backed by air power and “carrier killer” ballistic missiles — to challenge longtime U.S. naval dominance in the Indo-Pacific. And deliveries to Taiwan of billions of dollars in U.S. arms are backlogged, due to supply chain issues related to the pandemic and exacerbated by the Ukraine conflict.

“We have a rhetorical commitment to a force posture change in the Indo-Pacific, but that’s belied by the reality of what’s actually happening,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who will become chair of the new House Select Committee on China in the next Congress. He called Ratner’s assertions the military planning equivalent of “whistling past the graveyard.”

Those familiar with U.S. military strength in the region agree.

...

But neither Japan nor South Korea have military cybersecurity standards that allow for secure transfer of U.S. real-time tactical military data, some experts say. That makes it difficult for the U.S. to quickly and safely coordinate joint military response measures with Tokyo and Seoul in the event of hostilities with China.

.....

Ratner stressed in his December speech that deterring China from invading Taiwan is a long-term priority for the Pentagon. “It’s a today problem. It’s a tomorrow problem. It’s a 2027 problem. It’s a 2035 problem. It’s a 2040 problem,” he said.

But in the short term, Beijing’s interpretation of these limitations to U.S. force posture in the Indo-Pacific could encourage it to act.

There’s a growing danger that “the Chinese have a misperception of our own weakness — that they think we’re weaker than we are and launch an invasion based on misperceptions,” said Gray, the former NSC chief of staff.

Why the U.S. isn’t ready for a fight in the Indo-Pacific

Politico

Pentagon’s promise to shore up its forces in the Pacific in 2023 is meeting skepticism.

U.S. President Joe Biden, right, and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands before their meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit meeting on Nov. 14, 2022, in Nusa Dua, in Bali, Indonesia. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo

12/27/2022 04:30 AM EST

The U.S. has pledged to deploy so much firepower to the Indo-Pacific in 2023 that China won’t even consider invading Taiwan. Lawmakers and allies say it’s already too late.

The promise is a big one: “2023 is likely to stand as the most transformative year in U.S. force posture in the region in a generation,” Ely Ratner, assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, said in early December.

But GOP lawmakers say the Pentagon faces a stiff challenge in delivering on that pledge. That’s because Beijing now wields a navy large enough — backed by air power and “carrier killer” ballistic missiles — to challenge longtime U.S. naval dominance in the Indo-Pacific. And deliveries to Taiwan of billions of dollars in U.S. arms are backlogged, due to supply chain issues related to the pandemic and exacerbated by the Ukraine conflict.

“We have a rhetorical commitment to a force posture change in the Indo-Pacific, but that’s belied by the reality of what’s actually happening,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who will become chair of the new House Select Committee on China in the next Congress. He called Ratner’s assertions the military planning equivalent of “whistling past the graveyard.”

Those familiar with U.S. military strength in the region agree.

Facing down China’s military threat will “require a larger navy force structure than we have in the foreseeable future,” said Alexander Gray, former chief of staff of the National Security Council in the Trump administration.

That’s fueling fears that Beijing could exploit its growing naval power advantage to launch an invasion of Taiwan before the U.S. military can catch up, sparking a devastating regional conflict that would force the United States to either intervene or abandon its promise to protect the self-governing island.

The Pentagon has spent billions since 2021 on Asia-focused initiatives, including base maintenance and relocating some U.S. forces within the region, to maintain a “competitive advantage” over China’s military. And the U.S. military presence in the region will become “more lethal, more mobile and more resilient” in the coming 12 months, Ratner said, hinting that new partnerships are in the works. He said details on what that will mean in practice will come in early 2023.

But critics argue the U.S. may be so far behind as to make that goal impossible. The Pentagon is planning to temporarily cut its number of naval ships and is reducing its aircraft in the region as it prepares to replace them with more modern versions. And U.S. shipbuilding constraints could make it difficult to deliver on a plan to help Australia build nuclear submarines — part of a joint strategy to deter China.

“I personally do not believe we are moving fast enough to change the correlation of forces in the Pacific in our favor,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

As for Taiwan, while the Biden administration has increased the tempo of arms sales approvals for the self-governing island, some $19 billion of those weapons — including Harpoon anti-ship missiles and Stinger surface-to-air missiles — are yet to be delivered because of the supply chain issues.

“Until you turn all this happy talk about arming Taiwan into reality, you’re going to be in a precarious position with respect to near-term deterrence over Taiwan,” Gallagher said.

There are roadblocks on Capitol Hill, too. The defense policy bill, which President Biden signed into law on Friday, includes a provision that allows up to $10 billion in U.S. grants for security assistance to Taiwan over the next five years, but appropriators limited that funding in an omnibus government spending bill by stipulating that the assistance must come in the form of loans, not grants, at least for this fiscal year.

Despite the challenges, the Pentagon maintains that it is committed to prioritizing the Indo-Pacific.

Pentagon spokesperson John Supple said it is pursuing opportunities that “will add more flexibility and strengthen the U.S. military’s ability to operate forward with our allies and partners.”

“We fully expect that this commitment and continued hard work will bring tangible results in 2023,” he said.

China, meanwhile, is getting more aggressive in the waters around Taiwan. Beijing is building more warships, sending nuclear-capable bomber aircraft into Taiwan’s airspace and threatening to use force to control the self-ruling island.

China’s 340-warship navy is currently the world’s largest, and the Pentagon last month called it “an increasingly modern and flexible force.” The U.S. Navy has 292 vessels.

“After a while the quantity issue becomes a quality issue, and the Chinese are building such a vast overmatch in quantity that it is becoming the principal deterrence problem,” Gray said.

Beijing insists that there is nothing threatening about its military build-up. “China develops necessary military capabilities to defend its legitimate national security interests, which is entirely legitimate and reasonable,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said in September.

But few in the region are buying it. And some regional powers are trying to prepare for more Chinese aggression with the assumption that U.S. support won’t be robust.

Japan and South Korea both published security strategy documents this month implicitly aimed to address the growing threat from China.

Japan, for example, approved more than $2 billion in defense spending on Friday for purchases that include hundreds of long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles. And without mentioning China, South Korea’s new Indo-Pacific Strategy — published on Tuesday — commits Seoul to expanding regional security cooperation in an effort to defend against threats to democracy and protect Indo-Pacific sea lanes.

The Pentagon, for its part, applauded Japan’s new strategy. In a statement, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin cited “important alignment” between Japan’s strategy and the vision outlined in the U.S. National Defense Strategy.

But neither Japan nor South Korea have military cybersecurity standards that allow for secure transfer of U.S. real-time tactical military data, some experts say. That makes it difficult for the U.S. to quickly and safely coordinate joint military response measures with Tokyo and Seoul in the event of hostilities with China.

The U.S. has engaged some allies to help it counter Beijing’s increasingly lopsided regional military advantages. In an area mostly made up of water, the U.S. military is dependent on logistical support from regional partners such as base and port access. The administration has spent the past two years building on the work of the Obama administration to engage partners to increase that support, Ratner said.

Defense officials have pointed to the trilateral “AUKUS” agreement, under which the U.S. and the U.K. will help Australia acquire those nuclear-powered submarines along with other technology, as one example. There’s even a chance Japan will join the agreement, as security ties between Canberra and Tokyo grow.

Meanwhile the Philippines — which has had to fend off ongoing incursions by Chinese vessels into its waters — is working on building out current joint projects with the U.S. and exploring locations for new sites. That may allow the U.S. navy to return to its former base at Subic Bay more than three decades after U.S. forces pulled out at the Philippines government’s request.

And the Marine Corps is working on opening a new base, Camp Blaz, on Guam, the first new Marine Corps installation in 70 years.

At the same time, the State Department is racing to renew soon-to-expire strategic partnership agreements with the Pacific Island nations of Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands. Those deals provide the U.S. reliable port access from which it can deploy sea and air power.

But that might be too little, too late.

“To have a seamless reinforcing defense relationship … the infrastructure must be in place like naval bases, air bases, depots, radars. We don’t have these things in the Philippines,” said Delfin Lorenzana, former Philippine defense secretary. That means the U.S. “cannot sustain a long supply chain from Guam and Japan/Korea to project its power in the South China Sea,” he wrote in an email.

And most other Southeast Asian countries are likely to be reluctant to provide military or logistical support in the event of conflict with China due to fears of blowback from Beijing.

Regional governments like Indonesia and Malaysia “are certain that China will retaliate against them should they be seen as siding with the United States,” said Drew Thompson, former director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Ratner stressed in his December speech that deterring China from invading Taiwan is a long-term priority for the Pentagon. “It’s a today problem. It’s a tomorrow problem. It’s a 2027 problem. It’s a 2035 problem. It’s a 2040 problem,” he said.

But in the short term, Beijing’s interpretation of these limitations to U.S. force posture in the Indo-Pacific could encourage it to act.

There’s a growing danger that “the Chinese have a misperception of our own weakness — that they think we’re weaker than we are and launch an invasion based on misperceptions,” said Gray, the former NSC chief of staff.

POLITICO

Politico

15. The US military is planning for a 'transformative' year in Asia as tensions with China continue to rise

Countries are "generally welcoming?" Let's see who will welcome intermediate range ballistic missiles on tier soil.

Excerpt:

Countries there are "generally welcoming" of the US's military presence, Thompson said, "but they are as a group uncomfortable at the prospect of a US-China conflict over Taiwan, are wary of US expectations in terms of posture and access in the event of a conflict, and they are certain that China will retaliate against them should they be seen as siding with the United States."

The US military is planning for a 'transformative' year in Asia as tensions with China continue to rise

Business Insider · by Christopher Woody

US Marines rehearse for an amphibious landing with Philippine, South Korea, and Japanese troops in the Philippines in October.

US Marine Corps/Cpl. Yvonne Iwae

• Amid rising tensions with China, the US military has sought to bolster its presence in Asia.
• US forces there may see the "most transformative year" in a generation in 2023, a US official said.
• Major changes to the US military presence in Asia face logistical and political hurdles, however.

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The US military will have a "transformative" year in Asia in 2023, a top defense official said this month, continuing the Biden administration's efforts counter what US officials say is China's destabilizing influence on the region's security.

The administration spent its first two years working to bolster US relationships in the Indo-Pacific, but expanding the US military presence is likely to run into both logistical challenges and the political sensitivities of countries that are wary of backlash from of their bigger neighbor, China.

The Obama administration announced plans for a "pivot" to Asia in late 2011, but that shift was waylaid by wars in the Middle East and Europe and by the Trump administration's often antagonistic stance toward the region.

Since taking office, the Biden administration has unveiled major initiatives focused on improving the US's diplomatic, economic, and security presence in the Indo-Pacific — the latter of which will see notable changes next year, according to Ely Ratner, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs.

President Barack Obama speaks to Australian troops and US Marines in Darwin in November 2011.

JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

"It is no secret that the US forward presence in the region has historically remained predominantly in Northeast Asia, predominantly at major operating bases," Ratner said at the American Enterprise Institute on December 8.

Ratner said the administration agrees with calls for "a more mobile, lethal, diversified posture in the region" but stressed that such changes require years of "hard government work."

"It's not something that you flip overnight," Ratner added. "That said, I think it is fair to say that, in my view, 2023 is likely to stand as the most transformative year in US force posture in the region in a generation."

'Really hard work'

The 2011 "pivot" did lead to changes in US military posture in Asia, including basing of US warships in Singapore and US Marine Corps deployments to northern Australia, both of which continue today.

The US and the Philippines also signed the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement in 2014, allowing extended deployments of US troops, though implementation was delayed by tense relations under President Rodrigo Duterte, who left office in June.

Those changes required "years of really hard work" by US officials, Ratner said, adding that such work has continued, citing the AUKUS agreement with Australia and the UK, a recent agreement to accelerate and expand EDCA projects, and an announcement this month about plans to increase the US military presence in Australia.

US Navy littoral combat ship USS Coronado docks in Singapore in October 2016.

ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP via Getty Images

"We've been getting after that over the last couple of years, and I'm hopeful that we're going to start seeing the fruit of those efforts bearing quite soon," Ratner said. "I think folks are going to be quite satisfied with the results that are going to be rolling out throughout 2023."

Sending more US troops to the region may not be transformative on its own, as many likely won't be permanently assigned there, said Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank.

"A simple bean count does not capture whether these forces are truly combat credible and notably improve the United States' ability to defeat aggression," Pettyjohn told Insider.

"The number-one thing that would transform the region is making actual investments in infrastructure and facilities at new locations so that they can support distributed US operations and prepositioning equipment that American troops can unpack and use if they are deployed," Pettyjohn said, citing projects at northern Australian bases that will be used by the US Air Force, Navy, and Marines.

The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law this month, authorizes funds for military construction projects throughout the Pacific, including at major US bases and smaller outposts, such as Tinian in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory.

A US Air Force C-130J lands on an airstrip on Angaur Island in Palau in November.

US Air Force/Staff Sgt. Divine Cox

"In particular, I'd like to see these improvements happen in the Philippines and some locations in the South Pacific like Palau or Papa New Guinea," Pettyjohn said. "It would also be significant if Japan allowed US forces to have access to new bases even if this is just for temporarily deployments."

US military branches are working on their own initiatives — such as the US Air Force's agile combat employment — to enable their forces to operate in a more dispersed manner across the Pacific. Pettyjohn said training for those needed to be done on a larger scale and across services, as well as with allies, in order to be "a strong deterrent."

Opportunities and limits

Some allies and partners have been receptive to US interest in increased defense cooperation. Japan and Australia are working more closely with the US and with each other. Other countries have sought more training with the US military or, in the case of Palau, to host US forces.

The new Philippine government is pursuing deeper defense ties with the US because of China's "uncompromising position" on South China Sea disputes and because of a growing recognition that a war over Taiwan "would almost certainly spill over" into the Philippines, said Drew Thompson, a visiting senior research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III meets with Southeast Asian defense ministers in Cambodia in November.

US Defense Department/Chad J. McNeeley

Southeast Asian countries, including US ally Thailand, and Pacific Island states have been more cautious, however.

Leaders in Southeast Asia, geographically and economically close to China, are reluctant to be seen as choosing sides, and Pacific Islanders are wary of a great-power competition that they believe overlooks their most pressing issues, chiefly climate change.

The administration has made overtures to both regions on its own, with several trips by senior officials to Southeast Asia and the first-ever US-Pacific Island country summit in September, and with partners, including a maritime-domain-awareness project announced at a summit with leaders from Australia, Japan, and India that is seen as a response to longstanding security concerns among Southeast Asian and Pacific Island states.

There are opportunities for the US "to expand its access and deepen relationships" in both Northeast and Southeast Asia, said Thompson, a former US Defense Department official, but US leaders will have to reckon with the limits of those partnerships, especially in Southeast Asia.

Countries there are "generally welcoming" of the US's military presence, Thompson said, "but they are as a group uncomfortable at the prospect of a US-China conflict over Taiwan, are wary of US expectations in terms of posture and access in the event of a conflict, and they are certain that China will retaliate against them should they be seen as siding with the United States."

Business Insider · by Christopher Woody

16. Viewpoint: How U.S. Can Compete With China in Latin America

Strategic competition is global competition.

Viewpoint: How U.S. Can Compete With China in Latin America

nationaldefensemagazine.org

12/28/2022

By R. Evan Ellis

iStock illustration

During the Cold War, the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union forced attention to the question of whether government, or free markets and private property, best supported achieving the broad range of human desires from prosperity to security to dignity.

That debate played out in a range of centers of thinking, political movements and insurgencies across the globe, although the core philosophical question was colored by perceptions in the developing world of the benefits that “capitalism” had brought to them, as well as the complex historical relationships with the United States and former colonial powers as its champions.

The fall of the Soviet Union seemed to settle the question in favor of capitalism, perhaps best symbolized in Francis Fukuyama’s iconic essay “The End of History?” Latin America, among other parts of the world, was temporarily infected by the idea that capitalism was the best route, with a wave of conservative and neoliberal governments elected in the 1990s such as Raul Menem in Argentina, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Carlos Salinas de Gortari in Mexico, and Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in Bolivia, among others.

The diverse group of leftist governments that came to power in the early 2000s, from populist socialists such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Evo Morales in Bolivia, to more moderate social democratic coalitions such as the Workers Party government in Brazil, the Concertación in Chile and Frente Amplio in Uruguay, reflected the inability of neoliberal policies to satisfactorily address the region’s problems.

Yet the range of political responses also reflected a diversity of thinking about why Latin America’s neoliberal moment had not satisfied elevated hopes and what was the best path forward.

Latin America’s latest “turn to the left” is both broader than the region’s last “pink tide,” and arguably more problematic for the United States in strategic terms, with increased challenges to U.S. security, migration, and economic cooperation with the region’s partners, decreased leverage to pursue its policy objectives in bilateral and multilateral forums, and possibly greater opportunities for the People’s Republic of China to expand its presence in the region.

While Latin America’s new left is diverse, in both its ideology and commitment to democracy, the new political landscape also highlights a monumental shift across the hemisphere, including in the United States, with respect to fundamental questions about the role of government versus private enterprise and initiative, in both achieving desired economic and social objectives, and in protecting individual rights and liberties.

The remarkable commonality across Latin America’s heterogeneous left is that virtually all its regimes look to the expansion and empowerment of government to address the grave challenges of their countries.

While the particular agendas, and the likelihood of implementing them, vary greatly across countries, virtually all involve the expansion of government spending, programs and authorities, whether for poverty reduction, helping marginalized groups, infrastructure construction, public security, or providing education, healthcare and pensions.

Most, from Chile to Colombia to the United States, involve some corresponding form of tax increases to pay the bill.

While the Biden administration has important differences with and concerns about the new governments in the region, it arguably concurs on important parts of the new agenda, from attention to social justice to health care and education, to environmental protectionism and dismantling the carbon economy for an accelerated transition toward green energy.

The Biden administration has not abandoned the private sector and continues to work through it in organizations such as the Development Finance Corporation. Yet its reflexive coincidence with Latin America in focusing on expanded government programs, spending, authorities and taxes de-emphasizes the primacy of the private sector as the primary generator of wealth, inspiration of human initiative, and source of protection for individual rights and liberties.

The eroding attention to the fundamental role of the private sector as generator of value and protector of individual rights and liberties is compounded by the growing wealth and power of the People’s Republic of China and its impact on the hemisphere through its engagement, discourse and example.

Most Latin Americans understand that the authoritarian Chinese system impinges on the free expression and other liberties of its population, as well as on others, including its imprisonment of Uyghur Muslims and its suppression of democracy in Hong Kong.

Nonetheless, the economic transformation of Communist Party-led China over the past 40 years, whatever the true causes or underlying contradictions, sends the message, in ways the failed economy of the Soviet Union never could, that state-led development can produce results.

In the same fashion, Beijing’s use of state control, empowered by emerging technologies, generates the superficial appearance of security, order, and efficiency attractive in Latin America where such conditions are often lacking. From afar, it is easy for Latin Americans to overlook the corresponding sacrifice of personal rights and privacy.

Going beyond the power of its ambiguous example, China has also become increasingly assertive in publicly challenging the West as embodying democracy and human rights versus its own authoritarianism. While few maintain that China has the same quality of democratic freedoms and the protection of individual rights as the West, its obfuscation of democracy and rights creates moral space for authoritarian governments from Russia to Venezuela.

Such moral ambiguity also facilitates expanded government programs, authority and intrusive technologies on populations who hope that accepting them will bring them the security, order and economic benefits they yearn for.

What is arguably missing as the United States responds to the challenge of China, as well as to the crises and transformation of its own region, is clarity of thought and effective communication of the value of protecting and empowering the private, vis-à-vis the government as the fundamental generator of value and guarantee of human rights and liberties.

Doing so is not an easy sell in Latin America and other parts of the developing world as educational institutions, the media and public discourse have long associated capitalism with society’s ills. In the wake of Covid-19 and the inflationary effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, societies have become fatigued with the inability of market-based democracies to overcome endemic corruption, inequality and insecurity.

Yet time and time again, empowering the state over the individual and the will of the strongman over the rule of law has proven a recipe for disaster, whether the dystopian authoritarian kleptocracy of Venezuela, or those finding themselves not aligned with the interests of Xi Jinping in Beijing, from the Uyghurs, to democrats in Hong Kong, to neighbors whose territorial waters are on the wrong side of China’s “9-dash-line,” to Hu Jintao at the 20th Party Congress.

The non-state basis of Western economies means the United States cannot compete with China in mobilizing resources into questionable projects to win Latin American hearts and minds. Nor can its diverse political system out-propagandize Beijing with ambiguous platitudes that protect dictators while wooing the economic interests of democrats.

In Latin America, emphasizing common ground with the economic and social agendas of Latin America’s new left may permit friendly interactions in the near term, but may ultimately be self-defeating if the statist projects of those new governments unleash capital flight, economic collapse, further social conflict and Chinese dependence.

Against the siren song of Beijing’s seductive statism, and Latin America’s turn to unpromising government-led solutions, the Biden administration’s emphasis on democracy, however laudable, is not enough.

U.S. intellectual leadership in Latin America, and against mounting challenges to the Western-led global order more broadly, requires a return to first principles. That includes a focus on the fundamental nature of the private sector, coupled with effective rule-of-law, to collectively enable the prosperity and protection of individual rights and freedoms that makes true democracy viable.

The key for the United States in maintaining a secure and prosperous Western Hemisphere for all, and in effectively responding to the global China threat, is not to outbid China with gifts, but to show a new generation the merit of putting private, not government, initiative at the core of its sovereign national strategies and policies, and to make those same good choices itself.

R. Evan Ellis is Latin America research professor with the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute. The views expressed here are strictly his own.

nationaldefensemagazine.org

17. What Harry and Meghan Can Teach Us About Information Warfare

I am not really into following the royals (I am not an anglophile). But there are some interesting perspectives in this but I have been following Asha Rangappa's Freedom Academy

What Harry and Meghan Can Teach Us About Information Warfare

Their new Netflix series is a master class in how to launch a counterattack on false narratives. We can learn from them.

Asha Rangappa

8 min ago

1

I’m an Anglophile. I admit it. I chalk it up to some sort of Stockholm syndrome double whammy because I’m Indian-American. Naturally, this extends to a love-hate relationship with the British monarchy. I’ve binge-watched every season of The Crown, listened to the five-part “You’re Wrong About” podcast on Princess Diana, and actually sat through the entire Netflix screening of Diana: the Musical. To help you understand the level of commitment that last effort entailed, here is a sample of what I endured (CRINGE ALERT: THIS CANNOT BE UNSEEN):

Yes, that was Prince Charles breakdancing. Watch it again if you have to, it’s difficult to process the first time. I won’t judge.

Anyhoo, this is all to say that I was (obviously) not above watching Netflix’s new docuseries, Harry and Meghan. I had only briefly tuned into their royal wedding and occasionally got some glimpses of their royal dramas on Twitter, but I didn’t know a whole lot about the couple. Basically, I was the perfect target audience for their series, which is — and I’m speaking here with my scholarly hat on — essentially a white propaganda piece intended to sway hearts and minds to their side. (If you’re not taking my course and interested, I cover this concept in Class 2 — it’s not necessarily a bad thing.) Whatever you want to call it, it worked, at least on me: I left the series convinced that the British monarchy is a dysfunctional and exploitative institution that crushes dreams and breaks souls. (To be honest I already believed that from watching The Crown, but this sealed it.)

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Part of the reason the series was successful is that it employs some effective counter propaganda techniques. This isn’t surprising, considering that Prince Harry is one of fifteen commisioners on the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder, which recently released a study on misinformation. As we head into a Republican-led House, potential indictments against Trump, and another presidential election, the conservative propaganda machine is about to kick into full gear. Regardless of what you think about Harry, Meghan, or the British monarchy, it’s worth taking note of following lessons on how to give truth an advantage in our own information ecosystem.

1. Don’t Engage, Expose

More than debunking specific narratives, Harry and Meghan is really about exposing the inner dynamics of the royal household’s relationship with the British tabloid press. In fact, even if you aren’t interested in the series, Episode 3, which reveals the system of the “Royal Rota” — a symbiotic relationship in which the tabloids provide favorable coverage of various royal “principals” in exchange for dirt about other members of the household — is a fascinating glimpse into how outlets profit from disinformation and propaganda. Later episodes demonstrate how these narratives are then amplified by a small network of social media accounts, oversaturating the information space.

The description of the Royal Rota reminded me of what Columbia Law Professor Yochai Benckler (and co-author of Network Propaganda) calls the “propaganda feedback loop.” The propaganda feedback loop describes the interdependence between conservative U.S. media, political figures, and the public that creates a siloed media “bubble” completely detached from reality. (The palace relationship isn’t very different than the “propaganda feedback loop” diagram below, if you replace “politicians” with “royal household” — though with a less polarized media market the public audience is likely less siloed than in the United States.)

Understanding how the system operates is the first step in countering it, and what Professor Benckler notes is that this type of system is asymmetrical and resistant to traditional forms of truth-checking and self correction. In particular, Benckler observes that in covering the narratives coming from such a system, remaining “neutral,” as traditional media norms require, advantage the propagandist. “The problem is when the reality is that one side is lying vastly more than another,” he says, “neutrality becomes complicity.” Instead of trying to provide “balanced” coverage of crazy narratives, exposing the tactics being used to hoodwink the audience can make those exposed to it more resilient.

2. Get Into the Battle

The surest way to lose an information war is to not fight it. Michelle Obama’s maxim that “when they go low, we go high” is all well and good, but unfortunately “going high” often involves dismissing false narratives and conspiracy theories as not being worthy of coverage. As with neutrality, silence merely cedes ground to the adversary. Harry and Meghan eschews this route in favor of affirmatively telling a story that can compete against existing narratives.

This is an important lesson in combating conspiracy theories coming from the far right. The goal isn’t to convince people whose minds are already made up — they aren’t likely to change. Rather, as Professor Benckler has observed:

It's important not to confuse the people who exist purely inside the right-wing mega-media ecosystem and all Republican voters. To the best we can tell from surveys, it looks like it's about half to 60% of Republicans -- which is to say somewhere between 25% and 35%, or between a quarter and a third of the American population in general -- exists in cult-like isolation in a right-wing media ecosystem. Then there's the roughly quarter to 20%, or maybe it’s as few as 15%, who have half of a foot inside the Fox News universe, but also attend to more mainstream media. And those seem to be the most important audience to try to persuade, and explain to them just how wacky and different Fox News in particular is, relative to anything that should count as journalism.

As polarized as our media ecosystem appears, there is a sizable chunk that hasn’t made their minds up yet — but they can’t be persuaded if no one is presenting an alternative.

3. Change the Debate

The Harry and Meghan series challenges the entire system of royal media coverage. In doing so, the show recharacterizes the debate to move beyond petty personality differences and instead sheds a spotlight on previously unquestioned assumptions about the palace’s relationship with the media. Reframing the controversy this way contextualizes the debate on the couple’s terms and places the institution in a defensive position with regard to its public relations practices.

Their approach is an instructive one for the current “culture wars” waged by the right. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post has argued that these are winnable — if they can be turned into a liability for their proponents. Currently, the reactionary posture to right-wing culture war narratives — typically with Democrat (out-group) outrage and shaming — play into the propaganda feedback loop by confirming and solidifying Republican (in-group) identity. Changing this dynamic involves reframing the issue altogether. For example, instead of engaging with undefinable, catch-all terms like “wokeness” and “CRT,” it would be more effective to articulate the assumptions these controversies are based on — that teaching empathy and tolerance, or offering a full accounting of America’s past, for example, are not worthy goals — and force the culture warriors to defend these positions.

4. Question the Framing

Harry and Meghan brings the receipts in their condemnation of the British media. One particularly damning sequence is a montage of side-by-side differential tabloid coverage of the same behaviors by Meghan and her sister-in-law, Kate (like how they cradled their baby bump, and, no joke, their love of avocados). As frivolous as it sounds, they present a convincing picture that biased framing has impacted public perception.

We have seen this phenomenon play out in the never-ending “Hunter Biden’s laptop” saga: The “Twitter files” is framed as a scandal about the media not covering what the right claims is a scandal. But according to Professor Benckler, this is a classic conservative propaganda play:

Repeatedly what we see is that right-wing media are trying to work the ref. They're trying to come up with stories, many of which have a tiny little source of proof in them, and then a lot of crazy conspiracy. And they replicate it and they say it again and again on multiple sites. And then they start complaining, ‘Why isn't the media covering this? The media is political because it's not covering this.’

As we head into what will likely become a congressional hearing circus show about this supposed media conspiracy, it’s worth questioning this framing and confronting the story head on from other angles. This piece, for example, revisits the timeline to recall why the media was reluctant to cover the story, and this one looks at the laptop story as “the most invasive data breach imaginable.” (I’ll be doing a deep dive into Hunter Biden’s laptop narrative after the New Year, so stay tuned.)

5. Leverage Platforms

The British tabloid press is not an insignificant player in the pop culture media ecosystem and one that has significantly more reach and power than Harry and Meghan have as individuals. What the couple understood was that to compete with this system, they had to find a way to compensate for this disparity and reach their audience where they already are — a digital streaming platform was a perfect vehicle. We are seeing a similar effort on a global scale with President Zelensky’s use of Telegram — a social media platform owned by seemingly sketchy Russians which has become a preferred platform for Russian propaganda — to counter Russia’s efforts and communicate with 1.5 million people daily.

I’ve written about information asymmetry previously and the need to upend norms to effectively counter false narratives. Correcting for this asymmetry also requires competing with the volume and dynamic of the right-wing media ecosystem, which is fast and prolific, as Professor Benckler describes:

And it's that difference: not the supply of crazy stories; they exist on the left and the right, not even the excitement of people on the left and the right to share on Facebook the craziest story. It’s that dynamic of the top media repeating, confirming, accrediting and recycling…. That can only happen through a committed propagandist effort by the most viewed and the most trusted form of media on the right, which is Fox News.

This means thinking outside the box finding new ways to saturate the information space with truthful information. Take, for instance, a fact-based narrative like the January 6 Committee’s 845-page final report. This material is unlikely to trickle to the “undecided” public in any detail (Mueller’s report was half that length and we know how that one fared). One possibility is to break down and repackage this material into digestible formats for today’s audience (especially young audiences) and saturate information spaces beyond TV. (The clips of prominent Republicans alone, like Bill Barr and Ivanka, admitting that there was no voter fraud ought to be enough to go viral on platforms like Tik Tok.) A message doesn’t do much good if it’s no one is receiving it.

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Those are the big, meta takeaways…which isn’t to say there isn’t any fluff in the Harry and Meghan series. There is — and I won’t blame you if you can’t bring yourself to watch it. But, keep an eye on these two: The rogue royals may know better than anyone how to go up against a well-oiled propaganda machine.

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18. Strategery 101: When enemy Russia attacks friend Ukraine, back the friend

Strategery 101: When enemy Russia attacks friend Ukraine, back the friend

Ukraine isn't asking for U.S. troops, just arms to defeat a common enemy

washingtontimes.com · by Clifford D. May

OPINION:

A week ago Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, dressed in olive-green fatigues, made a surprise visit to Bakhmut in the eastern region of Donetsk, where his troops are engaged in a bloody battle with Russian invaders. He risked his life to boost the morale of his country’s defenders. If that’s not leadership, what is?

Last Wednesday, the Ukrainian president made a surprise visit to Washington, where he met with President Biden and addressed Congress. He was dressed as he had been on Tuesday because, I surmise, he wanted to communicate visually that his nation is at war; a war from which he can have no respite; a war against Vladimir Putin, a predator allied with China’s communists, Iran’s jihadis and North Korea’s despotic dynasty — an axis of America’s enemies.

Commentator Tucker Carlson was not merely unimpressed; he was offended by what he saw as a fashion faux pas. “Today the president of Ukraine arrived at the White House like the manager of a strip club and started to demand money,” he told his television audience. “Amazingly, no one threw him out.”

To the speaker of the House, Mr. Zelenskyy presented a battle flag from Bakhmut on which Ukrainian soldiers had written messages. “They asked me to bring this flag to you,” he said, “to the U.S. Congress, to members of the House of Representatives and senators whose decisions can save millions of people.”

Commentator Benny Johnson was not merely unmoved by this expression of gratitude; he was outraged. “It is a disgrace to wave any flag other than America’s inside our own Capitol,” he tweeted.

Such churlishness no doubt entertains television viewers and generates clicks. But it’s unserious.

Another contributing factor: reflexive contrarianism. Aren’t Mr. Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s economic, immigration, energy, climate, identity and many other policies damaging American interests? (Yes!) Doesn’t that imply that their support for Ukraine also should be opposed, and that conservatives should cut the Kremlin some slack? (No!)

Misinformation may play a role, too. A friend asked if I wasn’t troubled by Mr. Zelenskyy‘s “banning certain churches.” I explained that there are two Orthodox churches in Ukraine. One opposes Russia’s attempt to turn the country into a vassal province. The other is loyal to the patriarch in Moscow who is loyal to Mr. Putin and supports the eradication of the Ukrainian state and culture by whatever means — war crimes included.

A bit more: In 2017, as a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, I visited Ukraine and saw for myself that the Orthodox churches — as well as Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims — all enjoyed religious freedom. By contrast, the commission singled out Russia for its oppression of religious minorities.

The anti-Ukrainian right is de facto allied with Code Pink, Win Without War, and other far-left groups triggered by increases in American defense spending and the strengthening of NATO.

Some moderate figures on the left also don’t get it. Batya Ungar-Sargon, the liberal deputy opinion editor at Newsweek, wrote: “It is possible to admire President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people’s bravery, resilience, and fortitude in the face of a malevolent, godless foe while also recognizing that his interests are not our interests, his fight is not our fight, and his requests should not be granted.”

To understand why that’s dead wrong, imagine that Ukraine had quickly fallen to Russia’s military machine — as most analysts expected. Would Mr. Putin have retired to his Italianate palace on the Black Sea? No, because his mission is to reestablish the Russian empire.

He’d have figured: “After surrendering to the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Americans turned a blind eye to my conquest of Ukraine. So, what are the chances they’ll go to war over Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia?”

If his reasoning proved correct, that would be the end of NATO. The Poles, the Finns, the Kazakhs and the peoples of other nations would soon be in the Kremlin’s crosshairs.

Meanwhile, in Beijing, Xi Jinping would firm up his plans for the conquest of Taiwan.

In Tehran, Ali Khamenei would know for certain that Americans will not stand in his way — especially if Iran becomes nuclear-armed.

In Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un would consider whether the time was ripe for an attack on South Korea. The Americans would implore him to negotiate, and he’d agree. He has a nuclear arsenal today because both he and his father have made fools of U.S. presidents and their envoys.

If you understand all this, you should also grasp that the anti-Ukrainian right cannot claim to care about American greatness. And those on the left obsessed about bathrooms and pronouns while Russian troops in Ukraine slaughter, rape, and steal children cannot claim to give a fig about human rights.

If Americans abandon Ukraine, America will be seen — with justification — as a nation in terminal decline. Even the past will look different if it turns out that World War II and the Cold War only postponed — but did not prevent — the rise of totalitarianism.

Ukrainians are reminding the world what it means to value freedom. I’ve been less surprised than some to see their courage and determination because, as an election observer for the nonpartisan International Republican Institute during the 2019 Ukrainian election, I saw how proud and empowered Ukrainians were to be exercising their right to choose their leaders.

Today, that and every other right Ukrainians have enjoyed since the collapse of the Soviet Union is threatened. But Mr. Zelenskyy is not asking Americans to take up arms and fight alongside Ukrainians. He’s asking Americans to continue providing arms made by American workers in American factories so that Ukrainians can frustrate the ambitions of a common enemy and the despots who back him.

If granting that request is not Strategery 101, what is?

• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for The Washington Times.

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washingtontimes.com · by Clifford D. May

19. 5 big questions China faces in 2023

These questions identify weaknesses and possible areas for explosion in strategic competition. 

1. How will China manage its way out of zero-covid?

2. Will China’s economy recover?

3. Will Xi Jinping’s hold on power weaken?

4. Will protesters take to the streets again?

5. Will China make progress on addressing climate change?

5 big questions China faces in 2023​

It’s hard to recall a more tumultuous end to any recent year in China — and prognosticating about the country is never easy. Grid asked several experts for their thoughts about what awaits China in 2023 — or at least for the right questions to be asking.

Lili Pike

China Reporter

December 27, 2022​

grid.news · by Lili Pike

Heading into 2022, some things were foreseeable: President Xi Jinping’s appointment to a third term at the October Communist Party Congress was all but assured, U.S.-China relations were bound to remain rocky, and a real estate crisis would continue to grip the nation.

But the main story of the year — China’s draconian zero-covid policy — was just beginning to take hold; few predicted how it would upend life for millions of Chinese people. And even fewer foresaw that China would — as a result — be hit with its most widespread protests in years.

Now, on the precipice of 2023, one thing is clear — how China handles the messy unwinding of zero-covid looks to be the most profound question facing the country as new year begins. Almost everything else, from the fate of the economy to the future of climate action, hinges to some degree on how smoothly — or not — the government and the nation move from harsh restrictions to a true reopening.

Our list leaves out key topics — from U.S.-China relations to potential breakthroughs on technologies like electric vehicle batteries and semiconductors — but it covers core questions involving the pandemic, internal politics and China’s economic growth (or lack thereof). The answers to these questions will have major reverberations in China, and they may well have impact all over the world.

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1. How will China manage its way out of zero-covid?

As the rest of the world has seen with omicron, you give an inch and the virus takes a mile; in the final days of 2022, covid cases have soared across Beijing and many other large cities. The spike that the government insisted for three years had to be prevented at all costs has finally come. And as Grid has reported, experts fear that the healthcare system may not be able to withstand the sudden surge.

To some extent, then, this question is both critical and relatively easy to answer: The transition out of zero-covid is likely to be chaotic at best.

For one thing, experts say the current surge is just the beginning. “The peak time hasn’t arrived; many of the hospitals have reached their capacity, but the worst is yet to come,” Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Grid.

China’s population is more susceptible to the virus because so few people have been infected, and China’s weaker vaccines don’t offer the same level of protection as the mRNA shots used in the U.S. And while the Chinese government has directed hospitals to boost ICU capacity by the end of December, many experts told Grid that hospital beds and staffing will likely fail to meet the needs.

A period of particular concern will come early in 2023: Chinese New Year, the country’s most important holiday, which starts on Jan. 21. During the holiday, hundreds of millions of people typically travel home to spend time with family. It’s been a scaled-down celebration for the last three years; the loosening of restrictions means all that pent-up travel could prove to be a nationwide superspreader event, accelerating the transmission of the virus and bringing it to vulnerable rural areas where China’s healthcare system is even weaker.

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How bad might things get? Public health experts have published a range of estimates.

“I think we’ll see astronomical case numbers,” Jennifer Bouey, an epidemiologist and leader of China policy studies at the Rand Corporation, told Grid. A study published in Nature Medicine earlier this year projected 1.6 million deaths over six months, if restrictions were lifted. More recent modeling from U.K. health analytics firm Airfinity projects a higher number — 1.3 to 2.1 million deaths over three months, if China’s outbreaks mirror Hong Kong’s lethal wave from last spring.

It’s a nightmare scenario that could have ripple effects well beyond China’s public health — the nation’s economic growth and perhaps even Xi’s leadership could be called into question if things take that bad a turn.

As dark as the next few months look, experts also note a possible silver lining — the idea that the easing of zero-covid might offer a light at the end of the tunnel for people in China — a return to something resembling life pre-2020.

“This could be the worst time for China, but if China manages to muddle through the crisis,” said Huang, “we will see that China will learn to live with the virus, the economic recovery will be speedy and you’re going see impressive economic growth, the social and economic life will be returned to normal.”

That’s the hope.

2. Will China’s economy recover?

Just how speedy might the economic recovery be? That’s the next big question for China in 2023 — and as Huang suggests, the answer is directly related to the zero-covid questions.

Zero-covid has been a well-documented drag on the economy over the past year; factories suffered when their workers were locked down, and Chinese consumers reined in their spending as they lost paychecks and jobs. GDP growth will clock in at around 3 percent for 2022, well short of the 5.5 percent target policymakers had originally set.

The hope here is that the easing of lockdowns and other restrictions will unleash the Chinese economy once more. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that a Politburo official is drawing up plans for a GDP target above 5 percent in 2023; the official goal won’t be announced until the National People’s Congress meets in March.

But some international financial institutions are less sanguine. The World Bank recently projected 4.3 percent GDP growth for China in 2023, reflecting the potential impact of the growing covid wave on the Chinese economy.

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Experts Grid spoke with echoed those concerns. “Reopening is very much underway now, but recovery won’t come right away,” said Tianlei Huang, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. A key question, Huang and others said, is how much Chinese consumers are willing to spend after years in hibernation.

In 2023, the government will be looking to consumers as a critical driver of growth, but people across China remain shaken after a year of uncertainty and lost paychecks; even if the covid wave doesn’t follow the worst-case scenarios, it might take time for consumers to start traveling and shopping again.

“Across the whole year, [reopening] is definitely better than continuing to enforce zero-covid over a longer period of time,” Logan Wright, a partner at Rhodium Group, told Grid. “But it’s not at all clear, exactly, for the broader economy, whether people are still going to be more interested in spending versus just, you know, a little more concerned about the economic outlook in the future as well.” To assess the potential strength of consumer spending, Wright said he’ll be looking at the level of government support to revive consumption, including providing coupons and subsidies directly to consumers.

Consumer habits in 2023 are particularly important because other key engines of the Chinese economy are likely to underperform. Given the economic issues in the U.S. and other countries, exports from China — which turbocharged the economy in 2021 — are looking weak heading into the new year.

Meanwhile, China’s property sector, which has historically accounted for about a quarter of GDP, is also still likely to be “a very meaningful headwind to growth in 2023,” Wright said. Ever since heavily indebted real estate giants like Evergrande defaulted last year, Chinese developers have been using their limited liquidity to finish projects that were already underway rather than starting new ones. The government has walked a fine line — trying to soften the property downturn by providing more credit to developers without adding more fuel to the sector’s debt crisis. Experts expect the property market to continue lagging.

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“This is a long-term unwinding of a very, very long-lasting credit bubble,” Wright said. A big question for 2023, he added, will be whether the property sector defaults lead to broader issues throughout the financial system — one more nightmare scenario that economists have feared for many years.

All these issues aren’t just questions for investors and companies; they come after a year of rising income inequality and record-high unemployment among China’s youth. Millions of Chinese are hoping for an economic shot in the arm.

3. Will Xi Jinping’s hold on power weaken?

Not long ago, it would have seemed strange to even include this question. Before the November protests, Xi’s control appeared unassailable. Only a month earlier, at October’s Communist Party Congress, he was granted another term as party chief and placed new leaders on the Politburo Standing Committee, the inner circle of top party officials. All those new leaders are considered deeply loyal to Xi.

Then came the protests — unprecedented during his reign in terms of their geographic breadth, and also remarkable for what some of the protesters were saying. Along with calls for an end to the covid lockdowns, there were people in the streets shouting “Xi Jinping step down!”

By agreeing to the protesters’ main demand — an end to zero-covid — it appears that Xi has quieted the grassroots opposition for now. But some experts said Xi might have been too hasty in answering the protesters — shifting gears too dramatically; in this view, Xi may have incorrectly believed that the economic benefits of reopening — even a poorly planned reopening — would outweigh the costs.

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“The issue for me is whether Xi may have badly overestimated the public’s dissatisfaction with covid-zero and underestimated the public’s fear of covid,” said Andrew Wedeman, director of the China studies department at Georgia State University. “My hunch is that he will certainly suffer if the number of deaths is anywhere near the numbers being batted about right now.”

Xi may suffer reputational damage in the eyes of the public, but Wedeman and other experts said that even a botched pivot away from zero-covid — and the perception that the party is to blame — still may not lead to immediate political consequences for him.

In all likelihood, Xi will secure the role of president at the National People’s Congress in March — it’s an almost predetermined outcome — and no major schisms among the party’s top leaders will be publicly apparent. “There is a possibility that Xi’s people may have some type of divisions among themselves, but they are all very loyal to him,” Suiseng Zhao, a professor of Chinese politics at University of Denver, told Grid. “So that will not threaten Xi Jinping’s power foundation, at least I mean by next year.”

4. Will protesters take to the streets again?

Experts in Chinese politics are divided as to whether dissatisfaction with Xi and the post-zero-covid reopening might lead to more protests in 2023.

Several cited a recent crackdown on protesters as reason to believe that further large-scale dissent is unlikely. After the November protests erupted, police began randomly searching people’s phones for VPNs and blocked apps, like Telegram, that protesters had used to communicate. An unknown number of demonstrators were detained and questioned; some are still being held.

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“I think the government is likely to double down on punishment should there be more protesters in the coming year,” Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, told Grid.

Beyond the repression, there is the simple if profound fact that the protesters’ mission has been accomplished to a large degree. That could cut two ways.

On the one hand, given their success and the repression, “it would really be the rare young person or migrant laborer who would now come out on the street,” Susan Shirk, a research professor at the University of California, San Diego, said during a recent Foreign Policy event.

But James Palmer, deputy editor at Foreign Policy, argued that a major healthcare failure during the coming surge could tip off another round of public anger against the government.

And Victor Shih, an associate professor of political economy at the University of California, San Diego, said that the November experience may embolden others. “Now that the protesters know sympathizers are out there, they’re going to be much more willing,” he told the New Yorker. “Even the people who are being detained right now [will] get let go at some point. They’re going to do it again when the next crisis emerges. I think we will see more frequent protests, with political demands, across cities, which is something that we haven’t seen since 1989.”

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5. Will China make progress on addressing climate change?

With the turbulence of the last year, from lockdowns to protests to economic troubles, climate action took something of a back seat in China in 2022. If zero-covid led to greater economic problems, those problems in turn led to backsliding on key targets, including a proposed deadline to peak emissions from the carbon-intensive building materials industry by 2025, which was pushed back to 2030.

“China has suffered so much uncertainty over the recent months,” Li Shuo, global policy adviser at Greenpeace East Asia, told Grid, “much of it related to its covid situation. This has an impact on all aspects of life, including the country’s climate agenda.”

The silver linings, when it comes to climate change? The economic slowdown means China’s emissions will likely have fallen slightly in 2022, and China will probably hit a record in terms of newly installed solar energy capacity this year — no small achievement.

Looking ahead, China’s 2023 climate outcomes will rest on the nation’s covid trajectory and economic recovery. As Li said, “How soon the country will get back to normal will determine when attention will get back to the environmental agenda.”

Climate watchers have been heartened lately by the government’s messaging during a recent economic planning meeting, which suggested that the recovery will be driven by consumption; growth spurred by consumption and services carries a lower carbon footprint compared with China’s traditional approach of relying on construction and heavy manufacturing to boost growth. The latter tends to send CO2 emissions soaring.

“I’m cautiously optimistic about that,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Meanwhile, signals from the meeting point to another good year for electric vehicle sales, which are expected to finish at a record high in 2022. Myllyvirta was also upbeat about the potential for another banner performance for solar and wind installations. “I think we’ll see another record or near-record year,” he said.

But overall, the planning meeting suggested that climate change won’t be in the spotlight. “Energy security and economic stability will be the main priorities, not leaving much room for climate policy,” Yan Qin, lead carbon analyst at Refinitiv, told Grid.

And thorny questions remain — not least whether China will start to phase out coal and make its power grid more flexible to handle solar and wind energy. The bottom line is that the Chinese government still has a lot of runway left: It has only pledged to start reducing coal consumption between 2025 and 2030, and to begin reducing overall emissions by 2030. Climate experts say that emissions could peak and begin to decline well before then — an imperative for the world to meet the Paris Agreement climate targets. Among many crucial questions for China in 2023, how the country moves toward those goals is the one that will ultimately have the most impact on the rest of the world.

Cleo Li-Schwartz contributed reporting. Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.

grid.news · by Lili Pike

20. Ukraine’s Long-Term Road to Recovery

Recovery will take a (global) village.

Conclusion:

Ukraine faces a daunting challenge in rebuilding its society. However, with the right mix of economic aid, fairly self-evident policy remedies, and some luck with GDP growth, Kyiv can meet its targets.

Ukraine’s Long-Term Road to Recovery - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Collin Meisel · December 28, 2022

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited a liberated Kherson city in southern Ukraine in mid-November, he declared that Ukraine’s victory there marked “the beginning of the end of the war.” Though much remains to be seen, President Zelenskyy’s words highlight the importance of thinking about rebuilding Ukraine after the war ends.

To that end, the Ukrainian government has been persistent in developing and maintaining post-conflict recovery plans. Kyiv’s top-level goals include 7 percent average annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth through 2032, $750 billion in accumulated investment during that time, net positive inward migration, and a substantial shift away from fossil fuels to reduce reliance on coal, natural gas, and oil from two-thirds of Ukraine’s energy supplies today to a little over one-third within a decade.

The government’s goals are undoubtedly ambitious — but also achievable with ample, sustained Western aid and a little luck. The exact level of ambition will depend on the course of the conflict and the timing and strength of rebounds in Ukrainian production, consumption, and investment. The roughly $100 billion in Western aid to Ukraine to date has helped further these goals, but Ukrainian perseverance is likely to require billions of dollars in additional aid per month, according to the International Monetary Fund. And Ukraine’s success will likely to bring with it a new challenge: a managed Russian decline and thinking ahead about how Moscow may demand positive economic inducement from the West to negotiate a lasting peace.

A Protracted War

An evaluation of Ukraine’s long-term recovery prospects must start with a consideration of the likely trajectory of the conflict. Although no one can say for certain, and a sudden collapse of the Russian military is a possibility, many signs point toward a protracted conflict. From a broad conceptual perspective, this is due to both the Ukrainian and Russian sides maintaining secure conditional viability, or a situation where substantial resources — in Ukraine’s case, Western economic, military, and intelligence support; in Russia’s case, sizeable arms stocks and a nuclear arsenal — make it unlikely that the conflict will end in outright victory for either side.

Become a Member

Senior U.S. military officials and outside analysts’ assessments of the situation appear to support this notion, as suggested by Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley’s assertion that “the probability of a Ukrainian military victory, defined as kicking the Russians out of all of Ukraine, to include what they claim is Crimea… is not high, militarily.” And indeed, President Zelenskyy has made clear that victory from his perspective would include a retaking of Crimea and the Donbas along with territories occupied by Russia since February 24, 2022.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, has passed two “points of no return,” according to Michael Kofman, research program director in the Russia Studies Program at CNA: the recent referenda illegally annexing additional Ukrainian territory and a mass mobilization of up to 300,000 (though likely somewhat fewer) Russians this fall. In other words, neither the Russian nor the Ukrainian side appears intent on backing down any time soon. According to Kofman’s best guess at present, the war could last for another year from this point.

How Russian and Ukrainian military strategies evolve in the coming months will also likely affect the war’s duration. According to some of the best statistical models, a shift toward a “punishment strategy” by either side — that is, where one force seeks to inflict high costs rather than to outmaneuver or attrit opposing military forces — should be expected to increase the war’s duration by roughly three to nine months relative to non-punishment strategies and holding other factors equal. Recent persistent Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure are an indicator of such a shift.

Recovery Goals

A protracted conflict will have a direct impact on Ukraine’s recovery goals. Much will depend on GDP growth, which, although an imperfect measure, will offer a good approximation of the strength of Ukraine’s recovery. Already, Ukraine has vastly exceeded expectations on this front. In April 2022, the World Bank predicted that Ukraine’s economy would contract by 45 percent in 2022. The World Bank’s October revision reduced this figure by 10 percentage points to 35 percent — a devastating loss but a full $20 billion of additional economic activity that earlier projections had written off.

Unfortunately, the World Bank’s latest forecast for 2023 projects that Ukraine’s economy will grow at only 3.3 percent next year. Considering the much lower base value (i.e., an economy that is only two-thirds of its pre-war size), this would be bad news for Ukrainians. Although no perfect comparison exists, a much healthier recovery would be similar to the rebounds seen in Libya in 2012, which saw an economic contraction of 50 percent in 2011 followed by 86 percent growth in 2012, or in Iraq in 2004, which saw a contraction of 36 percent in 2003 followed by 53 percent growth in 2004.

What Ukraine of course does not want to see is a growth trajectory more similar to Syria or Yemen following the initiation of their ongoing conflicts. Syria experienced double-digit economic losses for several years following the outbreak of war in 2011, returning to positive growth —an anemic 1.4 percent – in 2018. Yemen similarly has only seen positive economic growth in four of the past 10 years, setting back its human capital development by two decades.

If history is any indication of the past, a positive sign for Ukraine’s ability to reach the government’s target of 7 percent average annual growth for the next decade is that it has done so before. Although a very different time for the country, the period from 2000 through 2008 saw the beginning of Ukraine’s recovery from its post-Soviet economic contraction, with 6.9 percent average annual economic growth in those years. This growth was ultimately hampered by domestic dysfunction, including corruption — which serves as an important reminder that the government’s objective to “tackle corruption” will be critical for Ukraine’s long-term growth prospects.

If next year or in 2024 Ukraine experiences a growth rebound typical of other post-conflict countries and thereafter meets government targets, the results would exceed the more optimistic pre-war forecasts, including those from the World Bank and its partners at the Ministry of Economy, Ministry of Finance, and National Bank of Ukraine in 2017. In this case, the war would prove to be an opportunity for both democratic and economic renewal.

Meeting government targets for overall economic growth will require that a series of other targets be met, including long-term growth by 2032 (relative to 2019 values) in agriculture and — to a lesser extent — energy, metallurgy, and information and technology exports. While several major wheat and millet producing areas in Ukraine remain contested territory, the majority of its primary barley, corn, rapeseed, soybean, and sunflower seed producing areas remain in Ukrainian control. Although 2022 crop production is estimated to have amounted to two-thirds of 2021 production, Ukraine’s ample grain stocks have buffered exports in recent months. Land tenure reform and an increased focus on high-value-added products have the potential to bring substantial long-term growth to Ukraine’s agriculture sector despite possible losses of territory. Continuance of the Black Sea grain deal allowing for the shipment of agricultural goods from Ukrainian ports will of course remain critical and require sustained cooperation from an otherwise difficult partner in Ankara.

Household consumption will likely contribute less to Ukrainian GDP in the near term given that nearly one-fifth of Ukrainians are estimated to have fled the country since February 2022, making the government’s targets for net inward migration through 2032 critical for long-term growth. Despite early estimates that remittances to Ukraine would increase by 20 percent in 2022 relative to 2021, they appear to have remained largely unchanged, growing only by 2 percent according to more recent World Bank estimates. For those who remain in Ukraine, inflation will continue to reduce purchasing power, although the National Bank of Ukraine noted in November that inflationary pressures appeared to have begun easing. Additionally, the majority of Ukrainian household savings were in foreign currencies in the years before the war. Assuming this pattern has held, then domestic inflation will have less of an impact on purchasing power than might otherwise have been the case.

Perhaps most critical will be continued foreign aid. As the conflict progresses, Ukraine’s national budget deficit continues to grow. The government has set a target of a quarter of a trillion dollars in foreign aid over the next decade. While ambitious, financial aid commitments to date have approached the government’s 2022 target of $60 billion.

Other Building Blocks of Recovery

Whether Ukraine is successful in achieving these goals will have substantial implications for whether it is likely to maintain net positive inward migration in the coming years. Strong economic growth, along with improved security, would encourage Ukrainian refugees to return home — something that would in turn be expected to boost Ukraine’s economic growth. In other words, a strong initial recovery can initiate a virtuous cycle, ultimately resulting in a Ukraine that would, for example, likely graduate from lower-middle to upper-middle income country status. In such an instance, Ukraine would also likely see its economic competitiveness and innovation near the levels of many high-income countries — another top-level goal for the government.

A similar feedback loop can be expected with investment, where investment directly drives growth and signals confidence in the economy, and confidence in the present begets confidence in Ukraine’s future. As such, early growth figures may provide an indication of likely future investment. The sooner investment returns, the longer there will be for gains to compound and growth to accumulate.

Yet, Ukraine’s road to recovery will become increasingly difficult the more effective Russian troops are in destroying Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, particularly that related to energy. Indeed, energy consumption is often relied upon as an alternative to, or a means to validate, GDP growth figures, which can be subject to manipulation and difficult to estimate amid major shocks. This is for good reason: without electricity, it is hard to get work done. Unfortunately for those desiring a shift away from fossil fuels, Ukraine may need to rely on whatever energy sources it can get, including potentially an increased reliance on coal.

Conclusion

What to watch for in the days and months ahead will be Western — especially American — support for Ukraine. Despite substantial support to date, Ukraine maintains a dire need for additional recovery funds, including a recent request for $17 billion in economic relief. As many inside and outside Ukraine have warned, support to get through this winter will be especially critical. Yet, in the long run, Western aid donors will need to strike a balance between support for recovery efforts and an accidental fostering of aid dependence, which would likely suppress long-term growth.

In the meantime, Ukraine’s supporters should temper hope with modest expectations. While it is plausible that Ukraine could embark on a decade-long recovery trajectory that is ultimately stronger than its pre-war path, it is too soon to say whether such a recovery is probable. Even in the better potential scenarios for Ukraine, Western leaders may need to consider post-conflict support for Russia as well, along with potential (admittedly controversial) off-ramps to end the conflict. This approach of pairing deterrence with assurance may be unpalatable, but Russia faces serious economic and demographic challenges ahead, and officials will have to consider how economic inducement could be used to kick-start or sustain peace negotiations. Ukraine’s economic recovery hinges on a return to normalcy and an end to the fighting. Moscow is, almost certainly, going to try and wrest concessions from the West if and when it chooses to consider ending the war.

Ukraine faces a daunting challenge in rebuilding its society. However, with the right mix of economic aid, fairly self-evident policy remedies, and some luck with GDP growth, Kyiv can meet its targets.

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Collin Meisel is the associate director of geopolitical analysis at the University of Denver’s Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies and a geopolitics and modeling expert at the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Collin Meisel · December 28, 2022

21. The Ghosts of Kennan

​Excerpts:

All the while, Kennan condemned what he saw as the abuses of industrialization and urbanization and called for a restoration of “the proper relationship between Man and Nature.” In the process, Costigliola convincingly argues, he became an early and prescient advocate of environmental protection. And all the while, his antimodernism showed a retrograde side, as he looked askance at feminism, gay rights, and his country’s increasing ethnic and racial diversity. Maybe only the Jews, Chinese, and “Negroes” would keep their ethnic distinctiveness, he suggested at one point, and thus use their strength to “subjugate and dominate” the rest of the nation. Costigliola comments acidly: “Kennan was aware enough to confine such racist drivel to his diary and the dinner table, where his adult children squirmed.”

Kennan was not always consistent; he got some things wrong.

Kennan’s long-held skepticism about democracy, meanwhile, showed no signs of abating. “‘The people’ haven’t the faintest idea what’s good for them,” he groused in 1984. Left to themselves, “they would (and will) simply stampede into a final, utterly disastrous, and totally unnecessary nuclear war.” Even if they somehow managed to avoid that outcome, they would complete their wrecking of the environment, “as they are now enthusiastically doing.” In his 1993 book, Around the Cragged Hill, a melancholy rumination on all that plagued modern American life, Kennan called for the creation of a nine-member “Council of State,” an unelected body to be chosen by the president and charged with advising him on pressing medium- and long-term policy issues, with no interference by the hoi polloi. The idea was half-baked at best. That American democracy was in its essence a messy, fractious, pluralistic enterprise, with hard bargaining based on mutual concessions and with noisy interest groups jockeying for influence, he never fully grasped.

What he did understand was diplomacy and statecraft. Here, his body of writing, published as well as unpublished, historical as well as contemporaneous, stands out for its cogency, intricacy, and fluency. He was not always consistent; he got some things wrong. But as a critic of the militarization of U.S. foreign policy, in the Cold War and beyond, Kennan had few if any peers. For he grasped realities that have lost none of their potency in the almost two decades since his death—about the limits of power, about the certainty of unintended consequences in war-making, about the prime importance of using good-faith diplomacy with adversaries to advance U.S. strategic interests. Understanding the growth and projection of American power over the past century and its proper use in this one, it may truly be said, means understanding this “life between worlds.”​

The Ghosts of Kennan

Lessons From the Start of the Cold War

By Fredrik Logevall

January/February 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Fredrik Logevall · December 20, 2022

We all read him, those of us who did graduate work in U.S. diplomatic history in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For although there were other important figures in modern U.S. foreign relations, only one was George Kennan, the “father of containment,” who later became an astute critic of U.S. policy as well as a prize-winning historian. We dissected Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram” of February 1946, his “X” article in these pages from the following year, and his lengthy and unvarnished report on Latin America from March 1950. We devoured his slim but influential 1951 book, American Diplomacy, based on lectures he gave at the University of Chicago; his memoirs, which appeared in two installments in 1967 and 1972 and the first of which received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and any other publication he wrote that we could get our hands on. (I figured there was no skipping Russia Leaves the War, from 1956, as it won not only the same awards garnered by the first volume of his memoirs but also the George Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize.) And we dove into the quartet of important studies of Kennan then coming out in rapid succession by our seniors in the guild—by David Mayers, Walter Hixson, Anders Stephanson, and Wilson Miscamble.

Even then, some of us wondered whether Kennan was quite as important to U.S. policy during the early Cold War as numerous analysts made him out to be. Perhaps, we thought, he should be considered an architect of American strategy, not the architect. Perhaps the most that could be said was that he gave a name—containment—and a certain conceptual focus to a foreign policy approach that was already emerging, if not indeed in place. Even at the Potsdam Conference in mid-1945, after all, well before either the Long Telegram or the “X” article, U.S. diplomats understood that Joseph Stalin and his lieutenants were intent on dominating those areas of Eastern and Central Europe that the Red Army had seized. Little could be done to thwart these designs, officials determined, but they vowed to resist any effort by Kremlin leaders to move farther west. Likewise, the Soviets would not be permitted to interfere in Japan or be allowed to take control of Iran or Turkey. This was containment in all but name. By early 1946, when Kennan penned the Long Telegram from the embassy in Moscow, the wartime Grand Alliance was but a fading memory; by then, anti-Soviet sentiment was a stock feature of internal U.S. policy deliberations.

Still, the 1946 telegram and the 1947 article were remarkable pieces of analytical writing that explained much about how U.S. officials saw the postwar world and their country’s place in it. That Kennan soon began to distance himself from containment, and to claim that he had been grievously misunderstood, that the policy in action was turning out to be more bellicose than he had envisioned or wanted, only added to the intrigue. Was he more hawkish regarding Moscow in this early period than he later claimed? Or had he merely been uncharacteristically loose in his phrasing in these writings, implying a hawkishness he did not feel? The available evidence suggested the former, but one held off final judgment, pending the full opening of Kennan’s personal papers and especially his gargantuan diaries, which spanned 88 years and ran to more than 8,000 pages.

These materials were indeed rich, as the world learned with the publication of John Lewis Gaddis’s authorized biography, three decades in the making, which appeared to wide acclaim in 2011 and won the Pulitzer Prize. Gaddis had full access to the papers and made extensive and incisive use of them. Then, in 2014, came the publication of The Kennan Diaries, a 768-page compendium of entries ably selected and annotated by the historian Frank Costigliola. Scholars had long known about Kennan’s prickly, complex personality and his tendency toward curmudgeonly brooding, but the diaries laid bare these qualities. What emerged was a man of formidable intellectual gifts, sensitive and proud, expressive and emotional, ill at ease in the modern world, prone to self-pity, disdainful of what he saw as America’s moral decadence and rampant materialism, and given to derogatory claims about women, immigrants, and foreigners.

Yet in one key respect, Kennan’s diaries proved unrevealing. Like many people, Kennan journaled less when he was busy, and there is virtually nothing of consequence from 1946 or 1947, when he wrote the two documents on which his influence rested and when he began to reconsider fundamental assumptions about the nature of the Soviet challenge and the preferred American response. For the entirety of 1947, arguably the pivotal year of both the early Cold War and Kennan’s career, there is but a single entry: a one-page rhyme. Any serious assessment of Kennan’s historical importance—How deeply did he shape U.S. policy at the dawn of the superpower struggle? When and why did he sour on containment as practiced? Is it proper to speak of “two Kennans” with respect to the Cold War?—must center on this period of the late 1940s.

Now Costigliola has come out with a full-scale biography of the man, from his birth into a prosperous middle-class family in Milwaukee, in 1904, to his death in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2005. (What a century to live through!) It is an absorbing, skillfully wrought, at times frustrating book, more than half of which is focused on the diplomat’s youth and early career. Costigliola’s unmatched familiarity with the diaries is on full display, and although he does not shy away from quoting from some of their more unsavory parts, his overall assessment is sympathetic, especially vis-à-vis the “second” Kennan, the one who decried the militarization of containment and pushed for U.S.-Soviet negotiations. Kennan, he writes, was a “largely unsung hero” for his diligent efforts to ease the Cold War.

Intriguingly, as Costigliola shows but could have developed more fully, these efforts were already underway in the late 1940s, while the superpower conflict was still in its infancy. This transformation in Kennan’s thinking is especially resonant today, in an era that many analysts are calling the early stages of yet another cold war, with U.S.-Russian relations in a deep freeze and China playing the role of an assertive Soviet Union. If the analogy is correct, then it bears asking: How did Kennan’s thinking change? And does his evolution hold lessons for his successors as they forge policy for a new era of conflict?

OUR MAN IN MOSCOW

Kennan’s love of Russia came early, and partly because of family ties: his grandfather’s cousin, also named George Kennan, was an explorer who achieved considerable fame in the late nineteenth century for his writings on tsarist Russia and for casting light on the harsh penal system in Siberia. Soon after graduating from Princeton, in 1925, the younger Kennan joined the Foreign Service and developed an interest in the country; in time, it became much more. Costigliola writes, “Kennan’s love for Russia, his quest for some mystical connection—impulses that stemmed in part from the hurt and loneliness in his psyche going back to the loss of his mother—had enormous consequences for policy.” That is a pregnant sentence indeed, with claims that would seem hard to verify, but there can be no doubt that Kennan’s passion for pre-revolutionary Russia and its culture was real and abiding, staying with him to the end of his days.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, as an ambitious young State Department officer, Kennan toggled between Germany, Estonia, and Latvia, working hard to develop facility in the Russian language and serving from 1931 to 1933 at the Soviet listening post in Riga. There followed an intense, exhilarating, draining period in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, under the mercurial ambassador William Bullitt. Costigliola finds the middle of the decade to be a formative period for Kennan—he devotes an entire 48-page chapter to “The ‘Madness of ’34,’” and another of equal length to the years 1935–37, writing, in effect, a small book within a book and adding much to our understanding of Kennan’s worldview—as the diplomat worked to the point of exhaustion to establish himself as the premier Soviet expert in the Foreign Service.

Kennan treasured Russians as a warm and generous people but looked askance at Marxist-Leninist ideology, speculating even then that Russian communism was headed toward ultimate disintegration, on account of its disregard for individual expression, spirituality, and human diversity. About Western capitalism he had scarcely better things to say: it was characterized by systemic overproduction, crass materialism, and destructive individualism. He disliked and distrusted the “rough and tumble” of his own country’s democracy and longed for rule by an “intelligent, determined ruling minority.”

John Lee

During World War II, Kennan served first as the chief administrative officer of the Berlin embassy and then, after a brief assignment in Washington in 1942, as second-in-command at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Lisbon. The top U.S. representative at the post, Bert Fish, seldom set foot in the building, which left Kennan to negotiate base rights in the Azores with Portugal’s premier, António de Oliveira Salazar, whose dictatorial but anti-Nazi rule Kennan admired. He grew disenchanted, by contrast, with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime diplomacy. He opposed the president’s demand that Germany and Japan unconditionally surrender, as it foreclosed the possibility of a negotiated settlement. And after returning to the Moscow embassy in mid-1944, he faulted as naive Roosevelt’s belief that the United States could secure long-term cooperation with Stalin. Both then and later, Costigliola maintains, Kennan failed to detect Roosevelt’s underlying realism and shrewd grasp of power politics, as he continually mistook the president’s public statements for his private views. He missed the degree to which, despite their differences, he and Roosevelt “agreed on the fundamental issue of working out with the Soviets separate spheres of influence in Europe.”

About the subsequent Cold War, Costigliola is unequivocal: it need not have happened and, having broken out, need not have lasted nearly as long as it did. This argument is less novel than the book implies, but the author is certainly correct that “the story of Kennan’s life demands that we rethink the Cold War as an era of possibilities for dialogue and diplomacy, not the inevitable series of confrontations and crises we came to see.”

All the more puzzling, then, that Costigliola gives scant attention to the sharp downturn in U.S.-Soviet relations that began in the fall of 1945, as the two powers clashed over plans for Europe and the Middle East. He notes in passing that Kennan was “unaware how rapidly U.S. opinion and policy were souring on Russia” in this period, but he does little to contextualize this important point. The schism over the Soviet occupation of Iran goes unmentioned, and readers learn nothing of Washington’s decision in early 1946 to abandon atomic cooperation with Moscow. And if indeed Kennan was incognizant of how swiftly American views and policy were changing as the year turned, how is this ignorance to be explained?

“X” MARKS THE SPOT

Costigliola is surely correct to note Kennan’s transformation from a position of opposing negotiations with the Kremlin in 1946 to one of advocating them in 1948. But one wants to know more about this metamorphosis. Costigliola is authoritative (if, especially compared to Gaddis, terse) on the Long Telegram and the “X” article, but one wishes for more context—even in a biography—especially concerning 1947, when the latter piece appeared. There is no discussion, or even mention, of the crises in Greece and Turkey that raged during that year; of President Harry Truman’s speech to a joint session of Congress, in which he asked for $400 million in aid for the two countries and articulated what became known as the Truman Doctrine, by which the United States pledged to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”; or of the 1947 National Security Act, which was closely tied to the perceived Soviet threat and which gave the president vastly enhanced power over foreign affairs.

Kennan, as other sources reveal, objected to the expansive nature of Truman’s speech and what it implied for policy. But he chose not to alter the “X” article—then still in production—by emphasizing his desire for a limited form of containment. Appearing in these pages in July under the pseudonym “X” and the title “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the essay was widely seen as a systematic articulation of the administration’s latest thinking about relations with Moscow, as its author laid out policy of “firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.” For the foreseeable future, Kennan seemed to be saying, diplomacy was a waste of time. Stalin’s hostility to the West was irrational, unjustified by any U.S. actions, and thus the Kremlin could not be reasoned with; negotiations could not be expected to ease or eliminate the hostility and end the U.S.-Soviet clash. The Soviet Union, he wrote, was “committed fanatically to the belief that with the United States there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional ways of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.”

The assertion likely raised few eyebrows among Foreign Affairs readers that tense summer of 1947. But not everyone in the establishment was convinced. The influential columnist Walter Lippmann railed against Kennan’s essay in a stunning series of 14 articles in The New York Herald Tribune in September and October that were parsed in government offices around the world. The columns were then grouped in a slim book whose title, The Cold War, gave a name to the superpower competition. Lippmann did not dispute Kennan’s contention that the Soviet Union would expand its reach unless confronted by American power. But to his mind, the threat was primarily political, not military.

Moreover, Lippmann insisted that officials in Moscow had genuine security fears and were motivated mostly by a defensive determination to forestall the resurgence of German power. Hence their determination to seize control of Eastern Europe. It distressed Lippmann that Kennan, as well as the Truman White House, seemed blind to this reality and to the possibility of negotiating with the Kremlin over issues of mutual concern. As he wrote,

The history of diplomacy is the history of relations among rival powers, which did not enjoy political intimacy and did not respond to appeals to common purposes. Nevertheless, there have been settlements. Some of them did not last very long. Some of them did. For a diplomat to think that rival and unfriendly powers cannot be brought to a settlement is to forget what diplomacy is all about. There would be little for diplomats to do if the world consisted of partners, enjoying political intimacy, and responding to common appeals.

Containment as outlined by Kennan, Lippmann added, risked drawing Washington into defending any number of distant and nonvital parts of the world. Military commitments in such peripheral areas might bankrupt the Treasury and would in any event do little to enhance U.S. security. American society would become militarized to fight a “Cold War.”

His influence waning, Kennan left the government in 1950.

Kennan was stung by this multipronged, multiweek takedown, which Costigliola oddly does not discuss. The diplomat admired Lippmann’s stature as perhaps the most formidable foreign policy analyst in Washington, and he felt flattered that the great man would devote so much space to something he had written. More than that, he found himself agreeing with much of Lipp­mann’s interpretation, including with respect to Moscow’s defensive orientation and the need for U.S. strategists to distinguish between core and peripheral areas. “The Soviets don’t want to invade anyone,” he wrote in an unsent letter to Lippmann in April 1948, adding that his intention in the “X” article had been to make his compatriots aware that they faced a long period of complex diplomacy when political skills would dominate. Once Western Europe had been shored up, he assured Lippmann, negotiations under qualitatively new conditions could follow.

In the months thereafter, Kennan, now director of the newly formed Policy Planning Staff in the State Department, began to decry the militarization of containment and the apparent abandonment of diplomacy in Truman’s Soviet policy. He pushed for negotiations with the Kremlin, just as Lippmann had earlier. His influence waning, Kennan left the government in 1950, returning for a brief stint as ambassador to Moscow in 1952 and later, under President John F. Kennedy, a longer spell as ambassador to Yugoslavia.

OUT OF THE ARENA

So began George Kennan’s second career, as a historian and public intellectual, from a perch at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. It would last half a century. Costigliola is consistently fascinating here, even if he is less interested in Kennan’s writings and policy analysis than in his deep and deepening alienation from modern society and his strenuous efforts to curate his legacy. Readers get almost nothing on American Diplomacy, Kennan’s important, realist critique of what he called the “legalistic-moralistic” approach to U.S. foreign policy, or on the two volumes of memoirs, the first of which must be considered a modern classic. Costigliola says little about Kennan’s analysis of the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam (he was less dovish in 1965–66 than Costigliola implies) but a great deal about his loathing of the student protesters—with their “defiant rags and hairdos,” in Kennan’s words—against the war. As elsewhere in A Life Between Worlds, more would have been better. Readers deserve more, for example, on what the diplomat-historian made of the crises over Berlin and Cuba under Kennedy in the early 1960s or on how he interpreted the severe worsening of superpower tensions under Jimmy Carter in 1979–80.

More and more as the years passed, Kennan felt underappreciated. Never mind the literary prizes and other accolades, never mind the Presidential Medal of Freedom presented to him by President George H. W. Bush in 1989. On more days than not, he was a Cassandra, despairing at the state of the world and his place in it, worried about how he would be remembered. Thrilled to secure in Gaddis a brilliant young historian as his biographer, he grew apprehensive, especially as it became clear that Gaddis did not share his low opinion of U.S. Cold War policy in general and nuclear strategy under President Ronald Reagan in particular. (Another worry: that Gaddis would be too distracted by other commitments to complete the work in a timely fashion, thus allowing supposedly less able biographers—“inadequate pens,” Kennan called them—to come to the fore.)

Even the Soviet Union’s collapse, in 1991, brought Kennan little cheer. For half a century, he had predicted that this day would come, but one finds scant evidence of public or private gloating, only frustration that the Cold War had lasted so long and concern that Washington risked inciting Russian nationalism and militarism with its support for NATO expansion into former Soviet domains. The result, he feared, could be another cold war. In the fall of 2002, at the age of 98, he railed against what he saw as the George W. Bush administration’s heedless rush into war in Iraq. The history of U.S. foreign relations, he told the press, showed that although “you might start a war with certain things on your mind . . . in the end you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before.” It dismayed him that the administration seemed to have no plan for Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and he doubted the evidence about the country’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. For that matter, he argued, if it turned out Saddam in fact had the weapons or would soon acquire them, the problem was in essence a regional one, not America’s concern.

All the while, Kennan condemned what he saw as the abuses of industrialization and urbanization and called for a restoration of “the proper relationship between Man and Nature.” In the process, Costigliola convincingly argues, he became an early and prescient advocate of environmental protection. And all the while, his antimodernism showed a retrograde side, as he looked askance at feminism, gay rights, and his country’s increasing ethnic and racial diversity. Maybe only the Jews, Chinese, and “Negroes” would keep their ethnic distinctiveness, he suggested at one point, and thus use their strength to “subjugate and dominate” the rest of the nation. Costigliola comments acidly: “Kennan was aware enough to confine such racist drivel to his diary and the dinner table, where his adult children squirmed.”

Kennan was not always consistent; he got some things wrong.

Kennan’s long-held skepticism about democracy, meanwhile, showed no signs of abating. “‘The people’ haven’t the faintest idea what’s good for them,” he groused in 1984. Left to themselves, “they would (and will) simply stampede into a final, utterly disastrous, and totally unnecessary nuclear war.” Even if they somehow managed to avoid that outcome, they would complete their wrecking of the environment, “as they are now enthusiastically doing.” In his 1993 book, Around the Cragged Hill, a melancholy rumination on all that plagued modern American life, Kennan called for the creation of a nine-member “Council of State,” an unelected body to be chosen by the president and charged with advising him on pressing medium- and long-term policy issues, with no interference by the hoi polloi. The idea was half-baked at best. That American democracy was in its essence a messy, fractious, pluralistic enterprise, with hard bargaining based on mutual concessions and with noisy interest groups jockeying for influence, he never fully grasped.

What he did understand was diplomacy and statecraft. Here, his body of writing, published as well as unpublished, historical as well as contemporaneous, stands out for its cogency, intricacy, and fluency. He was not always consistent; he got some things wrong. But as a critic of the militarization of U.S. foreign policy, in the Cold War and beyond, Kennan had few if any peers. For he grasped realities that have lost none of their potency in the almost two decades since his death—about the limits of power, about the certainty of unintended consequences in war-making, about the prime importance of using good-faith diplomacy with adversaries to advance U.S. strategic interests. Understanding the growth and projection of American power over the past century and its proper use in this one, it may truly be said, means understanding this “life between worlds.”

• FREDRIK LOGEVALL is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs and Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1956.

Foreign Affairs · by Fredrik Logevall · December 20, 2022

22. The Taiwan Long Game

Excerpts:

Rather than perpetuate the fiction of constancy, the United States should tell the truth: its decisions are guided by a determination to keep the peace in the Taiwan Strait, and if Beijing intensifies pressure on Taipei, Washington will adjust its posture accordingly. And the United States should pledge that it will do the same if Taiwan pursues symbolic steps that erode cross-strait conditions. Such an approach would recognize that the status quo in the Taiwan Strait is dynamic, not fixed. It would recognize Beijing’s agency in either sustaining or undermining peace. Washington should make it clear that if Beijing or Taipei upsets stability in the strait, it would seek to reestablish the equilibrium. But for such an approach to work, the actions and intentions of the United States must be clear, and its commitment to this equilibrium must be credible.

The United States should be firm and consistent in declaring that it will accept any resolution to cross-strait tensions that is reached peacefully and in accordance with the views of Taiwan’s people. If Xi wants to find a peaceful path to unification, which he and other Chinese leaders still stress is their preference, then he must sell this option to Taiwan’s public. The truth is that such a reconciliation may not come for decades, if ever. But it is nonetheless worth pursuing a peace that allows Taiwan to grow and prosper in a stable regional environment, even if such a goal does not have the sense of finality that many American analysts and policymakers crave.

After half a decade of deterioration, the U.S.-Chinese relationship stands at the edge of crisis. Bilateral frictions have moved from trade to technology and, now, to the threat of direct military confrontation. To be sure, Beijing’s threats toward Taiwan are the fundamental cause of the tensions across the strait. But this blunt fact only serves to highlight just how vital it is for the United States to act with foresight, resolve, and dexterity. A direct confrontation between the United States and China would wreak devastation for generations. Success will be measured by each day that the people of Taiwan continue to live in safety and prosperity and enjoy political autonomy. The fundamental objectives of American efforts must be to preserve peace and stability, strengthen Taiwan’s confidence in its future, and credibly demonstrate to Beijing that now is not the time to force a violent confrontation. Achieving these objectives requires elongating timelines, not bringing an intractable challenge to a head. Wise statecraft, more than military strength, offers the best path to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.

The Taiwan Long Game

Why the Best Solution Is No Solution

By Jude Blanchette and Ryan Hass

January/February 2023

Foreign Affairs · by China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong · December 20, 2022

For 70 years, China and the United States have managed to avoid disaster over Taiwan. But a consensus is forming in U.S. policy circles that this peace may not last much longer. Many analysts and policymakers now argue that the United States must use all its military power to prepare for war with China in the Taiwan Strait. In October 2022, Mike Gilday, the head of the U.S. Navy, warned that China might be preparing to invade Taiwan before 2024. Members of Congress, including Democratic Representative Seth Moulton and Republican Representative Mike Gallagher, have echoed Gilday’s sentiment.

There are sound rationales for the United States to focus on defending Taiwan. The U.S. military is bound by the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act to maintain the capacity to resist the use of force or coercion against Taiwan. Washington also has strong strategic, economic, and moral reasons to stand firm on behalf of the island. As a leading democracy in the heart of Asia, Taiwan sits at the core of global value chains. Its security is a fundamental interest for the United States.

Ultimately, however, Washington faces a strategic problem with a defense component, not a military problem with a military solution. The more the United States narrows its focus to military fixes, the greater the risk to its own interests, as well as to those of its allies and Taiwan itself. War games held in the Pentagon and in Washington think tanks, meanwhile, risk diverting focus from the sharpest near-term threats and challenges that Beijing presents.

The sole metric on which U.S. policy should be judged is whether it helps preserve peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait—not whether it solves the question of Taiwan once and for all or keeps Taiwan permanently in the United States’ camp. Once viewed this way, the real aim becomes clear: to convince leaders in Beijing and Taipei that time is on their side, forestalling conflict. Everything the United States does should be geared toward that goal.

To preserve peace, the United States must understand what drives China’s anxiety, ensure that Chinese President Xi Jinping is not backed into a corner, and convince Beijing that unification belongs to a distant future. It must also develop a more nuanced understanding of Beijing’s current calculus, one that moves beyond the simplistic and inaccurate speculation that Xi is accelerating plans to invade Taiwan. Support for Taiwan should bolster not only the island’s security but also its resilience and prosperity. Assisting Taiwan will also require new U.S. investments in tools that benefit the island beyond the military realm, including a more holistic deterrence strategy to deal with Beijing’s coercive gray-zone tactics. Critics may contend that this approach sidesteps the hard questions at the root of the confrontation, but that is precisely the point: sometimes, the best policy is to avoid bringing intractable challenges to a head and kick the can down the road instead.

Sea Change

In the final years of the 1945–49 Chinese Civil War, the losing Nationalists retreated to Taiwan, establishing a mutual defense treaty with the United States in 1954. In 1979, however, Washington severed those ties so it could normalize relations with Beijing. Since then, the United States has worked to keep the peace in the Taiwan Strait by blocking the two actions that could lead to outright conflict: a declaration of independence by Taipei and forced unification by Beijing. At times, the United States has reined in Taiwan when it feared the island was tacking too close to independence. In 2003, President George W. Bush stood next to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and publicly opposed “comments and actions” proposed by Taipei that the United States saw as destabilizing. At other times, the United States has flexed its military muscle in front of Beijing, as it did during the 1995–96 Taiwan Strait crisis, when U.S. President Bill Clinton sent an aircraft carrier to the waters off Taiwan in response to a series of Chinese missile tests.

Also important to the U.S. approach have been statements of reassurance. To Taiwan, the United States has made a formal commitment under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act to “preserve and promote extensive, close, and friendly commercial, cultural, and other relations” with Taiwan and to provide the island “arms of a defensive character.” To Beijing, the United States has consistently stated that it does not support Taiwan’s independence, including in its 2022 National Security Strategy. The goal was to create space for Beijing and Taipei to either indefinitely postpone conflict or reach some sort of political resolution.

For decades, this approach worked well, thanks to three factors. First, the United States maintained a big lead over China when it came to military power, which discouraged Beijing from using conventional force to substantially alter cross-strait relations. Second, China was focused primarily on its own economic development and integration into the global economy, allowing the Taiwan issue to stay on the back burner. Third, the United States dexterously dealt with challenges to cross-strait stability, whether they originated in Taipei or Beijing, thereby tamping down any embers that could ignite a conflict.

Celebrating National Day, Taipei, Taiwan, October 2022

Ann Wang / Reuters

Over at least the past decade, however, all three of these factors have evolved dramatically. Perhaps the most obvious change is that China’s military has vastly expanded its capabilities, owing to decades of rising investments and reforms. In 1995, as the United States sailed the USS Nimitz toward the Taiwan Strait, all the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could do was watch in indignation. Since then, the power differential between the two militaries has narrowed significantly, especially in the waters off China’s shoreline. Beijing can now easily strike targets in the waters and airspace around Taiwan, hit U.S. aircraft carriers operating in the region, hobble American assets in space, and threaten U.S. military bases in the western Pacific, including those in Guam and Japan. Because the PLA has little real-world combat experience, its precise effectiveness remains to be seen. Even so, its impressive force-projection capabilities have already given Beijing confidence that in the event of conflict, it could seriously damage the United States’ and Taiwan’s forces operating around Taiwan.

Alongside China’s military upgrades, Beijing is now more willing than ever to tangle with the United States and others in pursuit of its broader ambitions. Xi himself has accumulated greater power than his recent predecessors, and he appears to be more risk-tolerant when it comes to Taiwan.

Finally, the United States has abandoned any pretense of acting as a principled arbiter committed to preserving the status quo and allowing the two sides to come to their own peaceful settlement. The United States’ focus has shifted to countering the threat China poses to Taiwan. Reflecting this shift, U.S. President Joe Biden has repeatedly said that the United States would intervene militarily on behalf of Taiwan in a cross-strait conflict.

Ready, Set, Invade?

Driving this change in U.S. policy is a growing chorus arguing that Xi has decided to launch an invasion or enforce a blockade of Taiwan in the near future. In 2021, Admiral Philip Davidson, then the head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, predicted that Beijing might move against Taiwan “in the next six years.” That same year, the political scientist Oriana Skylar Mastro likewise contended, in Foreign Affairs, that “there have been disturbing signals that Beijing is reconsidering its peaceful approach and contemplating armed unification.” In August 2022, former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby wrote, also in Foreign Affairs, that the United States must prepare for an imminent war over Taiwan. All these analyses base their judgments on China’s expanding military capabilities. But they fail to grapple with the reasons why China has not used force against Taiwan, given that it already outmatches the island in military strength.

For its part, Beijing has stuck to the message that cross-strait relations are moving in the right direction. China’s leaders continue to tell their people that time is on their side and that the balance of power is increasingly tilting toward Beijing. In his speech at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Beijing in October 2022, Xi declared that “peaceful reunification” remains the “best way to realize reunification across the Taiwan Strait,” and that Beijing has “maintained the initiative and the ability to steer in cross-strait relations.”

Yet at the same time, Beijing believes that the United States has all but abandoned its “one China” policy, in which Washington acknowledges China’s position that there is one China and Taiwan is a part of it. Instead, in the eyes of Beijing, the United States has begun using Taiwan as a tool to weaken and divide China. Taiwan’s internal political trends have amplified China’s anxieties. The historically pro-Beijing Kuomintang Party has been marginalized, while the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party has consolidated power. Meanwhile, public opinion in Taiwan has soured on Beijing’s preferred formula for political reconciliation, the “one country, two systems” policy, in which China rules over Taiwan but allows Taipei some room to govern itself economically and administratively. Taiwan’s public became especially skeptical of the idea beginning in 2020, when Beijing abrogated its promise to provide Hong Kong a “high degree of autonomy” until 2047 by imposing a hard-line national security law. In high-level pronouncements, Beijing has reiterated that “time and momentum” are on its side. But beneath public projections of confidence, China’s leaders likely understand that their “one country, two systems” formula has no purchase in Taiwan and that public opinion trends on the island run against their vision of greater cross-strait integration.

Taipei has its own sense of urgency, driven by concerns over Beijing’s growing military might and the ongoing worry that U.S. support might diminish if Washington’s attention shifts elsewhere or Americans turn against overseas commitments. The new refrain from the administration of Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen—“Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow”—is both a genuine reflection of Taipei’s worries about Chinese aggression and an attempt to galvanize support that will extend beyond the current geopolitical upheaval. In other words, the one thing that Beijing, Taipei, and Washington seem to agree on is that time is working against them.

The United States must avoid backing China into a corner.

This sense of urgency is to some extent grounded in fact. Beijing does have a clear and long-held ambition to annex Taiwan and has openly threatened to use military force if it concludes that the door to peaceful unification has been closed. Beijing’s protestations that the United States is no longer adhering to understandings on Taiwan are, in some cases, accurate. And for its part, Taipei is right to worry that Beijing is laying the groundwork to suffocate or seize Taiwan. But American anxieties have been intensified by sloppy analysis, including assertions that China could take advantage of the United States’ distraction in Ukraine to seize Taiwan by force or that China is operating along a fixed timeline toward military conquest. The first of these examples has been disproved by reality. The second reflects a misreading of China’s strategy.

In fact, there is no conclusive evidence that China is operating on a fixed timeline to seize Taiwan, and the heightened worry in Washington is driven primarily by China’s growing military capabilities rather than any indication that Xi is preparing to attack the island. According to Bill Burns, the director of the CIA, Xi has instructed his military to be prepared for conflict by 2027, and he has declared that progress on unification with Taiwan is a requirement for fulfilling the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” for which he set 2049 as the target date. But any timeline that has a target date nearly three decades in the future is little more than aspirational. Xi, like leaders everywhere, would prefer to preserve his freedom of action on matters of war and peace and not lock himself into plans from which he cannot escape. China’s leadership appears to be spending profligately to secure the option of a military solution to the Taiwan problem, and the United States and Taiwan must not be complacent. By the same token, however, it would be wrong to conclude that the future is foretold and that conflict is inescapable.

Fixating on invasion scenarios pushes U.S. policymakers to develop solutions to the wrong near-term threats. Defense officials prefer to prepare for blockades and invasions because such scenarios line up most favorably with American capabilities and are the easiest to conceptualize and plan for. Yet it is worth recalling that Chinese leaders in the past have chosen options other than military occupation to achieve their objectives, such as building artificial islands in the South China Sea and using lawfare in Hong Kong. Indeed, Taiwan has been defending itself against a wide variety of Chinese gray-zone attacks for years, including cyberattacks, meddling in Taiwan’s electoral politics, and military exercises meant to undermine the island’s confidence in its own defenses and the credibility of U.S. support. China’s response to U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 visit to Taiwan underlines China’s efforts to erode Taiwan’s psychological confidence in its self-defense. After the visit, Beijing lobbed missiles over Taiwan for the first time, conducted unprecedented air operations across the Taiwan Strait median line, and simulated a blockade of Taiwan’s main ports.

Although the military threat against Taiwan is real, it is not the only—or most proximate—challenge the island faces. By focusing narrowly on military problems at the expense of other threats to Taiwan, the United States risks making two serious mistakes: first, overcompensating in ways that do more to escalate tensions than deter conflict; and second, losing sight of broader strategic problems that it is more likely to confront. Beijing is already choking Taiwan’s links to the rest of the world and attempting to persuade the people of Taiwan that their only option for avoiding devastation is to sue for peace on Beijing’s terms. This is not a future hypothetical. It is already an everyday reality. And by hyping the threat of a Chinese invasion, U.S. analysts and officials are unintentionally doing the CCP’s work for it by stoking fears in Taiwan. They are also sending signals to global companies and investors that operating in and around Taiwan brings with it a high risk of being caught in a military conflict.

Demonstrating in support of Pelosi's visit, Taipei, Taiwan, August 2022

Ann Wang / Reuters

Another mistake is to presume conflict is unavoidable. By doing so, the United States and Taiwan bind themselves to preparing in every way possible for the impending conflict, precipitating the very outcomes they seek to prevent. If the United States backs China into a corner, for example, by permanently stationing military personnel on Taiwan or making another formal mutual defense commitment with Taipei, Chinese leaders might feel the weight of nationalist pressure and take drastic actions that could devastate the island.

Moreover, unilaterally risking a war with the United States over Taiwan would not mesh with Xi’s grand strategy. His vision is to restore China as a leading power on the world stage and to transform China into, as he puts it, a “modern socialist nation.” The imperatives of seizing Taiwan on the one hand and asserting global leadership on the other are thus in direct tension. Any conflict over Taiwan would be catastrophic for China’s future. If Beijing moves militarily on Taiwan, it will alert the rest of the region to China’s comfort with waging war to achieve its objectives, likely triggering other Asian countries to arm and cohere to prevent Chinese domination. Invading Taiwan would also jeopardize Beijing’s access to global finance, data, and markets—ruinous for a country dependent on imports of oil, food, and semiconductors.

Even assuming Beijing could successfully invade and hold Taiwan, China would then face countless problems. Taiwan’s economy would be in tatters, including its globally invaluable semiconductor industry. Untold civilians would be dead or injured, and those who survived the initial conflict would be violently hostile to the invading military power. Beijing would likely face unprecedented diplomatic blowback and sanctions. Conflict just off China’s eastern shoreline would incapacitate one of the world’s busiest maritime corridors, bringing with it disastrous consequences for China’s own export-driven economy. And of course, by invading Taiwan, China would be inviting military engagement with the United States and perhaps other regional powers, including Japan. This would be the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory.

These realities deter China from actively considering an invasion. Xi, like all his predecessors, wants to be the leader who finally annexes Taiwan. But for more than 70 years, Beijing has concluded that the cost of an invasion remains too high, and this explains why China has instead relied largely on economic inducements, and more recently, gray-zone coercions. Far from having a well-thought-out plan to achieve unification, Beijing is, in fact, stuck in a strategic cul-de-sac. After Beijing trampled on Hong Kong’s autonomy, no one can believe that China will solve the crisis in the strait through a policy of “one country, two systems.” China’s hope that the gravitational pull of its economy would be enough to bring Taipei to the negotiating table has likewise been dashed, a victim of both Taiwan’s economic success and Xi’s economic mismanagement.

An invasion of Taiwan doesn’t solve any of these problems. Xi would risk it only if he believed that he had no other options. And there are no signs that he is anywhere close to drawing such a conclusion. The United States should try to keep it this way. None of Xi’s speeches resemble the menacing ones that Russian President Vladimir Putin gave in the run-up to his invasion of Ukraine. It is impossible to rule out the chance that Xi might miscalculate or blunder into a conflict. But his statements and behavior do not indicate that he would act so recklessly.

Hold Your Forces

Even if Xi is not yet considering forced unification, the United States must still project sure-footedness in its ability to protect its interests in the Taiwan Strait. Meanwhile, military decisions must not be allowed to define the United States’ overall approach, as many analysts and policymakers are effectively suggesting they should. The inescapable reality is that no additional increment of U.S. military power that is deployable in the next five years will fundamentally alter the military balance. The United States must rely on statecraft and a broader array of tools to make clear to Beijing the high price of using force to compel unification.

The ultimate goal of a sustainable Taiwan policy should be to preserve peace and stability, with a focus on elongating Beijing’s time horizon such that it sees unification as a “some day” scenario. The United States must especially avoid backing Xi into a corner, preventing a situation in which he no longer treats Taiwan as a long-term objective but as an impending crisis. This different approach would entail an uncomfortable shift in mindset for many analysts and policymakers, who see the United States and China as locked in an inevitable showdown and view any consideration of Beijing’s sensitivities to be a dangerous concession.

This is not to say that the goal of U.S. policy should be to avoid angering Beijing. There is no evidence that diminished U.S. support for Taiwan would reduce China’s eagerness to absorb the island, which is elemental to the founding narrative of the CCP. But this reality means that the United States should bolster Taiwan’s prosperity, security, and resilience in ways that don’t gratuitously antagonize its powerful neighbor ruled by an increasingly nationalistic leader.

U.S. support should be dedicated to fortifying Taiwan’s capacity to withstand the full range of pressures the island already contends with from China: cyber, economic, informational, diplomatic, and military. But critically, the United States must be disciplined in declining Taiwan’s requests to provide symbols of sovereignty, such as renaming Taiwan’s diplomatic office in the United States, which would aggravate Beijing without improving security in the Taiwan Strait. Similarly, congressional delegations should be geared toward advancing specific objectives to ensure that benefits exceed costs. The United States should channel its support for Taiwan into areas that concretely address vulnerabilities, such as by helping Taiwan diversify trade flows, acquire asymmetric defensive weapons systems, and stockpile food, fuel, medicine, and munitions that it would need in a crisis. It is a comforting illusion that the solution to cross-strait tensions lies in simply strengthening the military capabilities of Taiwan and the United States such that Beijing decides that it must stand aside and let Taiwan go its own way. In reality, Beijing would not sit idly by as the defense capabilities of the United States and Taiwan grow ever stronger. Indeed, the demonstration of U.S. naval power during the 1995–96 Taiwan Strait crisis had the unintended consequence of provoking a wave of new PLA investments that have eroded U.S. military dominance. Current efforts by Taipei or Washington to prepare for military conflict should account for the PLA’s predictable reaction.

The very idea that “strategic clarity” is “clear” is a myth.

Any approach to maintaining peace in the Taiwan Strait must begin with understanding how deeply political the issue of Taiwan is for China. It is noteworthy that the 1995–96 Taiwan Strait crisis and the recent spike in tensions over Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan were driven by issues of high political visibility—not by U.S. arms sales to Taiwan or efforts to back Taipei in international organizations or initiatives to strengthen bilateral economic ties. The lesson is that the United States has more room to concretely support Taiwan when it focuses on substance rather than publicly undercutting Beijing’s core domestic narrative that China is making progress toward unification. Chinese authorities will inevitably grumble about quieter efforts, such as expanding defense dialogues between the United States and Taiwan, but these remain below the threshold of public embarrassment for Beijing.

Accordingly, U.S. actions should both meaningfully support Taiwan and give Xi domestic space to proclaim that a path remains open to eventual unification. Examples of such efforts include deepening coordination between the United States and Taiwan on supply chain resilience, diversifying Taiwan’s trade through negotiation of a bilateral trade agreement, strengthening public health coordination, making more asymmetric defensive weapons available to Taiwan, and pooling resources to accelerate innovations on emerging technologies such as quantum computing and artificial intelligence applications. All such efforts would strengthen Taiwan’s capacity to provide for the health, safety, and prosperity of its people without publicly challenging Beijing’s narrative of eventual unification.

In addition, the United States must back its policy with a credible military posture in the Indo-Pacific, placing greater emphasis on small, dispersed weapons systems in the region and making larger investments in long-range antisurface and antiship missile systems. Such investments could bolster the United States’ ability to deny China opportunities to secure quick military gains on Taiwan. And if the United States sends weapons in a low-key manner, it will frustrate Beijing but leave little room for China to justify the use of force as an appropriate response. In other words, the United States should do more and say less.

The United States should also resist viewing the Taiwan problem as a contest between authoritarianism and democracy, as some officials in Taipei have urged. Such a framework is understandable, especially in the wake of Russia’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine. It is easier to convince Americans of the value of a safe and prosperous Taiwan when contrasting its liberal democratic identity with Beijing’s deepening autocratic slide. Yet this approach misdiagnoses the problem. The growing challenge to maintaining peace in the Taiwan Strait stems not from the nature of China’s political system—which has always been deeply illiberal and unapologetically Leninist—but from its increasing ability to project power, combined with the consolidation of power around Xi.

Footage of PLA military exercises, Beijing, August 2022

Tingshu Wang / Reuters

Perhaps more troubling, this approach boxes Washington in. If the United States paints cross-strait relations with bright ideological lines, it will hinder U.S. policymakers in making nuanced choices in gray areas. As American game theorist Thomas Schelling demonstrated, deterring an adversary requires a blend of credible threats and credible assurances. The assurance requires convincing Beijing that if it refrains from using force, then the United States will hold off on supporting Taiwan’s independence. When U.S. policy on Taiwan becomes infused with ideology, the credibility of American assurances diminishes, and the United States’ willingness to offer assurances to China becomes proscribed. Taking Beijing’s concerns into consideration may not fit the hawkish Zeitgeist in Washington, but this type of strategic empathy is imperative for anticipating an opponent’s calculus and decision-making.

Framing tensions as an ideological struggle risks backing China into a corner, too, because it feeds Beijing’s anxieties that the United States will stand in permanent opposition to any type of resolution to the Taiwan problem. This, in turn, might lead Beijing to conclude that its only choice is to exploit its military strength to override the United States’ opposition and forcibly subsume the island, even at significant economic and political cost. Any Chinese leader would consider Taiwan’s escape from China’s grasp an existential loss. Biden’s comments in September 2022 that the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense if China were to launch an “unprecedented attack” have again sharpened the debate on whether U.S. policy is shifting toward a clearer articulation of when and how it would intervene on Taiwan’s behalf. Yet this debate over “strategic clarity” is a distraction. For one thing, the Chinese military already assumes that the United States would intervene if China were to launch an all-out invasion, so from Beijing’s perspective, U.S. involvement is already factored into military plans. Moreover, in the absence of a mutual defense treaty between the United States and Taiwan, which is not on the table, there is no binding requirement for Washington to intervene, even if a president has suggested that it should do so. What’s more, an outright and unprovoked invasion by the PLA is the least likely scenario the United States will encounter, and so the way in which the United States responds to Beijing’s aggression would inevitably depend on the specific circumstances of a Chinese attack. In this sense, the very idea that “strategic clarity” is “clear” is a myth.

More important than rehashing a decades-old debate over strategic clarity is to focus on how the United States’ “one China” policy should be adapted to meet the new and pressing challenges presented by a vastly more powerful and aggressive China. Simply stating that U.S. policy has not shifted, as the White House did following Biden’s remarks, rings hollow to Beijing and to any honest observer of U.S. policy over the past six years.

Balancing Act

Rather than perpetuate the fiction of constancy, the United States should tell the truth: its decisions are guided by a determination to keep the peace in the Taiwan Strait, and if Beijing intensifies pressure on Taipei, Washington will adjust its posture accordingly. And the United States should pledge that it will do the same if Taiwan pursues symbolic steps that erode cross-strait conditions. Such an approach would recognize that the status quo in the Taiwan Strait is dynamic, not fixed. It would recognize Beijing’s agency in either sustaining or undermining peace. Washington should make it clear that if Beijing or Taipei upsets stability in the strait, it would seek to reestablish the equilibrium. But for such an approach to work, the actions and intentions of the United States must be clear, and its commitment to this equilibrium must be credible.

The United States should be firm and consistent in declaring that it will accept any resolution to cross-strait tensions that is reached peacefully and in accordance with the views of Taiwan’s people. If Xi wants to find a peaceful path to unification, which he and other Chinese leaders still stress is their preference, then he must sell this option to Taiwan’s public. The truth is that such a reconciliation may not come for decades, if ever. But it is nonetheless worth pursuing a peace that allows Taiwan to grow and prosper in a stable regional environment, even if such a goal does not have the sense of finality that many American analysts and policymakers crave.

After half a decade of deterioration, the U.S.-Chinese relationship stands at the edge of crisis. Bilateral frictions have moved from trade to technology and, now, to the threat of direct military confrontation. To be sure, Beijing’s threats toward Taiwan are the fundamental cause of the tensions across the strait. But this blunt fact only serves to highlight just how vital it is for the United States to act with foresight, resolve, and dexterity. A direct confrontation between the United States and China would wreak devastation for generations. Success will be measured by each day that the people of Taiwan continue to live in safety and prosperity and enjoy political autonomy. The fundamental objectives of American efforts must be to preserve peace and stability, strengthen Taiwan’s confidence in its future, and credibly demonstrate to Beijing that now is not the time to force a violent confrontation. Achieving these objectives requires elongating timelines, not bringing an intractable challenge to a head. Wise statecraft, more than military strength, offers the best path to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.

• JUDE BLANCHETTE is Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is the author of China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong.
• RYAN HASS is a Senior Fellow, Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies, and Michael H. Armacost Chair in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. From 2013 to 2017, he served as Director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia at the U.S. National Security Council.

Foreign Affairs · by China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong · December 20, 2022

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com