Quotes of the Day:

"Strategic competition is a persistent and long-term struggle that occurs between two or more adversaries seeking to

pursue incompatible interests without necessarily engaging in armed conflict with each other.

...

We think of being at peace or war…our adversaries don’t think that way.

​...

Strategic competition is thus an enduring condition to be managed, not a problem to be​ ​solved​."

...

By taking actions designed to shift the focus of strategic competition into areas that favor

U.S. interests or undermine an adversary’s interests, the Joint Force can exploit the

competitive space to gain advantage over adversaries and pursue national interests.​"​

- Joint Concept for Competing​ 10 February 2023​

"I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have had."

​- ​Marlene Dietrich [1901-92]

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."

​- ​data scientist Jeff Hammerbacher

​1. Joint Concept for Competing 10 February 2023

2. Kherson's underground resistance: How ordinary people fought Russia from the shadows

3. AI Can Tell Us How Russians Feel About the War. Putin Won’t Like the Results.

4. Touting ‘Ethnic Fusion,’ China’s New Top Official for Minority Affairs Envisions a Country Free of Cultural Difference

5. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 25, 2023

6. Transactional vs. Transformational Recruits

7. Ukraine's Banksy stamps feature art of Putin in judo match

8. In Pursuit of a General Theory of Proxy Warfare

9. Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Agency Now Says

10. Russia’s Descent into Warlordism

11. South Korea to conduct radiation exposure tests on North Korean escapees

12. Ex-Washington adviser calls for US naval visits

13. Putin Wanted to Lead a Great Power. Instead, He Shrunk Russia’s World.

14. Putin’s myth-making glorifies Russia. Ours humiliates the West

1. Joint Concept for Competing 10 February 2023

https://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/joint-concept-competing

This unclassified 91 page document was recently published.  

I​t​ can be downloaded HERE. 

Page 1 of the EXSUM is below.

This document has already been well received and it is gaining momentum. Three is a comment from a national security practitioner:

“We’ve had some great feedback already, to include some personnel at State who’ve used it to initiate some really interesting CIV-mil, real-world experiments.”

Some key points:

Strategic competition is a persistent and long-term struggle that occurs between two or more adversaries seeking to pursue incompatible interests without necessarily engaging in armed conflict with each other.

...

We think of being at peace or war…our adversaries don’t think that way.

​...

Strategic competition is thus an enduring condition to be managed, not a problem to be​ ​solved​.

...

By taking actions designed to shift the focus of strategic competition into areas that favor U.S. interests or undermine an adversary’s interests, the Joint Force can exploit the competitive space to gain advantage over adversaries and pursue national interests.

...​

The United States can and should develop a more holistic approach to strategic competition that recognizes and seizes upon the irregular, non-lethal, and non-military aspects of competing as fundamental to success, and that focuses on U.S. interests and values, not just what it opposes.

...

The Joint Force will conduct irregular warfare operations and activities proactively to subvert, create dilemmas for adversaries, and impose costs on an adversary’s strategic interests, including its economy, civil society, institutional processes, and critical infrastructure. Irregular warfare favors indirect and asymmetric approaches, though it may employ the full range of military and other capabilities, in order to erode an adversary’s power, influence, and political will."

It also recognizes the importance of understanding China's Unrestricted Warfare:

China, in particular, has rapidly become more assertive; it is the only competitor capable of mounting a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system.17 In 1999, Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui wrote the “new principles of war are…using all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military, and lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to accept one’s interests.” Accordingly, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) does not seek to defeat the United States in a direct military confrontation. The PRC intends to deter U.S. intervention militarily and present the United States with a fait accompli that compels the United States to accept a strategic outcome that results in a PRC regional sphere of influence and an international system more favorable to PRC national interests and authoritarian preferences.

It appears that the JCS doctrine still embraces Department of Defense Irregular Warfare Annex to the National Defense Strategy. 2019. It is refernced an number of times along with the Joint Chiefs of Staff Irregular Warfare Mission Analysis, 19 October 2021.

I notice a number of parallels between this JCC and USASOC's White Paper on Support to Political Warfare fromm 2015. I recommend reading it in conjuction with the JCC. The white paper can be accessed HERE.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Based on combatant commander (CCDR) assessments of their limited ability to compete

successfully in strategic competition, at a Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Tank on 19 June 2020, the

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) directed the development of a joint concept for

competition to drive joint strategic planning and joint force development and design. The Joint

Concept for Competing (JCC) advances an intellectual paradigm shift to enable the Joint Force,

in conjunction with interagency, multinational, and other interorganizational partners, to engage

successfully in strategic competition. For the purposes of this concept, strategic competition is

a persistent and long-term struggle that occurs between two or more adversaries seeking to

pursue incompatible interests without necessarily engaging in armed conflict with each

other. The normal and peaceful competition among allies, strategic partners, and other

international actors who are not potentially hostile is outside the scope of this concept.

The Strategic Environment

Recognizing the overwhelming conventional military capability demonstrated during Operation

DESERT STORM in 1991 and Operation IRAQI FREEDOM in 2003, U.S. adversaries

responded by seeking to circumvent U.S. deterrent posture through competitive activity below

the threshold of armed conflict with the United States. Adversaries are employing cohesive

combinations of military and civil power to expand the competitive space. Adversaries aim to

achieve their strategic objectives through a myriad of ways and means, including statecraft and

economic power as well as subversion, coercion, disinformation, and deception. They are

investing in key technologies designed to offset U.S. strategic and conventional military

capabilities (e.g., nuclear weapons, anti-access and area denial systems, offensive cyberspace,

artificial intelligence, hypersonic delivery systems, electromagnetic spectrum). Simply put, our

adversaries intend to “win without fighting,” but they are also building military forces that

strengthen their ability to “fight and win” an armed conflict against the United States. Facing

this dilemma, more of the same is not enough. By ignoring the threat of strategic competition,

and failing to compete deliberately and proactively, the United States risks ceding strategic

influence, advantage, and leverage while preparing for a war that may never occur. The United

States must remain fully prepared and poised for war, but this alone is insufficient to secure U.S.

strategic interests. If the Joint Force does not change its approach to strategic competition, there

is a significant risk that the United States will “lose without fighting.”

Purpose of Strategic Competition

Analyzing any adversary’s way of war is instructive. As former CJCS General Joseph F.

Dunford recognized, “We think of being at peace or war…our adversaries don’t think that

way.” They believe they are in a long-term “conflict without combat” to alter the current

international system, advance their national interests, gain strategic advantage and influence, and

limit U.S. and allied options. The JCC postulates that the Joint Force should also view the

spectrum of conflict as an enduring struggle between international actors with incompatible

strategic interests and objectives, but who also cooperate when their interests coincide.

Strategic competition is thus an enduring condition to be managed, not a problem to be

solved.

2. Kherson's underground resistance: How ordinary people fought Russia from the shadows

"We live for resistance." (Kyiv Calling - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWQUkRKqp2E)

Kherson's underground resistance: How ordinary people fought Russia from the shadows

NPR · by Joanna Kakissis · February 25, 2023

Tetiana Horobstova, 70, and her husband, Volodymyr, on the balcony of their home, where their daughter was talking on the phone when Russian soldiers came to arrest her in Kherson, Ukraine. Laurel Chor for NPR

KHERSON, Ukraine — Tetiana Horobstova, a retired physics teacher born in Russia, did not believe Russians would attack this city founded by Catherine the Great.

"Attack a Russian-speaking city, where people had family and friends in Russia?" she recalls, shaking her head. "No way."

On Feb. 24, 2022, despite warnings from the West that Russia was about to invade Ukraine, Horobstova remembers waking to a beautiful morning and watching the sunrise from her balcony. It turned the sky pink and illuminated green fields bursting with the winter harvest.

"And then I heard the explosions. And then I saw the explosions," she says. "One near the airport, then a second. The third at a gas station that seemed to turn everything red."

She began to cry. She called her friends and family to see if they were OK. Some were packing their bags to flee west. But Horobstova, her husband, Volodymyr, and her youngest daughter, Iryna, refused. Even with their Russian roots, their loyalties were clear.

"We had a Ukrainian flag on our TV, and a poster that says 'Putin Get Out!' " she says. "My poster, by the way."

Their daughter in western Ukraine begged them to flee. But they stayed, along with their youngest daughter, Iryna, who intended to resist.

The Russian army made short work of occupying the city

Kherson was the first major city occupied by Russian forces. With Kherson's deep historical ties to Russia, Moscow did not expect it to be a center of resistance. But the city, like the rest of Ukraine, defied the Kremlin's expectations.

The first days of the invasion in Kherson were chaotic. Serhiy, a soldier from a local brigade, watched in horror as Russian soldiers quickly overran the riverbank on the other side of the Dnipro River.

"Ukraine didn't even have time to mobilize forces," says Serhiy, who won't reveal his last name for security reasons. "It all happened so fast."

Serhiy, a soldier who cannot show his face or reveal his last name as he has family in occupied territory, poses in front of a World War II memorial in Kherson, Ukraine. Laurel Chor for NPR

Ukrainian soldiers fought to keep Russian paratroopers off the Antonivka Bridge, which crosses the Dnipro River into the city of Kherson. Serhiy wondered why Ukrainian authorities hadn't blown up the bridge on the first day of the invasion.

"It should have been blown up," he says. "That would have slowed down the Russian troops."

Serhiy got his wife and children out of Kherson. Then, as Russian forces took over his city, he turned to a special mission.

"To destroy the enemy's equipment and enemy troops," he says. "And also to find and kill collaborators."

For many, choosing to be a partisan was easy

Many civilians wanted to help the Ukrainian military. Oksana Pohomii, a 59-year-old accountant and city council member, had been warning for years that the Kremlin could not be trusted and says at first President Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn't take the Russian threat seriously.

"I have been having nightmares that Russians were going to invade Kherson since 2014," she says, referring to the year Russia invaded and occupied Crimea and the eastern Ukrainian industrial heartland known as Donbas. "And then my nightmare came true."

Oksana Pohomii, a 59-year-old accountant and city council member who had spied on the Russian forces during their occupation of Kherson, poses for a portrait in the bakery where she now bakes and distributes bread to local residents. Laurel Chor for NPR

With her dyed-fire-red hair braided into a rattail, Pohomii looks like a cross between Cyndi Lauper and a Viking. Just before the invasion, she applied to train as a soldier with the territorial defense, but the recruiting office turned her down, saying they were flooded with applicants.

During the invasion, she helped evacuate Ukrainian soldiers and their families stuck on the other side of the river, with the Russians at their heels.

"They hid in shallow parts of the Dnipro River, covered in reeds and mud," she says. "And we organized cars to go pick them up."

After the invasion, she joined protests in Kherson. Locals were angry but cautious.

"I remember this boy with an amputated leg in the central market," she says. "He played the guitar and sang the Ukrainian national anthem. It was really brave. We would gather around him and sing along quietly, like bunnies."

Just as quietly, an underground resistance formed. Hundreds of civilians secretly became partisans, forming espionage cells reporting to the Ukrainian military and security services. Pohomii joined one. Her job was to document who was collaborating with Russian forces and to send her findings to Ukraine's security services via the secure messaging app Signal.

"I saw there were three types of people in Kherson," she says. "Those who will die for Ukraine. Those who will die for Russia. And those who do not care, who are like, 'Ukraine is OK, Russia took over, and that's also OK.' "

Pohomii took photos and videos of suspected collaborators and eavesdropped on conversations, then passed on the information to Ukraine's security services.

The suspects included some of her fellow city council members, a prominent doctor who helped the city survive COVID, and even a childhood classmate who was a teacher of Ukrainian history.

"Many teachers quit," Pohomii says, "but she decided to work with the Russians."

Kherson's amateur spies went to work

Pohomii's close friend, Olha Chupikova, a 48-year-old landscape designer, also became a spy.

She lives near the Antonivka Bridge and served, she says, as "the eyes and ears of the Ukrainian military."

"I told them everything I saw about Russian troops — where they live, where they put their vehicles," Chupikova recalls, adding that she followed them wherever she could.

Olha Chupikova, a 48-year-old landscape designer who spied on the occupying Russian forces, poses inside the bakery where she now helps to bake bread to distribute to local residents in Kherson, Ukraine. Laurel Chor for NPR

"Sometimes I'd pretend I was going to the grocery store or waiting for the bus, and I tried to change my clothes as often as I could," she says. "I'm not saying I'm Agent 007. I just did whatever made sense to me."

Chupikova was hard to track, in part, because "I do not look like a threat," she says. With her pixie cut and bright blue eyes, she looks like a Minnesota soccer mom about to offer you a freshly baked apple pie.

"They wanted us to look average, unremarkable, not easy to remember so we could work undetected," she says, "as if we were moving between drops of rain."

She recruited her husband, Valerii Chupikov, to work with her. They used Google Maps to find coordinates of Russian convoys and sent them via Signal to a contact of Olha's in Ukraine's military.

When the internet was out and cellphone service was weak, she would climb to the roof of her house and throw her phone up in the air, hoping for a signal to send her messages.

"I was really scared the first time I was on the roof," she says. "We're not professional spies. We are amateurs. But if not us, then who?"

The danger for Kherson's partisans was constant

Russian troops seemed to be watching everyone closely. Olha Chupikova says residents were getting arrested for simply giving Russian soldiers dirty looks.

"I was worried that Olha would get arrested too," her husband says. "She had such a hard time hiding the hate in her eyes for them."

Tetiana Horobstova, 70, and her husband, Volodymyr, on the balcony of their home, where their daughter was talking on the phone when Russian soldiers came to arrest her in Kherson, Ukraine. Laurel Chor for NPR

Tetiana Horobstova, the retired teacher who watched the invasion from her balcony, worried about her daughter Iryna.

She says Iryna spent months driving all over the city, giving rides to nurses and doctors secretly helping injured Ukrainians.

"She also spent all of her money buying medicine to distribute to people here," Horobstova says.

On May 13, Iryna's 37th birthday, two cars pulled up outside the house.

"There were 11 guys, armed to the teeth, with their faces covered, wearing military fatigues and waving machine guns and pistols," Horobstova recalls. "Six went upstairs to our apartment and right to her room. She didn't deny anything. She said, 'Yes, I'm a Ukrainian patriot, and I hate you.' And they took her away."

The armed men confiscated Iryna's phones, laptop and memory stick, and Horobstova's laptop, too, which she says was only filled with lessons for her physics classes.

"They even took my husband's binoculars and his power bank," she says. "But we didn't care. We cared that they took our daughter."

One of the armed Russians grabbed at the Ukrainian flag on her TV and kept yelling, "You've got a breeding ground here!"

"And I kept saying 'a breeding ground of what?' " she says. "I said, 'This is the flag of our country, where I live and where my daughter lives. You also have a country, and you have your own flag.' He just kept yelling."

The Russian occupiers were known for their brutality

Hundreds of other residents disappeared, including the elected mayor of Kherson, Ihor Kolykhalev, who was arrested in June.

By the end of summer, several members of Oleksandr Diakov's espionage cell had also been arrested.

Diakov, a shy, bearded apartment manager, had spent months spying on Russian-installed politicians for Ukraine's security services. He suspects the Russians may have found a way to listen to partisans' conversations. But he says Russians also got information about cells by torturing captured partisans.

Oleksandr Diakov, a Kherson resident, poses outside the facility where he was detained and tortured by Russian forces during the occupation of the city. Laurel Chor for NPR

"I knew that sooner or later, the Russians would find me, too," he says. "They arrested me when I was at a friend's house."

They covered his head and drove him to the city jail. He remembers it being full of fellow Khersonians he recognized.

The torture began almost immediately. His hands shake as he recalls four long torture sessions, three of them especially brutal. They electrocuted him and beat him with clubs, metal pipes and their boots. They asked him about a man in his espionage cell.

"And I would say, 'He's a very nice person,' " Diakov says. "And they would beat me some more."

The screams of tortured partisans filled the jail. Natalya Havrylenko, another imprisoned partisan, remembers hearing Russian soldiers rape a man in a corridor.

"And you're listening to this cruelty, listening to his screams, and then all of sudden they're forcing him to sing the Russian national anthem or 'Katusha,' this old Soviet song," she says. "Insane things. The fear and psychological pressure were enormous."

Collaborators were numerous and at times unexpected

After two weeks of detention and torture, Oleksandr Diakov could barely move. His Russian captors kicked his left leg so badly that it broke and got infected. He pleaded for a doctor.

On Sept. 2, Russian soldiers loaded him into a van and drove him to what looked like the outskirts of town.

"I thought they were taking me not to the doctor, but to the forest" to be executed, he says. He had heard in prison that others there had died that way.

Oleksandr Diakov, a Kherson resident, sits in his home and shows scars on his leg from when he was tortured by Russian soldiers during the occupation of the city. Laurel Chor for NPR

But the Russians did end up taking Diakov for medical care. He had two surgeries. Over the next several weeks, he recuperated with Russian soldiers stationed outside his door.

By the end of September, the Russian-installed government organized a referendum to pave the way for Russia to annex Kherson.

Oksana Pohomii, the city councilwoman and partisan on the lookout for suspected collaborators, saw a list of locals who helped organize the referendum and recognized many names, including the son of her former classmate. She says that classmate also forced residents to vote, driving them to the polls herself.

"She was a teacher of Ukrainian history and yet, here she was, proud to be part of this referendum organized by the butchers," Pohomii says, referring to the Russians. "She didn't even try to hide it."

Pohomii laughs when she recalls the referendum results, which showed nearly everyone who voted wanted to join Russia. She says even the Russians knew it was a sham and that it made Russian President Vladimir Putin look desperate.

"The Russians lost the day they decided to attack us," she says.

By fall, Pohomii and the rest of the underground resistance had helped weaken the Russian hold on Kherson.

Politicians installed by the Russians were assassinated. When Ukraine got sophisticated missiles from the U.S., military officials say the partisans helped Ukrainian troops target sites like the Antonivka Bridge, which cut off Russian supply routes.

Finally, the city is liberated

On Oct. 24, when a doctor helped Oleksandr Diakov escape from the hospital, Russian forces were already looting the city and starting to evacuate. Russian-installed officials even removed the bones of Grigory Potemkin, the 18th century Russian commander, from St. Catherine's Cathedral.

By November, Ukrainian forces had pushed the Russians to the other side of the Dnipro River. The Russians left behind tanks, trucks and ammunition.

A building damaged by a strike in Kherson, Ukraine. Laurel Chor for NPR

Diakov was hiding at a friend's house when he heard a convoy of cars on the night of Nov. 10.

"They were blasting Ukrainian music, and I realized our guys were entering the city," he says. "Every day we were waiting for this. When I was tortured, I kept imagining the day when the Ukrainian soldiers would come home, and all our work would mean something."

The next morning, it was clear that Ukrainian troops controlled Kherson. Residents poured into the streets and cheered. Diakov, unable to walk, cheered from his bed.

Pohomii, the city councilwoman, helped replace Russian flags with Ukrainian ones.

The former classmate, the teacher of Ukrainian history who had helped Russians try to annex Kherson, tried to stop her.

"She said, 'What are you doing? Maybe the Russians will come back?' " Pohomii recalled. "But soon she realized that we would make sure that Kherson is Ukraine forever. So she left for Russia. And many others like her left, too."

Kherson is back under Ukraine's control but still vulnerable

More than three months after liberation, Russian forces remain across the river — less than a mile away.

They hit Kherson every day with rockets, missiles and artillery. More than 80 civilians have died. Only a fifth of the city's prewar population of 300,000 remains.

Serhiy, the soldier from the local brigade, is back in Kherson. He runs reconnaissance missions to the left bank of the Dnipro and is in touch with partisans there who tell him where collaborators and traitors are hiding.

"I know people who did a lot of harm, who are guilty in the death of Ukrainians," he says, "and they're still alive."

Serhiy, a soldier who cannot show his face or reveal his last name as he has family in occupied territory, poses in a park in Kherson, Ukraine. He had used information given by local civilians to target Russian forces during the occupation of Kherson. Laurel Chor for NPR

Serhiy says he heard about Kherson's liberation while fighting in the Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine. His brigade had helped free parts of that region in September. But he says his commanders told him they couldn't help with the liberation of their hometown.

"I guess they were nervous and afraid that we would seek vengeance on traitors and collaborators," he says. "I felt bad not to be there. But I understand why I wasn't."

Oksana Pohomii now runs a volunteer bakery with her friend Olha Chupikova, the landscape designer who used to spy on the Russian military near the Antonivka Bridge. Just outside the bakery, a missile strike has left a huge crater.

On a recent morning, they are dusted in flour as they stack the warm loaves they call "Kherson Undefeated Bread." The bread is free. Pohomii says they deliver it to stressed residents.

"We never try to force anyone to stay because not everyone can take it," she says. "I know people who don't leave their homes. I know people who could handle the shelling at first but then something broke inside them after the shelling killed people. They stopped eating and drinking. And I said, "It's time to leave.' "

She often telephones Ukrainians trapped on the left bank, including the partisans there.

"They ask me, 'Oksana, are you going to leave Kherson?' and I always tell them 'No, no, no. No way!' " she says. "I tell them that as soon as we free them, I'm going to bake bread for 24 hours straight, load the loaves onto a motorboat with the Ukrainian flag, cross the Dnipro River and bring it to them personally."

The cost of defending Kherson remains high, and the future is uncertain

Chupikova says Russian sympathizers remain in Kherson. Some homes have the word "collaborator" spray-painted on a wall or door.

"You can always recognize them, because they're angry and aggressive, because they chose Russia and now everyone knows they're traitors," she says.

She's still in touch with the Ukrainian soldier she worked with during her spy days. He's in Bakhmut, where the fiercest fighting of the war is taking place. She says she worries about him and looks back on the work they did together with pride – and bewilderment.

Two women walk past a building damaged by a strike in Kherson, Ukraine. Laurel Chor for NPR

"It was like a crazy adventure," she says. "But we did it because we knew we had to do it."

Many partisans are still missing, presumed to be somewhere in Russian custody. Tetiana Horobstova's daughter Iryna is among them. Horobstova hasn't spoken to her daughter and isn't sure where she's being held, though there's evidence she's imprisoned in Russian-occupied Crimea.

"I worry that she is cold, because when they took her away, she was only wearing a summer top," Horobstova says. "She has no change of underwear, no hygiene pads, nothing."

Horobstova is pleading with her fellow ethnic Russians to free her daughter. She says her Russian roots are now a deep source of heartache.

"I feel ashamed," she says, and starts to cry, "as if it was me personally who started this terrible war."

Hanna Palamarenko contributed reporting from Kherson, and Julian Hayda from Kyiv. Editing by Mark Katkov and Pam Webster. Chad Campbell produced a version of this story for broadcast.

NPR · by Joanna Kakissis · February 25, 2023

3. AI Can Tell Us How Russians Feel About the War. Putin Won’t Like the Results.

Excerpts:

It is difficult to get any reliable information out of Russia, but our research suggests the Kremlin’s hold on its people is perhaps not what it is made out to be. Despite Kremlin-pushed messages about high — or even increasing — levels of support for the war as the country marks the anniversary of its invasion of Ukraine, our analysis suggests that people’s overall feelings have changed very little in 2023 and that propaganda still isn’t as effective as it once was.

AI-enabled sentiment data analysis can provide a window into how Russians feel and how fickle public sentiment is. This poses internal threats to Putin’s legitimacy and thus his power. It also signals an inherent mistrust of state institutions that will be part of Russian society — especially outside of Moscow — well after Putin’s reign ends, whenever that may be.

AI Can Tell Us How Russians Feel About the War. Putin Won’t Like the Results.

Politico · by FilterLabs.AI

Magazine

Russian propaganda is good at manipulating public opinion. But its effects aren’t working like they used to.

Data tells a different story about Russian public opinion, especially outside Moscow, about the war un Ukraine — a story Vladimir Putin will not like. | Michael Probst/AP Photo

By Erol Yayboke, Jonathan D. Teubner, Abigail Edwards and Anastasia Strouboulis

02/25/2023 07:00 AM EST

Erol Yayboke is a senior fellow and director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.

Jonathan D. Teubner is founder and CEO of and visiting faculty at the Harvard Human Flourishing Program.

Abigail Edwards is a research assistant at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Anastasia Strouboulis is a former research assistant at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Vladimir Putin is notorious for deploying propaganda on Russian citizens, one of the oldest plays in the authoritarian playbook. But does it work?

When it comes to Russia’s war against Ukraine, the answer would seem to be yes. At the national level, public polling of Russian attitudes toward the war have shown support remaining relatively stable since the Feb. 24, 2022, invasion: On average, Russians still seem to support the war, even if not with the overwhelming positivity that the Kremlin might suggest. Even dips in national level public support have recovered over time, as polling showed was the case after Putin announced the “partial mobilization” in September.

But in an authoritarian country, polling is unreliable. While polling works when people are willing to tell the truth, other tools are needed in places like Russia where such openness and access cannot be assumed.

Artificial intelligence can help with this. For the past year, the Center for Strategic and International Studies has worked with FilterLabs.AI, a Massachusetts-based data analytics firm, to track local sentiment across Russia using AI-enabled sentiment analysis.

Sentiment analysis is a well-tested form of artificial intelligence that trains computers to read and understand human-generated text and speech. The analysis evaluates scraped public documents and comments across social media, news media, messenger app groups (including Telegram, which is widely used in Russia), and other popular forums to gauge what people are thinking and feeling at the local level, and whether that sentiment is trending positive or negative.

This data tells a different story about Russian public opinion, especially outside Moscow — a story Putin will not like.

Standard polling often concentrates on population centers including Moscow and St. Petersburg, which can skew national averages. Outside of those major cities, a more negative picture emerges. Our analysis shows that the Kremlin is increasingly unable to control public sentiment outside major cities with national propaganda.

Kremlin propagandists work iteratively, piloting slightly different messages successively and rolling them out in waves when their analysis signals that they are needed. Since the invasion, Russian state-sponsored propaganda waves elevated public sentiment toward the war for an average of 14 days across all regions and topics. As the war in Ukraine drags on, though, these positive waves of public sentiment are getting shorter, particularly outside the major cities, and are needing to be deployed with increasing frequency across Russia.

In other words, Russians appear to be less and less influenced by propaganda from Moscow, especially when it clearly contradicts the struggles in their daily lives. As Putin’s war of choice inflicts personal costs on citizens, Russians seem less willing to swallow the state narratives that are delivered over state television, which remains the primary source of information for most Russians.

Effects of Mobilization

The news is not all bad for Putin. Russian information operations remain formidable in their ability to mobilize and leverage state resources. They are particularly adept at muddling information environments, making people unsure of what to believe, and sapping their motivation.

But as the war drags into a second year and as more Russians feel its effects on their daily lives — especially the growing number of men drafted or conscripted into the armed forces — the limitations of Kremlin propaganda are increasingly apparent.

This is particularly true in the regions of Russia most heavily targeted by Putin’s mobilization. Some of the first data FilterLabs gathered after the invasion was from the republic of Buryatia, a mostly rural, underdeveloped region 3,700 miles from Moscow and bordering Mongolia. Many of those drafted into the Russian army regardless of age, military experience and medical history come from ethnic minority dominant regions like Buryatia. In April, a national propaganda campaign created a positive spike in local sentiment in Buryatia towards the war that lasted for 12 days before reverting to pre-campaign levels. But by late May, that cycle had shrunk to nine days. By June, as EU sanctions started to impact the economy and as information about western consolidation behind Ukraine and heavy resistance to Russian advances seeped into Buryatia, it took only eight days after a wave of propaganda for public sentiment to drop down to a negative steady state.

These trends are not unique to Buryatia. Significant shifts in Russian attitudes were detected across the country, sometimes over the prosecution of the war itself. For example, when Russian armed forces met much fiercer resistance from Ukrainians in March and April 2022, and reports of high death tolls filtered back into Russia, FilterLabs detected a decrease of support for the war in many regions of the country.

When the nationwide “partial mobilization” was announced in September 2022, there were demonstrable dips in the effectiveness of pro-war propaganda. We tracked sentiment across Russia’s eight federal districts, from Siberia to the far east, south to northwest, and the drop in public sentiment was clearly visible. Opinions trended negative and efforts to impact those opinions were less effective and shorter lived.

The analysis suggests that Russians, especially outside of Moscow, are not buying the propaganda as they once were. The Kremlin has also been unable to use its propaganda to sustainably mobilize popular sentiment around an affirmative agenda, in this case its war in Ukraine. Muddling the information environment and sowing mistrust has not generated positive support for Moscow’s misadventures.

Regime Fragility

The data suggest that the Russian government could be more fragile than it would like to admit. Corruption and weak institutions have contributed to state fragility in Russia for decades. The war appears to be exacerbating that trend.

In effect, our analysis suggests that the social contract between Russians and the Putin regime is fraying. Bankrolled by high energy prices over the last two decades, the public has acquiesced to Putin’s autocratic rule in exchange for improved living standards and functional public services.

The state propaganda apparatus — which has expanded from print media and TV into online platforms — has been crucial in crystallizing this acquiescence, especially since Putin came to power in the early 2000s. The Kremlin has used information operations to create a more chaotic, undiscernible media space and to obscure the regime’s fragile underbelly, adopting “foreign agent” and “extremism” laws and intimidating would-be opposition voices, all while supporting Kremlin-aligned politicians, authorities and policies.

However, the events of the last several years — the 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine, the protests spurred by opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and the Covid-19 pandemic — have repeatedly demonstrated that propaganda narratives are not enough to cover up diminishing public trust in the legitimacy of the state. And the chaos itself can backfire — or at least quickly diminish its effectiveness — when out of step with lived experience, further undermining legitimacy in the state. Considering all this, telling Russian men and their families that it is in their interest to fight, and die, in faraway Ukraine is a harder story to sell.

It is difficult to get any reliable information out of Russia, but our research suggests the Kremlin’s hold on its people is perhaps not what it is made out to be. Despite Kremlin-pushed messages about high — or even increasing — levels of support for the war as the country marks the anniversary of its invasion of Ukraine, our analysis suggests that people’s overall feelings have changed very little in 2023 and that propaganda still isn’t as effective as it once was.

AI-enabled sentiment data analysis can provide a window into how Russians feel and how fickle public sentiment is. This poses internal threats to Putin’s legitimacy and thus his power. It also signals an inherent mistrust of state institutions that will be part of Russian society — especially outside of Moscow — well after Putin’s reign ends, whenever that may be.

POLITICO

Politico · by FilterLabs.AI

4. Touting ‘Ethnic Fusion,’ China’s New Top Official for Minority Affairs Envisions a Country Free of Cultural Difference

"Fusion?"  Or a euphemism for elimination of cultures opposed by the CCP?

Conclusion:

The colonial character of this initiative is stunning, yet also familiar in light of Pan’s earlier writing. We must wait to see how the project develops; the ongoing COVID-19 crisis is almost certainly making the implementation of any preconceived plans more complicated. But time and again Pan has demonstrated a willingness to think big and take bold action—the darker side of the environmentalism for which foreign observers have repeatedly praised him. As we watch him take his next steps, journalists and China scholars need to grapple with the fact that a celebrated environmentalist is now at the center of one of China’s most notorious policy arenas, and to imagine the chilling possibilities of ethnic governance at ecological scale.

Touting ‘Ethnic Fusion,’ China’s New Top Official for Minority Affairs Envisions a Country Free of Cultural Difference

​by Aaron Glasserman​

chinafile.com · February 24, 2023

Last October, China’s top officials convened the once-every-five-year congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to determine the leadership and political trajectory of the country for the next half decade. Xi Jinping secured a precedent-breaking third term as paramount leader of the Party, confirming expectations that the congress would cement his authority and concentrate power in a single person to a degree not seen since the Mao era. Several high-profile promotions and demotions signaled that officials’ political survival depends on personal loyalty to Xi, and that aggressive implementation of his policies is key to career advancement. Among the officials garnering Xi’s support is Pan Yue, who was elected as a full member of the Central Committee of the CCP.

Since last June, Pan has been head of the State Council’s Ethnic Affairs Commission, which is responsible for policy concerning China’s “minority nationalities,” the 55 officially recognized ethnic groups who collectively represent around 8.9 percent of the total population. For decades, the CCP’s ethnic policies have oscillated between multiculturalism—recognizing and even celebrating distinct ethnic identities—and assimilationism—denying and destroying them—with significant variation at the local level. The Chinese term “minzu” (民族) captures this policy range: it refers both to individual “nationalities” or ethnic groups, like Han, Uyghurs, and Tibetans, and to the overarching “Chinese nation” (zhonghua minzu, 中华民族), which comprises all 56 (55 minorities plus the Han majority) groups.

Pan’s election to the Central Committee suggests that the Xi administration’s hard turn toward assimilationism will likely continue and perhaps intensify. Pan is the second Han official in a row to head the Ethnic Affairs Commission, which for nearly 70 years had been led by a Party member from a non-Han nationality. Since the beginning of Xi’s second term in 2017, measures related to “managing” ethnic minorities have run the gamut from destruction of what officials deem “foreign” architectural elements such as mosque domes and removal of Arabic signage on restaurant awnings and storefronts to the imposition of Mandarin as the sole language of instruction for certain subjects in some schools. Repression has been most severe in Tibet and Xinjiang, where the local populations have been subjected to extreme restrictions on movement, constant surveillance, mass internment, and as has been reported of Uyghur women, forced sterilization.

Pan did not initiate these policies, but he is poised to extend and expand them. Over a winding path to the center of Chinese political power, in a career spanning official media, economic restructuring, and environmental policy, as well as a stint in the United Front Work Department, he has repeatedly staked out bold policy positions. He is a talented politician and an effective communicator who has long espoused assimilationist views, even before it was politically fashionable to do so. If Xi were looking for a lieutenant with the vision and policy entrepreneurship needed to guide and accelerate assimilation in his third term, he has found one in Pan.

* * *

To the extent that Pan is known outside of China, his renown is due to the public profile he cultivated as an official in China’s environmental protection agency from 2003 to 2016. He won accolades from foreign media outlets and organizations for terminating development projects with powerful political and business support for their violations of environmental standards. He is regarded as the architect of the “Green GDP” system, which incorporated environmental harm into metrics for economic growth. The Hu Jintao administration endorsed this scheme in 2004 but ultimately abandoned it, reportedly due to opposition from provincial officials who resented the additional performance criteria it entailed. When Pan missed out on a promotion in 2007 and was ousted from his position as spokesperson for the Ministry of Environmental Protection in 2008, some observers speculated that he was being sidelined due to his zealous regulation.

But his stint as an environmental crusader had come only after a long and well-connected career in official life. Born a “princeling” in Nanjing in 1960 as the son of a senior military official, Pan began his career with several years of military service. During the 1980s and early 1990s, he held editorial positions at official outlets including Economic Daily and China Youth Daily. His networks in Chinese officialdom came through his own lineage as well as through a former marriage to the daughter of the powerful General Liu Huaqing. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Pan held posts in the Economic Restructuring Office of the State Council and the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, helping manage China’s transition from a planned to a market economy. Like many Chinese officials seeking to distinguish their resumes, Pan pursued an advanced degree, receiving a Ph.D. in history in 2002 from Central China Normal University.

Pan has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to make a name for himself through bold and controversial policy proposals. After the attempted coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991, Pan organized a conference of fellow princelings to formulate a strategy to secure CCP rule. The resulting manifesto, “Realistic Responses and Strategic Options for China after the Soviet Upheaval,” which Pan helped produce, called on the Party to focus on ensuring social stability, exert greater control over state assets, and guard against emerging dangers including radical economic reform and ethnic separatism. Pan elaborated some of these ideas in another piece in early 2001, which circulated among high-ranking officials, on the need for the CCP to adapt and evolve from a revolutionary party to a ruling one. Later that year, he penned an essay criticizing the Party’s doctrinaire hostility to religion, for which he was censured.

Pan’s tenacity has been politically costly at times, but never fatal. His career slumped following the failure of the Green GDP initiative but has bounced back under the Xi administration. In 2015, Pan was again promoted within the Ministry of Environmental Protection, and the following year he became Party secretary and executive vice president of the Central Institute of Socialism, a ministry-level department, where he introduced new programming on Chinese civilization and launched a curriculum dedicated to promoting a unified national consciousness. He also held high-level positions in the United Front Work Department, the CCP bureau responsible for building relationships with and controlling groups and institutions outside of the Party, and the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, the government agency in charge of cultivating ties with the Chinese diaspora, before his appointment as director of the Ethnic Affairs Commission last June. Last summer, he joined a handful of other top officials accompanying Xi Jinping on a trip to Xinjiang.

* * *

We can only speculate as to why Pan’s political fortunes improved so dramatically since Xi came to power. One possible factor is that both men appreciate the political utility of Chinese tradition for constructing a unified and confident national identity. The use of culturally resonant symbols to frame political claims and mobilize the masses has long been a technique of Communist power and is common to many political systems around the world. But self-styled revolutionary regimes must balance appealing to tradition and transforming society. Throughout the Maoist period, and especially during the Cultural Revolution, the CCP cast traditional culture as backward and oppressive. Since then, and especially under Xi, however, the Party has forsaken much of its older Marxist rhetoric for a discourse of Chinese civilization, rebranding itself as a champion of tradition and celebrating once-abjured icons like Confucius.

Pan was an early advocate of using Chinese tradition to secure CCP control. The manifesto “Realistic Responses and Strategic Options” noted the diminished appeal of Communist ideology among the Chinese people and called for the creative adaptation of traditional Chinese culture to safeguard China’s socialist system. In his 2001 essay on reforming the Party’s religious policy, Pan similarly advocated harnessing religion to reinforce political control. In addition to theorizing the political utility of engaging with Chinese tradition, Pan has modeled what such engagement should look like. During his years of service in the environmental sector, he wrote extensively on the importance of the environment in classical Chinese philosophy. He synthesized his interpretation of Chinese tradition into the concept of “ecological civilization,” a state of harmony among individual humans, society, and the natural world, which he touts as one of China’s historic contributions to humanity.

But there is a dark side to what often reads as a humane exegesis of Chinese tradition: an intolerance toward local cultures and peoples deemed alien and resistant to it, and a corresponding mandate to assimilate them through “ethnic fusion” (minzu ronghe, 民族融合). The term “ethnic fusion” connotes the adoption of Han customs, institutions, and language by other ethnic groups. It has always been part of the CCP’s lexicon but has mostly been understood as an inevitable outcome of long-term socialist development, not the immediate objective of current policy. In important speeches on ethnic work in the 1990s and 2000s, Presidents Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao both affirmed the “long-term nature” of ethnic identities. In the early 2010s, calls for “ethnic fusion” and “ethnic blending” grew louder in some circles as part of a larger debate on “Second-Generation Ethnic Policy” focused on promoting a unified Chinese identity over individual ethnic ones. Since becoming president and leader of the Party, Xi Jinping has elevated “forging a common Chinese national consciousness” (in some iterations, “forging a sense of community of the Chinese nation”) as a primary goal of “ethnic work” and more recently has stressed the need to promote “ethnic unity and fusion.”

As with his embrace of Chinese tradition, Pan was early in his unqualified endorsement of “ethnic fusion.” He elaborated this concept in his 2002 dissertation, “Research on the History and Actual Situation of Migrant Settlement of China’s Western Region,” a proposal to settle 50 million Han from eastern and central China in western China over the following half century. Pan argued that large-scale migration would address multiple crises China faces: easing the pressures of overpopulation in the country’s eastern and central regions, facilitating exploitation of natural resources while advancing the country’s sustainable development, and eliminating the national security threat of ethnic separatism by eroding the differences between ethnic groups and promoting “ethnic fusion.”

Pan devoted two chapters of his dissertation to identifying precedents for his proposal. He stressed the need to learn from the experience of other countries, citing the benefits reaped from large-scale migration: anti-desertification in Israel, resource exploitation in Russia, and skyrocketing agricultural production, transportation capacity, and geopolitical power in the United States. “Westward expansion,” he writes, “not only allowed America to tentatively complete its modernization but also led it to become a great power playing an increasingly important role in the world. . . We absolutely can draw on some of America’s policies and measures as a reference. . . We must, as quickly as possible, formulate a migration strategy with Chinese characteristics.” Pan also found ample precedent for his proposal in Chinese history, from the westward expansion of the ancient Han dynasty to the Qing dynasty’s conquest of Xinjiang. Pan linked his proposal to a longer tradition of Chinese colonization by frequently using the term tunken (屯垦), a classical reference to settlement through troop garrison and land reclamation.

There is a certain ambiguity to “ethnic fusion” in Pan’s writings. On one hand, it is an inevitable outcome of history. He declares in his 2001 essay on reforming the Party’s religious policy that “no matter the strength of foreign religions, whenever they enter China, they will all be integrated [xiang rong, 相融] into Chinese culture, without exception.” On the other hand, not all cultural and religious traditions are equally assimilable. On this point, Pan is particularly critical of Tibetan Buddhism and Islam, both of which he describes as “unreformed,” theocratic, and irrational. He sees Islam as especially dangerous. As he writes in his dissertation,

Religions originally possessed a rather strong exclusionary character. Even today, the exclusionary character of Islam, which has not undergone religious reform, remains extraordinarily fierce. They still believe in fundamentalism. From the spiritual to the material, from behavior to appearance, all the way to etiquette, diet, and so forth—their standards are completely based on ancient doctrines and admonishments. They are suspicious of everything, refuse to integrate with other cultures, and do not trust any foreign political authority or external collectivity.

Many scholars attribute ethnic tensions and unrest in Xinjiang to a combination of factors, including state repression, state-backed Han immigration and settlement, employment discrimination against Uyghurs and other non-Han peoples, and the dominance of extractive industries in the local economy. These factors exacerbate economic inequality and unemployment and in some cases may enhance the appeal of militancy and violent extremism against the local security apparatus as well as civilians. For Pan, however, the problem is Islam itself, which he views as stubbornly unreformed. He presents the problem as especially acute in areas where Muslims are highly concentrated, in spite of what he sees as the benevolent policies of the country’s leaders:

Since the country’s founding [in 1949], the central government has extended extremely favorable treatment to minority nationalities; however, when it comes to Islam, no matter how many advantages it provides, and no matter how favorable its treatment may be, the results have been far from ideal, and ethnic separatist activities remain incessant. On the other hand, wherever Han people are concentrated in large numbers, there is little unrest, such as in northern Xinjiang; by contrast, wherever Muslims are concentrated in large numbers, unrest is greater, as in southern Xinjiang.

Pan casts Islam as a spatial and demographic problem as much as a cultural or ideological one. It is unsurprising, then, that his proposed solution involves resettlement on a massive scale.

If Islam and Tibetan Buddhism are problems in Pan’s framework, so too is the system that has permitted them to persist unreformed and unassimilated. In his dissertation, Pan takes direct aim at what he characterizes as the shortcomings of the Party’s conventional approach to ethnic affairs. He elaborates the damaging consequences of what he sees as excessive respect for linguistic diversity, criticizing the creation of writing systems for nationalities that previously lacked them—once a point of pride for the Party: “Our goal is to strengthen ethnic unity and fusion; rather than spending energy creating ethnic scripts that never existed, it would be better to promote Putonghua [standard Mandarin], which is used throughout the country.” He also warns of the demographic danger posed by the implementation of family planning regulations (such as the one-child policy), which often exempt “minority nationalities” from limits on childbearing.

Pan saves his sharpest criticism for China’s system of ethnic territorial autonomy. Under this system, “minority nationalities” ostensibly enjoy representation in local government and certain cultural rights, including the official use of their native language, in areas where they are a local majority or are relatively populous, such as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, and the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, among others. The CCP historically has touted the system of territorial autonomy as proof of its egalitarian rule. But Pan regards the institutionalization of cultural and demographic distinctions inherent in autonomous administration as a driver of ethnic separatism and threat to national security. While Pan acknowledges the system’s important contributions to ethnic equality and development, he unambiguously affirms the necessity of moving beyond it, stating that “the system of ethnic territorial autonomy is not the optimal system, less still one that can be a permanent system.”

* * *

Pan’s appointment to lead the Ethnic Affairs Commission and his promotion to the Central Committee mark the convergence of his long-stated views on ethnic fusion and the more recent assimilationist turn in Chinese ethnic governance. Of course, what Pan wrote in his 2002 dissertation will not necessarily determine how he will handle ethnic governance today. But there is good reason to believe that Pan remains committed to “ethnic fusion” and is continuing to promote it as he moves toward the inner ring of Chinese political power. In a 2019 speech at the Central Institute of Socialism, Pan reiterated nearly word-for-word his 2001 assertion of the inevitability of assimilation, stating that “no matter the strength of foreign religions, whenever they enter China, they will all be integrated into Chinese civilization.” In one of his first published statements since the 2022 Party congress, he called for promoting “contact, interaction, and blending” among ethnic groups, adopting language regarding ethnic policy codified in the CCP’s top journal. Recently, the Ethnic Affairs Commission has also partnered with the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce to launch the “Private Enterprise Advances Toward the Frontier” initiative, meant to fulfill the Party’s directive of securing China’s frontier by encouraging privately owned companies to invest in the border regions, deepen cross-region contact, and “create a platform and vehicle for promoting contact, interaction, and blending of all nationalities.”

The colonial character of this initiative is stunning, yet also familiar in light of Pan’s earlier writing. We must wait to see how the project develops; the ongoing COVID-19 crisis is almost certainly making the implementation of any preconceived plans more complicated. But time and again Pan has demonstrated a willingness to think big and take bold action—the darker side of the environmentalism for which foreign observers have repeatedly praised him. As we watch him take his next steps, journalists and China scholars need to grapple with the fact that a celebrated environmentalist is now at the center of one of China’s most notorious policy arenas, and to imagine the chilling possibilities of ethnic governance at ecological scale.

Aaron Glasserman

Aaron Glasserman is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University. His research interests include the history and politics of ethnicity and religion in China; minority nationalism; law and legal history; comparative religion-state relations; and modern Islamic political and religious movements. He was previously an Academy Scholar (postdoctoral fellow) at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies at Harvard University. He received a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2021 and a B.A. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2013.

chinafile.com · February 24, 2023

5. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 25, 2023

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-25-2023

Key Takeaways

• UK, French, and German officials are reportedly preparing a NATO-Ukraine pact that falls far short of the protections Ukraine would receive from NATO membership and appears to reflect a desire to press Ukraine to accept a negotiated settlement on unfavorable terms.
• Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko plans to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, possibly to assist Russia and China in sanctions evasion amidst reports that China is seriously considering sending Russia lethal aid.
•  US President Joe Biden rejected China’s 12-point peace plan as Russian sources continue to capitalize on the announcement of the plan to vilify the West and Ukraine.
• Lukashenko breathed new life into the Kremlin’s Transnistria information operation by falsely claiming that opening a Transnistrian front would be in the West’s interests.
• Russian authorities detained more than 50 people at anti-war demonstrations in 14 Russian cities on February 24.
• Wagner Group Financier Yevgeny Prigozhin and his supporters criticized Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu over his son-in-law Alexei Stolyarov’s alleged Instagram “likes” of anti-war posts.
• Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks northwest of Svatove and near Kreminna.
• Russian forces made marginal territorial gains around Bakhmut and Avdiivka and continued to conduct ground attacks across the Donetsk Oblast front line.
• Russian forces continue to struggle to conduct effective combat operations on the Zaporizhia Oblast front line.
• Russian forces are continuing to suffer significant losses on the battlefield prompting some milbloggers to criticize the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) for failing to recognize the scale of the casualties.
• Russian authorities are exploiting Ukrainian children from Mariupol as propaganda to falsely portray Russia as the savior of occupied areas.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 25, 2023

Feb 25, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 25, 2023

Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, Kateryna Stepanenko, Nicole Wolkov, and Frederick W. Kagan

February 25, 7 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.

UK, French, and German officials are reportedly preparing a NATO-Ukraine pact that falls far short of the protections Ukraine would receive from NATO membership and appears to reflect a desire to press Ukraine to accept a negotiated settlement on unfavorable terms.[1] The Wall Street Journal reported that the exact provisions of the pact are undecided, but the officials indicated that the pact will provide advanced military equipment, arms, and ammunition to Ukraine, but not Article V protection or a commitment to station NATO forces in Ukraine—falling short of Ukraine’s aspirations for full NATO membership. The officials stated that the pact aims to provision Ukraine so that Ukrainian forces can conduct a counteroffensive that brings Russia to the negotiating table and deter any future Russian aggression. The Wall Street Journal noted that these officials expressed reservations about the West’s ability to sustain a prolonged war effort, the high casualty count that Ukraine would sustain in such a prolonged war, and Ukrainian forces’ ability to completely recapture long-occupied territories like Crimea, however. The Wall Street Journal contrasted these officials’ private reservations with US President Joe Biden’s public statements of support—which did not mention peace negotiations—and with Central and Eastern European leaders’ concerns that premature peace negotiations would encourage further Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin has given no indication that he is willing to compromise on his stated maximalist goals, which include Ukraine’s “neutrality” and demilitarization—as well as de facto regime change in Kyiv, as ISW has consistently reported.[2]

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko plans to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, possibly to assist Russia and China in sanctions evasion amidst reports that China is seriously considering sending Russia lethal aid. Lukashenko announced plans to visit China from February 28 to March 2 and to meet with Xi Jinping likely to sign agreements on trade, investment, large-scale joint projects, and other matters.[3] Lukashenko also plans to meet with top Chinese officials and the heads of Chinese corporations.[4] Lukashenko’s announcement of his planned visit coincides with reporting from CNN and The Washington Post that senior US officials assess that China is seriously considering selling combat drones, personal weapons, and 122mm and 152mm artillery shells to Russia.[5] Russian and Chinese officials have also reportedly developed plans for the shipment of drones to Russia under falsified shipping documents to avoid international sanctions measures.[6] China may seek to use agreements with Belarus to obfuscate violations of sanctions.

US President Joe Biden rejected China’s 12-point peace plan as Russian sources continue to capitalize on the announcement of the plan to vilify the West and Ukraine. Biden stated that the Chinese peace plan is only beneficial for Russia and that it would make no sense for China to participate in negotiations on the war in Ukraine.[7] Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) head Denis Pushilin argued that China’s peace plan is a fundamentally different approach to the war in Ukraine from the West’s as the West demands the fulfillment of preconditions while exacerbating the conflict through supporting Ukraine.[8] Pushilin nevertheless also rejected the Chinese plan because it would prevent Russia from achieving its maximalist goals in Ukraine.[9] Russian officials and propagandists continue to assert that Western aid that helps Ukraine resist Russia’s illegal invasion protracts the war and to ignore the role that Russia’s determined pursuit of its maximalist aims plays in prolonging the conflict.

Lukashenko breathed new life into the Kremlin’s Transnistria information operation by falsely claiming that opening a Transnistrian front would be in the West’s interests.[10] Lukashenko claimed that Ukraine would suffer high casualties if it opened a second front to the war, but that the West aims to defeat both Russia and Russian-occupied Transnistria and bring Moldova closer to the West. Lukashenko’s statements support the Kremlin’s broader information operation that paints Russia as being at war with the West rather than with Ukraine. Lukashenko embroidered on the Russian government’s statements warning of a supposed Ukrainian provocation along the Ukraine-Transnistria border by adding the unfounded assertion that the West desires a conflict in Moldova. The Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute has previously assessed that the Kremlin likely conducted a false flag operation against the Transnistrian occupation Ministry of Defense (MoD) in April 2022 in order to blame Ukraine for the attacks and draw Transnistria into the war, a goal that the Kremlin has so far failed to accomplish.[11]

Russian authorities detained more than 50 people at anti-war demonstrations in 14 Russian cities on February 24. Independent Russian outlet OVD-Info reported that police detained at least 54 people for anti-war demonstrations at which they picketed, laid flowers, and wrote messages in the snow.[12] The arrests suggest that the protests were far more limited in scale than they had been earlier in the war, since Russian authorities detained 1,800 people on the first day of the war and almost 5,000 on March 6, 2022.[13] Russian milblogger Anatoly Nesmiyan claimed that Russian authorities only arrested 18 people at an anti-war demonstration on February 25 in St. Petersburg compared to 500 on February 25, 2022.[14] The protests are noteworthy for having occurred at all rather than because of their size given the intense pressure the Kremlin has put on all public opposition to the war, including the criminalization of criticism of the war’s conduct, of military officials, and of the Kremlin itself.[15]

Wagner Group Financier Yevgeny Prigozhin and his supporters criticized Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu over his son-in-law Alexei Stolyarov’s alleged Instagram “likes” of anti-war posts. Independent Russian-language opposition news outlet Meduza reported that Stolyarov denied liking posts by anti-war journalist Yuri Dud and claimed that screenshots circulating social media were photoshopped.[16] Prigozhin added to the criticism of Stolyarov saying “bring [Stolyarov] to me. I will train him for six weeks” and claiming that he could help Stolyarov improve by sending him into combat.[17] A pro-Wagner milblogger called for Shoigu’s removal over his association with his son-in-law.[18]

Key Takeaways

• UK, French, and German officials are reportedly preparing a NATO-Ukraine pact that falls far short of the protections Ukraine would receive from NATO membership and appears to reflect a desire to press Ukraine to accept a negotiated settlement on unfavorable terms.
• Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko plans to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, possibly to assist Russia and China in sanctions evasion amidst reports that China is seriously considering sending Russia lethal aid.
•  US President Joe Biden rejected China’s 12-point peace plan as Russian sources continue to capitalize on the announcement of the plan to vilify the West and Ukraine.
• Lukashenko breathed new life into the Kremlin’s Transnistria information operation by falsely claiming that opening a Transnistrian front would be in the West’s interests.
• Russian authorities detained more than 50 people at anti-war demonstrations in 14 Russian cities on February 24.
• Wagner Group Financier Yevgeny Prigozhin and his supporters criticized Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu over his son-in-law Alexei Stolyarov’s alleged Instagram “likes” of anti-war posts.
• Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks northwest of Svatove and near Kreminna.
• Russian forces made marginal territorial gains around Bakhmut and Avdiivka and continued to conduct ground attacks across the Donetsk Oblast front line.
• Russian forces continue to struggle to conduct effective combat operations on the Zaporizhia Oblast front line.
• Russian forces are continuing to suffer significant losses on the battlefield prompting some milbloggers to criticize the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) for failing to recognize the scale of the casualties.
• Russian authorities are exploiting Ukrainian children from Mariupol as propaganda to falsely portray Russia as the savior of occupied areas.

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.

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

Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1— Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and continue offensive operations into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks northwest of Svatove on February 25. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted an unsuccessful offensive action near Masyutivka (51km northwest of Svatove).[19] Luhansk Oblast Administration Head Serhiy Haidai stated that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian forces attempting to advance with heavy equipment in the Svatove area.[20] Geolocated footage posted on February 24 shows Ukrainian forces shelling Russian infantry in Dzherelne (15km west of Svatove).[21] A BARS (Russian Combat Reserve) unit claimed that Russian forces disrupted a Ukrainian counterattack near Stelmakhivka (15km west of Svatove).[22]  

Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks in the Kreminna area on February 25. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive actions near Nevske (18km northwest of Kreminna), Bilohorivka (10km south of Kreminna), and in the Serebrianska forest area (10km south of Kreminna).[23] Haidai claimed that Russian forces suffered heavy losses in an assault near Kreminna with 70 killed in action and about 70 wounded in the course of a three-company assault.[24] A Russian milblogger posted footage on February 25 purportedly showing elements of the 98th Guards Airborne Division operating in the Kreminna direction.[25]

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

Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut on February 25. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Orikhovo-Vasylivka (11km northwest of Bakhmut), Berkhivka (4km north of Bakhmut), Ivanivske (6km west of Bakhmut), and Pivnichne (21km southwest of Bakhmut).[26] Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed that Wagner Group fighters captured Yahidne (2km north of Bakhmut) and posted a picture of Wagner fighters posing near the settlement’s welcome sign that was later geolocated, indicating that Wagner fighters likely captured the settlement.[27] Russian sources continued to claim that Wagner fighters captured Berkhivka and completed clearing the settlement, although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these claims.[28] Russian sources provided conflicting claims about Russian gains near Dubovo-Vasylivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut), with Zaporizhia Oblast occupation official Vladimir Rogov claiming that Wagner fighters captured the settlement and a prominent milblogger claiming that Russian forces only entered the settlement.[29] Another prominent Russian milblogger claimed that fighting was ongoing on the outskirts of Dubovo-Vasylivka.[30] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces destroyed a dam north of Bakhmut and flooded the Stupky area of Bakhmut in order to slow Russian advances from the north, although ISW has seen no visual evidence of these claims.[31] Russian milbloggers claimed that Wagner fighters conducted assaults near Zaliznianske (11km north of Bakhmut), Vasyukivka (14km north of Bakhmut), Rozdolivka (17km northeast of Bakhmut), and Fedorivka (18km north of Bakhmut).[32] Geolocated footage published on February 24 indicates that Russian forces likely made marginal advances in eastern Bakhmut.[33] The Ukrainian Border Guards Service reported that the Russians have committed their most combat-ready forces to Bakhmut and that there are many Wagner Group convict personnel around the city.[34] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced in the southern part of Bakhmut and that Wagner fighters conducted ground attacks near Chasiv Yar (12km west of Bakhmut) and Dyliivka (15km southwest of Bakhmut).[35]

Russian forces continued offensive operations along the western outskirts of Donetsk City on February 25. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive actions near Avdiivka and within 36km southwest of Avdiivka near Vodyane, Pervomaiske, Nevelske, Marinka, and Novomykhailivka.[36] Geolocated footage published on February 25 indicates that Russian forces likely made marginal advances southwest of Avdiivka and near Pobieda (32km southwest of Avdiivka).[37] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced towards Pobieda and conducted assaults on the southern and northern outskirts of Marinka (27km southwest of Avdiivka).[38] Another Russian milblogger claimed that elements of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) “Somalia” Battalion advanced towards Avdiivka from Opytne (3km southwest of Avdiivka) and that Russian forces surrounded a Ukrainian stronghold between Pervomaiske (12km southwest of Avdiivka) and Vodyane (8km southwest of Avdiivka).[39] Representative of the Ukrainian Tavriisk operational direction Oleksiy Dmytrashkivyskyi reported that Russian forces also conducted attacks near Krasnohorivka, although it is unclear if it is the settlement 22km southwest of Avdiivka or the one 9km north of Avdiivka.[40] A Russian milblogger claimed that the DNR 11th Motorized Rifle Regiment (now the 114th Separate Guards Motorized Rifle Division) broke through Ukrainian defenses near Novobakhmutivka (13km northeast of Avdiivka) and advanced up to the Krasnohorivka north of Avdiivka.[41]

Russian forces continued offensive operations in western Donetsk Oblast on February 25. Dmytrashkivyskyi reported that Russian forces conducted attacks near Vuhledar (30km southwest of Donetsk City).[42] Dmytrashkivyskyi reported that Russian forces have not changed their tactics around Vuhledar but that lately there has been an increase in Russian forces conducting assaults without armored support and even some instances of armored personnel carriers driving infantry to the frontline for dismounted assaults and then withdrawing.[43] Dymtrashkivsykyi reported that the 155th and 40th Naval Infantry Brigades of the Pacific Fleet have merged into one brigade because of significant losses in the Vuhledar area and that Russian forces deployed a Rosgvardia special rapid response unit to prevent these personnel from rioting and refusing to fight.[44] Dymtrashkivyskyi also reported that Russian forces transferred an unspecified number of personnel by bus from Melitopol to the area to replenish the 155th and 40th Naval Infantry Brigades.[45] ISW has previously reported that 43 buses of Wagner fighters arrived in Melitopol possibly representing one or two battalions’ worth of personnel, and Russian forces may have since transferred these Wagner personnel to the Vuhledar area.[46] ISW has not observed any visual confirmation of Wagner fighters operating in the Vuhledar area, and Russian forces could also have transferred mobilized personnel to replenish the severely degraded naval infantry formations. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces still hold positions in the dacha areas near Vuhledar and continue to inflict heavy losses on Ukrainian forces.[47] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted an assault near Prechystivka (35km southwest of Donetsk City) but failed to break through Ukrainian defenses.[48]

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

Russian forces continue to struggle to conduct effective combat operations on the Zaporizhia Oblast front line. Ukraine’s Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) released an intercepted call in which a Russian servicemember claimed that 120 soldiers of the Russian 503rd Motorized Rifle Regiment (19th Motorized Rifle Division, 58th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) tried to conduct reconnaissance near Shcherbaky (32km northwest of Tokmak) but Ukrainian forces struck all 120 personnel.[49]

Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces continue to establish military positions in civilian areas in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast. Head of the Ukrainian Joint Coordination Press Center of the Southern Forces Nataliya Humenyuk stated on February 25 that Russian military positions in civilian areas complicate the Ukrainian ability to strike against Russian positions.[50] Humenyuk also stated that Russian forces have moved the majority of their forces tens of kilometers back from the Dnipro River bank and are reinforcing their positions with mobilized personnel.

Russian forces continued routine fire west of Hulyaipole and in Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts on February 25.[51]

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

Russian forces are continuing to suffer significant losses on the battlefield prompting some milbloggers to criticize the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) for failing to recognize the scale of the casualties. BBC and Russian opposition outlet Mediazona confirmed that Russian forces suffered confirmed 15,136 casualties based on open source information such as publicly available obituaries since the start of the war.[52] BBC and Mediazona also reported that Russian forces lost over 1,200 mobilized servicemen, over 1,300 convicts, over 1,800 officers, and 199 lieutenant colonels, colonels, and generals. Western officials previously reported that Russian forces sustained almost 200,000 casualties since the beginning of the invasion.[53] Idel.Realii reported that as of February 23, Russian officials confirmed that 3,312 residents of the Volga (Povolzhye) region died in combat.[54] Omsk Oblast Civil Association observed that the Russian official records indicate that 237 residents of Omsk Oblast died in Ukraine, and a local Svedlovsk Oblast project found that 97 mobilized men from Sverdlovsk Oblast were killed in combat.[55] A prominent Russian nationalist critic noted that Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and the rest of the military leadership are silent over Russia’s heavy losses.[56]

The Russian MoD continues its efforts to integrate irregular formations into its conventional formations. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on February 25 that the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) “force structures” will switch to operating on the basis of Russian legislation as of March 1.[57] The Ukrainian General Staff also reported that the Russian military command is releasing servicemen of DNR’s 1st Army Corps who have reached the end of their terms of military service. The Russian MoD will likely attempt to install its own conventional officers into these units.

The Kremlin continues to recruit forces within radical online groups. A prominent Russian news aggregator published a video on February 24 promoting the Russian Espanyola volunteer battalion comprised of Russian soccer hooligan fan clubs.[58] The Espanyola volunteer battalion has been reportedly operating in Ukraine since fall 2022 under the command of Stanislav Orlov who had previously led the Horlivka reconnaissance company since 2014.

A Russian source indicated that convicts are fighting within the DNR units in eastern Ukraine. A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger denied reports that convicts within the DNR “Somalia” battalion deserted to Rostov Oblast.[59] The milblogger claimed that those individuals were mobilized servicemen, claiming that convicts that fight within Somalia achieve “good results.”

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 are exploiting Ukrainian children from Mariupol as propaganda to falsely portray Russia as the savior of occupied areas. Russian opposition outlet Important Stories reported on February 24 that Russian soldier Yuri “Angel” Gagarin, whom Russian sources claim saved over 300 children in Mariupol, and three Ukrainian children travel to multiple propaganda events, including the Luzhniki Stadium rally in Moscow on February 22, in which the children thanked Gagarin for saving them.[60] Gagarin also claimed that Russian forces have a duty to protect children in Donbas and Mariupol, portraying the children as Russian rather than Ukrainian. Important Stories noted that six children whom Gagarin reportedly saved and who were featured at the Luzhniki rally survived the siege of Mariupol, and many were either separated from or lost relatives due to the conflict and subsequent forced removals from occupied Ukraine.

Significant activity in Belarus (ISW assesses that a Russian or Belarusian attack into northern Ukraine in early 2023 is extraordinarily unlikely and has thus restructured this section of the update. It will no longer include counter-indicators for such an offensive.

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, but these are not indicators that Russian and Belarusian forces are preparing for an imminent attack on Ukraine from Belarus. ISW will revise this text and its assessment if it observes any unambiguous indicators that Russia or Belarus is preparing to attack northern Ukraine.)

The Belarusian Ministry of Defense amplified a video posted by Belarusian-state affiliated outlet VoenTV claiming cadets at the Integrated Training Center are mastering new types of equipment, including Tochka-U and Iskander missile systems.[61]

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://www.wsj.com/articles/natos-biggest-european-members-float-defens...

[2] https://isw.pub/UkrWar011423 ; https://isw.pub/UkrWar011123 ; https:...

[3] https://president.gov dot by/ru/events/aleksandr-lukashenko-28-fevralya-2-marta-sovershit-gosudarstvennyy-vizit-v-kitayskuyu-narodnuyu-respubliku

[4] https://president.gov dot by/ru/events/aleksandr-lukashenko-28-fevralya-2-marta-sovershit-gosudarstvennyy-vizit-v-kitayskuyu-narodnuyu-respubliku

[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/02/24/china-russia...

[6] https://www.spiegel dot de/international/world/the-war-in-ukraine-china-is-reportedly-negotiating-with-russia-to-supply-kamikaze-drones-a-13909157-4740-4f84-830e-fb3c69bc1dff?sara_ecid=soci_upd_KsBF0AFjflf0DZCxpPYDCQgO1dEMph

[7] https://www.reuters.com/world/not-rational-china-negotiate-outcome-ukrai...

[8] https://t.me/pushilindenis/3216  

[9] https://t.me/pushilindenis/3216  

[10] https://www.interfax dot ru/world/887696; https://t.me/modmilby/23719 ; https://t.me/pul_1/8301 ;

[11] https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/what-russias-failed-coercion-of...

[12] https://t.me/ovdinfolive/18754

[13] https://zona dot media/article/2023/02/24/year-of-protests

[14] https://t.me/anatoly_nesmiyan/7929

[15] https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/03/07/russia-criminalizes-independent-war-.... ; https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/how-russia-is-applying-new-laws-sti...

[16] https://meduza dot io/news/2023/02/25/zyat-shoygu-postavil-layk-pod-antivoennym-postom-yuriya-dudya-prigozhin-predlozhil-poymat-ego-i-otpravit-na-boevye-deystviya

[17] https://t.me/Prigozhin_hat/2724

[18] https://t.me/grey_zone/17395; https://t.me/m0sc0wcalling/20303

[19]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0frSSJPjh7MrsQZzAGXY...

[20] https://t.me/luhanskaVTSA/8898

[21] https://twitter.com/SerDer_Daniels/status/1629395665640882176?s=20; htt...

[22] https://t.me/russkiy_opolchenec/35916

[23]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0frSSJPjh7MrsQZzAGXY...

[24] https://t.me/luhanskaVTSA/8898

[25] https://t.me/milinfolive/97370

[26]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0frSSJPjh7MrsQZzAGXY...

[27] https://twitter.com/EdsenTheWeather/status/1629530932490149888?s=20 ; ...

[28] https://t.me/rybar/43963  ; https://t.me/readovkanews/53555; https:/...  

[29] https://t.me/vrogov/7854  ; https://t.me/rybar/43973

[30] https://t.me/boris_rozhin/79072; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/45652

[31] https://t.me/rus_bakhmut/15912 ; https://t.me/milinfolive/97367 ; ht...

[32] https://t.me/wargonzo/11093 ; https://t.me/rybar/43973

[33] https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1629237419944951810; https://twi...

[34] https://www.facebook.com/DPSUkraine/videos/538649155035674  

[35] https://t.me/wargonzo/11093; https://t.me/boris_rozhin/79072; https://...

[36]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0frSSJPjh7MrsQZzAGXY...

[37] https://twitter.com/SerDer_Daniels/status/1629373762603819008?s=20 ; h...

[38] https://t.me/wargonzo/11093

[39] https://t.me/rybar/43969  

[40] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5vvrb1YsqU; https://suspilne dot media/396623-dodatkovi-leopardi-dla-ukraini-es-pogodili-sankcii-proti-rf-367-den-vijni-onlajn/

[41] https://t.me/wargonzo/11106

[42] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5vvrb1YsqU; https://suspilne dot media/396623-dodatkovi-leopardi-dla-ukraini-es-pogodili-sankcii-proti-rf-367-den-vijni-onlajn/

[43] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2023/02/25/okupanty-zdijsnyuyut-nastupalni-diyi-bez-pidtrymky-bronetehniky-oleksij-dmytrashkivskyj/

[44] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2023/02/25/okupanty-zdijsnyuyut-nastupalni-diyi-bez-pidtrymky-bronetehniky-oleksij-dmytrashkivskyj/

[45] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2023/02/25/okupanty-zdijsnyuyut-nastupalni-diyi-bez-pidtrymky-bronetehniky-oleksij-dmytrashkivskyj/

[46] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[47] https://t.me/voin_dv/1861

[48] https://t.me/wargonzo/11093

[49] https://gur dot gov.ua/content/vrode-dolzhno-byt-u-nas-nastuplenye-a-dolbiat-po-nam.html

[50] https://suspilne dot media/396950-na-livoberezzi-hersonsini-rosijski-vijska-oblastovuut-svoi-pozicii-sered-miscevogo-naselenna-gumenuk/

[51] https://t.me/dnipropetrovskaODA/3306; https://t.me/mykola_lukashuk/3608; https://t.me/vilkul/2808; https://t.me/rybar/43966; https://t.me/vrogo... https://t.me/zoda_gov_ua/16990; https://t.me/zoda_gov_ua/17008; https:... https://t.me/khersonskaODA/3974; https://www.facebook.com/sergey.khlan/posts/pfbid02DFQfBgBpk3jhMUBBNnxL2...

[52] https://t.me/mediazzzona/10755

[53] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass...

[54] https://t.me/idelrealii/25321

[55] https://itsmycity-ru dot cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/itsmycity.ru/amp/2022-10-17/spisok-pogibshih-vovremya-specoperacii-mobilizovannyh-zhitelej-sverdlovskoj-oblasti; https://notes.citeam.org/mobilization-feb-23-24; https://t.me/omsk_ogo/...

[56] https://t.me/strelkovii/4058; https://t.me/strelkovii/4059  

[57]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0frSSJPjh7MrsQZzAGXY...

[58] https://t.me/readovkanews/53511 ; https://t.me/vladlentatarsky/19549  

[59] https://t.me/wargonzo/11103

[60] https://storage.googleapis dot com/istories/news/2023/02/24/na-kontserte-v-luzhnikakh-deti-blagodarili-rossiiskuyu-armiyu-za-spasenie-vazhnie-istorii-nashli-etikh-detei/index.html

[61] https://t.me/modmilby/23648

Tags

Ukraine Project

File Attachments: 

ISW LOGO FINAL ACRONYM NAME_ISW LOGO FINAL ACRONYM NAME CMYK.png

Donetsk Battle Map Draft February 25,2023.png

DraftUkraineCoTFebruary25,2023.png

Kherson-Mykolaiv Battle Map Draft February 25,2023.png

Zaporizhia Battle Map Draft February 25,2023.png

Kharkiv Battle Map Draft February 25,2023.png

6. Transactional vs. Transformational Recruits

Transactional vs. Transformational Recruits

By Brandon Sanders

https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/transactional-vs-transformational-recruits

“Why do the support MOSs tend to have the most issues?” my battalion commander asked me. It took me a second to formulate an answer from the years of work as a chaplain, advanced education, and untold study hours concerning the human condition and military life.

“I have no idea.”

My analysis warranted a shoulder shrug from him, but my lack of understanding of something so basic nearly drove me insane. Why do our cooks, fuelers, mechanics, and other non-combat arms Soldiers tend to contribute an untold amount of workload to the Soldier support structure of the Army?

Trying to understand why the Soldiers sitting on my couch were much more likely to work in supply and not the infantry became an obsession for me. They weren’t recruited differently. The combat support and service support jobs were generally easier for the same pay. As a national guard battalion, they even came from the same communities.

So what was driving the trend? Why is it always this way, no matter what unit I served in? Even when I was a crew chief on active duty, all of our DUIs, criminal activity, and wild sex shenanigans seemed to come from our support company.

Why?

Paying Attention to Counselings

I then started to examine why people came to see me as their battalion chaplain. At the time, we were a Stryker Infantry battalion augmented with cavalry scouts and a battery of field artillery. I had a very interesting group to learn from, to say the least.

The first thing I noticed confirmed the question itself. The most underrepresented MOS I had coming to my office was the infantry. This seems crazy since the vast majority of Soldiers we had were infantry, and you would expect that they would make up the majority of my counseling practice.

However, I can only think of a few that darkened my door. Most of them simply wanted life guidance. They wanted to talk about an issue that they were afraid would make them look weak, or they didn’t trust their peers to give them sound advice.

On the other hand, the vast majority of the counselings that came from our support company and other support personnel is the kind of thing that makes me rethink being a chaplain. Child abuse, neglect, dubious moral decisions, and adherence to toxic ideologies weighed heavy on my couch and on my heart.

There was a clear difference between the two. If you were in combat arms, you either didn’t talk about the toxic environment you came from, or you were blessed to avoid that world altogether. However, if you came from supply, maintenance, or some sort of administration-type role, your chances of experiencing the worst humanity has to offer at an early age were very high.

Maslow's Hierarchy

I needed some way to verify what I was picking up on. Luckily, I was also on another quest to understand morale. That led me to survey the formation with bemoaned “morale surveys” in an attempt to quantify our formation's morale level so it could be properly analyzed.

I simply needed a line of questions our Soldiers could respond to that would help me understand why they joined the Army in the first place. Since the Army allows you to choose your MOS from the start, this would illuminate the motivations for selecting their MOS as well.

If you have ever taken a psychology class, you have heard about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The premise is pretty simple, human motivation starts at their most basic needs and progresses to the more complex and abstract needs. The person without food isn’t too concerned with their identity or purpose. They just want to eat.

So I constructed a question concerning why they joined the Army. It prompted them to select a statement that best reflected why they joined. On the lower end of Maslow’s hierarchy, the option of “I joined the Army because I needed food, water, shelter, etc.” was available. The questions progressed through the hierarchy and culminated with the self-actualization option of “I joined the Army to become something.”

My theory was pretty simple. Those who joined out of adverse backgrounds would seek “a way out.” They would get in our formation and bring the trauma of their childhood with them. Those escaping the foster care system, abusive situations, and neglect would best harmonize with the lower end of the spectrum.

However, those that came into the Army wanting to serve the idea of “being a Soldier” would gravitate toward the other end of the spectrum. Those with fantasies of being Solid Snake, James Bond, or Rambo would select “I want to become something.”

The results were astonishing.

Most of those in the line companies selected the option “I joined the Army to become something.” Without fail, the combat arms Soldiers had joined without the motivation for money, shelter, or escape. Instead, they were there to live out childhood fantasies, prove to themselves they had what it took, and confirm a warrior identity.

However, the support personnel in those companies, our support company, and headquarters Soldiers nearly always selected something on the lower end of Maslow’s Hierarchy. They weren’t all focused on acquiring basic needs, but they were far from trying to self-actualize.

Adverse Childhood Experiences

My wife has long since worked in the foster care system as a licensor. That presents me with a unique view into that system and the science that is leveraged to understand the environments that children are removed from.

One tool that is frequently used to determine if a person has experienced trauma in their past is the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) quiz. This is a simple, ten-question quiz in which you answer yes or no to each question. The “yes” answers are totaled at the end of the quiz. Any score over a 4 indicates a higher proclivity toward physical and mental health issues in adulthood.

I included the ACEs questions at the end of the survey. I hypothesized that the support Soldiers would tally a much higher aggregated ACEs score than the combat arms Soldiers. The answers I got were much, much more compelling. 

I was wrong.

The support company responded with a whopping, consistent “0” to the ACEs quiz, while the combat arms companies were all over the place. This makes a much more compelling answer than if they had come back with a solid 5 or 6.

Now, I knew the people responding to the quiz very well. They would also stop me in the chow hall, our office hallways, or on the street and ask me, “what’s up with the weird survey questions.” Those who wanted to talk to me about it outright lied on the quiz.

 From counselings, I knew they nearly maxed out the ACEs index but responded with 0 and had an emotional reaction to the quiz itself. It was an eye-opening result.

Not only did it confirm that they had come from an adverse childhood, despite their reluctance to respond to the quiz, but it also unveiled something more interesting. They didn’t trust our organization, the survey, or me with their childhood experiences.

Now, that could be because they were in denial. It could be because confirming it on the quiz is so embarrassing to them. It could be that I am a poor chaplain, and no one trusts me. I will allow for all those possibilities.

However, for an entire company to respond unanimously with “0” when their peers responded honestly is compelling.

So What?

The support company were transactional recruits. When we recruit someone like that, they will continually barter their time for benefits. That is until the trade becomes unacceptable for them. They also bring the trappings of someone deprived of basic human needs.

However, the combat arms Soldiers show up asking, “how do I become.” They are transformational recruits. When we recruit those people, we get people fighting for promotions, school opportunities, and the privilege of serving.

Recruiting the Right People

It is profound when we consider the implications of this on how we market to Soldiers. Army marketing almost always attempts to cajole people into enlisting by advertising material gain. Bonuses, free schools, and benefits are aimed at the lower end of Maslow’s hierarchy.

As we pump millions into advertising across multiple platforms, we must consider who we attract to our formation. While one of the most endearing things of American military service is the ability to ascend from poverty to unrestricted heights, we still have a country to defend.

By attracting those on the lower end of Maslow’s, we also are bringing in people with a high ACEs score. Those people are more likely to struggle with height and weight compliance, commit suicide, and consume support resources at an astonishing rate.

However, if our recruiting messaging transmits “become something” to future Soldiers, we are much more likely to recruit people who will enlist, re-enlist, and be value-added for their careers. A simple cost-to-benefit analysis would demand that Army advertise the opportunity to test itself against hardship rather than get an absurdly high enlistment bonus.

Despite the easy access to high numbers of people showing up for the benefits, advertising for military service should take the more challenging path of finding the right people instead of just people.

Trust, Morale, and Lethality

If we have learned anything from the war in Ukraine, it is this: the will to fight matters. If you are a student of warfare, you will be able to think of many examples of how the will of a select few stopped better-equipped, vastly more numerous, and more experienced armies dead in their tracks.

The critical distinctive in all those examples has been, and always will be, their morale level. While the discussion of morale is beyond the scope of this article, suffice it to say that morale is best understood as the level of trust that exists in an organization.

A quick study of morale will undoubtedly land you reviewing JFC Fuller’s Foundation of the Science of War. Fuller would submit that winning in the moral sphere of war depends on a soldier's trust that he will be protected, helped, well-equipped, fed, paid, and remembered.

As a young sergeant, I was taught that the “five things that affect morale are meals, mail, military justice, pay, and billets.” All of those are functions of trust. I trust you will pay me, feed me, treat me fairly, and let me have a reasonable level of comfort and communication. That old board question is brilliant.

When we consider the result of the ACEs survey, we can see the support company simply had no trust in the organization. That’s a severe problem. If they tend to be untrusting, then building trust in the organization may not be achievable.

The recruitment of people with a very high ACEs score could be a chink in the armor of the American military machine.

Looking Forward

For several reasons, the Army is wrestling with recruitment shortfalls. As with many problems in the military, the tendency is to “whip out the money gun” and shoot the problem right in the face. However, we need to be very careful with doing that in this context.

Simply flooding the internet and airwaves with promises of $50k bonuses and a life of benefits may only set us up for failure in the next conflict. Instead, we should look at how to tailor our communication and Soldier experience to let our future warriors become what they truly want to be.

American Heroes.

About the Author(s)

Brandon Sanders

Chaplain (CPT) Brandon Sanders is the chaplain for 3-161 IN in the Washington National Guard. He holds a BS in Business Economics and a Master of Divinity for Liberty University. He has 27 months of combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has also completed one rotation through Enhanced Forward Prescence-Poland. As a freelance writer, he has been published in various outdoors and military publications. You can connect with him at bbsanders.com.

Website bbsanders.com 

LinkedIn Link

Instagram @bbsanders

7. Ukraine's Banksy stamps feature art of Putin in judo match

Ukraine's Banksy stamps feature art of Putin in judo match

BBC · by Menu

• Published
• 13 hours ago
• 
  

Image source, Getty Images

Image caption,

The new stamps depict a man resembling Russian President Vladimir Putin being flipped during a judo match with a young boy

Ukraine has issued postage stamps featuring a mural by renowned UK graffiti artist Banksy to mark the first anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion.

The mural depicts a man resembling Russian President Vladimir Putin being flipped during a judo match with a young boy.

The original art is on a house that was devastated by Russian shelling in the town of Borodyanka, near the capital Kyiv.

A phrase with an abbreviated expletive addressing the Russian leader has been added to the bottom left corner of the stamps.

Mr Putin is a judo black belt and an admirer of the martial art.

Many Ukrainians see Banksy's mural as a metaphor of Ukraine's fierce resistance to the Russian invasion, which began on 24 February 2022.

Queues were reported in Kyiv on Friday as residents rushed to buy the new stamps from the main post office, Holovposhtamt.

"It's a very cool gesture for the world to understand Ukraine, that we remain in the spotlight," Maxime, 26, told the AFP news agency.

She added that she was delighted to see a "first stamp from one of Banksy's works".

Media caption,

Watch: Banksy releases footage of his art in Ukraine

Banksy has produced art works on buildings in several Ukrainian towns that have been among the worst-hit during the ongoing war.

Borodyanka was seized by Russian troops in the first few days of the invasion. After the town was recaptured in the spring, Ukrainian officials accused the Russians of committing mass war crimes there.

This followed the discovery of hundreds of bodies of Ukrainian civilians in mass graves in areas around Kyiv. Some had their hands tied and had apparently been shot at close range.

Russia denies killing civilians, and - without offering any evidence - says Ukraine staged the scenes.

BBC · by Menu

8. In Pursuit of a General Theory of Proxy Warfare

You can download the 26 page report HERE.

In Pursuit of a General Theory of Proxy Warfare 

by Major Amos C. Fox, U.S. Army

"PREFACE. In recent years, the U.S. Army has routinely found itself in wars being waged through intermediaries, or proxy forces. At the same time, the Army does not speak frankly about these proxy wars but instead speaks indirectly about the character of these environments and its relationship with its partnered force. It does so by arguing that those environments are one in which it operates by, with and through partners in a security force assistance capacity in pursuit of common objectives. While this approach softens the coarseness of proxy warfare, it also degrades understanding of proxy warfare by not speaking frankly about its environmental and

relational character. In examining proxy warfare, one finds that it is dominated by a principal-actor dynamic, power relationships and the tyranny of time. Taking those ideas a step further, this examination yields two models of proxy warfare—the transactional model and the exploitative model. The goal of setting forth this theory of proxy warfare is to generate better conceptual understanding, allowing the U.S. Army to more effectively manipulate proxy environments toward its own ends."

https://www.ausa.org/sites/default/files/publications/LWP-123-In-Pursuit-of-a-General-Theory-of-Proxy-Warfare.pdf

9. Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Agency Now Says

Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Agency Now Says

Energy Department’s revised assessment is based on new intelligence

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a?mod=hp_lead_pos1

By Michael R. GordonFollow

 and Warren P. StrobelFollow

Feb. 26, 2023 7:00 am ET

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.

The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office.

The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.

A nurse cared for a patient at a California intensive-care unit in May 2020 as Covid-19 continued to spread across the U.S.

PHOTO: ALLISON ZAUCHA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.

The Energy Department made its judgment with “low confidence,” according to people who have read the classified report.

The FBI previously came to the conclusion that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak in 2021 with “moderate confidence” and still holds to this view.

The FBI employs a cadre of microbiologists, immunologists and other scientists and is supported by the National Bioforensic Analysis Center, which was established at Fort Detrick, Md., in 2004 to analyze anthrax and other possible biological threats.

U.S. officials declined to give details on the fresh intelligence and analysis that led the Energy Department to change its position. They added that while the Energy Department and the FBI each say an unintended lab leak is most likely, they arrived at those conclusions for different reasons.

The updated document underscores how intelligence officials are still putting together the pieces on how Covid-19 emerged. More than one million Americans have died in the pandemic that began more than three years ago.

The National Intelligence Council, which conducts long-term strategic analysis, and four agencies, which officials declined to identify, still assess with “low confidence” that the virus came about through natural transmission from an infected animal, according to the updated report.

The updated report was completed by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office earlier this year.

PHOTO: JOSE LUIS MAGANA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency that officials wouldn’t name remain undecided between the lab-leak and natural-transmission theories, the people who have read the classified report said.

Despite the agencies’ differing analyses, the update reaffirmed an existing consensus between them that Covid-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program, the people who have read the classified report said.

A senior U.S. intelligence official confirmed that the intelligence community had conducted the update, whose existence hasn’t previously been reported. This official added that it was done in light of new intelligence, further study of academic literature and consultation with experts outside government.

The update, which is less than five pages, wasn’t requested by Congress. But lawmakers, particularly House and Senate Republicans, are pursuing their own investigations into the origins of the pandemic and are pressing the Biden administration and the intelligence community for more information.

Officials didn’t say if an unclassified version of the update would be issued.

The Covid-19 virus first circulated in Wuhan, China, no later than November 2019, according to the U.S. 2021 intelligence report. The pandemic’s origin has been the subject of vigorous, sometimes partisan debate among academics, intelligence experts and lawmakers.

David Relman, a Stanford University microbiologist who has argued for a dispassionate investigation into the pandemic’s beginnings, welcomed word of the updated findings.

“Kudos to those who are willing to set aside their preconceptions and objectively re-examine what we know and don’t know about Covid origins,” said Dr. Relman, who has served on several federal scientific-advisory boards. “My plea is that we not accept an incomplete answer or give up because of political expediency.”

The Energy Department revised its assessment of the origins of Covid-19, according to an updated U.S. intelligence report.

PHOTO: ERIC LEE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

An Energy Department spokesman declined to discuss details of its assessment but wrote in a statement that the agency “continues to support the thorough, careful, and objective work of our intelligence professionals in investigating the origins of COVID-19, as the President directed.”

The FBI declined to comment.

China, which has placed limits on investigations by the World Health Organization, has disputed that the virus could have leaked from one of its labs and has suggested it emerged outside China.

The Chinese government didn’t respond to requests for comment about whether there has been any change in its views on the origins of Covid-19.

Some scientists argue that the virus probably emerged naturally and leapt from an animal to a human, the same pathway for outbreaks of previously unknown pathogens.

Intelligence analysts who have supported that view give weight to “the precedent of past novel infectious disease outbreaks having zoonotic origins,” the flourishing trade in a diverse set of animals that are susceptible to such infections, and their conclusion that Chinese officials didn’t have foreknowledge of the virus, the 2021 report said.

Yet no confirmed animal source for Covid-19 has been identified. The lack of an animal source, and the fact that Wuhan is the center of China’s extensive coronavirus research, has led some scientists and U.S. officials to argue that a lab leak is the best explanation for the pandemic’s beginning.

U.S. State Department cables written in 2018 and internal Chinese documents show that there were persistent concerns about China’s biosafety procedures, which have been cited by proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis.

NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP

What’s News

Catch up on the headlines, understand the news and make better decisions, free in your inbox every day.

Preview

Subscribe

Wuhan is home to an array of laboratories, many of which were built or expanded as a result of China’s traumatic experience with the initial severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, epidemic beginning in 2002. They include campuses of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, which produces vaccines.

An outbreak at a seafood market in Wuhan had initially been thought to be the source of the virus, but some scientists and Chinese public-health officials now see it as an example of community spread rather than the place where the first human infection occurred, the 2021 intelligence community report said.

In May 2021, President Biden told the intelligence community to step up its efforts to investigate the origins of Covid-19 and directed that the review draw on work by the U.S.’s national laboratories and other agencies. Congress, he said, would be kept informed of that effort.

The October 2021 report said that there was a consensus that Covid-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program. But it didn’t settle the debate over whether it resulted from a lab leak or came from an animal, saying that more information was needed from the Chinese authorities.

The U.S. intelligence community is made up of 18 agencies, including offices at the Energy, State and Treasury departments. Eight of them participated in the Covid-origins review, along with the National Intelligence Council.

Before that report, the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory prepared a study in May 2020 concluding that a lab-leak hypothesis was plausible and deserved further investigation.

The debate over whether Covid-19 might have escaped from a laboratory has been fueled by U.S. intelligence that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care.

A House Intelligence Committee report concluded last year that this disclosure didn’t strengthen either the lab-leak or the natural-origin theory as the researchers might have become sick with a seasonal flu. But some former U.S. officials say the sick researchers were involved in coronavirus research.

Lawmakers have sought to find out more about why the FBI assesses a lab leak was likely. In an Aug. 1 letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, requested that the FBI share the records of its investigation and asked if the bureau had briefed Mr. Biden on its findings.

In a Nov. 18 letter, FBI Assistant Director Jill Tyson said the agency couldn’t share those details because of Justice Department policy on preserving “the integrity of ongoing investigations.” She referred the senator to Ms. Haines’s office for information on what briefings were arranged for the president.

Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Warren P. Strobel at Warren.Strobel@wsj.com

10. Russia’s Descent into Warlordism

Excerpts:

Meanwhile, Putin’s dream of recreating the Russian empire and dominating Europe is now a shambles. He once described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” He then went about attempting to rebuild the Russian empire by invading Georgia in 2008, annexing Crimea and occupying parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014, propping up Alexander Lukashenko’s regime in Belarus as it came under threat from pro-democracy protesters in 2020, and conducting malign influence operations across Europe with the aim of keeping countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union within Russia’s sphere of influence.

Putin also dreamed of replacing the United States as the world’s superpower. He spent decades working toward that goal, most notably by meddling in US elections in 2016 and 2020. Russia “captured” Western elites, politicians, and officials in critical agencies in its bid to undermine the West from within and weaken any response to Russia’s increasingly egregious actions, such as the invasions, illegal annexations, and attempted, and in some cases successful, assassinations of critics on European soil using chemical weapons.

When he invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Putin had calculated that it would quickly collapse as a result of decades of Russian influence operations and the cultivation of political parties inside the country.

Putin miscalculated big time in Ukraine. The war has shaken Russian and unified the West. The big question now is, what happens next in Russia?

Russia’s Descent into Warlordism

As Putin’s army flounders in Ukraine, Russian warlords are flexing their muscles with a growing array of mercenary armies.

cepa.org · by Olga Lautman · February 21, 2023

Stung by a string of defeats in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has chosen to outsource the war to warlords and their mercenary armies. As these warlords gain power, rival groups are emerging to challenge them.

Russia’s irregular forces — most notoriously the Wagner Group, which musters around 50,000 men — not only form a key element of Russia’s invasion forces in Ukraine, they are increasingly, and unprecedentedly, engaging in verbal battles with the Russian state. This signals an erosion of the social order in Russia and its ultimate consequences are unclear.

The rise of one man in particular, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Soviet-era convict who helped organize Russian interference in US elections, has caught widespread attention. So far, Prigozhin has had Putin’s support. His Wagner Group has provided plausible deniability for Putin in Syria and Africa, as well as Ukraine.

Another warlord, Ramzan Kadyrov, the notorious Chechen leader, and self-publicist, has also contributed an “impressive number” of soldiers to the war in Ukraine. His ambitions don’t end there — he said on February 19 that he planned to follow Wagner’s example. “When my service to the state is completed, I seriously plan to compete with our dear brother Yevgeny Prigozhin and create a private military company. I think it will all work out.”

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry Intelligence Directorate, citing a decree signed by Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, reported that the Russian oil giant Gazprom also has plans to launch a mercenary army. While such a move is illegal under Russia’s constitution, that seems to have had little effect on Wagner Group.

With wartime losses piling up, warlords have criticized the Russian state’s handling of the war, causing unease in some quarters of the Kremlin. Prigozhin has criticized Russia’s military leaders, oligarchs, elites, and even members of Putin’s inner circle; Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu is a notable target. Prigozhin has also been locked in a high-profile dispute with Igor Girkin, a former Federal Security Service (FSB) operative who played a key role in the 2014 annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbas. Girkin criticized Prigozhin’s “political ambitions.”

Speculation about Prigozhin’s ultimate political ambitions has had Russia’s intelligence services scrambling to cut him down to size. While Putin remains largely hidden from public view, attending only carefully orchestrated events, and traveling on an armored train, Prigozhin is on the frontlines with his mercenaries. Sergei Markov, a pro-Putin political analyst, told the New York Times officials had instructed Moscow’s talking heads not to “excessively promote Prigozhin and Wagner.”

A power struggle seems underway, with Prigozhin stating on February 21 that the defense ministry’s refusal to arm and equip his men inside Ukraine amounted to treason. He said: “There is simply direct opposition going on which is nothing else but an attempt to destroy Wagner PMC (private military company). This can be equated to high treason now when Wagner PMC are fighting for Bakhmut losing hundreds of their fighters every day.”

Get the Latest

Get regular emails and stay informed about our work

Meanwhile, Prigozhin is finding it harder to recruit Russian prisoners to use as cannon fodder — a tactic the Ministry of Defence (MoD) quietly adopted late last fall after struggling to recruit Russians. Around 700,000 Russians, many of them male and subject to conscription fled the country following Putin’s “partial mobilization” call.

Russia’s steady losses in Ukraine — now estimated to be around 200,000 casualties including perhaps 50,000 dead — have left its normally well-oiled propaganda machine in disarray. Divisions within the defense ministry, intelligence services, mercenaries, and elites are on full display. It is not just the warlords who are critical of the state. Each battlefield loss elicits fresh criticism of the MoD’s ineptitude from Russia’s military bloggers, elites, and some in Putin’s inner circle. Girkin derided Russia’s military leadership as “complete cretins” after Russian troops suffered heavy losses in Vuhledar, a coal mining town in the Donetsk region. Such public criticism was unthinkable in the past.

The independent media outlet, Meduza, citing sources, wrote about growing frustrations among the elites: “There is an understanding — we lost the real war. People begin to think about how to live on, what place they would like to take in the future, what bets to make, what to play.”

Meanwhile, Putin’s dream of recreating the Russian empire and dominating Europe is now a shambles. He once described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” He then went about attempting to rebuild the Russian empire by invading Georgia in 2008, annexing Crimea and occupying parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014, propping up Alexander Lukashenko’s regime in Belarus as it came under threat from pro-democracy protesters in 2020, and conducting malign influence operations across Europe with the aim of keeping countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union within Russia’s sphere of influence.

Putin also dreamed of replacing the United States as the world’s superpower. He spent decades working toward that goal, most notably by meddling in US elections in 2016 and 2020. Russia “captured” Western elites, politicians, and officials in critical agencies in its bid to undermine the West from within and weaken any response to Russia’s increasingly egregious actions, such as the invasions, illegal annexations, and attempted, and in some cases successful, assassinations of critics on European soil using chemical weapons.

When he invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Putin had calculated that it would quickly collapse as a result of decades of Russian influence operations and the cultivation of political parties inside the country.

Putin miscalculated big time in Ukraine. The war has shaken Russian and unified the West. The big question now is, what happens next in Russia?

Olga Lautman is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), the host of the Kremlin File podcast , and an analyst/researcher focusing on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe. 

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.

Read More From Europe's Edge

CEPA's online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America.

Read More

cepa.org · by Olga Lautman · February 21, 2023

11. South Korea to conduct radiation exposure tests on North Korean escapees

South Korea to conduct radiation exposure tests on North Korean escapees

Exactly 881 escapees who resettled in the South lived near the Punggye-ri nuclear testing site

By Jeong Eun Lee for RFA Korean

2023.02.24

rfa.org

South Korea has announced it will conduct radiation exposure testing on people who once lived near North Korea’s Punggye-ri nuclear testing site prior to escaping the country and resettling in the South.

There are 881 people who fit the criteria for testing because they fled North Korea after its first nuclear test in 2006, Lee Hyo-jung, a spokesperson for South Korea’s Ministry of Unification told reporters on Friday. The ministry will select candidates for testing from among those who consent, she said.

The ministry is concerned that radiation may have leaked from the site in northeastern North Korea after six underground nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017, putting people who lived near the facility at risk.

It previously tested 40 North Korean escapees who lived near Punggye-ri in 2017 and 2018, detecting traces of exposure in 9 of them, but said no causal relationship could be determined, and there were no cases of radiation exposure that required medical treatment.

“At the time, there was no control group, and the number of samples was limited,” said Lee. “There was insufficient information to identify confounding variables such as smoking and heavy metal poisoning, making it difficult to generalize the results. We are pushing ahead with a full-scale investigation to obtain meaningful results.”

The exposure test will be conducted in parallel with a general health checkup for the escapees, she said.

Potential risk

Hundreds of thousands of people, including in South Korea, Japan and China, are potentially at risk from radioactive materials from the Punggye-ri nuclear testing site, a recent report by the Seoul-based Transitional Justice Working Group NGO said.

The report, published Monday, showed the risk of radioactive materials in water leaking from the site, by mapping the possible dissemination to people living nearby, then spreading through agricultural and marine products smuggled to China, then possibly exported to South Korea and Japan.

The report estimated that if 25% of the 1.08 million people living in eight cities and counties near Punggye-ri testing site were exposed, then the number of affected people would be 270,000. If 50% are affected, the number jumps to 540,000.

“While there has been a tendency to discuss North Korea’s nuclear program solely as a security issue, this report is significant for confirming that North Korea’s nuclear tests threaten the right to life and the right to health of not only the North Korean people, but also of those in South Korea and other neighboring countries,” said Hubert Younghwan Lee, executive director of the Transitional Justice Working Group.

Ethan Hee-Seok Shin, the group’s legal analyst, urged South Korea to test the 881 escapees who lived near Punggye-ri and said North Korea should launch an investigation after results are available.

According to the Ministry of Unification, around 33,000 North Koreans have settled in South Korea since 1998, but arrivals have decreased significantly since 2020, likely due to border restrictions in North Korea and China during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

rfa.org

12. Ex-Washington adviser calls for US naval visits

Sun, Feb 26, 2023 page1

Ex-Washington adviser calls for US naval visits

JUST A START: The US should also integrate Taiwan into collective defense organizations in Asia, such as with Australia, Japan and South Korea, Bolton said

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2023/02/26/2003795051

Former US national security adviser John Bolton on Friday reiterated a call for US naval visits to the Port of Kaohsiung, as he affirmed the Pentagon’s reported plan to send more troops to Taiwan.

The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reported that the US is increasing its small contingent of soldiers in Taiwan to train local forces.

The US military presence in Taiwan would grow from 100 to 200 troops, up from about 30 a year earlier, it said.

Former US national security adviser John Bolton speaks to journalist Michael Duffy in a Washington Post Live interview on Friday.

Photo: screen grab from Washington Post Live livestream

In response, a Pentagon spokesman said that “we don’t have a comment on specific operations, engagements or training, but I would highlight that our support for, and defense relationship with, Taiwan remains aligned against the current threat posed by the People’s Republic of China.”

In a conversation with Washington Post journalist Michael Duffy on the newspaper’s Washington Post Live platform posted on Friday, Bolton said the Pentagon was making the right move by increasing the US’ troop presence in Taiwan.

“I think that deployment was a correct decision, but I think there’s a lot more to do,” he said.

“I think there has to be a lot more not simply in increasing Taiwan’s military capabilities, but also showing increased American support. I think the time for strategic ambiguity over Taiwan has gone. I would suggest home porting American naval vessels in Kaohsiung harbor in southern Taiwan, putting more Americans in to train and assist Taiwanese forces,” he said.

“And over the long term, which isn’t all that long, but over the next several years, recognizing that Taiwan is an independent country,” he added.

“I think we should begin to integrate Taiwan into more elaborate collective defense organizations in East and South Asia, with Japan, South Korea, Australia and others, because the more Taiwan is linked in with others who worry about China’s belligerence, the greater the chance that we can deter any Chinese menace toward Taiwan,” he said.

Separately, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo also responded positively to the Wall Street Journal report.

“Sending more troops to Taiwan is a start,” he wrote on Twitter yesterday. “Now, we should do the right thing and recognize Taiwan as a free and sovereign nation.”

13. Putin Wanted to Lead a Great Power. Instead, He Shrunk Russia’s World.

Excerpts:

Putin launched this war hoping to reincorporate Ukraine into the Russian state and gather in other lands which, he believes, Russia has a right to rule. Russia would emerge from the conflict a larger, stronger power with a sphere of influence in its neighborhood, regaining aspects of great power status which were lost when the USSR collapsed.

But Putin will emerge from this war no longer the leader of a great power. His status as a competent leader has been diminished by his army’s poor performance and by the West’s isolation of him. Russia may still have the largest number of nuclear warheads and a veto on the U.N. Security Council, but it will have lost its seat at the table of global leadership.

Opinion | Putin Wanted to Lead a Great Power. Instead, He Shrunk Russia’s World.

Opinion by ANGELA STENT

02/26/2023 07:00 AM EST

Angela Stent is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest.

Politico

Magazine

Opinion | Putin Wanted to Lead a Great Power. Instead, He Shrunk Russia’s World.

In many ways, Russia’s president has already lost his war on Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, near the Kremlin Wall during the national celebrations of the "Defender of the Fatherland Day" in Moscow on Feb. 23, 2023. | Pavel Bednyakov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP

Opinion by Angela Stent

02/26/2023 07:00 AM EST

Angela Stent is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest.

One year into his war with Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s world has shrunk. He’s lost his claim to be a global leader. Prior to his launching the invasion of Ukraine a year ago, the world treated Russia as a great power with a seat at the table on major international issues. Relations with the West may have been tense, but European and American officials continued to engage with Russia. Russia was an energy superpower with the geopolitical heft that went with that, and Putin had just established a “no limits” partnership with China’s President Xi. And Ukrainians were divided over how they viewed Russia.

What a difference a year has made. The devastation wreaked by Russians on the Ukrainian people has consolidated the entire country against them and ensured that Ukrainians will despise their large neighbor for a long time to come. Ukraine will emerge from this war with one of the most effective armies in Europe and with the prospect of European Union membership and close ties to NATO. Ukraine, as numerous officials reiterated at last weekend’s Munich Security Conference, will become part of the European family, the exact opposite of what Putin hoped to achieve with this war.

Russia’s relations with the West are broken and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Few Western leaders advocate engaging Russia anymore. And the collective West is united in its opposition to the war as it increases sanctions on Russia and severs economic ties. Russian officials are sanctioned, no longer welcome in many international fora. And Russian oligarchs have lost access to their homes and yachts in Europe.

Putin may have believed a year ago that Europeans were so dependent on Russian hydrocarbons that they would not jeopardize their access to them by opposing the war. But Europe has managed to wean itself from Russian oil and gas in a remarkably short time, jettisoning 50 years of energy interdependence. Russia will no longer have the geopolitical influence that had qualified it as an energy superpower even as it sets its sights on the Asian market.

Putin has closed the window on the West which his much-invoked favorite Tsar Peter the Great opened three centuries ago. But Russia’s ties with China remain strong. China repeats the Russian narrative about the West being responsible for the war, while indirectly criticizing Putin’s threats that Russia might use nuclear weapons. China does not want Russia to lose this war because of concerns that a leader who might succeed Putin might re-evaluate Russia’s ties to China. China needs Russia for ballast in this new era of great power competition. So China remains the anchor of Putin’s world, even as the relationship increasingly makes clear that Russia is the junior partner.

In one part of the world Russia is still a player. Since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, Putin has assiduously courted the developing world, the global South, and this part of his world has expanded in the past year. No country in Africa, the Middle East or Latin America has sanctioned Russia and some have abstained on United Nations resolutions condemning the invasion and subsequent annexation of four territories in Ukraine. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was recently in South Africa, where he and his South African counterpart agreed to conduct joint naval exercises with China this week. Russia’s influence on the African continent has grown this year with the mercenary group Wagner becoming increasingly active in supporting autocratic leaders and profiting from their ample natural resources. Many countries in the global south view the Russia-Ukraine war as a regional European conflict of little relevance to them and refuse to take sides. Ironically, given their own experience of colonialism, they do not view Russia as a colonial power seeking to restore its lost empire.

Putin’s world may have shrunk, but he has used this past year to consolidate his power at home. The poor performance of the Russian military and the significant casualties — over 200,000 killed or severely wounded — have not damaged his political position. As many as 1 million Russians have left the country in the past year, many of them coming from the most dynamic parts of the economy, but those that remain by and large support the war or are indifferent to it. Greater repression and jail time for those who dare to question the “special military operation,” plus an endless barrage of propaganda about Russia fighting “Nazis” and NATO in Ukraine, have acted as a disincentive to oppose the war. Unlike during the Soviet-Afghan war, there is no independent Soldiers’ Mothers committee to protest. When Putin met recently with the mothers of dead soldiers, the cold-blooded words he offered them was that it was better that their sons die as war heroes than drink themselves to death.

Putin has also made the Russian political elite accept the war by making clear that there is no alternative. Very few of them have left, perhaps out of fear about what might happen to them if they do. The rest, including those once known as pragmatic technocrats who favored ties to the West, have adapted to the war and its constraints. There is no obvious challenger to Putin. The Russian people have been told that Putin is the leader of great power fighting the West just as the USSR fought Nazi Germany in World War II and that Russia will prevail because, according to Putin, there’s no alternative. The degree of state control and repression which has grown in the last year, where anyone who dissents is branded a traitor, makes it unlikely that Russia’s fading international stature will backfire on him domestically.

Putin launched this war hoping to reincorporate Ukraine into the Russian state and gather in other lands which, he believes, Russia has a right to rule. Russia would emerge from the conflict a larger, stronger power with a sphere of influence in its neighborhood, regaining aspects of great power status which were lost when the USSR collapsed.

But Putin will emerge from this war no longer the leader of a great power. His status as a competent leader has been diminished by his army’s poor performance and by the West’s isolation of him. Russia may still have the largest number of nuclear warheads and a veto on the U.N. Security Council, but it will have lost its seat at the table of global leadership.

POLITICO

Politico

14. Putin’s myth-making glorifies Russia. Ours humiliates the West

We really need to reflect on this essay if we are going to be effective in strategic competition.

Conclusion:

Russia, in its mortification at having lost the Cold War, is seeking to revive a myth of past glory, at the same time as the West – having won the great argument – is mired in self-loathing. Where is that going to end, do you think?

COMMENT

Putin’s myth-making glorifies Russia. Ours humiliates the West

Advanced capitalist democracies have much to be proud of. Now, uniquely in world history, we are fabricating lies to denigrate our successes

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/25/putins-myth-making-glorifies-russia-humiliates-west/

JANET DALEY

25 February 2023 • 2:38pm

The mythology of Russia's new imperialism avoids references to the Soviet Union's dark past CREDIT: YURI KOCHETKOV/Shutterstock

When autocrats want to change the course of their country’s future they begin by taking control of the past. By setting their objectives – however outrageous they may actually be – in what appears to be a plausible historical trajectory they create a story (now called a “narrative”) which makes their own ambition justifiable. If this propaganda operation is conducted successfully, it can make even the most appalling crimes seem not just acceptable but necessary.

The mythology that underpins Russia’s new imperialism combines a resurrected medieval mission with 20th-century global paranoia – but neatly eliminates references to Soviet Russia’s own monstrous crimes. The starvation of whole swathes of the Ukrainian population by Stalin and the mass murder committed in the Gulags do not feature at all. The Putin fable is so tortuous and bizarre that it is difficult to believe that any contemporary population could be convinced by it – and yet the majority of today’s Russian population appear to accept it, along with the horrific consequences to which it leads.

Most oddly, much of the belief system that this new national identity involves comes directly from the Orthodox Church whose authority was, within living memory, criminalised in Russia. The saints and martyrs to whom Vladimir Putin now makes ostentatious obeisances were, during his time with the KGB, regarded as ludicrous fictional figures used by a wicked Tsarist tyranny to entrap the masses in superstition. In truth, that supposedly universal rejection of theology by Communist Russia may always have been misunderstood. A friend of mine who visited a major Soviet university in the 1960s told me that, inscribed over its front entrance were the words: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.” What is that, if not a form of displaced religious belief? Communism did not so much discard religion as replace it with a new conception of what was sacred and what was forbidden.

Absolutism remained – along with the idea that Russia as a nation had a unique moral obligation to preserve the nativist integrity of its people. Those who share its blood bond (and particularly its language) must be united with their brethren in the Motherland. If some of them happen, by accident or misfortune, to reside in what is technically another nation state, then that is a problem which must be overcome – by force if necessary.

This Russian revanchism is remarkably similar to Nazi Germany’s claims over the Sudetenland. The reclaiming of territory that once belonged to one country but has since become part of another is one of the oldest sources of war, possibly the very oldest. There is nothing very new here. With territory comes power and wealth. The loss of it – especially to a competitor state – means increased vulnerability, humiliation at home and abroad, and the possible collapse of a ruling regime. And, as it happens, some of the territory that Putin is attempting to seize for Russia is peculiarly useful to its economy and, in the case of Crimea, has played a significant role in Russian history.

This is really a very old kind of story: the sanctification of the history of a people whose collective memory must be reshaped into a tale of heroic resurgence with all the nasty bits left out.

What is – so far as I know – quite unprecedented is what the opponents of this aggressive campaign, our side, are doing to their history at precisely the same moment. While Putin tells the Russians that they have been, for centuries, the blameless victims of the world’s hostility, the West is teaching its young that they have inherited the fruits of evil – that the advantages which their political culture and economic system have provided are inherently tainted, that even their ineradicable genetic traits such as skin colour convey guilt and the need for endless self-abasement.

Instead of editing out the bad chapters in its history as Russia is doing to such spectacular effect, the West is perversely avoiding any recognition of the tremendous contributions it has made to improving the conditions of life through the spread of mass prosperity and personal freedom.

The reach of Western ideas around the world is recounted as an unrelieved story of wickedness, of relentless conquest and exploitation from which no one outside the rich of those imperial nations ever benefited. This is factually wrong and deeply pernicious. But these arguments about the colonial past have been going on for a long time. Now there is a new and more radical version of Western self-hatred. We, who are alive now, are not just responsible retroactively for what our ancestors may have done centuries ago. We are also actively culpable for what is happening right at this moment by living our modern lives – making use of the products and discoveries of industrialisation that are destroying the planet and therefore the futures of other less advanced peoples.

To atone for this, we must move backwards to a pre-modern time when we did not ravage the earth with our desire for unseasonal warmth, plentiful and varied food and travel beyond the narrow bounds of our birthplace, while fully expecting our descendants to lead ever more free and comfortable lives.

We have been ready and prepared to offer the means to achieve these things to less advantaged countries. Now, not only must we accept self-denial for ourselves – we must impose it on the world at large because this Western way of life is too dangerous to be propagated.

Where once the developing world might have expected to graduate to the standard of living we took for granted, it is now being told that the party is over: we will not give them a chance to experience life in the modern era, after all.

Russia, in its mortification at having lost the Cold War, is seeking to revive a myth of past glory, at the same time as the West – having won the great argument – is mired in self-loathing. Where is that going to end, do you think?

15.

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