Quotes of the day:
“To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”
- James Carse
"First of all, my persuasion is what really breeds violence is political differences. But because religion serves as the soul of community, it gets drawn into the fracas and turns up the heat."
- Huston Smith
“For some of us, politics means fighting for our right to exist”
- Scott Westerfeld, Shatter City
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 26 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. Putin Doesn’t Realize How Much Warfare Has Changed
3. With Captured Tanks, Ukraine Now Has More Armor Than When the War Began
4. Biden denounces Russian invasion, casting it as part of a decades-long attempt to crush democracies.
5. Russia's war in Ukraine is far from over
6. Why spies and veterans want to do more for Ukraine
7. Essential reading for understanding U.S.-Russia intelligence warfare
8. Opinion | The Insidious Effects of the Meme-ification of War
9. How Biden sparked a global uproar with nine ad-libbed words about Putin
10. Dollar reserve system frays with India-Russia currency deals
11. Why India, US don’t see eye to eye on Ukraine
12. Philippines reaching back to US as Duterte fades away
13. Momentous Changes in the U.S. Marine Corps’ Force Organization Deserve Debate
14. Russian generals are getting killed at an extraordinary rate
15. Russian troops’ tendency to talk on unsecured lines is proving costly
16. Ukrainian Farming Town Destroys Putin's Tank Assault - BBC - 3/22/2022
17. Young Ukrainian mums tell how they have taken up arms to defend Odesa
18. English-language military drills held (Taiwan)
19. Air Force creates new information warfare training detachment
20. Wagging the Dog: The Ten Commandments of Propaganda
21. How my F-16 crashed into the cuckoo’s nest: Battling the internal and external demons
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 26 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 26 (PUTIN'S WAR)
The Ukrainian General Staff reports that the Russian military is continuing efforts to replace personnel and equipment losses but struggling to do so. The General Staff claimed on March 25 that Russia has established a base in Russia’s Bryansk Oblast to repair and rehabilitate equipment pulled from strategic reserves.[2] The General Staff asserted that much of Russia’s reserve equipment is unusable or in very poor states of repair, with essential gear—including engines—stripped out of many vehicles. The General Staff added on March 26 that the Russians are attempting to refurbish old T-72 tanks as part of this effort.[3] The General Staff also claimed that the Russian military is lowering its standards for conscripts and recruits and has been forced to use a higher proportion of conscripts in combat as it has suffered losses among its professional soldiers.[4] We have no independent confirmation of these reports, but they are consistent with observed patterns of Russian operations and losses in Ukraine and with ISW’s earlier assessment of the state of the Russian personnel reserve system.[5]
Morale problems within the Russian military are becoming more serious and apparent. Reports that the soldiers of a Russian unit killed their brigade commander by running him over with a tank and, more recently, that the commander of the 13th Guards Tank Regiment of the 4th Guards Tank Division (1st Guards Tank Army) committed suicide likely indicate a general breakdown of morale even among first tier Russian combat units.[6]
The Russians continue to try to concentrate forces for renewed fighting around Kyiv, however. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on March 26 that additional Russian forces from the Eastern Military District were being sent into Ukraine at an unspecified location.[7] Eastern Military District forces have been engaged exclusively in the Kyiv and Chernihiv region.
We do not report in detail on the deliberate Russian targeting of civilian infrastructure and attacks on unarmed civilians, which are 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 forces are engaged in four primary efforts at this time:
- Main effort—Kyiv (comprised of three subordinate supporting efforts);
- Supporting effort 1—Kharkiv;
- Supporting effort 1a—Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts;
- Supporting effort 2—Mariupol; and
- Supporting effort 3—Kherson and advances northward and westward.
Main effort—Kyiv axis: Russian operations on the Kyiv axis are aimed at encircling the city from the northwest, west, and east.
Subordinate main effort along the west bank of the Dnipro
Russian forces did not attempt any major offensive operations west of the Dnipro in the past 24 hours but are continuing to fight for positions in Irpin and around Hostomel.[8] Russian forces deny Ukrainian reports that they have been surrounded at Hostomel Airfield.[9] We assess that Russian forces are not yet fully encircled, but Ukrainian forces have created a Russian salient that is exposed from several directions and apparently under continued pressure. Russian forces continue to dig in around northwestern Kyiv and to shell Ukrainian-held positions without conducting significant offensive operations.[10]
Subordinate supporting effort — Chernihiv and Sumy axis
Russian forces pushed into the town of Slavutych, about 35 kilometers west of Chernihiv, on March 26.[11] Residents of the town protested the Russian incursion, prompting Russian soldiers to fire into the air to disperse them.[12] Russian forces reportedly demanded that Ukraine withdraw Ukrainian police from Slavutych.[13] Russian operations in the area of Slavutych are likely intended to tighten the encirclement of Chernihiv and presumably force the city to surrender. The fall of Slavutych is unlikely to change the overall operational situation around Kyiv materially.
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv:
Ukrainian forces conducted a successful counterattack to regain control of the towns of Mala Rohan and Vilkhivka, roughly 20 kilometers east of Kharkiv city on March 25.[14] Russian forces continued shelling Kharkiv City but otherwise refrained from conducting significant operations in this area in the past 24 hours.[15]
Supporting Effort #1a—Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts:
Russian forces launched a limited ground offensive operation in an apparent effort to capture the towns of Popasna and Rubizhne on March 26, but without success according to the Ukrainian General Staff.[16] Russian forces regularly attack villages in this area with helicopter gunships according to social media sources.[17]
Supporting Effort #2—Mariupol:
Russian media claimed that Russian forces in Mariupol will soon “divide” the city, presumably along the east-west axis on which they have been attacking.[18] The Donetsk People’s Republic claimed that it opened its own police departments in occupied areas of Mariupol.[19] The Ukrainian General Staff noted the fighting in Mariupol but did not comment on the success of the most recent Russian offensive operations.[20] We have no independent verification of Russian claims, but they appear consistent with observed indicators from the battlefield and recent trends in the fighting.
Supporting Effort #3—Kherson and advances northward and westwards:
Russian forces did not conduct any offensive operations in the southern direction in the past 24 hours. The Ukrainian General Staff claimed on March 26 that the Russians have deployed all Rosgvardia units based in Crimea and/or located in Kherson, Donetsk, and Zaporizhiya Oblasts to suppress Ukrainian unrest in Kherson, Henichesk, Berdyansk, and some districts of Mariupol.[21] The General Staff further reported that the Russians are attempting to establish strict administrative and police regimes in these areas on March 26.[22] These reports appear to confirm statements by an unnamed US Department of Defense official that Kherson is no longer fully under Russian control.[23] There is no front line anywhere near Kherson City, so the assessment that the Russians no longer control it fully almost certainly rests on the existence of local Ukrainian partisan activity.
Immediate items to watch
·
Russian forces will likely capture Mariupol or force the city to capitulate within the coming weeks and have entered the city center;
·
Russian forces around Kyiv will likely continue efforts to hold against Ukrainian counter-attacks while also attempting to restart offensive operations on a limited scale;
·
Russian and proxy troops will continue efforts to seize the full territory of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, but will not likely make rapid progress in doing so.
[13] https://gazeta dot ua/articles/kiev-life/_rosijski-teroristi-vzyali-v-kilce-slavutich/1078501
2. Putin Doesn’t Realize How Much Warfare Has Changed
Putin is not the only one.
A sober conclusion:
Against all prewar expectations, though, a Russian military collapse also looks possible. A complete disintegration of morale could lead to a humiliating withdrawal, a potentially devastating result of Putin’s inability to part with the Soviet past.
Putin Doesn’t Realize How Much Warfare Has Changed
The Russian president’s obsession with World War II is hindering his invasion of Ukraine.
Otto von Bismarck once said that only a fool learns from his own mistakes. “I learn from other people’s,” the 19th-century German chancellor said. Astonishingly, the Russian army is repeating the past mistakes of its Soviet predecessor. In April 1945, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, under intense pressure from Stalin, sent his tank armies into Berlin without infantry support. Vladimir Putin’s forces not only made the same error; they even copied the way their forebears had attached odd bits of iron—including bed frames—to their tanks’ turrets in the hopes that the added metal would detonate anti-tank weapons prematurely. This did not save the Russian tanks. It simply increased their profile and attracted Ukrainian tank-hunting parties, just as the Soviet tanks in Berlin had drawn groups of Hitler Youth and SS, who attacked them with Panzerfausts.
The Russian president’s distorted obsession with history, especially with the “Great Patriotic War” against Germany, has skewed his political rhetoric with bizarre self-contradictions. It has clearly affected his military approach. Tanks were a great symbol of strength during the Second World War. That Putin can still see them that way defies belief. The vehicles have proved to be profoundly vulnerable to drones and anti-tank weapons in recent conflicts in Libya and elsewhere; Azerbaijan’s ability to destroy Armenian tanks easily was essential to its 2020 victory in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Yet Putin seems to have learned as little as he has forgotten. In August 1968, the Warsaw Pact forces entering Czechoslovakia were told by their political officers that they would be welcomed as liberators. They found themselves cursed, out of fuel, and hungry. Morale was shattered. Putin’s control of domestic media can hide the truth from most of the Russian population, but his conscripts, forced now to sign new contracts to turn them into volunteers, are all too aware of the reality.
His treatment of his own people is as pitiless as his treatment of his enemies. The army even brought a mobile crematorium to Ukraine to dispose of Russian casualties in order to reduce the body-bag count going home. Putin’s Soviet predecessors had a similar disregard for their troops’ feelings. In 1945, the Red Army faced a number of mutinies. Frequently treated with contempt by officers and political departments, soldiers were ordered out at night into no-man’s-land not to retrieve the bodies of fallen comrades, but to strip them of their uniforms for reuse by replacement troops.
Another old pattern repeating itself in Ukraine is the Russian army’s reliance on heavy guns. In World War II, the Red Army bragged about the power of its artillery, which it called “the god of war.” In the Berlin operation, Zhukov’s artillery fired more than 3 million shells, destroying more of the city than the Allies’ strategic air offensive had. The Soviets used Katyusha rocket launchers, which German troops nicknamed “Stalin’s organ” for their howling sound, to kill any remaining defenders. While Putin’s conventional artillery smashes Ukrainian buildings open in the same old way to eliminate potential sniper positions, thermobaric ordnance—the devastating “vacuum bombs” that create a fireball that sucks the oxygen away from their targets—takes the place of the old Katyushas.
The Russians’ destruction of Grozny and Aleppo had already revealed how little their urban-conflict doctrine, unlike that of Western armed forces, has evolved since World War II. The international coalition that reclaimed the cities of Raqqa and Mosul from the Islamic State demonstrated a far more targeted approach, sealing off each city and then clearing it sector by sector.
Putin’s army is clearly not the Red Army, just as Putin’s Russia is not the Soviet Union. Institutional corruption across the government has affected everything, even with officers profiting off of the sale of spare parts and ignoring logistic support in favor of prestige projects. While Ukrainian defenders are destroying Cold War–era Russian T-72 tanks like ducks in a row, the Russian priority has been to reserve enough money to pay for the next generation of high-tech Armata tanks. Yet the Armata can still do little more than trundle across Red Square in Victory Day parades every May 9 to impress the crowds and foreign media. On the battlefield, it would suffer exactly the same fate as the T-72s.
Elite units, paratroopers, and Spetsnaz special forces still exist within the Russian military, but they can achieve little on their own in the chaos of bad command and control. The lack of foresight involved in the introduction of the Russian army’s new Era encrypted-communications system would have been much harder to believe in the more rigorous Soviet days, when such mistakes were severely punished. Supposedly secure, it relies on 3G towers—which Russia destroyed when it invaded Ukraine. Because the system is simply not working, Russian officers have to communicate in open speech by cellphone, as gleeful Ukrainian volunteers listen in.
The 2008 invasion of Georgia, which dealt a setback to the small former Soviet republic but revealed incompetence and weakness on Russia’s part, led to plans to reequip and reform Putin’s armed forces. Those efforts have manifestly failed. This says a good deal about the lack of idealism, probity, and sense of duty within his regime. How this can change at such a late and crucial stage in the Ukraine invasion is very hard to see.
At Stalingrad in late 1942, the Red Army surprised itself and the world with a sudden turnaround, and there are indications that Putin’s forces are adjusting their tactics and preparing two major strategic envelopments, around Kyiv and in eastern Ukraine. An almost Stalinist determination to right the Russian military—backed by the execution of deserters and failing officers—could well extend the conflict in a bloodbath of relentless, grinding destruction.
Against all prewar expectations, though, a Russian military collapse also looks possible. A complete disintegration of morale could lead to a humiliating withdrawal, a potentially devastating result of Putin’s inability to part with the Soviet past.
3. With Captured Tanks, Ukraine Now Has More Armor Than When the War Began
Now that is a statistic. Rarely does an army get to forage from the enemy on his own land.
With Captured Tanks, Ukraine Now Has More Armor Than When the War Began
The man standing near what appears to be a captured Russian T-72 tank is ecstatic.
“Our guys commandeered a Russian tank,” he says, as it rolls by. “Now it will be ours.”
The man’s battle cry for revenge using a tank captured Friday in what Ukrainians say was a battle outside Kyiv highlights what Ukraine officials and independent observers say is a startling trend: By putting captured Russian equipment into service with its own army, Ukraine may now have more armor today than it did when Russia launched its massive assault on Feb. 24.
As of Friday morning, Ukraine has captured almost 370 Russian armored vehicles, including 122 tanks, according to the Oryx monitoring site, which only lists equipment losses for which photo or videographic evidence is available. By comparison, Russia has captured 135 pieces of Ukrainian armor, including 38 tanks.
#Ukraine: A VERY rare Russian T-80UK tank was captured by the Ukrainian forces. In total, the Russian army has only a few of these tanks – and two of them were already lost in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/SjnmVjml3L
“That’s astonishing,” Mike Jason, a retired Army colonel who spent 24 years as an armor officer at various levels of command and helped stand up Iraq’s armor forces, said.
Jason spoke to Coffee or Die Magazine Friday and said that according to figures he’s seen, “if you added up the delta of Ukrainian lost armor versus Russian lost armor, and start throwing in captured armor that Ukrainians are turning around and using, the Ukrainians now have more tanks than when the war started.”
Which is not to say the Ukrainians have caught up with Russian forces in sheer numbers. But Russia enjoyed an overwhelming advantage in total armor when the war started — more than 12,000 tanks to about 2,600 for Ukraine, according to Global Firepower — battlefield losses are starting to even things out. Aside from captured equipment, Russia also has seen 400 armored vehicles destroyed, including 124 tanks, according to Oryx, while Ukraine has lost 85 vehicles destroyed, including 26 tanks.
Armies using captured enemy weapons is nothing new, Jason said.
118-121. Luk’yanivka battle continued (tweet 104-117). The same RuAF T-72B3 on right in tweet 104 + shown arriving in tweet 109, here shown at point of capture. One soldier removes its top HMG. Film from Brotherhood (Voluntary) Battalion. Same film shows another captured BMP-2 pic.twitter.com/f6doiJXqwC
Captured tanks saw combat in World War II and in more recent conflicts like the Islamic State’s march through much of Iraq and Syria.
“One of the reasons [Ukraine’s haul of captured equipment] seems like a lot is because in the 21st century we get to see it happen in real time instead of having to wait for battlefield reports,” Mike Houk, who was an M1A1 Abrams main battle tank crewman for four years before another 19 in Army public affairs, said. He is currently chief of staff for ww2armor.org, a not-for-profit that demonstrates vintage World War II tanks, armored fighting vehicles, and artillery for the public.
But even if an enemy can figure out how to operate a captured tank or armored personnel carrier, keeping it running is not easy, Jason said.
“Tanks eat parts,” he said. “You have to have a supply chain to support the equipment.”
A Ukrainian soldier poses on the front of a captured tank in a video clip sent to Coffee or Die Magazine.
As an example, Jason said, the list of parts and systems that constantly need attention on US M1A1 Abrams seems endless. The tank requires specific hydraulic, brake, and other fluids, including gas, plus track pads, road wheels, ball bearings, gaskets, seals, and wiring.
Making things easier for Ukraine, however, is the fact that Ukrainian soldiers have likely trained on much of the equipment being captured, including both old, Soviet-style vehicles and more modern Russian Federation armor.
“During the Cold War, some of the largest tank factories in the Warsaw Pact were in Ukraine,” Jason said. “They manufactured a lot of Soviet-style hardware, and they had it in their military for 50 years.”
There hasn’t been a tremendous amount of game-changing innovation since.
“Their tanks and armored vehicles haven’t really changed,” he said. “All the instruction panels are legible in the same language. The oils and fluids are the same. The sizing and gauging of the bolts is the same, as are the tools you have in your tool bag. So short-term, Ukrainians can turn around, jump on that stuff and roll with it and fight with it.”
According to Oryx, Ukraine has captured several 1960s-era T-64BVs, scores of 1970s-era T-72 variants, and even about a half-dozen of Russia’s most modern armor, the 1990s-era T-90. Russia’s confirmed captures include a couple dozen Ukrainian T-64BVs and a couple T-72 variants and a T-80BV.
So why has Ukraine captured tanks and other armor so effectively?
Although a number of internet memes trumpet the apparent predilection of Ukrainian farmers to make off with Russian armor, Jason and Houk chalk the gains up to now-familiar themes in Russia’s month-old war: poor planning, poor strategy and tactics, and poor logistics.
“We’re seeing soldiers walking off the scene and desert,” Jason said. “I suspect the primary reason is the vehicles are either getting stuck, breaking down, or running out of gas. And so it goes back to the Russians expected this to be a blitz.”
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4. Biden denounces Russian invasion, casting it as part of a decades-long attempt to crush democracies.
I think the most used adjective for his speech was fiery. And of course his comment that Putin should not remain in power has really stirred things up despite the walk back by officials (which I think makes it even worse).
Excerpts;
The president unleashed an angry tirade against Mr. Putin for the claim that his invasion is intended to “de-Nazify” Ukraine. Mr. Biden called that claim “a lie,” noting that President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish and his father’s family was killed in the Holocaust.
“It’s just cynical. He knows that. And it’s also obscene,” Mr. Biden said.
Mr. Biden said the war in Ukraine was nothing less than an extension of the Soviet Union’s long history of oppression, dating back to its military invasions of Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s to end pro-democracy movements, following the end of World War II.
Those countries won their freedom from the Soviet Union, he said, but said that “the battle for democracy did not conclude with the end of the Cold War.”
Biden denounces Russian invasion, casting it as part of a decades-long attempt to crush democracies.
March 26, 2022, 2:09 p.m. ET
“Today, Russia has strangled democracy and sought to do so elsewhere,” President Biden said in a speech outside Warsaw’s Royal Castle in Poland.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
WARSAW — President Biden delivered a forceful denunciation of Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, declaring “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” and casting the military clash as the “test of all time” in a decades-long battle to defend democracy.
In a speech from a castle that served for centuries as a home for Polish monarchs, Mr. Biden drew a stark line between the forces of liberty and oppression in the world. He described the face-off with Mr. Putin as a moment he has long warned about: a clash of competing global ideologies.
“Russia’s choice of war is an example one of the oldest human impulses — using brute force and disinformation to satisfy a craving for absolute power and control,” he declared before a crowd of hundreds of people. “In this battle, we need to be clear: this battle will not be won in days or months either. We need to steel ourselves for the long fight ahead.”
The president unleashed an angry tirade against Mr. Putin for the claim that his invasion is intended to “de-Nazify” Ukraine. Mr. Biden called that claim “a lie,” noting that President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish and his father’s family was killed in the Holocaust.
“It’s just cynical. He knows that. And it’s also obscene,” Mr. Biden said.
Mr. Biden said the war in Ukraine was nothing less than an extension of the Soviet Union’s long history of oppression, dating back to its military invasions of Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s to end pro-democracy movements, following the end of World War II.
Those countries won their freedom from the Soviet Union, he said, but said that “the battle for democracy did not conclude with the end of the Cold War.”
“Today, Russia has strangled democracy and sought to do so elsewhere,” he said.
The president spoke directly to Russia’s residents: ‘Let me say this if you’re able to listen,” he said. “You the Russian people are not our enemy.” He described the horrors suffered by Ukrainian people during the past month. “These are not the actions of a great nation.”
5. Russia's war in Ukraine is far from over
Yes we cannot be overly optimistic. There is a lot of fighting left to be done.
Russia's war in Ukraine is far from over
“Of course, we have stopped them, but now the real hard task begins,” a senior Ukrainian officer told me.
BY ANDREW MILBURN | PUBLISHED MAR 26, 2022 2:17 PM
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KYIV, Ukraine — Kyiv is a different place this morning. News of the announcement by the Russian defense ministry that the capital is no longer the Russian army’s main objective has spread fast. Indicators are everywhere that the collective mood in the city has lightened overnight: a single café has opened up down the road from my apartment and is dispensing croissants and hot coffee to patrons. The park below the window where I am writing is full of people walking their dogs (pet owners, along with the elderly, were one segment of the population now overrepresented in the city. The prospect of leaving their dogs to the Russians was enough to eclipse fears for their own safety).
“Of course, we have stopped them, but now the real hard task begins,” a Ukrainian general told me yesterday. The senior officer is tasked with forming and leading the resistance movement across the entire country.
Samir Khuder, Anna Ponomaryava and their pet Fedya enjoy the fresh air after a night spent in the basement which they used as a bomb shelter when the rocket hit the shopping mall on March 21, 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. As Russia’s advance on Kyiv has largely stalled, the Ukrainian capital has continued to be hit by missiles and shellfire. More than three million people have fled Ukraine since Russia launched its large-scale invasion of the country on Feb. 24. (Photo by Anastasia Vlasova/Getty Images)
There are solemn reminders here that Russian troops still remain on the outskirts of the city and show no signs of full-scale retreat. Sirens continue to wail several times an hour and the rumble of artillery is clearly audible in the city center. Ambulances — often makeshift vans bearing white flags — dash through the streets. On the way back from the café this morning, I passed a group of women clad in medical garb. All looked exhausted and glum. Two were in tears.
The Ukrainian general knows that stopping the Russians is quite a different prospect from rolling them back from the gates of the city — and indeed from the entire country, as is his mandate. The men and women under his command are an eclectic mix of special operators and spontaneous partisans who commute to war in small squad-sized teams (which we veterans of the U.S. military, with our love for a dramatic turn of phrase, would call “Hunter Killer Teams”). Guided by locals, the Ukrainians move easily through Russian lines and ambush Russian armored columns, using the handful of anti-tank missiles they have left.
“We moved around for about three days and just kept ambushing groups of tanks and BTRs,” said the general’s deputy commander, a hawk-faced colonel with a background in the Azov — a heralded, some might say notorious, special operations unit. “Killed maybe a hundred of them,” he told me, smiling benignly as though discussing paintball.
Like most Ukrainian soldiers I have spoken with, he has a story about the enemy’s morale. After one engagement in which his team destroyed several Russian vehicles, hatches flew open up and down the column and Russian soldiers emerged with their hands up. As they climbed out of their vehicles, the colonel was surprised to see that they wore Soviet-era high boots and used outdated equipment.
“We are a small team, I cannot take prisoners,” the colonel said as he leaned towards me, and I dreaded hearing what I thought was coming next. But, laughing delightedly at the expression on my face, he held up his palms towards me in a gesture of reassurance.
“These are kids, maybe 19, so I tell them [to] give us your weapons, and then I point behind them and say, ‘go home to Russia,’ and we left them there.”
When I asked him if he thought that the Russians were on the ropes, he quickly became serious. “Victory means no Russians left in Ukraine – anything less is defeat,” he reminded me. “Only then do we celebrate.”
Servicemen of Ukrainian Military Forces move to their position prior to the battle with Russian troops and Russia-backed separatists in Luhanskregion on March 8, 2022 (Photo by ANATOLII STEPANOV/AFP via Getty Images)
No one here thinks that day is near. The Ukrainians believe they cannot compromise as long as there are Russians left on Ukrainian soil, including areas of Donetsk and Luhansk that Moscow has controlled since its incursion in 2014. This is more than an understandable emotional response to what the Russians have done to the Ukrainians: If they don’t retake these areas, Putin is able to portray the war as a sum gain. Those who think this is not possible because of the scale of Russian casualties are not paying attention to aspects of Russian history, politics, and culture which make it entirely possible that the catastrophic effect that this war has had on the Russian army will simply be buried.
Russian morale is rock bottom, but they are adapting. As they dig in, they resort to laying reams of mines alongside roads and around their positions. The Ukrainians, who lack mine-clearing equipment, find themselves now unable to get close enough to use some of their much-vaunted anti-tank systems. The British-made NLAW, for instance, which has done sterling work throughout the campaign so far, has an effective range of only 500 meters in the hands of a good gunner (this despite what the manuals say, since feedback from the field is just that).
Assets such as small drones, which are regarded as being de rigueur for effective small unit operations in the U.S. military, are in short supply here – and the ones that the Ukrainians possess are vulnerable to Russian interference. Ukrainian soldiers use their cell phones to communicate because they don’t have secure radios – and by doing so make themselves a target for Russian artillery. They drive their own cars to the front because official vehicles are not available. A fleet of Toyota pick-ups with cross-country capability would make all the difference, the colonel told me, assuming as so many here do that because I am an American I have easy access to such things.
Despite stories in the media that appear to indicate that the Ukrainian military is now one of the best equipped and supplied armies in the world thanks to Western largess, bureaucratic and logistic difficulties plague the equitable distribution of badly needed assets. And everything the Ukrainians need costs money – something that they simply don’t have. A friend of mine, an American who has lived in the city for some 30 years, runs one of the leading non-government organizations devoted to the defense of Ukraine, and yet has amassed a paltry $400,000. That will buy exactly two of the mid-range drones requested by the general with whom I spoke.
To the south and east, as a stark reminder that the war is far from over, Maripol continues to be battered amidst scenes of collective misery that haven’t been seen in Europe since the Second World War. Two days ago, a Ukrainian officer told me that soldiers defending the city were reduced to taking ammunition off the bodies of dead Russians. If – as appears likely – Mariupol falls, the Russians will have seized a key port in the Black Sea and consolidated their hold on the region inland from Crimea. By then moving north, they have the chance of completing the annexation of Donetsk and Luhansk – a move that could indeed be trumpeted by Putin as being a “better-than-previous” status quo.
If this happens, ten Ukrainian battalions, currently holding the line East of the Dnieper river, run the risk of being cut off. Can the Russians do this with the heavily depleted units in the country, plus the 16 extra battalions (13 of them comprising conscripts) that are being rushed to the area of operations? It’s impossible to say of course, but they will certainly try to complete this encirclement before the Ukrainians can stop them.
Sir Basil Liddell Hart, a British military historian, famously said, “the purpose of war is to make a better peace.” No one can fault the Ukrainians for wanting exactly that. All of which is to say, that while Kyiv may no longer be center-bullseye — a development for which I am personally grateful — no ceasefire that acknowledges Russian gains will lead to long-term peace. History has shown that Putin uses compromise to his advantage, as he did after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. And while there are Russian boots on Ukrainian soil and Vladimir Putin remains in power, Ukraine remains in danger.
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Andrew Milburn retired from the Marine Corps as a colonel in 2019 after a 31-year career as an infantry and special operations officer. His last position in uniform was Deputy Commander of Special Operations Central (SOCCENT), and prior to that commanding officer of the Marine Raider Regiment and Combined Special Operations Task Force – Iraq. Since retiring, he has written a critically acclaimed memoir, When the Tempest Gathers, and has had articles published in a number of national publications. He is currently on assignment for Task & Purpose in Ukraine. Follow him on Twitter at @andymilburn8.
Read more exclusive T&P dispatches from Ukraine:
6. Why spies and veterans want to do more for Ukraine
Excerpts:
We know that our Ukrainian brothers and sisters need us now more than ever. It feels immoral not to be on the front lines with them. So we hope that policymakers take more action in Ukraine's support. Let us send more weapons, provide more training, provide tactical intelligence. Basically, let's do what we have been doing but increase the scale of that activity exponentially. We must not become paralyzed by the fear of escalation as the civilian carnage grows. Most of all, we want to be sent back inside Ukraine. After all that we have been through ever the last 20 years, let us finally win a clearly righteous fight for freedom.
Why spies and veterans want to do more for Ukraine
The war in Ukraine has garnered extraordinary emotions among many veterans of the U.S. intelligence and military communities.
It is the classic David vs. Goliath, good vs. evil, struggle absent from our two decades of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. The absence of moral clarity in those conflicts has troubled and haunted many of us who served in them — many of us who saw our friends maimed or killed and who still have trouble processing the worth of the sacrifices made. I have struggled more with my service in Iraq, a war that rested on false premises that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, than with my service in Afghanistan, where I remain intensely proud of the work we did to degrade al Qaeda but where we lost our way and likely stayed too long. Make no mistake, the last two decades have been messy. Many seen and unseen scars remain for those who served.
Yet, in large part, this is why you now see so many U.S. military veterans wanting to travel to Ukraine to fight. For full disclosure, I don’t believe it is wise to make that journey outside of government authority. The risk is that Americans' capture by Russian forces would put an extra burden on other U.S. personnel who would have to focus on recovering those captured and relegating the priority mission of helping Ukraine. But I do understand the deep emotional attachment the Ukraine fight offers.
It resonates especially strong for those former members of the intelligence and special operations communities who have spent years helping to train, nurture, and fight with indigenous forces or newly established militaries. We live alongside our foreign partners, in small numbers, reliant on them for protection and in some cases for food and shelter. In turn, we bring unique capabilities to our common fight. The key point is that when it comes to practicing unconventional warfare around the world, it so often comes down to personal relationships with our foreign friends: Iraqis, Afghans, Syrians, Somalis, the list goes on. But we did not "win" in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or Somalia. Is Ukraine going to be different?
Many of us think so.
This is a conflict in which we can help our friends prevail. There is a great sense of joined moral clarity and military purpose. Ukrainians fight fiercely, defending their homeland. They are subject to horrific atrocities but never take a knee. Their leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky, is now a Winston Churchill-like figure, inspiring from the front. His phrase "I don’t need a ride, I need ammo" was brilliant on so many levels. It inspired Ukraine. It inspired the world. It inspired Americans. It made us think of Ukraine as Texas and Mariupol as the Alamo. I speak with many of my retired colleagues on a daily basis. As one of my closest friends told me recently, "We are all Ukrainians now." And we want to be with them.
I wish I was a young CIA case officer, getting ready to head to Europe. As a former CIA operations chief overseeing all of Europe and Eurasia, I used to tell our new officers that they had a chance to both witness and sometimes shape history. I imagine our officers today have this precise feeling of responsibility and opportunity. But imagine you have spent the past few years advising counterparts in the Ukrainian national security establishment. Your friends are now in the fight for their and their family members' lives. You want to be with them.
We believe in their righteous cause.
We know that our Ukrainian brothers and sisters need us now more than ever. It feels immoral not to be on the front lines with them. So we hope that policymakers take more action in Ukraine's support. Let us send more weapons, provide more training, provide tactical intelligence. Basically, let's do what we have been doing but increase the scale of that activity exponentially. We must not become paralyzed by the fear of escalation as the civilian carnage grows. Most of all, we want to be sent back inside Ukraine. After all that we have been through ever the last 20 years, let us finally win a clearly righteous fight for freedom.
Marc Polymeropoulos is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. A former CIA senior operations officer, he retired in 2019 after a 26-year career serving in the Near East and South Asia. His book Clarity in Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the CIA was published in June 2021 by Harper Collins.
7. Essential reading for understanding U.S.-Russia intelligence warfare
Excerpts:
The first American to bear witness against the Kremlin’s lies was George Kennan, who died in 2005 at the age of 101. Kennan was in charge of the American embassy in Moscow in February 1946 when he wrote “The Long Telegram,” still the most famous dispatch in the history of U.S. diplomacy. Every member of the newly emerging national-security establishment absorbed it, and Stalin, thanks to his spies, read it, too. So should you.
“The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth—indeed, their disbelief in its existence—leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another,” Kennan wrote. The Russians conducted their affairs on two levels: the public domain of policy and diplomacy, and the secret world of espionage and subversion. They were “impervious to the logic of reason” but “highly sensitive to the logic of force” — not tanks and troops but American political warfare designed to thwart the Kremlin’s dreams of glory. Kennan later defined political warfare as “all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives.” He was the intellectual author of the Marshall Plan to rebuild war-torn Europe and, to his sorrow later in life, the man who conceived that the newborn CIA should use covert operations, including “the encouragement of underground resistance,” in the fight against the Kremlin.
That realm of American intelligence is a dirty and dangerous business. When it fails, as it so often did, people die. But the fate of Ukraine — and Putin himself — may depend on its success.
Perspective | Essential reading for understanding U.S.-Russia intelligence warfare
By Tim Weiner
Tim Weiner’s most recent book is "The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare, 1945-2020." He is working on a history of the 21st-century CIA.
Yesterday at 8:00 a.m. EDT|Updated yesterday at 8:25 a.m. EDT
Vladimir Putin is waging war against the West. He’s been doing it for many years. You might call it World War Z, after the letter emblazoned on Russian military vehicles invading Ukraine. Russians write the letter Z as 3.
This war will not be won or lost with missiles and tanks alone. Armed forces live or die by virtue of intelligence. They depend on it to know their enemies, to see them coming, to shape their strategies for battle, and to try to win the hearts and minds of friends and foes alike. The United States and Russia have waged an intelligence war for 75 years. And U.S. intelligence — its abilities to anticipate and counter the Russian president’s moves, to call out his lies, to penetrate the walls of the Kremlin — is an essential element in the fight for Ukraine.
Now American spies and intelligence analysts have struck blows against Putin’s dreams of empire. The Central Intelligence Agency gave the White House and the State Department the power to expose Putin’s plans to use disinformation as pretexts for war. The preemptive strikes defused Russian lies and propaganda, shaping the battlefield in Ukraine and strengthening the will of the West. And U.S. intelligence has been providing covert support to Ukraine ever since Putin launched his first war against the nation eight years ago.
It’s the latest struggle in the political warfare that has raged between the United States and Russia since the CIA’s creation in 1947. We catch glimpses of that conflict when a turncoat is caught spying or when intelligence succeeds or fails spectacularly. But it takes time for the smoke to clear and the picture to become visible. To begin to understand the attack that Putin has levied on the United States and its allies, and the American response to his attack on Ukraine, it’s crucial to know the history of the CIA and to gain insight into Putin himself. Along with the reporting from the battlefront, arm yourself with a short stack of books.
In 1979, Thomas Powers published “The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA,” which remains the best book ever written about the agency. (I say this advisedly, having written one myself.) Present at its creation, Helms led the CIA under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, when the United States’ spies went head-to-head against their enemies in Asia, Europe, the Americas and, finally, in Washington. Nixon fired him for refusing to help cover up the Watergate break-in.
The genius of the book is its painstaking examination of a uniquely American question: How does a secret intelligence service exist in an open democratic society? Powers wrote in the aftermath of the 1975 Church Committee hearings, which exposed the CIA’s most egregious cold-war covert actions. Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) famously described the CIA as “a rogue elephant,” trampling people and nations, running coups, spying on Americans, installing dictators and plotting to kill leaders like Fidel Castro. Powers dared to ask: Who do you think gave those orders? Who wanted Castro dead? Presidents did. The CIA took the fall. Powers also observed that the Cold War conduct of the CIA presented a problem for the United States: “What sort of people are we? What do we stand for?” We might ask the same about the secret prisons and interrogation by torture in the war on terrorism. But the CIA’s blows against Putin — and the transparent way in which secrets have been wielded as political weapons — make clear that intelligence can also serve as a force for democracy.
The spilling of the CIA’s secrets was a godsend for the KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, who led the Soviet spy service from 1967 to 1982. Long before Putin monkey-wrenched the 2016 U.S. presidential election to help Donald Trump, Andropov created a huge department of disinformation, which found that Americans (and the world) could be persuaded to believe anything. The CIA killed JFK! America has seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca! The U.S. Army invented AIDS! Putin, Andropov’s KGB acolyte, built on that foundation in launching the war on Ukraine, creating fake videos of atrocities against Russians, false-flag attacks, phony reports of Ukrainian nukes and bioweapons, and much more.
Andropov, the Soviet leader from 1982 to 1984, became convinced that President Ronald Reagan was preparing to fight and win World War III in those years. Robert M. Gates — then the CIA’s chief intelligence analyst, later the agency’s director and a 21st-century secretary of defense — knew that the United States was far too close to the brink. His 1996 memoir, “From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War,” covers 30 years of American apprehensions and misapprehensions of the Soviet threat. Looking back, we now know that neither side ever saw the other clearly. A career Soviet analyst, Gates had never set foot on Russian soil until the Cold War was coming to a close. (“It was nice to see it from the ground,” he deadpanned at the time.) Our spy satellites had been counting their missiles but not the potatoes rotting in the field for want of fuel to take them to market, and so the CIA overestimated the true strength of the Soviets. Today, it looks as though the CIA’s spies have been gathering intelligence from inside the Kremlin to gain insights about Putin’s intentions. Odds are that someone in his inner circle is helping.
How else would they know what Putin was thinking? A KGB man to the marrow of his bones, he is “a master at manipulating information, suppressing information, and creating pseudo-information,” as Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy wrote in “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin,” originally published in 2013. “Putin has spent a great deal of time in his professional life bending the truth, manipulating facts, and playing with fictions,” they wrote. “He is also, we conclude, not always able to distinguish one from the other.”
As Washington’s best Kremlinologist, Hill was senior director for Russian and European affairs on President Trump’s National Security Council staff. She testified in his first impeachment, on the charge that he extorted Ukraine’s president, withholding deliveries of Javelin antitank weapons by first demanding “a favor” — dirt on Joe Biden. Hill directly accused Republicans of abetting Putin’s long war against American democracy. “Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country — and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did,” she testified. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”
The first American to bear witness against the Kremlin’s lies was George Kennan, who died in 2005 at the age of 101. Kennan was in charge of the American embassy in Moscow in February 1946 when he wrote “The Long Telegram,” still the most famous dispatch in the history of U.S. diplomacy. Every member of the newly emerging national-security establishment absorbed it, and Stalin, thanks to his spies, read it, too. So should you.
“The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth—indeed, their disbelief in its existence—leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another,” Kennan wrote. The Russians conducted their affairs on two levels: the public domain of policy and diplomacy, and the secret world of espionage and subversion. They were “impervious to the logic of reason” but “highly sensitive to the logic of force” — not tanks and troops but American political warfare designed to thwart the Kremlin’s dreams of glory. Kennan later defined political warfare as “all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives.” He was the intellectual author of the Marshall Plan to rebuild war-torn Europe and, to his sorrow later in life, the man who conceived that the newborn CIA should use covert operations, including “the encouragement of underground resistance,” in the fight against the Kremlin.
That realm of American intelligence is a dirty and dangerous business. When it fails, as it so often did, people die. But the fate of Ukraine — and Putin himself — may depend on its success.
Tim Weiner’s most recent book is “The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945-2020.” He is working on a history of the 21st-century CIA.
8. Opinion | The Insidious Effects of the Meme-ification of War
The meme is the 21st Century PSYOP leaflet. But the meme reaches far more than a leaflet ever could. But what kind of effects will memes achieve?
But I fear we are addicted to them (I know I enjoy a good meme and am not averse to sending them out.
Conclusion:
In the foreword for “The Mechanical Bride,” Mr. McLuhan references Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “A Descent Into The Maelström,” in which a sailor saves himself from drowning in a whirlpool by studying its currents and observing its movements with detachment. In this same way, we might try to identify and recognize the algorithmic undercurrents at the center of social media — but for most of us, the more practical solution is probably to just step away, and to find a better way to stay informed about world events.
Opinion | The Insidious Effects of the Meme-ification of War
Guest Essay
The Insidious Effects of the Meme-ification of War
March 26, 2022, 11:00 a.m. ET
By
Ms. Phelan is a writer and journalist. Her debut novel, “Like Me,” follows a would-be social media influencer.
Last week, as heavy bombardment rocked Ukrainian cities, killing at least hundreds of civilians and sending millions more fleeing, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, the man behind the vicious attacks, was challenged to a duel by the billionaire Elon Musk.
Mr. Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, tweeted at the official Twitter account of Mr. Putin’s presidential office, challenging the president to “single combat” with the “stakes” being Ukraine. The response in the Twittersphere was gleeful: There were mock-up posters promoting the big fight, and Photoshopped images that cast Mr. Musk as the Terminator or Rocky Balboa. Putin supporters — including the Russian space chief Dmitry Rogozin — mocked Mr. Musk for the tweet, and Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman head of Chechnya, a part of Russia, offered to train Mr. Musk, to “change from the gentle (effeminate) Elona into the brutal Elon you need to be.”
“I’ve seen this movie before,” one person tweeted, alongside a meme of the billionaire superhero Iron Man with Mr. Musk’s face overlaid.
There was something unsettlingly familiar and Hollywood-like about the moment. It was almost as if the tweeters had forgotten they were discussing a complex geopolitical situation, in which millions of lives are at stake — and not just another celebrity feud.
And perhaps that’s inevitable, when Russia’s war on Ukraine itself has became a kind of meme on social media, with images of exploded tanks, refugee convoys and body bags interspersed with Wordle humble brags, NFT hype-tweets and your friends’ adorable pets. “One of the strangest experiences of the modern world is following a war on social media,” Trevor Noah said on a recent segment of The Daily Show. “Because all the other stuff on social media doesn’t go away. It just gets mixed in together.”
The war in Ukraine, which has been called the world’s “first TikTok war,” has eroded the boundaries between war journalism and social media #content — from celebrities and socialites posting glamorous selfies with promises of thoughts and prayers in the captions to whatever the heck the actor AnnaLynne McCord’s slam poetry was. The Atlantic has called the flood of war-adjacent content “milling,” a sociological term to describe what the magazine called the often “Ugly, Embarrassing Spectacle” that ensues in the immediate aftermath of tragedy.
But it’s important to note that this is not necessarily a natural social phenomenon. Rather it is the direct result of an algorithm developed by profit-seeking companies. “Social media is optimized for the quickest and hottest and most outrageous takes,” Max Stossel, an adviser at the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reimagining digital infrastructure, told me. “It’s a process that’s really at odds with accuracy and thoughtfulness.”
And as social media becomes, for an increasing number of people, a primary source of news, the structures of the medium itself can warp our understanding of what’s happening in the world. The Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan noted in 1951 that the front page of a newspaper illustrated daily the “complexity and similarity of human affairs,” with news from all over the world printed side by side. Despite what he called “the frequent sensational absurdity and unreliability of the news,” Mr. McLuhan conceded that the total effect of this mosaic approach “is to enforce a deep sense of human solidarity.”
On social media, however, these disparate items appear singularly, and they disappear as we slide our thumbs down our screens. The result isn’t a mosaic but a blur in which the trivial follows the dire, the personal appears alongside the public. War starts to blend with entertainment (after all, it keeps popping up on one of the devices many turn to for entertainment). Before we know it, we have a tech billionaire challenging the Russian president to a fight, as if they were in a high school locker room. And the crowd cheers them on.
What’s the harm, you might ask? For one thing, some of what we see on social media is simply untrue, which can mislead us about the facts of what’s happening. Take, for example, a video of what appeared to be a young Ukrainian girl confronting a Russian soldier, which went viral at the end of February. In fact, the video was from 2012, and showed the Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi confronting an Israeli soldier. Besides raising important questions about why certain conflicts seem to garner our clicks and others do not, the mislabeled video is illustrative of the kind of broken-telephone messaging that happens when we mindlessly “like” and share. Even without blatant untruths, by compressing complex global events into flat images that can be understood with little context, social media tends to promote simplistic narratives that confirm existing biases. This leaves users incredibly vulnerable to misinformation and propaganda — as in Russia, where misleading videos, images and clips present the war as a righteous conflict.
All this scrolling can also lead to compassion fatigue. For Mr. McLuhan, who famously declared that “the medium is the message,” the tactile experience of media — in his time print publications, radio and television — was an essential component of its effect on the audience. On social media, as we banish posts to the ether with a flick of the thumb, we caress their images, gently touching the army tanks, the faces of celebrities, the bodies of civilians in the street; we wear them close to our chest and sleep next to them at night. This intimacy with violence and suffering can feel disturbing or emotionally triggering; it can also be desensitizing.
It also promotes a sense of complacency; we believe we already know what is happening, and can be downright smug in our convictions about who are the “bad guys” and who are the “good guys.” For Putin supporters, Mr. Musk’s tweet was further evidence of the West’s plot against Russia; for Mr. Musk’s fans, it was just another reason to love the irreverent billionaire.
Some of the strangest replies to Mr. Musk’s tweet were the ones thanking him for “helping” Ukraine. It’s unclear how, exactly, they believed the tech executive was helping the country, or why they would think Ukraine was his to gamble, but it’s indicative of how attention is often conflated with activism on social media.
This isn’t to say that nothing good can ever come from attention garnered on social media. For a counterexample, see President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine’s effective pleas for international support, which have raised morale and helped to raise substantial funds for Ukrainian people (including, according to Zelensky, $35 million, thanks to the efforts of Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis, largely through social media). The videos he has released have helped him come across as statesmanly and unifying, a leader who has been compared to Winston Churchill.
In the foreword for “The Mechanical Bride,” Mr. McLuhan references Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “A Descent Into The Maelström,” in which a sailor saves himself from drowning in a whirlpool by studying its currents and observing its movements with detachment. In this same way, we might try to identify and recognize the algorithmic undercurrents at the center of social media — but for most of us, the more practical solution is probably to just step away, and to find a better way to stay informed about world events.
Hayley Phelan is a writer and journalist. Her debut novel, “Like Me,” follows a would-be social media influencer.
9. How Biden sparked a global uproar with nine ad-libbed words about Putin
Hard to not see this coming. I guess the President used his inside voice.
Excerpts;
“If they were, Biden’s head wouldn’t be in a place where he’s saying, ‘Putin must go.’ The only way to get to war termination is to negotiate with this guy,” O’Hanlon said.
“When you say this guy must go you’ve essentially declared you’re not going to do business with him,” he added. “However appealing at an emotional level, it’s not going to happen. We can’t control it, and it probably won’t take place anytime soon.”
Over the past few weeks, Biden’s rhetoric on Putin — a man he once recounted telling to his face, “I don’t think you have a soul” — has become increasingly pointed. He has called him a “butcher” “pure thug” and a “murderous dictator.” So saying that he should be removed from power could viewed as the logical next step.
It also is in line with Biden at times articulating policy before his aides are ready. Last week, he called Putin a “war criminal,” which White House aides quickly said was simply him “speaking from the heart.” But within a few days, U.S. policy changed as Blinken also called Putin a war criminal and released a formal assessment on war crimes committed by Russia.
How Biden sparked a global uproar with nine ad-libbed words about Putin
By declaring that the Russian leader ‘cannot remain in power,’ the U.S. president seemed to suggest a drastic change in U.S. policy — prompting a scramble by White House officials
Yesterday at 7:25 p.m. EDT
The Washington Post · by Tyler Pager and Matt Viser Yesterday at 7:25 p.m. EDT · March 26, 2022
WARSAW — During his presidential campaign, President Biden often reminded his audience about the heavy weight that the words of a president can carry.
“The words of a president matter,” he said more than once. “They can move markets. They can send our brave men and women to war. They can bring peace.”
They can also, as Biden discovered on Saturday, spark a global uproar in the middle of a war.
With nine ad-libbed words at the end of a 27-minute speech, Biden created an unwanted distraction to his otherwise forceful remarks by calling for Russian President Vladimir Putin to be pushed out of office.
“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said.
It was a remarkable statement that would reverse stated U.S. policy, directly countering claims from senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who have insisted regime change is not on the table. It went further than even U.S. presidents during the Cold War, and immediately reverberated around the world as world leaders, diplomats, and foreign policy experts sought to determine what Biden said, what it meant — and, if he didn’t mean it, why he said it.
Shortly after the speech, a White House official sought to clarify the comments.
“The president’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia or regime change,” the official said.
Biden’s line was not planned and came as a surprise to U.S. officials, according to a person familiar with the speech who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation. In the immediate aftermath of the remark, reporters rushed to find Biden aides and seek clarity on the president seemingly supporting a regime change in Russia.
But Biden aides demurred, refusing to comment as they scrambled to craft a response.
White House officials were adamant the remark was not a sign of a policy change, but they did concede it was just the latest example of Biden’s penchant for stumbling off message. And like many of his unintended comments, they came at the end of his speech as he ad-libbed and veered from the carefully crafted text on the teleprompter.
“The speech was quite remarkable,” said Aaron David Miller, a veteran diplomat and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This is one of those speeches where the one-liner in many ways drowns out the intent of the speech. Because that’s exactly what people are focusing on.”
Miller said that had the White House not immediately clarified, the comment would have led to a significant shift in policy and signaled to Putin that the United States would attempt to drive him out of office. It is unclear what the full impact of the comment may be in coming days.
“I’m risk averse by nature, especially with a guy who has nuclear weapons,” he said. “But will it have operational consequences? I don’t know.”
It likely signals to Putin what he already suspected about Biden’s true feelings, and it almost certainly will be used as part of Russia’s propaganda.
“I guess you can call this a gaffe from the heart,” Miller said. “If Biden could close his eyes tomorrow and have 10 wishes, one would be there’s a leadership change in Russia.”
But the comment also seemed to provide a window into Biden’s current thinking, and some of the mind-set that the administration has with regard to Putin.
“If they were, Biden’s head wouldn’t be in a place where he’s saying, ‘Putin must go.’ The only way to get to war termination is to negotiate with this guy,” O’Hanlon said.
“When you say this guy must go you’ve essentially declared you’re not going to do business with him,” he added. “However appealing at an emotional level, it’s not going to happen. We can’t control it, and it probably won’t take place anytime soon.”
Over the past few weeks, Biden’s rhetoric on Putin — a man he once recounted telling to his face, “I don’t think you have a soul” — has become increasingly pointed. He has called him a “butcher” “pure thug” and a “murderous dictator.” So saying that he should be removed from power could viewed as the logical next step.
It also is in line with Biden at times articulating policy before his aides are ready. Last week, he called Putin a “war criminal,” which White House aides quickly said was simply him “speaking from the heart.” But within a few days, U.S. policy changed as Blinken also called Putin a war criminal and released a formal assessment on war crimes committed by Russia.
Biden’s comment was particularly striking because his administration has taken pains to avoid even implying that regime change is a goal of the Western response to Russia’s aggression.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state news agencies, “That’s not for Biden to decide. The president of Russia is elected by Russians.”
Some officials, both in the U.S. and abroad, said Biden’s comment was an honest acknowledgment of reality — the U.S. will likely never have a normal relationship with Putin after the invasion. But the bigger worry may be that, in the short term, Biden’s rhetoric could escalate tensions and make any diplomatic off-ramp harder to find.
“There ought to be two priorities right now: ending the war on terms Ukraine can accept, and discouraging any escalation by Putin. And this comment was inconsistent with both of those goals,” said Richard Haas, a veteran diplomat and president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
“It discourages Putin from any compromise essentially — if you’ve got everything to lose, it frees him up. Why should he show any restraint?” Haas added. “And it confirms his worst fears, which is that this is what the United States seeks. His ouster and systemic change.”
He said the remark overshadowed an otherwise relatively smooth trip aimed at building additional support for Ukraine, bulking up additional sanctions enforcement and further unifying NATO allies.
“What’s frustrating about this is, up to now, the Biden administration has conducted itself with significant discipline. … This goes against the grain of their handling of this crisis,” Haas said.
“They obviously recognize that, they walked it back in a matter of minutes,” he added. “The problem is, from Putin’s point of view the president revealed his and our true intentions.”
David Rothkopf, a foreign-policy analyst and CEO of the Rothkopf Group, compared Biden’s speech to President John F. Kennedy’s speech in Berlin expressing solidarity with German citizens in 1963.
“There is within Biden’s comment a kernel of truth,” Rothkopf said. “Vladimir Putin can’t lay waste to a country, kill tens of thousands of civilians, commit serial war crimes and expect to be welcomed back into the community of nations. If Russia wants to be part of the community of nations, then they are going to have to produce change.”
“The statement I think is naturally going to be a bit of lightning rod as it has already been,” he added. “It shouldn’t distract from the much more important speech, but it also wasn’t wrong.”
Biden entered office with significant foreign policy experience and frequently touted his relationships with world leaders and ability to forge diplomatic compromise.
But if some other leaders operate as discrete poker players with cards close to their chest, Biden has often failed to hide his true intentions and thoughts when he is before a microphone.
The man who once confessed, “I am a gaffe machine,” has a long history of veering from the carefully crafted text of his speechwriters, and the inability to control his words has been a running joke among staffers for decades.
“I feel very capable of using my mouth in sync with my mind,” he told reporters, with more than a hint of defensiveness, in 1987.
At the launch of his 2008 campaign, Biden came under criticism for calling Barack Obama “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Later, as Obama’s vice president, Biden was captured on a microphone whispering an expletive to Obama at the bill signing for the landmark health care law.
Biden drew significant ire from Obama and his aides when he announced his support for same-sex marriage before Obama or many other prominent politicians.
During the presidential campaign, Biden referred to Margaret Thatcher instead of the more recent British prime minister Theresa May, and he misstated when he had met with students impacted by a shooting in Parkland, Fla.
As president, aides have often worked to keep him on message. Sometimes that means limited exposure in formal settings — he waited longer than any president in at least a century to hold his first formal news conference — and it also means trying to keep him tightly to a script.
But there is little any aide can do when the president decides to extend his remarks and tuck in, almost as an aside, a declaration that he wants to see Putin removed from power.
“God bless you all. And may God defend our freedom,” he said after suggesting Putin’s removal. “And may God protect our troops. Thank you for your patience. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
Viser reported from Washington.
The Washington Post · by Tyler Pager and Matt Viser Yesterday at 7:25 p.m. EDT · March 26, 2022
10. Dollar reserve system frays with India-Russia currency deals
We must protect the most important aspect of our economic instrument of national power.
Excerpts:
America’s threat to the world comes down to the possibility that it might stop borrowing money from the rest of the world (its net foreign investment position is now negative $14 trillion) to buy goods from the rest of the world. America, that is, runs a trillion-dollar-a-year current account deficit, and finances the deficit by selling reserve assets to the rest of the world.
By seizing several hundred billion dollars of Russia’s central bank reserves, Washington has put a question mark over the rationale for the existing financial system, and encouraged the rest of the world to “rethink currency reserve holdings,” as the IMF put it.
But in plain English, that means to rethink the trillion dollars a year that the rest of the world lends to the United States.
Dollar reserve system frays with India-Russia currency deals
Sanctions on Russia boomerang on US dollar as questions about the rationale behind existing financial system spread far and wide
NEW YORK – Russia and India took a small but important step towards non-dollar trade financing and investment on March 25, when the Reserve Bank of India allowed Russia to invest the proceeds of its arms sales to India in local-currency corporate bonds.
Russia’s account with India’s central bank is small, with a reported balance of US$262 million, but the prospective advantages to both countries are enormous: India will pay for one of its most important import items, namely Russian weapons, in local currency, and Russia will invest the proceeds in a financial market safe from sanctions.
India changed its rules on external commercial borrowing to accommodate the Russian proposal, Bloomberg News reported. The US, European Union (EU) and Japan seized Russian central bank reserves as well as the assets of wealthy Russian nationals after Moscow’s troops invaded Ukraine in late February.
That is another small but indicative crack in the framework of the US dollar reserve system. Saudi Arabia reportedly will accept RMB in payment for oil shipments to China, its largest customer.
That implies in turn that the Saudi kingdom will maintain a significant portion of its reserves in Chinese currency, possibly in an arrangement like the Indian-Russian agreement for reinvestment of the proceeds of arms sales.
Human rights organizations have denounced Saudi Arabia for “longstanding human rights abuses,” as Human Rights Watch wrote on its website. After the seizure of Russian reserves, the Saudis are reluctant to keep their wealth where the US or other Western governments can grab it. Diversification into RMB is a logical alternative.
Russia, meanwhile, has demanded payment for gas shipments to “unfriendly” countries in its own currency, forcing European gas customers to purchase rubles on the open market. The ruble rallied from a low point of 140 rubles to the dollar on March 8 to 100 rubles to the dollar on March 25.
After the US, Europe and Japan seized more than half of Russia’s $630 billion in the wake of the Ukraine war, Russia has few safe places to park oil and gas earnings in dollars and rubles.
By accepting payment in rubles, Russia effectively removes some of its own currency from circulation, holding up the ruble’s exchange rate and suppressing inflationary pressure that arises from currency devaluation.
Graphic: Asia Times
The “nuclear” sanctions against the Russian economy will cause a 10% contraction this year, according to Goldman Sachs economist Clemens Grafe, followed by 3-4% growth in 2023 and 2024 – hardly the stuff that regime change is made of.
With oil and gas sales running at an estimated $1.1 billion a day, Russia probably will show a current account surplus of $200 billion this year, slightly higher than its $165 billion annualized surplus during the fourth quarter of 2021.
The International Monetary Fund, the international financial Institution created in 1944 to manage the world’s currencies on a combined gold and dollar standard, is worried. The gold part of the standard disappeared in 1971 when the United States unilaterally ceased paying for its current-account deficit in gold transfers.
But the dollar’s central role was affirmed in 1974, when Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil producers agreed to keep oil trade denominated in dollars, in return for US security guarantees.
All that might change, the IMF wrote on its website on March 15: “The war may fundamentally alter the global economic and geopolitical order should energy trade shift, supply chains reconfigure, payment networks fragment, and countries rethink reserve currency holdings.”
One indication of doubts about the dollar’s central reserve role is the rise in gold prices. Gold typically trades closely with the yields on Treasury inflation-protected securities (TIPS), which serve the same function. Both hedge against an unexpected inflation shock and currency depreciation.
During the past month, the gold price has decoupled from TIPS yields, rising instead of falling as inflation-indexed interest rates shot up.
Graphic: Asia Times
Judging from gold’s historic relationship to TIPS yields, the metal is about $300 too expensive. That suggests a geopolitical risk premium.
The US Treasury said on March 24 that existing sanctions prevent Russia from selling its gold reserves, worth about $140 billion at the present market price of about $1,960 an ounce. Numerous news reports have reported a “freeze” on Russia’s gold reserves due to Western sanctions, which is entirely misleading. Russia doesn’t need to sell gold to raise cash; it is taking in $1.1 billion a day from energy sales.
Central banks that trade outside the dollar system, for example, Russia and India, could use gold to settle balances. If Russia exports more to India than India exports to Russia under the local currency arrangement, Russia might invest the money in Indian assets, per the new agreement with the Reserve Bank of India. Alternately, India might transfer gold to Russia to settle the difference.
American or European sanctions are irrelevant in the case of a bilateral gold transfer between central banks.
America’s threat to the world comes down to the possibility that it might stop borrowing money from the rest of the world (its net foreign investment position is now negative $14 trillion) to buy goods from the rest of the world. America, that is, runs a trillion-dollar-a-year current account deficit, and finances the deficit by selling reserve assets to the rest of the world.
By seizing several hundred billion dollars of Russia’s central bank reserves, Washington has put a question mark over the rationale for the existing financial system, and encouraged the rest of the world to “rethink currency reserve holdings,” as the IMF put it.
But in plain English, that means to rethink the trillion dollars a year that the rest of the world lends to the United States.
11. Why India, US don’t see eye to eye on Ukraine
Don't take the Quad for granted.
Excerpts:
“Resources have always played a central role in shaping the world.… This makes the control of the Silk Roads more important than ever.”
The West still seems to want to “return to ‘normal,’” Frankopan writes, “and expects the newcomers to resume their old positions in the world order.”
Clearly, India, an erstwhile British colony, understands the real agenda behind Washington’s and Brussels’ geopolitical struggle with Russia. Principally, India is looking in all directions – Russia and China included – for partnerships.
If the Chinese news website Guancha is correct, which it mostly is, “China-India diplomatic relations will significantly ease and enter a recovery period. China and India will realize the exchange of visits of diplomatic officials in a relatively short time. Chinese officials will go to India first, and Indian Foreign Minister [Subrahmanyam] Jaishankar will come to China.”
This is good news. Modi’s unique stature in Indian politics enables him to make difficult decisions. The renewed mandate he secured from the heartland puts him in a position to break fresh ground in foreign policy.
Why India, US don’t see eye to eye on Ukraine
India simply cannot agree with the US and EU’s reckless attempt to weaponize global economic links over Russia’s war
An extraordinary week has passed for the Indian government’s dalliance with the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. Call it a defining moment, a turning point or even an inflection point, it has elements of all three.
The past week saw a two-day visit to Delhi by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, a virtual summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and foreign-ministry-level consultations with the visiting US undersecretary for political affairs, Victoria Nuland. The leitmotif was the situation around Ukraine.
US President Joe Biden has since taken a jab at India for a “somewhat shaky” stance on Ukraine. Who would have imagined that the geopolitics of Ukraine was going to shake up the Quad?
Certainly, India had a premonition. The Indian foreign-policy establishment has had no misconceptions about what began unfolding in Ukraine in the last week of February. It had spotted as far back as November-December at least, like Elijah in the Bible, a small cloud like the palm of a hand coming up from the sea.
Unlike the Indian media, academia or think tanks at large, the Indian leadership could sense that an epochal global struggle for ascendancy by the US and its Western allies versus Russia and China was breaking out in Ukraine.
Modi sensed that there would be collateral damage to India unless it saddled up to get down from the mountain, as the sky began to grow black with wind-driven clouds before the huge cloudburst of rain arrived.
There is a background to it. Any perceptive observer would have noticed that Modi has been in a reflective mood as regards foreign affairs for the past several months. His participation in the Summit for Democracy last December discernibly had a fin-de-siècle air about it – the closing of one era and the onset of another. One could attribute it to the sobering effect of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The point is, India struggled with the pandemic all by itself. No matter the hype about it, India realized that it has no real partnership with the US or the European Union, that it was a mere transactional relationship – and that in the final analysis, India lived in its own region.
Indeed, India handled the pandemic far better than most countries. International experts acknowledge that now, and those who threw stones at that time grudgingly accept it, too.
A pedestrian walks past a mural depiciting a health worker stopping the Covid-19 coronavirus, in Mumbai on April 21, 2021 amidst rising Covid-19 coronavirus cases. Photo: Punit Paranjpe
However, with the economy ravaged beyond recognition, the government is picking up the pieces and staggering forward. There is still much uncertainty in the air about yet another “wave” of the pandemic stealthily advancing to drown all ceremonies of repair and reconstruction of life.
Succinctly put, the big-power struggle in faraway Europe, precipitated by the Biden administration for geopolitical purposes to isolate and weaken Russia, erupted at a most critical juncture when India has been increasingly skeptical about American policies and statesmanship.
The picture that the US is presenting is not convincing either: a battleground of tribalism and culture wars, an aging superpower in decline with dwindling influence globally.
In the Indian economy’s tryst with destiny, the US is of no help. On the other hand, the waning multilateralism and the new constraints imposed on growth by the United States’ growing propensity to weaponize the dollar threaten to blight the shoots of post-pandemic growth in the Indian economy.
On Monday, Biden celebrated a Business Roundtable with the CEOs of the largest corporations in the US economy. He boasted of “6.7 million jobs last year – the most ever created in one year; more than 7 million now; 678,000 created just last month, in one month. Unemployment down to 3.8%.
“Our economy grew at 5.7% last year, and the strongest in nearly 40 years.… We reduced the deficit by $360 billion last year.… And we’re on track to reduce it by over $1 trillion this year.”
Biden is understandably thrilled beyond words. Yet when he deliberately orchestrated a confrontation with Russia at this juncture, it didn’t occur to him what crippling impact and downstream consequences his draconian “sanctions from hell” against a major G20 economy would have on the developing economies.
A report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) on March 16 titled “The Impact on Trade and Development of the War in Ukraine” concludes, “The results confirm a rapidly worsening outlook for the world economy, underpinned by rising food, fuel and fertilizer prices, heightened financial volatility, sustainable-development divestment, complex global supply-chain reconfigurations and mounting trade costs.
“This rapidly evolving situation is alarming for developing countries, and especially for African and least developed countries, some of which are particularly exposed to the war in Ukraine and its effect on trade costs, commodity prices and financial markets. The risk of civil unrest, food shortages and inflation-induced recessions cannot be discounted.…”
Does Biden even know that at least 25 African countries depend on Russia for meeting more than one-third of their wheat imports? Or that Benin actually relies 100% on Russia for its wheat imports? And that Russia supplies wheat at concessional prices for these poor countries?
Now, how do these meek and wretched countries of the planet import from Russia when Biden and EU chief Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen join hands to block the banking channels for trading with Russia?
Russia faces US and Western sanctions for its invasion of Ukraine. Photo: iStock
The cruelty and cynical complacency with which the Biden administration and the EU conduct their foreign policies is absolutely stunning. And, mind you, all this is happening in the name of “democratic values” and “international law”!
India cannot agree with the United States’ and EU’s reckless attempt to weaponize global economic links. The fact of the matter is that the US and EU may not even win this war in Ukraine. Unless Biden allows Kiev to agree to a peace settlement, the division of Ukraine along the Dnieper River is in the cards.
The US is destabilizing the European security order while Western sanctions are destabilizing the global economic order. The US and EU must bear responsibility for this collateral damage.
The West is in a panic that the world is living in the Asian century already.
“One reason for the optimism across the heart of Asia is the immense natural resources of the [Asian] region,” writes the famous Oxford historian Peter Frankopan in his recent book The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World. For the Middle East, Russia and Central Asia account for almost 70% of global proven oil reserves, and nearly 65% of proven natural-gas reserves.
Professor Frankopan writes: “Or there is the agricultural wealth of the region that lies between the Mediterranean and the Pacific … which account for more than half of all global wheat production … [and] account for nearly 85% of global rice production.”
“Then there are elements like silicon, which plays an important role in microelectronics and in the production of semiconductors, where Russia and China alone account for three-quarters of global production; or there are rare earths like yttrium, dysprosium and terbium that are essential for everything from super magnets to batteries, from actuators to laptops – of which China alone accounted for more than 80% of global production.…
“Resources have always played a central role in shaping the world.… This makes the control of the Silk Roads more important than ever.”
The West still seems to want to “return to ‘normal,’” Frankopan writes, “and expects the newcomers to resume their old positions in the world order.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (L) and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi don’t see eye to eye in the Himalayas. Photo: AFP / Kenzaburo Fukuhara
Clearly, India, an erstwhile British colony, understands the real agenda behind Washington’s and Brussels’ geopolitical struggle with Russia. Principally, India is looking in all directions – Russia and China included – for partnerships.
If the Chinese news website Guancha is correct, which it mostly is, “China-India diplomatic relations will significantly ease and enter a recovery period. China and India will realize the exchange of visits of diplomatic officials in a relatively short time. Chinese officials will go to India first, and Indian Foreign Minister [Subrahmanyam] Jaishankar will come to China.”
This is good news. Modi’s unique stature in Indian politics enables him to make difficult decisions. The renewed mandate he secured from the heartland puts him in a position to break fresh ground in foreign policy.
M K Bhadrakumar is a former Indian diplomat. Follow him on Twitter @BhadraPunchline.
12. Philippines reaching back to US as Duterte fades away
Excerpt:
By all indications, the Philippines, after years of mostly fruitless strategic flirtation with Beijing and Moscow, is now closing ranks with the US as Duterte fades from the scene.
Philippines reaching back to US as Duterte fades away
US-Philippines will hold largest joint exercises in recent memory as outgoing leader’s reach to China, Russia fails to take hold
MANILA – “America has lost now,” declared Philippine President Duterte just months after assuming office in 2016 and having chosen to visit Beijing for his first major foreign trip.
“I’ve realigned myself in your ideological flow and maybe I will also go to Russia to talk to [President Vladimir] Putin and tell him that there are three of us against the world – China, Philippines and Russia. It’s the only way,” the Filipino populist added in the Great Hall of the People, with no less than Chinese Vice-Premier Zhang Gaoli in attendance.
Days later, during a visit to Tokyo, Duterte upped the ante by announcing his preference for booting out all American troops stationed in the Philippines within his first two years in power.
“I want, maybe in the next two years, my country free of the presence of foreign military troops,” declared the Filipino president ahead of a summit with then-Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, a staunch US military ally.
In 2020, Duterte came closest to fulfilling his early threats after unilaterally suspending the Philippine-US Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), which facilitates large-scale joint military drills, amid disagreements on human rights issues with Washington.
But as the Filipino populist enters his twilight months in office, Philippine-US military cooperation seems stronger than ever while Duterte’s years-long strategic flirtation with both Russia and China has produced more disappointment than concrete achievements.
In the coming days, the Philippines and US are set to conduct their largest “Balikatan” (shoulder-to-shoulder) joint military drills in recent memory. Close to 9,000 troops from both the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the US military are set to conduct war games from March 28 to April 8 in the northern island of Luzon, the seat of power and economic hub of the Philippines.
If anything, this year is expected to see the AFP conducting more than 300 joint military activities with its American counterparts, more than any other ally or strategic partner in the entire Indo-Pacific. Ahead of the May 9, 2022, presidential election, the Pentagon and the Philippine defense establishment seem intent on setting the tone for robust military cooperation under whoever becomes the next Filipino president.
The US Embassy in Manila, which has been bereft of an ambassador throughout the pandemic, billed the forthcoming exercises as the “largest-ever iteration” of the joint military exercises as the two allies celebrate the 75th anniversary of US-Philippine security cooperation.
Philippine and US Marines during a surface-to-air missile simulation as part of exercise KAMANDAG on October 10, 2019. Photo: Lance Cpl. Brienna Tuck / US Marine Corps
Under Duterte, the Balikatan exercises were twice canceled, first in 2016, as he tried to build strategic bridges with China and Russia, and again in 2020 amid the China-originated Covid-19 pandemic, which disrupted US military operations across the Indo-Pacific. But last October, the AFP announced that joint military exercises will be back in full scale in 2022, along with more than 300 other scheduled joint activities with the Pentagon.
Crucially, the upcoming Balikatan exercises will feature for the first time in years more US military personnel (5,100) than Filipino forces (3,800). The two sides are expected to focus on “maritime security, amphibious operations, live-fire training, urban operations, aviation operations, counterterrorism, and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief,” according to the US Embassy in Manila.
To enhance interoperability, the two mutual defense treaty (MDT) allies are also scheduled to conduct a command post exercise which “tests the two militaries’ ability to plan, command, and communicate with each other in a simulated environment. This training will bolster the collective security and defensive capabilities of the alliance,” the US Embassy said.
US Chargé d’Affaires ad interim Heather Variava described the massive exercises as “a critical opportunity to work shoulder-to-shoulder with our Philippine allies toward a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific that is more connected, prosperous, secure, and resilient,’ as our Indo-Pacific Strategy calls for.”
Major General Jay Bargeron, US 3rd Marine Division Commanding General, hailed the upcoming Balikatan as a chance for both allies to “train together to expand and advance shared tactics, techniques, and procedures that strengthen our response capabilities and readiness for real-world challenges.”
“Our alliance remains a key source of strength and stability in the Indo-Pacific region,” the US general added.
For his part, Major General Charlton Sean Gaerlan, the AFP Exercise Director for Balikatan 22, was similarly effusive about the Balikatan exercises, describing them as “a testament to the strength of the Philippines and United States’ security relationship.”
“The experience gained in the exercise complements our security cooperation endeavors and will help to enhance existing mutual security efforts,” the Filipino general added.
The steady and robust revival of Philippine-US military cooperation has coincided with manifold challenges bedeviling Duterte’s pivot to China and Russia. Despite its promise of as much as $26 billion in large-scale investments, China has yet to finalize a single big-ticket infrastructure investment project during Duterte’s nearly finished tenure.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte salutes Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) navy soldiers during a visit to a Chinese Naval ship in Davao city, Philippines, May 1, 2017. Photo: China Daily
In response, even Duterte called out Beijing’s actions during the ASEAN-China Summit last year, where the Filipino president chastised his ally for aggressive activities that do “not speak well of the relations between our nations and our partnership.”
By and large, the Filipino public has also been highly distrustful of China. According to the Social Weather Stations (SWS) polling agency, China’s net trust rating in 2019 reached a low of -33% compared to 72% for the US.
Based on a preliminary survey, which the author and his colleagues at the National Defense College of the Philippines conducted in 2018, the vast majority of next-generation military officers in the AFP also expressed similar views towards the two superpowers.
In short, both the Philippine public and defense establishment have been largely skeptical of China, while recognizing the value of robust defense cooperation with the US.
Meanwhile, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has torpedoed its burgeoning defense cooperation with key Southeast Asian countries such as the Philippines. Early in office, Duterte described the Russian leader as his “favorite hero”, welcoming large-scale defense cooperation in a bid to lessen his country’s dependence on the US.
The imposition of a new barrage of Western sanctions, however, has thrown the future of Philippine-Russian defense cooperation into doubt. It’s highly unlikely that the US will grant its Southeast Asian ally any waivers from tightening sanctions on Russia’s defense sector under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA).
With Russia increasingly isolated, Duterte has accordingly changed tone, recently describing Putin as “suicidal”, while offering Philippine bases to the US in the event of an all-out global conflict between the two superpowers.
“[Duterte] was very clear that – if push comes to shove – the Philippines will be ready to be part of the effort, especially if this Ukrainian crisis spills over to the Asian region,” Philippine Ambassador to Washington Jose Manuel Romualdez told reporters in Manila during an online forum.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte meet on the sidelines of the APEC summit last year. Photo: Sputnik / Mikhail Klimentyev
“He offered that the Philippines will be ready to open its doors, especially to our ally the US in using our facilities, any facilities they may need,” the influential diplomat, who is widely seen as a top contender to become the next Philippine foreign affairs secretary, added.
Although Russia has no direct territorial disputes with the Philippines, and bilateral trade and investment relations have been hampered by Western sanctions, its trust rating among ordinary Filipinos has been largely at par with China’s.
By all indications, the Philippines, after years of mostly fruitless strategic flirtation with Beijing and Moscow, is now closing ranks with the US as Duterte fades from the scene.
13. Momentous Changes in the U.S. Marine Corps’ Force Organization Deserve Debate
Has there ever been this kind of public pushback about internal changes?
Excerpt:
New ideas, even if they are bad ideas, have a way of gaining media attention. Predictably, some commentators have dismissed the concerns of the Marine Corps retired community as coming from a bunch of graybeards whose minds are still focused on yesterday’s wars. Such comments do no justice to the long tradition of combat innovation that has always marked the Marine Corps, from amphibious doctrine to helicopter usage to the techniques of close-air support.
If Gen. Berger’s new ideas were well thought out and tested, we would be seeing 90% of retired generals enthusiastically supporting them instead of expressing concern. But the realities of brutal combat and the wide array of global challenges the Marine Corps faces daily argue strongly against a doctrinal experiment that might look good in a computerized war game at Quantico.
Twenty-two four-star generals deserve to be listened to. For the good of the country, let’s hope they will be.
Momentous Changes in the U.S. Marine Corps’ Force Organization Deserve Debate
Retired generals raise telling questions about the current commandant’s radical new ideas.
By Jim Webb
March 25, 2022 12:30 pm ET
For more than two years many of the Marine Corps’ finest former leaders have struggled with this dilemma as they quietly discussed a series of fundamental changes ordered, and in some cases already implemented, by Gen. David Berger, the current commandant. Among Marines there are serious questions about the wisdom and long-term risk of dramatic reductions in force structure, weapon systems and manpower levels in units that would take steady casualties in most combat scenarios. And it is unclear to just about everyone with experience in military planning what formal review and coordination was required before Gen. Berger unilaterally announced a policy that would alter so many time-honored contributions of the Marine Corps.
The unique and irreplaceable mission of the Marine Corps is to provide a homogeneous, all-encompassing “force in readiness” that can go anywhere and fight anyone on any level short of nuclear war. The corps has fought many political battles to preserve that mission but never from within—until now.
Among other decisions, Gen. Berger’s “Force Structure 2030” plan includes these provisions:
• Elimination of three infantry battalions from the current 24, a 14% reduction in frontline combat strength.
• Reduction of each remaining battalion by 200 Marines, taking an additional 4,200 infantry Marines from the frontline combat capabilities.
• Elimination of two reserve-component infantry battalions of the present eight, a 25% reduction of combat strength.
• Elimination of 16 cannon artillery battalions, a 76% reduction, to be replaced by 14 rocket artillery battalions, for use in “successful naval campaigns.”
• Elimination of all the tanks in the Marine Corps, even from the reserves.
• Elimination of three of the current 17 medium tilt-rotor squadrons, three of the eight heavy-lift helicopter squadrons, and “at least” two of the seven light attack helicopter squadrons, which were termed “unsuitable for maritime challenges.”
After several unsuccessful attempts by retired senior officers to engage in a quiet dialogue with Gen. Berger, the gloves have now come off. The traditional deference has been replaced by a sense of duty to the Marine Corps and its vital role in our national security. Recently, 22 retired four-star Marine generals signed a nonpublic letter of concern to Gen. Berger, and many others have stated their support of the letter. A daily working group that includes 17 retired generals has been formed to communicate concerns to national leaders. One highly respected retired three-star general estimated to me that “the proportion of retired general officers who are gravely concerned about the direction of the Corps in the last two and a half years would be above 90 percent.”
There is not much time to stop the potential damage to our national security. Questions should be raised. The law does not give the commandant of the Marine Corps carte blanche to make significant changes in force structure. Title 10 provides that the commandant perform his duties “subject to the authority, direction, and control of the Secretary of the Navy,” and that the Navy secretary “has the authority necessary to conduct all affairs of the Department of the Navy including. . . . organizing,” but “subject to the authority, direction, and control of the Secretary of Defense.” And the president retains ultimate authority as commander in chief.
The risk involved in a restructuring of this scale should have required full consideration and debate in such Pentagon offices as the Defense Resources Board, then a formal approval by the defense secretary before being sent to the White House for further review, and then extensive oversight hearings in Congress.
Few of our most serious members of Congress would have simply nodded and funded a program with almost irreversible long-term consequences. Gen. Berger’s announcement came during the Covid restrictions, when much of Congress had gone remote, and serious examination and oversight was extremely difficult. Added to that was the chaos that existed in the Pentagon during the 2020 campaign year and the inevitable postelection turbulence.
New ideas, even if they are bad ideas, have a way of gaining media attention. Predictably, some commentators have dismissed the concerns of the Marine Corps retired community as coming from a bunch of graybeards whose minds are still focused on yesterday’s wars. Such comments do no justice to the long tradition of combat innovation that has always marked the Marine Corps, from amphibious doctrine to helicopter usage to the techniques of close-air support.
If Gen. Berger’s new ideas were well thought out and tested, we would be seeing 90% of retired generals enthusiastically supporting them instead of expressing concern. But the realities of brutal combat and the wide array of global challenges the Marine Corps faces daily argue strongly against a doctrinal experiment that might look good in a computerized war game at Quantico.
Twenty-two four-star generals deserve to be listened to. For the good of the country, let’s hope they will be.
Mr. Webb was a Marine infantry officer in Vietnam, Navy secretary (1987-88) and a U.S. senator from Virginia (2007-13). He is the Distinguished Fellow at Notre Dame’s International Security Center.
14. Russian generals are getting killed at an extraordinary rate
Excerpts:
Pentagon and other Western officials say that Russian generals generally serve closer to the front lines than their NATO counterparts. By design, the Russian army is top heavy with senior officers, which makes them numerous, though not expendable.
Military analysts and Western intelligence officials say the Russian generals in Ukraine may be more exposed and serving closer to the front because their side is struggling – and that senior officers are deployed closer to the action to cut through the chaos.
One Western official suggested that Russian generals were also needed to push “frightened” Russian troops, including raw conscripts, forward. Earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Defence Ministry to withdraw conscripts from combat, having publicly pledged that they would not be deployed.
Russian generals are getting killed at an extraordinary rate
Brisbane Times · by William Booth, Robyn Dixon and David L. Stern · March 27, 2022
By William Booth, Robyn Dixon and David L. Stern
March 27, 2022 — 12.27pm
London/Mukachevo, Ukraine: The war in Ukraine is proving extraordinarily lethal for Russian generals, the grey men bedecked in service medals, who are being aggressively targeted by Ukrainian forces and killed at a rate not seen since World War II.
Ukrainian officials say their forces have killed seven generals on the battlefield, felled by snipers, close combat and bombings.
If true, the deaths of so many generals, alongside more senior Russian army and naval commanders – in just four weeks of combat – exceeds the attrition rate seen in the worst months of fighting in the bloody nine-year war fought by Russia in Chechnya, as well as Russian and Soviet-era campaigns in Afghanistan, Georgia and Syria.
The latest, Lt Gen Yakov Rezanstev, was killed on Friday (Ukraine time) in a strike near the southern city Kherson, according to Ukraine’s defence ministry.
“It is highly unusual,” said a senior Western official, briefing reporters on the topic, who confirmed the names, ranks and “killed in action” status of the seven.
In all, at least 15 senior Russian commanders have been killed in the field, said Markiyan Lubkivsky, a spokesperson for the Ukraine Ministry of Defence.
NATO officials estimated earlier this week that as many as 15,000 Russian troops have been killed in four weeks of war, a very high number. Russia has offered a far lower figure, reporting Friday that only 1351 of its fighters had died.
The Russian government has not confirmed the deaths of its generals.
If the numbers of senior commanders killed proves accurate, the Russian generals have been either extremely unlucky or successfully targeted – or both.
Shooting generals is a legitimate tactic of war – and it has been openly embraced by Ukrainian officials, who say their forces have been focused on slowing Russian advances by concentrating fire on Russian command-and-control units near the front lines.
Jeffrey Edmonds, former director for Russia on the National Security Council and now a senior analyst at the CNA think tank in Washington, said Ukrainian forces appear to be targeting “anyone with grey hair standing near a bunch of antennas,” a signal they may be senior officers.
Some experts suggest the Russian military has struggled to keep its communications secure and that Ukraine intelligence units have found their targets through Russian carelessness, with Russian forces reduced to using unencrypted devices. There have been reports of Russian soldiers using mobile phones.
Pentagon and other Western officials say that Russian generals generally serve closer to the front lines than their NATO counterparts. By design, the Russian army is top heavy with senior officers, which makes them numerous, though not expendable.
Military analysts and Western intelligence officials say the Russian generals in Ukraine may be more exposed and serving closer to the front because their side is struggling – and that senior officers are deployed closer to the action to cut through the chaos.
One Western official suggested that Russian generals were also needed to push “frightened” Russian troops, including raw conscripts, forward. Earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Defence Ministry to withdraw conscripts from combat, having publicly pledged that they would not be deployed.
Pentagon, NATO and Western officials say the Russian army in Ukraine is struggling with poor morale.
Russian soldiers attacked and injured their commanding officer after their brigade suffered heavy losses in the fighting outside the capital, Kyiv, according to a Western official and a Ukrainian journalist.
Troops with the 37th Motor Rifle Brigade ran a tank into Col. Yuri Medvedev, injuring both his legs, after their unit lost almost half its men, according to a Facebook post by Ukrainian journalist Roman Tsymbaliuk. The post said the colonel had been hospitalised.
A senior Western official said he believed Medvedev had been killed, “as a consequence of the scale of the losses taken by his own brigade”.
Oleksiy Arestovych, a military adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, told The Washington Post the Ukraine army has focused its efforts on “slowing the pace” of the Russian invasion, in part by “beheading” forward command posts, meaning killing, not literally beheading.
Killing senior officers can slow down the Russian advances by “three or four or five days” before new command structures can be put in place, Arestovych said.
He attributed successful targeting to both “excellent intelligence” and numerous Russian vulnerabilities.
Arestovych claimed that in addition to slowing Russian momentum, killing their generals undermines Russian morale, while bolstering Ukrainian resolve.
“The death of such commanders quickly becomes public knowledge and it is very difficult to hide,” he said. “Unlike the death of an ordinary soldier, it makes an outsized impression.”
Ukrainian officials and Western officials have named seven Russian generals killed in action: Rezanstev, Magomed Tushayev, Andrei Sukhovetsky, Vitaly Gerasimov, Andrey Kolesnikov, Oleg Mityaev and Andrei Mordvichev.
Russian officials and Russian media have confirmed the death of only one general.
Sukhovetsky, a deputy commander of Russia’s 41st army, was killed by a sniper at the beginning of the war, Ukrainian officials said. At his burial in Novorossiysk, a port city on the Black Sea, a deputy mayor said Sukhovetsky “died heroically during a combat mission during a special operation in Ukraine.”
Christo Grosev, director of open-source investigative group Bellingcat, said he confirmed the death of Gerasimov, which was first announced by Ukrainian intelligence. The Bellingcat investigator also reported on a March 7 phone call from a Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officer, reporting the death to his superior, a call captured by Ukrainian intelligence and shared with reporters.
One of the first commanders that Ukraine claimed to have killed, in late February, was Tushayev, a right-hand man to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.
Kadyrov denied the claim on his Telegram channel and Chechen Information Minister Akhmed Dudayev posted an audio message purportedly from Tushayev, which he said proved he was alive.
The deaths of senior officers are celebrated on Ukrainian social media - but kept out of Russian news.
Killing Russian generals “feels consequential to Ukraine,” especially in “the David versus Goliath narrative they are living through,” said Margarita Konaev, an expert on Russian military innovation at Georgetown University’s Centre for Security and Emerging Technology.
She said the nature of the fighting -- at close quarters in urban environments -- will likely add to the body count on both sides, for civilians, ordinary soldiers and commanders.
The urban dimension is especially deadly, she said.
Mason Clark, a senior analyst and expert on the Russian military at the Institute for the Study of War, said Ukrainian reports suggest that radio communications across the Russian forces are vulnerable to interception and location.
Before the war with Russia began, Clark said Ukraine forces learned how to use communications to “target and pinpoint” the sources of artillery fire in the separatist enclaves in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
“They’ve used this training at scale,” Clark said.
Ruth Deyermond, an expert in post-Soviet security in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, said it was unknown how the loss of senior officers in Ukraine might shape thinking in the Kremlin.
As Putin’s circle has shrunk, and decision-making become more opaque, she said, “you don’t even know what Putin is being told about the losses” by his own military.
The reported high attrition rate for Russian commanders in Ukraine underscores the problem of invading the country on a false set of assumptions, expecting to swiftly topple Ukraine’s government and install a puppet regime to bring it back into Moscow’s orbit. A military operation forecast by Russia to take a few days has entered its second month.
Russia is highly sensitive about military casualties, in particular involving senior officers.
Calling the invasion a “special military operation” to liberate Ukraine from “neo-Nazis,” Russian authorities have banned journalists from using the term “war” and have criminalised criticism of the military or the release of any information that could damage its standing.
After Russia’s initial failures, Putin has simply doubled down on the war effort, with the Kremlin dampening hopes of an off-ramp through peace talks. Russian authorities appear to be preparing for a long, bloody campaign, drumming up domestic unity through a propaganda blitz, as the military intensifies its pressure on Ukraine.
The Washington Post
Brisbane Times · by William Booth, Robyn Dixon and David L. Stern · March 27, 2022
15. Russian troops’ tendency to talk on unsecured lines is proving costly
There is a lot to parse about this. Why this indiscipline? Do they have no better communication methods? Are they using the local cell phone infrastructure? Is this why they have not shut down commas in Ukraine?
Excerpt:
“It appears likely,” he said, “some officers picked up bad habits that they thought would work in Ukraine.”
Russian troops’ tendency to talk on unsecured lines is proving costly
Russian troops in Ukraine have relied, with surprising frequency, on unsecured communication devices such as smartphones and push-to-talk radios, leaving units vulnerable to targeting, and further underscoring the command-and-control deficiencies that have come to define Moscow’s month-long invasion, observers say.
“We’re seeing them use a lot more unclassified communications because their classified communications capability, … for one reason or another, is not as strong as it should be,” a senior U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under terms set by the Pentagon, told reporters in a recent news briefing.
The Russian military possesses modern equipment capable of secure transmission, but troops on the battlefield have reached for simpler-to-use but less-secure lines because of uneven discipline across the ranks, an apparent lack of planning for conducting a sustained fight over long distances, and Russian attacks on Ukraine’s communication infrastructure that it, too, has relied on, experts say.
A European intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss NATO’s battlefield assessments, said that since the invasion began in late-February, there have been multiple instances of Russian commanders confiscating their subordinates’ personal phones for fear they would unwittingly give away a unit’s location.
Similarly, Ukrainian civilians have reported having their phones stolen by Russian troops who use them to speak with one another and with family back home, this official said. Those calls, the official noted, have revealed troops’ frustrations and declining morale as Ukraine’s military has stymied Russia’s advance around key cities, killing thousands of Russians in the process.
The Pentagon on Friday said that its latest intelligence showed Russian forces had lost full control of Kherson, a port city along the Black Sea, as Ukraine expands its offensive operations in key part of the country and Russia appears to be have shifted its emphasis to the separatist Donbas region in the east. Ukrainian forces also have pushed back Russian advances outside the northern city of Chernihiv with other offensives underway in the western suburbs of Kyiv, the capital, the senior U.S. defense official said.
There is evidence that the United States and other NATO countries have provided Ukrainian forces with electronic warfare equipment capable of interrupting Russian transmissions and allowing them to target Russian command posts, said Kostas Tigkos, a Russian military expert at the defense analysis firm Janes Group. By destroying Russia’s communication nodes, the Ukrainians could pressure their adversaries to use less-secure equipment, he said, increasing the likelihood their conversations will be intercepted or their positions triangulated.
While the Russian military has overhauled its military technology in the last two decades, with some emphasis on modernizing its communication hardware, Tigkos said equipment is only part of the equation. “It’s one thing,” he said, “to develop a good radio that works well. It’s another thing to deploy that radio, build a network, and conduct a complex military operation with thousands of moving parts, and have them work together like a symphony.”
Russian military transmissions over unsecured lines have been so prevalent, analysts say, that amateur radio enthusiasts have tuned into them online using sites such as Web SDR. Some conversations have revealed troops’ frustrations. In one transmission on March 5, a Russian service member identifies himself as “Blacksmith,” rather than a call sign. “Don’t say the last names on air!” another responds. The transmission was provided to The Washington Post by Shadow Break International, an open-source intelligence consultancy based in Britain.
In another discussion, Russian soldiers appear to confuse one another by mistaking their callsigns. One identifies himself as “Exchange.” Another then says that, in fact, that’s his call sign. “You got it all mixed up!” one of them explains.
Russian commanders also have exhibited difficulty orchestrating communications over such a vast, dynamic battlefield, analysts say. Their forces are stretched across Ukraine, the largest country in Europe outside Russia, posing challenges for military planners who must coordinate mobile transmission sites and ensure radios are operating on frequencies that must be consistently changed.
At the same time, military analysts have cautioned against making sweeping generalizations of the Russians’ communication performance. Some units, they say, may be better equipped and disciplined than others.
Photos of Russian equipment captured by Ukrainian forces show sophisticated and secure radios, said Sam Bendett, a Russian military technology expert at the Center for Naval Analyses in Arlington, Va. Other imagery show off-the-shelf equipment. Some Russian personnel may use such radios as a means to blend into the wide spectrum of civilian frequencies — like a needle in a haystack, Bendett said — rather than military frequencies that are more limited and detectable with the right equipment.
There is anecdotal evidence that Russia’s unsecured communications have led to battlefield losses. One Russian general was purportedly killed in an airstrike after his cellphone was detected by the Ukrainians, the New York Times reported earlier this month.
In another instance, shared by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, two Russian intelligence officials were heard discussing over an open frequency the death of a senior officer. When one asked to speak on an encrypted line, the other said it wasn’t working.
“We can’t get in touch with anyone at all,” the official said, lamenting his inoperable phone, called the Era. The Russian-made device relies on a cellular network to function, but heavy bombardment has destroyed cell towers in many parts of the country, in turn constraining the Russians’ ability to use secure phones, said Tigkos, the analyst with Janes Group.
It’s also likely that senior Russian officers with experience battling less capable forces in other theaters had become somewhat complacent and were caught off guard by how determined Ukrainian forces have proven to be. Russian commanders have rotated through Syria for years, where radios and cellphones could be used without worry of interference or tracking, noted Bendett, of the Center for Naval Analyses.
“It appears likely,” he said, “some officers picked up bad habits that they thought would work in Ukraine.”
Joyce Sohyun Lee and Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.
16. Ukrainian Farming Town Destroys Putin's Tank Assault - BBC - 3/22/2022
I grew up at Camp Mackall as a new teenage green beret candidate on Resistance training films of Poland and eastern Europe. Now, the circle is complete, I suspect this will soon be part of standard Resistance training films for this SF generation and future generations of teenage green berets:
Ukrainian Farming Town Destroys Putin's Tank Assault - BBC - 3/22/2022
"It's hard to explain how we did it. It's thanks to the fighting spirit of our local people and to the Ukrainian army," said the town of Voznesensk's mayor, Yevheni Velichko.
17. Young Ukrainian mums tell how they have taken up arms to defend Odesa
Young Ukrainian mums tell how they have taken up arms to defend Odesa
EXCLUSIVE: 'I will kill to protect my city, my family, my country': Young Ukrainian mothers tell how they have joined up and taken up arms to defend Odesa from Putin's forces
- Olena Lolesnyk, 30, and Kamila Suleymanova, 33, are defending Ukraine
- The two mothers are in a unit that is Ukraine's final line of defence for Odesa
- Olena told MailOnline: 'I am prepared to kill to protect my city, my family'
PUBLISHED: 10:38 EDT, 26 March 2022 | UPDATED: 15:13 EDT, 26 March 2022
Daily Mail · by Nick Fagge In Odesa, Ukraine, For Mailonline · March 26, 2022
Two Ukrainian mothers of young children have told how they will kill and be killed to protect their beloved city of Odesa from Russian invaders.
Before the war Olena Lolesnyk and Kamila Suleymanova held down normal jobs and spent their free time taking their sons to the many beaches and parks of this picturesque resort town, known as the 'Pearl of the Black Sea'.
But after Russian warships threatened to mount a seaborne assault of ancient port, these fiercely protective women took up arms to defend Ukraine.
Now Olena, 30, and Kamila, 33, are part of a unit of Ukraine's 3014 Army that is the final line of defence for Odesa – a long-held prize of the Kremlin.
Mothers Olena Lolesnyk, 30, (left) and Kamila Suleymanova, 33, have taken up arms to defend Ukraine
The pair attended a military ceremony to honour Ukraine's National Guard in Odesa, southern Ukraine
'I am prepared to kill to protect my city, my family, my country,' blonde-haired Olena told MailOnline, after she collected a bravery award from the city mayor.
'I try not to think about whether I might die, but I am prepared to give my life to protect everything I love.'
Kamila added: 'My mother does not know that I have joined the army.
'But we have to defend our land. It is for our children.'
The pair were speaking after they attended a military ceremony to honour Ukraine's National Guard.
Dressed in khaki-green uniforms, body armour, tin hats, and carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles, they stood shoulder to shoulder with their male comrades, as a military band played the Last Post.
The parade was held next to a famous statue of Russian Tsarina Catherine the Great, who founded the city in 1794.
But now this symbol of the Russian Empire is covered in sand-bags and surrounded by Ukrainian military hardware to protect it from the Kremlin warships that threaten to reduce the historic port to rubble.
Tank traps, barbed-wire and machine gun emplacement now litter the tree-lined boulevards and pedestrian walkways throughout the city centre.
Formally the fourth most important city in the Russian Empire, and with huge strategic value as Ukraine's main sea port, Odesa is a major Kremlin goal.
Russian warships fired shells into the town last week wrecking buildings.
A Ukrainian soldier guards in front of the National Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet and one of the city's symbols, behind a heavy barricade in Odesa, Ukraine, March 26
A woman asks for permission to cross the barricades while Ukrainian soldier guards in front of the Odesa National Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet
And the Ukrainian Army is on high-alert of a coordinated Normandy-style beach landing and parachute assault that could surround the city on three sides.
So ordinary citizens – like the two mothers – have taken up arms in their droves to defend their homes.
Back on parade, Olena revealed she does not know who will look after her nine-year-old son David if she is killed.
Her mother is dead and she split up from his father a long time ago.
But the 30-year-old, who usually works for a trade union, says she had no other choice than to help defend the city.
She said: 'This is my duty.
'At the moment I work in the army stores.
'But my unit is based here in the city of Odesa so if the Russians invade I will shoot them from the barricades.
Kamila, who used to work for the city council, said she felt she had no choice but to join the army.
She said: 'My son Daniel is 12 years old. I have to protect Odesa for him, for his future.
'I used to work in an office but now I go on patrol and man a post with my unit.'
Daily Mail · by Nick Fagge In Odesa, Ukraine, For Mailonline · March 26, 2022
18. English-language military drills held (Taiwan)
What message are the Taiwanese intending with this?
Photos at the link:
Sat, Mar 26, 2022 page1
- English-language military drills held
- By Wu Su-wei and Liu Tzu-hsuan / Staff reporter, with staff writer
-
-
The army’s Aviation and Special Forces Command conducted training yesterday in which all orders were delivered in English.
The training — held in Hsinchu County’s Kengzihkou (坑子口) area — featured simulations of troops ambushing enemy soldiers, including vehicles passing through the ambush zone.
The training was part of the special battalion’s “tactical mission march,” which runs from Tuesday last week until Friday next week.
- The fifth legion of the army’s Aviation and Special Forces Command undergoes casualty care training at the Kengzihkou shooting range in Hsinchu County yesterday.
Photo: CNA
Its aim is to improve combat readiness and strengthen the battalion’s capabilities, the military said.
Yesterday was the 10th day of the 456km march across New Taipei City, Taoyuan, and Hsinchu and Miaoli counties.
After yesterday’s leg, 234km were completed, the military said.
- A member of the army’s Aviation and Special Forces Command takes part in a training at the Kengzihkou shooting range in Hsinchu County yesterday.
Photo: Ritchie B. Tongo, EPA-EFE
Asked whether the use of military terms in English was linked to Taiwanese troops being trained by US military experts, command spokesman Major General Wang Chun-chieh (王俊傑) said there was no special meaning to the use of English during the training.
English allowed for easier and quicker communication during the training, Wang said.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in an interview with CNN in October last year said that a small number of US armed forces personnel were in Taiwan to train Taiwanese troops, confirming media reports about the training mission.
19. Air Force creates new information warfare training detachment
I had a discussion with their action officers recently. They are working to incorporate all best practices and lessons learned.
Air Force creates new information warfare training detachment
Written by
Mar 24, 2022 | FEDSCOOP
The Air Force has created a new information warfare training and research detachment aimed at improving the way the service prepares airmen to conduct operations.
Air Combat Command created the new entity March 22 at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. It will be a subordinate unit of the 55th Wing at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, with locations at the 67th Cyberspace Wing at Joint Base San Antonio, Texas, according to a news release.
According to the service, the detachment “will conduct IW training and research events to address the growing importance of operations in the information environment and the electromagnetic spectrum” as they relate to strategic competition.
“If we want to be a resolute world power, we must not only compete in the global commons but also compete and win in contested sovereigns,” said Gen. Mark Kelly, commander of Air Combat Command. “Most competition, if not all combat, will take place in the electromagnetic spectrum. Focusing our offensive and defensive capabilities in the digitally-enabled domain is critical to honing our lethality.”
Air Combat Command, the Air Force Research Lab, and the Secretary of the Air Force’s Concepts, Development and Management Office, along with several academic organizations have been experimenting with ways to change how the service conducts info-warfare training and research for the last several years, the Air Force said.
The department has created a hybrid, wing-level organization to connect airmen from multiple locations to accelerate readiness through training and research.
The Air Force has sought to improve its training especially through live-virtual-constructive environments, which leverage computer-generated entities to help simulate real-word scenarios. It has organized and executed 22 information warfare-focused events spanning the globe to reimagine traditional training and research models.
“We’ve adapted a ‘build, learn, correct, repeat’ model,” said Col. Christopher Budde, chief of Air Combat Command’s information warfare division. “We are experimenting with sustainable processes and events in quick succession to scale conceptual ideas, operationally test them, then integrate these processes across the larger federated enterprise.”
The model of linking airmen and experts across the world to experiment, test and train in the information environment and electromagnetic spectrum provides many advantages over the traditional approach, the Air Force said, namely giving info-warfare teams training and research repetitions.
“The distributed nature of the events means they can be conducted more frequently, can be ongoing, and members can participate in multiple iterations,” Budde said. “If a unit is unable to participate in an event, they can jump back into a future iteration when available, but the challenges in the information environment continue and the teams have to respond with the capabilities available.”
Most recently, info-warfare specialists from 34 organizations across 23 geographic locations integrated capabilities within an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance mission.
In 2019, the Air Force activated the 16th Air Force, the first info-warfare-focused numbered Air Force. This unit combines and consolidates cyber, electronic warfare, information operations and intelligence under a single command.
Since then, the service has conducted a series of exercises at a training facility in Playas, New Mexico. These exercises are designed around “live fire and live fly,” aiming to refine information warfare tactics, such as honing cyber, electronic warfare and electromagnetic spectrum capabilities.
20. Wagging the Dog: The Ten Commandments of Propaganda
For reflection. Propaganda works both ways (as these 10 commandments do)
Wagging the Dog: The Ten Commandments of Propaganda
“The first casualty when war comes is truth.” — Hiram Johnson
In the lead up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the propaganda campaign began. Weaving a comprehensive and compelling – to some – false narrative, Russian leaders and state-controlled media used both disinformation and focused propaganda across the internet and social media to influence public opinion. The onslaught was purposeful: Russia had to intervene to save Ukraine from itself.
The rhetoric was classic Putin, himself a product of a finely tuned propaganda apparatus. Russia didn’t want a conflict, he insisted, but his hand was being forced. The West was pushing Ukraine toward a conflict, dangling the possibility of NATO membership. There was also concern over planned chemical weapons attacks in the Donbas region, as well as biological weapons plants active in Ukraine. Then there was the Nazi problem. Putin desperately wanted to protect the people of Ukraine from the specter of nationalists, “to bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation.”
Despite massing over 100,000 troops on the border with Ukraine, it was merely a repositioning of forces for training purposes. Until it wasn’t. Then it was an invasion, one with a sole focus of decapitating the ruling and sovereign government.
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
Propaganda has always been a part of war. In his discussion of the ch’i, or extraordinary force, Sun Tzu emphasized the use of cunning as a means to win without fighting. The indirect strategy involved those actions short of military force – the ordinary force, or ch’eng – that could bring defeat to the enemy. In Samuel Griffith’s 1963 translation of Sun Tzu, it was clear that the ancient master considered propaganda fundamental to the indirect strategy.
In 1928, Arthur Ponsonby, a British politician and the son of Queen Victoria’s Private Secretary, published his book Falsehood in Wartime, opening with the words: “When war is declared, truth is the first casualty” (paraphrasing U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson). In his examination of the role of propaganda in World War I, he regarded false narratives as fundamental to warfare: without lies there would be “no reason and no will for war.” When Belgian historian Anne Morelli systematized Ponsonby’s thinking in her 2001 monograph, Principes Elémentaires de Propagande de Guerre (Basic Principles of War Propaganda), she summarized the techniques described in terms of ten principles, or what has become known as the Ten Commandments of Propaganda.
- We don’t want war, we are only defending ourselves.
- Our adversary is solely responsible for this war.
- Our adversary’s leader is inherently evil and resembles the devil.
- We are defending a noble cause, not our particular interests.
- The enemy is purposefully committing atrocities; if we are making mistakes this happens without intention.
- The enemy makes use of illegal weapons.
- We suffer few losses, the enemy’s losses are considerable.
- Recognized intellectuals and artists support our cause.
- Our cause is sacred.
- Whoever casts doubt on our propaganda helps the enemy and is a traitor.
Those commandments, proven by time, mirror Putin’s own approach in Ukraine, recasting a brutal invasion of a sovereign nation as some kind of humanitarian intervention.
PROPAGANDA IN THE INFORMATION AGE
While Putin’s initial efforts to set the stage for war may have been sufficient to recruit more than a few useful idiots, the effect was short-lived. The voices of those parroting Putin’s propaganda talking points were quickly muted by the on-ground realities in Ukraine. Facebook and Instagram blocked access to Russian state media outlets such as RT and Sputnik. As his attack faltered and losses mounted, he found himself on unfamiliar ground: losing the propaganda war.
Long considered a master of information warfare, Putin’s approach to this conflict was as predictable as a baby boomer descending on an all you can eat buffet at the Western Sizzler. He did what he always did. But this wasn’t Chechnya. It wasn’t Syria. It wasn’t even the Crimea. It was 2022, and he was facing a world of content savvy influencers who understood fighting in the modern information domain a lot better than he did. And when the tide of the information war turned on Putin, he found himself looking a lot like an old man wondering how he missed out on the last piece of peach cobbler. The world had passed him by, and he wasn’t quite sure how.
The false narrative that propelled him into Ukraine has now become the subject of wide ridicule. Ongoing attempts to justify the invasion – now mired in its third week of ineptitude – have failed to gain any significant traction. Efforts to twist facts to fit his narrative – for example, claims that medical research laboratories are actually bioweapons facilities – have been countered effectively. Even his denazification propaganda suffered as Task Force Rusich, Russian neo-Nazi mercenaries from the Wagner Group, suggested on Instagram that they might be returning to the fight in Ukraine.
A recent Atlantic Council post summarized Putin’s precarious position: “Faced with the reality of a catastrophic defeat on the information front, Putin has retreated” in a desperate attempt to “protect his grip on domestic Russian audiences.” Not even a staged war rally with forced attendance could turn the tide of the information war. That doesn’t mean that he won’t continue to press the attack in Ukraine, or that the atrocities won’t continue. But what it does mean is that he won’t be fooling anyone with ludicrous claims of innocence. This has become a stark conflict of black-and-white, of good and evil.
The Ten Commandments of Propaganda work both ways, it turns out.
21. How my F-16 crashed into the cuckoo’s nest: Battling the internal and external demons
A sad story from a friend and colleague from Georgetown. Many will know her (but don't really know her) as one of the most controversial and outspoken professors at Georgetown (or perhaps any university). Those who do know her will describe her as extremely passionate, committed, and a brilliant linguist and scholar. I have sat in on a number of her class lectures and she is a gifted teacher.
I am uncomfortable sending this because she is a friend but she published it online and as she writes hopefully this will create discussion and help someone.
Spoiler alert:
There’s no happy ending to the story: Just a story of how one person, who at first blush seems together and successful, manages the darkest of demons. And despite having some of the best health care an American can have, it’s still not enough. I share this deeply personal account because I know right now, someone reading this is going through I what I am going through. In short, ladai jari rahegi (battle is on). Because it has to.
Here’s the final kick in the teeth: Just as I’ve been trying to get over the shock that even seeing that hospital brings, those people had the temerity to send me the bill. Do prisoners pay the cost of their incarceration?
How my F-16 crashed into the cuckoo’s nest: Battling the internal and external demons
More than one in four American adults suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder. The pandemic has further exacerbated acute mental health crises across the world, failing those citizens who are most in need. In January 2022, I became one of those statistics.
March 24, 2022 07:57:31 IST
This is the photo I snapped in my disbelief right before they confiscated by my phone. Credit: C Christine Fair.
In 1954, Dr Brock Chisholm, the first Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), presciently declared that “without mental health, there can be no true physical health.” Some 68 years later, most citizens of the world’s largest and oldest democracies have inadequate access to mental health facilities, much less treatment, which often involves therapy as well as pharmaceutical approaches. In addition to the absence of resources, both countries to varying degrees stigmatise those with mental health problems. It’s a common retort when we are annoyed with someone to say: “Go back on your meds.” Anyone with actual experience with mental illness likely has a lot to say about this offensive quip. Would we ever say something like this to a diabetic: “Go back on your insulin”? No. Yet, the brain is like any other organ and sometimes it too requires care.
The statistics are staggering. More than one in four American adults suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder. Suicide, the most extreme manifestation of mental illness, is the tenth leading cause of death in the United States. For adolescents (15,019), it’s the fourth-leading cause of death. In 2019, 47,511 Americans killed themselves in addition to estimated 3.5 million people who planned to do so and 1.4 who attempted suicide but were saved. Overall, the United States has a suicide rate of 13.5 people per 100,000 people.
In India, mental health is also at a crisis point. In 2015-16, the Indian government undertook the Indian Mental Health Survey and concluded that some “150 million persons are in need of mental health interventions and care (both short term and long term) and considering the far-reaching impact of mental health (on all domains of life), in all populations (from children to elderly), in both genders, as well as in urban and rural populations, urgent actions are required.” India’s suicide rate is estimated to be 10.1 per 100,000.
Globally, each year some 800,000 people will take their lives. One person will commits suicide every 40 seconds and for each suicide, there are another 20 attempted suicides. The pandemic has only exacerbated acute mental health crises across the world, failing those citizens who are most in need. In January 2022, I became one of those statistics.
I don’t hide my own struggle with mental illness purposefully. When the social media trolls spanning the political spectrum between dangerously stupid and pathological malignant offer the “Go back on your meds” prescription, I confidently retort with complete sincerity: “Oh no, munda. I cannot go off my meds. It requires a lot of meds to keep this F16 jalopy in the air.” I am open about my experiences of trying to fix a jet while flying it because I know that there are others whose airplanes aren’t in tiptop condition either. Those without depression will most likely ask in earnest puzzlement: “Who wants to fly a broken plane?” The answer is easy: It’s the only plane we have. I know that I am not waging war on an injured brain alone.
To give you the elevator introduction to my brain, she’s fifty-three. She’s kept me alive despite more than a decade of childhood sexual abuse, a jaloos of every imaginable sort of zalims malingering in out of my mother’s life largely for economic reasons, and from my own inept mother, who despite her best efforts, was first unable and then unwilling to help me. And she was also known to give me a good whooping with any whooping object she could find, in addition to a sharp tongue and no internal filters. So unless she intended to raise a highly educated savage, we may question her parenting skillset.
While I first deduced that I could end this “bhayaanak naatak”, if I could figure out how to make myself die at the age of eight, I’ve largely managed these urges with medications and therapy until I couldn’t. This past year was the year the urges became too strong and too loud. The last calendar year has been an unending onslaught of major assaults to my central nervous system. My tendentious mother-in-law finally died after three years of dying and my remaining in-laws, who consider me one chromosome short of being a chipkilli inhabiting the reading light in the dining room, have repeatedly assaulted the fundament of my marriage. I am being sued for defamation by an alleged sexual assailant for defending her alleged victims.
The emotional strain and drain of trying to help the Afghans who sought my help added to the burgeoning intolerable burden. Just when it was clear than window to help Afghans was closing, the holidays came. The holidays are that special time of year when your loved ones demonstrate how little regard they have for you. These specific challenges further strained my brain chemistry evolving under the ravages of menopause all the while suffering from unending pain from a broken wrist. One of the medications (gabapentin) given to me to stem my wrist pain has a regrettable side effect of suicide. One of my physician's ex post facto categorically denounced this drug as “dangerous.”
And so, on a lovely Friday afternoon on 7 January, without any compulsions or reservations at all, I drove my car into my garage, tried to run a hose from my exhaust pipe to my window and I hoped for that permanent sleep. Sometime later, the police were breaking into my garage and car and all hell broke loose. What happened next isn’t even clickbait: It’s just a horror show.
I was rendered into what is called a “Temporary Detention Order” and I was forcefully admitted into our local hospital. There was one problem: That hospital had no psychiatric care. (As a well-practiced mental health survivor with an unfortunate habit of getting injured, I know my hospitals.) I explained this to the police who kindly offered not to cuff me (as per protocol) for the short ride and they agreed that I was correct. But statutorily they could not take me to the hospital that did have those facilities unless they asked for permission and they didn’t want to do that.
The police took me to the back-most room in the emergency room and cuffed me to the side of the rail, leaving my broken wrist unfettered. I briefly met with a doctor, who was younger than most wines I drink, who did a cursory exam and disappeared. I wouldn’t see her until about 9 or 10, some seven hours later, when I was begging to see a psychiatrist. The Alexandria Social Worker tasked to evaluate me via an overpriced notepad with ten percent battery remaining for all of ten minutes, announced that I should be remanded to a facility based upon virtually nothing.
For about nine hours, I was cuffed to that bed. I had been given juice and a turkey sandwich when I came in at about 3 pm. They did not serve me dinner. When I asked for dinner, I was told the service was over. They did not apologise for failing to give me dinner and indignantly complained when I explained I hadn’t had a proper meal since 7 am and needed to eat. They brought another turkey sandwich with the same enthusiasm with which one might dig a communal latrine. There was no privacy for my misery. A cop sat out my door. People wondered in front of me and stared. They thought I was a criminal. My students, colleagues or neighbours could’ve walked by.
For the entire duration of the stay, which spanned 3 pm to past midnight, I cried nonstop. Without a proper meal, without any medication for my anxiety or even a sedative to help me sleep, I was chained to that bed. No one, including my husband, could visit me. I was essentially a prisoner receiving no medical care for my principal illness: PTSD-related depression. The bright lights and constant noise and untreated anxiety meant sleep was impossible. I was denied my phone and had no mental stimulation at all apart from coming up with creative ways to insult the humanity of the various humans whose actions and inactions put me in this situation.
A bit past midnight, I was ‘transferred’ in an unmarked police vehicle to a psychiatric ward about three hours from my home. My husband could not see me off and in fact, I wouldn’t see him until many days later, after my court date.
Once checked into the pagal khaana, I realised how bad our mental health facilities are. At one point, I actually considered checking into one of these clinics voluntarily. I now realised how bad that idea was. The ward was unsegregated which meant that I never felt safe the entire time I was there. What stroke of genius was this to put a woman with PTSD with a history of sexual assault onward with men? The staff was thin due to Covid-19.
The first doctor who saw me was a creepy older man who was redolent of brill cream and moisturizer for his pasty skin. He bristled when I introduced myself as “Dr Fair,” after he introduced himself to me with his own title of “Doctor”. To regain the upper hand in this power dynamic, he casually announced that he “would not do my vaginal exam”. To which I replied, “Great. Because I wouldn’t let you.” This was a needless power move to reassert his control over the situation and my own helplessness. In the words of my therapist, to whom I later recounted this fiasco, it was “retraumatising.” He also sought to deprive me of medications that I required to manage my menopause symptoms which in large measure are intended to help regulate my mental state.
Given that I was remanded to the paagal khaanaa on an emergency basis against my will, one would have thought that getting me to see a psychiatrist would be the highest priority. But it wasn’t. I wouldn’t see a psychiatrist until the day before I was allowed to go home, following a court hearing. This was not treatment: It was involuntary incarceration. It was a place they put me in hopes that my misery would pass without medical intervention. It was holding a tank.
I could fill pages with the insanity of that psychiatric ward. For those who have seen (or read) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, let me say that that film is more documentary than fiction. I had to get out of there. My PTSD made me a very unsuitable candidate for this kind of facility. (I’m not sure who is a good candidate for what was the equivalent of a goldfish bowl for humans.) I became very anxious as the court date came. Despite the efforts of my local authority in Alexandria who advocated the judge via telephone that I should remain detained against my will, the court-appointed lawyer and my own therapist persuasively and successfully argued that I should be released.
I’ve been home for twelve weeks and the hell of that event continues to play out. In their efforts to medicate me without understanding me, my trauma and my needs, they put me on medication (aripiprazole) known for inducing a state of hypomania. Unbeknownst to me, I had been living in an unsustainable state of hypomania for weeks. Eventually, my state became so disturbed that even I could discern it. I was fearful of what would follow when this hypomania ended.
The current task is to find what works to silence the voices in my head without causing yet another set of problems to manage. Knowing that I’ll be under treatment for the rest of my life and am unlikely to ever be cured and thus free of this illness, is itself a source of depression that can be overwhelming.
There’s no happy ending to the story: Just a story of how one person, who at first blush seems together and successful, manages the darkest of demons. And despite having some of the best health care an American can have, it’s still not enough. I share this deeply personal account because I know right now, someone reading this is going through I what I am going through. In short, ladai jari rahegi (battle is on). Because it has to.
Here’s the final kick in the teeth: Just as I’ve been trying to get over the shock that even seeing that hospital brings, those people had the temerity to send me the bill. Do prisoners pay the cost of their incarceration?
C Christine Fair is a professor at Georgetown University, a life struggler with depression. She is the author of ‘Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and the Other Irritating States’, ‘Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War’, and ‘In Their Own Words: Understanding the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba’. Her website is www.christinefair.net. She tweets at @CChristineFair. Views expressed are personal.
Updated Date: March 25, 2022 12:26:41 IST
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
