Quotes of the Day:

“In a war of ideas it is people who get killed.”

– Stanisław Jerzy Lec

"The revolution of the United States was the result of a mature and reflecting preference of freedom, and not of a vague or ill-defined craving for independence. It contracted no alliance with the turbulent passions of anarchy; but its course was marked, on the contrary, by a love of order and law."

– Alexis de Tocqueville

“NATO's vision of being free and allied contrasts with the Eurasian version of President Vladimir Putin's Russia or the Sinocentric vision of President Xi Jinping’s China. Essentially, NATO was and remains a test bed for the geopolitical relevance of western values. What happens next to NATO is of concern to everyone.” 

– Stan Rynning, NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the WOrld’s Most Powerful Alliance

​1. Readout of Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III's Meeting With Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

2. Joint Readout on the Inaugural U.S.-Philippines 3+3 Meeting

3. Tony Abbott, a Fighter in the Cold War With China

4. Why Taiwanese Islands With View of China Aren’t Worried About Rising Tensions

5. Ukraine Drops Ancient Roman Weapons From Drones To Stop Russian Trucks

6. U.S. Moves Warships to Defend Israel in Case of Iranian Attack

7. China Has Helped Russia Boost Arms Production, U.S. Says

8. Opinion | The Middle East is on the precipice of the wider war no one wants

9. Myanmar’s Collapsing Military Creates a Crisis on China’s Border

10. How Iraq was lost (book review by Robert D. Kaplan)

11.  J.D. Vance: The Math on Ukraine Doesn’t Add Up

12. Taiwan's Ma visits Xi, whose intentions he trusts

13. A Warm Welcome for Japan’s Kishida in Washington

14. The End of Secular India

15.China’s Public Memory Management in Kyrgyzstan

16. Ukraine Already Uncovers 11 Spy Cells This Year: Ukrainian Intelligence

17. ​Hamas has a secret weapon no one talks about: Western stupidity

18. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, April 12, 2024

19. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 12, 2024

20. China-Taiwan Weekly Update, April 12, 2024

21. SPECIAL REPORT: RUSSIAN STRIKES MORE EFFECTIVE AS UKRAINE EXHAUSTS DEFENSES

1. Readout of Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III's Meeting With Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Readout of Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III's Meeting With Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

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April 12, 2024 |×

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Pentagon Press Secretary Major General Pat Ryder provided the following readout:

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III hosted Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. at the Pentagon today.

Secretary Austin and President Marcos underscored the historic strength of the U.S.-Philippines Alliance, which both countries are expanding and modernizing in support of a shared vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific region.

The two leaders expressed support for growing Alliance initiatives to expand interoperability. Secretary Austin highlighted that the President's Budget Request for Fiscal Year 2025 seeks $128 million to execute 36 projects at Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) sites, which would more than double the amount that DoD has invested in EDCA infrastructure since the inception of the agreement.

Secretary Austin expressed his support for Philippine military modernization, highlighting the Department's strong commitment to the Armed Forces of the Philippines through this year's budget, as well as bilateral efforts to finalize a multi-year Security Sector Assistance Roadmap.

The two leaders discussed opportunities to deepen bilateral planning and operational cooperation, including increasing the frequency of combined maritime activities like joint patrols, to support the Philippines' lawful exercise of its rights in the South China Sea. They also agreed to accelerate a number of bilateral initiatives to enhance information-sharing, interoperability, and capability enhancements for the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

The leaders applauded the April 7 maritime cooperative activity within the Philippine exclusive economic zone with Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the United States — an example of the ways the two countries are working more closely with like-minded nations to strengthen shared principles, including the rule of law, freedom of the seas, and respect for territorial sovereignty.

Secretary Austin reaffirmed U.S. support of the Philippines in defending its sovereign rights and jurisdiction, and he reiterated that the U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty extends to both countries' armed forces, public vessels, and aircraft — including those of its Coast Guard — anywhere in the Pacific, including the South China Sea.

The leaders' meeting — their second at the Pentagon in less than a year — reaffirmed the United States and the Philippines' enduring commitment to stand shoulder-to-shoulder as allies to bring greater security, prosperity, and stability to the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.

Philippine Secretary of National Defense Gilberto Teodoro Jr., Philippine Secretary of Foreign Affairs Enrique A. Manalo, and Philippine National Security Advisor Eduardo M. Año also participated in today's meeting between Secretary Austin and President Marcos. Earlier today, Secretary Austin joined Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and their Philippine counterparts at the State Department to reaffirm both countries' shared vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific and discuss ways to deepen coordination against shared challenges in the South China Sea. Today's engagements follow President Biden's bilateral meeting with President Marcos and the historic United States-Japan-Philippines trilateral leaders' summit on April 11.

Austin Defense Secretary Indo-Pacific partnerships

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2. Joint Readout on the Inaugural U.S.-Philippines 3+3 Meeting

Excerpt:

Secretary Blinken, Secretary of Defense Austin, and National Security Advisor Sullivan reiterated the United States' ironclad commitment to the U.S.-Philippine Alliance and recalled that the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty extends to armed attacks on Philippine armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft – including those of its Coast Guard – anywhere in the South China Sea.

Joint Readout on the Inaugural U.S.-Philippines 3+3 Meeting

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April 12, 2024 |×

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The text of the following statement was released by the Governments of the United States of America and the Philippines on the occasion of the inaugural U.S.-Philippines 3+3 Meeting.

Begin text:

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met with Philippine Secretary of Foreign Affairs Enrique Manalo, Philippine Secretary of National Defense Gilberto Teodoro, and Philippine National Security Advisor Eduardo M. Año in Washington, DC today. The meeting followed President Biden's bilateral meeting with Philippines President Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr. and the historic Japan-Philippines-United States Trilateral Leaders' Summit on April 11.

The parties reaffirmed their shared vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific and discussed ways to deepen coordination regarding shared challenges in the South China Sea, including repeated harassment of lawful Philippine operations by the People's Republic of China. Secretary Blinken, Secretary of Defense Austin, and National Security Advisor Sullivan reiterated the United States' ironclad commitment to the U.S.-Philippine Alliance and recalled that the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty extends to armed attacks on Philippine armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft – including those of its Coast Guard – anywhere in the South China Sea. The parties underscored their determination to increase U.S. support for the modernization of the Armed Forces of the Philippines to improve interoperability and to achieve our shared security objectives. The parties further decided to explore additional opportunities to strengthen global support for upholding the international law of the sea.

End text.

Indo-Pacific Philippines Austin Defense Secretary

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3. Tony Abbott, a Fighter in the Cold War With China

I hope his optimism and pessimism do not cancel each other out and that his optimism prevails. We must have faith that we will do the right thing for US national security.

Excerpts:

Vladimir Putin and Mr. Xi regard the West as “degenerate, utterly effete. And I don’t think that’s a good image to show to the wider world, particularly to people who don’t see our self-doubt as a sign of maturity, but as a sign of weakness.”

For all that, Mr. Abbott—who entered a Roman Catholic seminary at 26 but decided the priesthood wasn’t for him—professes a seemingly unshakable faith in the U.S.: “America unleashed is an amazing, creative country, with an enormous capacity if roused,” he says. “One of my little missions is to express, on behalf of myself and many of my compatriots, gratitude to the United States for everything it’s done over the last seven decades.” The modern world is a product of “American strength, American benevolence, American blood, American treasure.” It is “more free, more fair, more safe, more rich for more people than at any time in history, thanks to the Pax Americana.”

This Pax America has been challenged, he says, “as never before, and yet America remains the indispensable nation, not because it should be expected to do everything, but because without America the efforts of others will be much less successful, even quite futile.”

The prospect of a Pax Sinica—a Chinese world order—makes Mr. Abbott shudder. “A world under American leadership becomes more like America, and a world under Chinese leadership would inevitably become more like China. I think it would be a very oppressive pax indeed.”

Tony Abbott, a Fighter in the Cold War With China

The former Australian prime minister is worried by the U.S. tilt toward isolationism—though he has faith America will come through in the end.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-fighter-in-the-cold-war-with-china-australia-former-prime-minister-pacific-a0dc45c5?mod=MorningEditorialReport&mod=djemMER_h

By Tunku Varadarajan

April 12, 2024 1:49 pm ET

Tony Abbott ILLUSTRATION: KEN FALLIN

Phoenix

Americans dispirited by the 2024 presidential campaign might find it bracing to listen to Tony Abbott. “The Western world has never been more materially rich,” Mr. Abbott recently told a symposium on classical education here. “But it’s rarely been more spiritually bereft.” Since winning the Cold War, he says, the West has become “economically, militarily and culturally flabby, like a retired sportsman.” His warning is dire: If we don’t shape up, China will leave us in the dust.

Mr. Abbott, 66, is a politician, but not an American one. He served as prime minister of Australia from 2013 through 2015, arguably the most conservative and pro-American leader his notably pro-American country has had. He swears by Plato, Shakespeare, the New Testament and “narrative history starting with the ancient Greeks and Romans.” Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill are his political role models.

But he’s a fighter as well as a thinker—every inch the pugilist he was when he won his boxing colors, called a “blue,” as a 21-year-old heavyweight at Oxford University. (He is also a director of Fox Corp., whose ownership overlaps with the Journal’s parent company, News Corp.) We meet in a corner of the Phoenix Convention Center on the morning after his speech. He’s just been to the gym at his modest downtown hotel and can’t resist boasting that he hasn’t outgrown his Oxford blue’s blazer. “I found it in the cupboard and as an experiment I tried to see if I could still fit it,” he says. “I can.”

You might call Xi Jinping his personal trainer, for it’s China, he says, that “exercises” him the most. He wishes he could talk about “the China opportunity”—and a decade ago he did. “As prime minister, I concluded a free-trade deal between my country and China—the only free-trade deal at the time . . . that China has done with a G-20 economy.” He regrets it now: For China, “There is no such thing as a free market, no such thing as an independent business. The Chinese turn trade on and off like a tap to suit their strategic purposes.”

Relations between Canberra and Beijing started to sour after Malcolm Turnbull succeeded Mr. Abbott as prime minister. In 2018 Australia banned Huawei from its 5G rollout over national-security concerns. “We were the first country to do that, even before the United States,” Mr. Abbott says. (The U.S. did it in 2019.)

Tensions heightened in May 2020, when the Australian government called for a full, independent international investigation into the origins of “the Wuhan virus,” as Mr. Abbott calls it. “That really set the Chinese off. There was a furious reaction from Beijing, including statements from the Global Times”—a state propaganda organ—“that Australia was the ‘chewing gum’ on China’s boot.” China slapped what Mr. Abbott calls “capricious and arbitrary bans on some $20 billion worth of Australian trade,” including lobster, wine, barley and coal.

In 2021 the Chinese Embassy in Canberra issued a list of 14 demands, including “essentially, that we end the American alliance, permit all Chinese investment, and cease all criticism of the Chinese government. No independent, sovereign country could accept that.” Australia didn’t.

“It’s crystal clear under Xi Jinping that the role of the party-state is being massively reinforced,” Mr. Abbot says. “There’s been the rise of the ‘social credit’ system, and the increasingly genocidal tendencies in Xinjiang province. Having crushed the freedom of Hong Kong, they’re now dead set on taking Taiwan as part of their oft-declared aim to be the global hegemon by midcentury.” That means we’re “deep into a new cold war,” one that could be “every bit as difficult, as taxing, as costly, as stressful as the last one.”

If not more. China is “rapidly becoming a first-rate military, but it is also undoubtedly a first-rate economy,” Mr. Abbott says. By contrast, the Soviet Union was “never more than a third-rate economy, and Russia and the other Comecon nations were more or less hermetically sealed from the economies of the wider world.” (Comecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, consisted of the Soviet Union, its Eastern European satellites, and the communist states of Cuba, Mongolia and Vietnam.)

The West, “inevitably led by the United States,” needs “to accept the reality of this new cold war and do our best to ensure that it ends as well as the last one did, with a victory for freedom and liberalism.” How? “By doing everything we can to reduce our economic vulnerability, to increase our deterrent capability, and to regain the cultural self-confidence that was an important part of winning the Cold War.”

On the economic front, Mr. Abbott believes that “decoupling” from China, “at least in vital supply chains,” is necessary, “however lengthy and costly, particularly for a country like the United States, if it is to remain what it always has been—a great arsenal of democracy.” The West needs to “rebuild its manufacturing base as quickly as possible by not having free trade with China, by not sharing significant [industrial] secrets, by not giving them access to our manufacturing processes.”

It also needs to halt “the widespread economic self-harm that we are inflicting upon ourselves.” By this he means “the climate cult. This notion that there is a climate emergency is, I think, completely without foundation.”

“Even if the global-warming hypothesis is correct,” he says with relish, “a couple of degrees of warming over several decades wouldn’t justify the extreme steps that we’re taking—the economic revolution that we’re undertaking.” He says that “a country which thinks that the greatest economic, political and moral challenge of our times is climate change is, at the very least, going to be extremely distracted if it comes to fighting a war, or even running a cold war.” Never mind a hot one: “The Ukrainians aren’t worrying too much about climate change right now,” he says. “I don’t think the Israelis are obsessing about emissions at the moment.”

Mr. Abbott says he won’t comment on the policies of an American president, then does so anyway, describing President Biden’s “so-called Inflation Reduction Act” as “basically a climate-change policy masquerading as anti-inflation policy.” That may not augur well for Mr. Biden in November. Every election in Australia where climate change has been an issue, Mr. Abbott says, has produced a thumping win for the party “which is most skeptical of the whole thing. But this is one of those transitions where the public is rarely asked. It’s an elite project which has been foisted on the public.”

As for military deterrence, Mr. Abbott points to two “projects” that could discourage Beijing from using force in Taiwan and elsewhere. The first is the Quad, the four-nation “democratic partnership” between Australia, India, Japan and the U.S., set up in 2007 to counter China in the Indo-Pacific. Australia withdrew the following year when the center-left Kevin Rudd became prime minister, then rejoined in 2010 after Mr. Rudd’s party lost power. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe then “made massive efforts to reinvigorate it.”

Mr. Abbott sets great store by the Quad: “It’s the first time that independent India has moved away from strategic detachment. It’s a definite tilt by India towards the West.” But the Quad will work only “if America appreciates Indian pride and self-respect and potential.” India wouldn’t have joined the grouping “if the Quad initiative had come from the Americans. The fact that it came from Abe made it acceptable to the Indians.” Mr. Abbott praises Abe, who left office in 2020 and who was assassinated in 2022, as “a great global statesman.”

The second project is Aukus, the trilateral security pact set up in 2021 between “the great Anglosphere countries,” Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. Mr. Abbott describes it as “a whole new level of defense and security cooperation.” The three nations are now “essentially treated as one for military procurement and strategic cooperation purposes.” Australia will acquire Virginia-class nuclear submarines—the newest class available—from the U.S. and a new-generation British sub will be built in Australia.

The original Cold War was as much a duel of ideologies as it was a shadow (and often proxy) military confrontation. The West seems to have depleted the self-confidence that sustained it through the Cold War. “How and why it’s gone is a fascinating question,” Mr. Abbott says, “but gone it has, at least among vast swaths of Western elites.” Behind the loss of swagger is an enervation rooted in a sense of historical guilt.

Americans agonize incessantly over slavery, Britons over imperialism, Australians over the treatment of indigenous people. Mr. Abbott wants us to acknowledge that “Project America, Project Britain and Project Australia are marvels”: “The main Anglosphere countries are as free, as fair, as prosperous as anything on earth.” People all over the world are “desperate” to come to them, testimony “that our societies are welcoming, magnanimous, decent places. And yet we don’t seem to see in ourselves what everyone else does.”

As Mr. Abbott tells it, a palpable loss of domestic confidence in the U.S. is corroding America’s external projection and potency. The same is true of Australia, though in a minor key since the country’s heft is much smaller. The U.S. move toward isolationism is evident in its wavering over Ukraine. “I just think, frankly, that America is badly letting down a democracy in desperate need.”

He gives President Biden “all credit for what he has done,” but wishes it had been more. “The congressional game-playing over the Ukrainian aid package is wrong. Given that everyone says they wanted to provide the aid, I just wish they would not let their disagreements on other issues jeopardize the provision of aid that Ukraine desperately needs.”

Vladimir Putin and Mr. Xi regard the West as “degenerate, utterly effete. And I don’t think that’s a good image to show to the wider world, particularly to people who don’t see our self-doubt as a sign of maturity, but as a sign of weakness.”

For all that, Mr. Abbott—who entered a Roman Catholic seminary at 26 but decided the priesthood wasn’t for him—professes a seemingly unshakable faith in the U.S.: “America unleashed is an amazing, creative country, with an enormous capacity if roused,” he says. “One of my little missions is to express, on behalf of myself and many of my compatriots, gratitude to the United States for everything it’s done over the last seven decades.” The modern world is a product of “American strength, American benevolence, American blood, American treasure.” It is “more free, more fair, more safe, more rich for more people than at any time in history, thanks to the Pax Americana.”

This Pax America has been challenged, he says, “as never before, and yet America remains the indispensable nation, not because it should be expected to do everything, but because without America the efforts of others will be much less successful, even quite futile.”

The prospect of a Pax Sinica—a Chinese world order—makes Mr. Abbott shudder. “A world under American leadership becomes more like America, and a world under Chinese leadership would inevitably become more like China. I think it would be a very oppressive pax indeed.”

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.

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To China's frustration, the Aukus partnership between the U.S., U.K. and Australia to deliver Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines is gaining ground, despite funding challenges to the U.S. submarine industrial base. Images: U.S. Navy/Zuma Press/AP Composite: Mark Kelly

Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the April 13, 2024, print edition as 'A Fighter in the Cold War With China'.

4. Why Taiwanese Islands With View of China Aren’t Worried About Rising Tensions

Not mentioned in this article is the training that is taking place on Kinmen with US troops. Here is a briefing slide from my PACOM Security presentation.

​

Why Taiwanese Islands With View of China Aren’t Worried About Rising Tensions

The Kinmen archipelago has been on the front line of friction with Beijing for decades, but most of those who live there say a new political reality provides reassurance

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/why-taiwanese-islands-with-view-of-china-arent-worried-about-rising-tensions-cbb8cae3?mod=latest_headlines

By Joyu WangFollow

 and Austin RamzyFollow

 | Photographs by Annabelle Chih for The Wall Street Journal

Updated April 13, 2024 12:07 am ET

KINMEN, Taiwan—Those who live on this tiny island joke that the Chinese mainland, just 3 miles away, is close enough that roosters crow to chickens on the other side.

The Kinmen archipelago has been the front line of friction between China and Taiwan for decades. Those tensions have been heating up again recently.

In February, China reacted furiously to the death of two fishermen who were killed while being pursued by Taiwan’s coast guard. Taiwan’s defense minister acknowledged last month that American troops have been sent to the outlying islands to train Taiwanese forces. On Monday, the Taiwanese army repelled two Chinese drones flying close to two of Kinmen’s outlying islands, the military said.  

A group of Taiwanese students take selfies next to an abandoned tank on Kinmen.

But many of those who live on Kinmen aren’t worried, saying that China has little incentive to use force against the Taiwanese territory with the strongest ties to the mainland. Such an assault would only harden the resolve of the rest of Taiwan while encouraging the U.S. to make a firmer commitment to its defense.

Kinmen’s main island was the site of a ferocious clash shortly after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, when thousands of Mao Zedong’s Communist troops were killed by the rival Nationalist forces, who were retreating to Taiwan. In the years after, two major artillery battles were fought on Kinmen, followed by decades of regular shelling. Kinmen remained under the control of the Nationalists, also known as the Kuomintang, and quiet has prevailed since the late 1970s.

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A conflict between the U.S. and China over Taiwan has become a commonplace discussion in the national security community. A military strategist lays out the outcome of a potential war in the Taiwan Strait based on recently conducted wargames.

Yang Kuo-chin, 73, recalled the time he heard the thump of Chinese artillery when he was just 7 on his family farm. “They are fighting again,” he recalled his brother telling him. They raced to hide underneath piles of peanuts that were used to make peanut oil. The family dug a makeshift bomb shelter under their home, where they hid during shelling in 1958, as hundreds of thousands of bombs rained on the island in what is known as the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, or locally as the Aug. 23 Artillery War.

“Seeing it go—bang bang bang—was very terrifying,” he said. Nobody died, he added, but his house was littered with peanuts.

As he cleaned oysters from stakes planted in a beach facing the mainland, Yang said he wasn’t worried that the roar of artillery would return. Rows of metal posts were arrayed across the beach to help defend against a potential invasion.

His calm in the face of a potential conflict with China isn’t merely stoicism, but a recognition of Kinmen’s position that is sometimes lost from afar. The archipelago represents the Communist Party’s slim hope of using soft power, rather than force, to win over a neighbor it covets but has never controlled.

The skyline of Xiamen offers a view of the economic potential in the mainland. 

Fishing has been the industry most affected by the rising tensions with China.

Kinmen’s proximity to China means many of its residents have much more direct kinship ties to people on the mainland. The archipelago tends to reliably support the Nationalist Party, which takes a warmer stance toward relations with China. But even as many Kinmen residents call for more travel and trade with China, they also say they cherish living in a democracy and cast doubts on China’s authoritarian system.

Kinmen was once defended by as many as 100,000 Taiwanese soldiers in the late 1950s. Chiang Kai-shek based a large portion of Taiwan’s military here as a Cold War tripwire to draw in American support if China overpowered their defenses. The island beaches are still festooned with old barriers and disused forts. Its roundabout intersections frequently feature a pillbox in the center, now overgrown with trees or topped with giant bottles of kaoliang liquor to advertise the fiery local specialty.

A beach on Lieyu Township.

A market on Kinmen.

Kinmen once served a key role in bottling up China’s then-limited ability to carry out a maritime assault on Taiwan, said Chieh Chung, a defense analyst at the National Policy Foundation, a think tank in Taipei affiliated with the Nationalists, the former Chiang-led party that ruled Taiwan for decades after World War II and is now the main opposition party. But as China’s military strength has grown, Kinmen’s military importance has diminished to little more than an early-warning post. The garrison there is now down to a few thousand Taiwanese soldiers.

“China’s firepower, whether through its air force or naval weapons, can easily surpass Kinmen and directly hit Taiwan’s main island,” Chieh said.

Today, Kinmen is protected more by political and economic reality than military might. The use of force against Kinmen would signal that China can no longer hope to win the rest of Taiwan through anything but force, and would make such an invasion that much more difficult.

“I cannot imagine any scenario, except as a prelude to a full-scale invasion, in which seizing the islands makes sense,” said Michael Szonyi, a professor of Chinese History at Harvard University and author of a book on Kinmen, “Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line.”

A Chinese cargo ship outside Xin Hu port.

China’s chief tool of persuasion toward Kinmen is now economic. The archipelago has been largely left out of Taiwan’s boom. Courtyard homes with gently swaybacked tile roofs fill its cramped villages, the sort of traditional architecture often torn down for development on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

Just across the water, the glittering skyline of Xiamen shows the potential for growth. Construction work at Xiamen’s new airport is visible and audible from Kinmen.

Hung Hsin-i, who owns a clothing and accessories shop in Kinmen’s central town of Jincheng, said local businesses have been struggling through a downturn in tourism, following prolonged restrictions on mainland Chinese tourists since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. She lost her previous job at a duty-free shop that lost 90% of its business when the travel ban was enacted. Last year, Chinese nationals who live abroad were allowed again to visit Taiwan, including Kinmen, with many in the tourism sector looking forward to a full reopening.

Kuo-Chin Yang, an oysterman on Kinmen.

People purchase ferry tickets at a port in Kinmen to travel to Xiamen.

Hung had hoped that the Nationalists would win the presidential election in January. She said she expects the party and its allies to promote travel and trade with the mainland. But the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which is more skeptical of Beijing’s intentions toward Taiwan, retained the presidency, with Lai Ching-te elected to replace Tsai Ing-wen, who has reached her two-term limit.

“We’ve come a long way from the past,” Hung said. “Even if we are afraid of war—or unification—it’s not within our control to worry about.”

Fishing has been the local industry most heavily affected by tensions between the two sides. “There are simply too many boats from the mainland,” said Chen Shui-i, the head of the Kinmen Fishermen’s Association, noting that the Taiwanese fishing grounds are richer compared with the more competitive conditions on the Chinese side.

In response to the death of the two Chinese fishermen, Beijing said it would step up coast guard patrols in the area. Beijing also declared that it didn’t recognize Taiwan’s boundary around the Kinmen islands, although Taiwanese authorities say the Chinese side traditionally adhered to those lines in law enforcement operations.

“Our space for fishing has been compressed, which isn’t to say they won’t let us fish but we can randomly be stopped and investigated,” said Liu Mao-jung, 69, as he was preparing to leave a Kinmen port to fish.

The opening of direct links more than 20 years ago during an earlier period of cross-strait rapprochement has allowed Kinmen locals to make regular trips to Xiamen by ferry. The connection to the mainland has allowed people to re-establish family ties cut by the Chinese civil war, as well as carry out more prosaic tasks such as picking up cheap goods.

The ferry service, which was halted for nearly three years due to Covid controls, resumed in early 2023. The boats leave from a terminal on the southwest corner of Kinmen’s main island, just below a hill with memorials to two American soldiers killed by Chinese shelling in 1954.

Yang, the oysterman, visits Xiamen regularly and said he was planning to visit the city in the afternoon to go shopping after he cleaned up his harvest. But there are limits to China’s pull. “Of course living in a democratic country is much better,” he said.

Rows of posts on the beach are there to help defend against an invasion.

Write to Joyu Wang at joyu.wang@wsj.com and Austin Ramzy at austin.ramzy@wsj.com

5. Ukraine Drops Ancient Roman Weapons From Drones To Stop Russian Trucks

Synthesize the old and new - caltrops dropped from drones.

Photos at the link.

The caltrop may be one of the most enduring military technologies throughout history. And an ambush is an ambush, whether an L shaped one on the ground, or an ambush by drone. The basic tactics remain the same.

Excerpt:

In the 20th century the caltrop made a comeback for attacking rubber tires. During WWII American O.S.S. mass produced caltrops and distributed them to resistance fighters in Europe. Simpler and more reliable than explosives, they could be scattered on roads to stop German vehicles, either as harassment or as a prelude to an ambush.

...

Caltrops represent a simple, low-cost way of stopping a truck so it can be finished off by a grenade-dropping drone. Ukrainian operators are world leaders at demolition by drone, though a truck may be a more difficult target than a tank. This is because tanks are invariably loaded with ammunition, and a grenade through an open hatch will usually start a fire leading to detonation, but a truck may take several attempts to ignite.

Ukraine Drops Ancient Roman Weapons From Drones To Stop Russian Trucks

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/04/12/ukraine-teams-ancient-and-modern-weapons-to-stop-russian-trucks/?sh=4e75e2d03938&utm

David Hambling

Senior Contributor

I'm a South London-based technology journalist, consultant and author3

Apr 12, 2024,04:42am EDT

The latest Ukrainian version of caltrop used to stop Russian vehiclesSOCIAL MEDIA

The Russians are facing a new threat behind the front line: tire-popping metal obstacles called caltrops dropped by drones. It is an ingenious new use of a very old weapon, which is causing problems for Russia’s already overstretched last-mile supply chain by halting vehicles so they can be hit by bomber drones.

FPV kamikaze drones regularly hit Russian logistics vehicles ferrying supplies to front-line troops. The only way to get ammunition, food and other supplies through the danger zone is to pack them into UAZ-452 Bukhanka (“Loaf”) vans and make a dash at top speed. Ukrainian operators post a steady stream of videos of FPVs hitting Bukhankas at high speed with jokes about burned loaves.

Now the Loaf drivers have to look down as well as up.

Jagged Iron

Ukrainian drones are strewing the roads with four-pointed metal weapons designed so that whichever way they fall, one point is always upwards. The name caltrop comes from the Latin for ‘heel trapper;’ the Romans also called them murex ferreus or ‘jagged iron,’ but they go back even further. Caltrops can be dated at least to 313 BC when Alexander the Great’s army used them against Persian cavalry.

Roman caltrops were jagged so that the point would stick in a horse’s hoof and be difficult to remove. Caltrops in various forms were used all through the ancient and medieval era, and were still in use in the eighteenth century.

In the 20th century the caltrop made a comeback for attacking rubber tires. During WWII American O.S.S. mass produced caltrops and distributed them to resistance fighters in Europe. Simpler and more reliable than explosives, they could be scattered on roads to stop German vehicles, either as harassment or as a prelude to an ambush.

WWII German 'hedgehog' air-dropped caltropUS ARMY

The Germans also used caltrops in WWII, which they called hedgehogs or crow's feet, developing a version which could be dropped in canisters from the air. One canister could scatter a thousand caltrops, and targets included airfields as well as roads. The hedgehogs were made of thin sheets of steel and weighed about 60g / two ounces each. Other versions, many of them improvised, have been used in the Vietnam war and other conflicts. Effective use relies on putting them in the enemy's path in places where they may not be expected.

Drone Age Caltrops

Drones which can deliver payloads with precision are an obvious match for caltrops. A Chinese company showed off a caltrop-dropping drone at a military expo in 2019.

While the Ukrainians went through a flurry of caltrop-making in 2022, these were larger versions which were mainly emplaced by hand. They have not been seen much until recently pictures emerged on social media.

One Russian blogger complained: “The enemy keep coming up with new nasty things. Not only do they drop mines from the drones, but they literally cover dangerous sections of frontline roads with spikes. "

“For safety reasons we have to literally ‘fly through’ these areas and our vehicles.… drive at the maximum possible speed. And imagine what happens to a car when two (or more) wheels are immediately punctured by its spikes.”

Supply runs are typically made at night when there is less danger from FPV attacks, but driving at speed there may be little chance of spotting caltrops on the road. A vehicle that suffers a high-speed blowout might lose control and crash. But much worse is likely to follow.

“In these places, enemy drones are waiting for their ‘prey’ – as soon as the vehicle stops, an enemy ‘bird’ immediately appears and drops bombs. Insidious bastards! Only this morning I received photos and information on this situation,” writes the blogger.

Drones Drop Anything, Anywhere

As the blogger noted, the Ukrainians have also used drones to drop anti-tank mines. But these are heavier, harder to obtain, and may not function reliably.

Caltrops represent a simple, low-cost way of stopping a truck so it can be finished off by a grenade-dropping drone. Ukrainian operators are world leaders at demolition by drone, though a truck may be a more difficult target than a tank. This is because tanks are invariably loaded with ammunition, and a grenade through an open hatch will usually start a fire leading to detonation, but a truck may take several attempts to ignite.

The tactic of dropping caltrops from drones will no doubt inspire a variety of other novel techniques. Drones can already place mines, ground sensors and even small robots. The only limit is the imagination of the users.

Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other work here. 

David Hambling

Author of 'Swarm Troopers: How small drones will conquer the world,' following cutting-edge military technology in general and robotic systems in particular. New time-travel adventure 'City of Sorcerers' out now in paperback and Kindle.  

6. U.S. Moves Warships to Defend Israel in Case of Iranian Attack

I can say with some sarcasm but a lot of truth: our nation's military is all over the map. Of course the isolationists and populists as well as the extreme left and extreme right all have an answer for this. Bring the troops home and let the world fend for itself. Is that really in the US national security interests?

U.S. Moves Warships to Defend Israel in Case of Iranian Attack

Tehran has threatened to retaliate for Israeli attack on Iranian diplomatic building in Syria

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iranian-attack-expected-on-israel-in-next-two-days-42b0537c?mod=latest_headlines

By Gordon Lubold

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, Benoit Faucon

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 and Dov Lieber

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Updated April 12, 2024 10:07 pm ET

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei PHOTO: IRANIAN SUPREME LEADER’S OFFICE/ZUMA PRESS

The U.S. rushed warships into position to protect Israel and American forces in the region, hoping to head off a direct attack from Iran on Israel that could come as soon as this weekend.

The moves by the U.S. that are part of an effort to avoid a wider conflict in the Middle East came after a warning from a person familiar with the matter about the timing and location of the potential Iranian attack. A person briefed by the Iranian leadership, however, said that while plans to attack are being discussed, no final decision has been made.

Army Gen. Erik Kurilla, the head of U.S. Central Command, discussed a possible Iranian attack with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in Israel on Friday. “We are prepared to defend ourselves on the ground and in the air, in close cooperation with our partners, and we will know how to respond,” Gallant said, according to Israel’s Defense Ministry.

The U.S. moves included repositioning two destroyers, one of which was already in the region and another that was redirected there, U.S. officials said, adding that at least one of the vessels carried the Aegis missile-defense system.

President Biden, asked Friday when an Iranian strike on Israel may occur, said, “My expectation is sooner than later.” Asked if he had a message for Iran, Biden said: “Don’t.”

“We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel and help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” Biden said.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, in black, meeting with Army Gen. Erik Kurilla, head of U.S. Central Command, at an air base in Israel. PHOTO: ARIEL HERMONI/ISRAEL MINISTRY OF DEFENSE/ZUMA PRESS

U.S. officials fear that an Iranian strike against Israel could prompt an Israeli response inside Iran that could spark a regional conflict and draw in the U.S., whose forces and allies in the Middle East could be targeted by Tehran if its territory is hit.

Washington is asking Israel to carefully weigh its response to any Iranian attack and to keep in mind the potential that it could spark further escalation, according to a senior U.S. official.

John Kirby, the White House’s national security spokesman, said Friday that Iran’s threats to strike Israel remain “real” and “viable.”

Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, chief of Israel’s general staff, met with Kurilla about a possible Iranian attack after a separate meeting with commanders on the readiness of Israeli forces.

Late Thursday, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had called Gallant to reassure him Washington would defend its closest ally in the region if Tehran struck on its soil. Austin told Gallant “Israel could count on full U.S. support to defend Israel against Iranian attacks, which Tehran has publicly threatened,” a Pentagon spokesman said.

Iran has threatened to retaliate for an attack last week in Damascus, Syria, that Tehran said was an Israeli airstrike on a diplomatic building. The strike killed several top Iranian military officials, including a senior member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force.

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Syria and Iran accused Israel of a missile attack on an Iranian diplomatic building in Damascus, in a possible escalation of a shadow war between Iran and Israel. Photo: Ammar Safarjalani/Zuma Press

An Iranian strike on Israel could inflame the region as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is under growing international pressure to wrap up its military campaign against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, which killed around 1,200 people, and Israel’s subsequent offensive in Gaza, which has claimed more than 33,000 lives, have ratcheted up tensions in the Middle East to a level not seen in decades.

In their phone call on Thursday, Gallant told Austin that “a direct Iranian attack would require an appropriate Israeli response against Iran,” the Israeli Defense Ministry said.

U.S. officials, frustrated by Israel’s decision to not inform them about the Damascus strike, have pushed their Israeli counterparts to share information about how Israel could respond to an Iranian strike, U.S. officials said, in part to protect forces in the region.

Netanyahu met Friday with senior security officials, including Gallant, to discuss Israel’s readiness for an Iranian response, according to Israeli officials.

In Tel Aviv, residents went about their day on Friday, flocking to cafes and shops on the first day of the Israeli weekend.

“We are strong. We are not afraid,” said Andrey Uchitel, 48, who took a leisurely walk with his friend on the Tel Aviv boardwalk. “It will be OK in the end.”

Israel’s Home Front Command, which is tasked with preparing the public for disasters and conflict, hasn’t issued any changes to its emergency instructions to the public, Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said Thursday night.

Last week, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, publicly threatened retaliation for the Damascus strike and Israel disrupted local GPS networks that can be used to guide weapons. But the Israeli military sought to calm the public over a possible attack. “There is no need to buy generators, store food and withdraw money from” cash machines, Hagari said at the time.

The U.S., which doesn’t have diplomatic relations with Tehran, has encouraged its European and Middle Eastern allies to pressure Iran not to attack Israel, American and British officials said on Friday.

The foreign ministers of Germany and the U.K.—Annalena Baerbock and David Cameron—called their Iranian counterpart, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, on Thursday to ask Tehran not to attack Israel, according to British and Iranian officials.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two U.S. allies in the Middle East, conveyed the same message to the Islamic Republic, the officials said.

In separate talks with Oman last weekend, Amir-Abdollahian said privately Iran’s response would be calibrated to avoid any response that would lead to further escalation in the region, according to Omani and British officials and a Syrian government adviser.

Rubble is cleared from last week’s deadly strike on an Iranian diplomatic building in Damascus, Syria. PHOTO: FIRAS MAKDESI/REUTERS

France on Friday pulled family members of its diplomatic staff from Tehran and advised its citizens to refrain from traveling to Iran, Lebanon, Israel or the Palestinian territories in the coming days. It also banned missions by French officials to those countries.

The American Embassy in Israel said Thursday that U.S. government employees and family members would be restricted from any personal travel outside of central Israel, Jerusalem and Beersheba until further notice. German airline 

Lufthansa also extended the suspension of its flights to Tehran due to the situation in the Middle East until next Thursday.Attacks by rockets and drones from southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, and more recently from places like Iraq and Yemen, have become commonplace in Israel. Most are intercepted by Israel’s air-defense system or fall in unpopulated areas.

The scenarios for a potential attack on Israel that have been presented to Khamenei include strikes by Tehran’s proxies in Syria and Iraq, according to advisers to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the Syrian government.

To avoid an attack within Israel’s internationally recognized territory, Iran and its allies could also attack the Golan Heights, a disputed territory annexed by Israel from Syria in 1981, the advisers said. Another option would be to hit Israeli embassies, notably in the Arab world, to show them that friendly ties with Israel could be costly, these people said.

In recent days, social-media accounts associated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard have stepped up messaging around a potential attack on Israel. Several widely shared posts include satellite images of prominent locations in Israel, such as Ben Gurion Airport, surrounded by Iranian attack drones.

“What place do you love? The choice is in your hands,” the posts, which were picked up by several Israeli media, say in Hebrew.

Another post includes a video showing an Iranian hypersonic missile with the Farsi caption “5 minutes to Haifa and Tel Aviv.”

Anat Peled, Ken Thomas, Nancy A. Youssef and Summer Said contributed to this article.

Write to Gordon Lubold at gordon.lubold@wsj.com, Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com and Dov Lieber at dov.lieber@wsj.com

7. China Has Helped Russia Boost Arms Production, U.S. Says

The axis of authoritarians/dictators/totalitarians.

China Has Helped Russia Boost Arms Production, U.S. Says

Beijing’s support is helping Moscow at critical stage in its war in Ukraine, officials say

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/china-russia-arms-production-help-c098c08b?mod=latest_headlines

By Michael R. Gordon

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, Warren P. Strobel

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 and Alan Cullison

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Updated April 12, 2024 7:55 pm ET

President Biden voiced his objections in a call last week with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. PHOTO: TINGSHU WANG/REUTERS

China has helped Russia revive its military production at a critical stage in its Ukraine war, providing Moscow with optics, microelectronics, drone engines and other dual-use material that have significantly strengthened Moscow’s battlefield capabilities, senior Biden administration officials said Friday.

In the last quarter of 2023, China provided Russia with more than 70% of its nearly $900 million in machine-tools imports, which Moscow has likely used to build ballistic missiles, the officials said. 

For all of 2023, 90% of Russia’s microelectronics imports, crucial for the production of missiles, tanks and aircraft, also came from China, they said, citing newly declassified intelligence.

China “is actually taking a systematic effort to support Russia’s war effort,” one senior official said.

Beijing has paid heed to U.S. warnings last year about providing lethal weaponry to Russia for use in Ukraine, administration officials said.

But China has provided Russia with a growing stream of technology and equipment that has military and commercial applications. Moscow is using those imports to significantly bolster its arsenal, the officials added. 

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During a visit to China, the Treasury Secretary also raised concerns about Chinese firms and financial institutions helping provide goods to Russia that Moscow is using in its invasion of Ukraine. Photo: Florence Lo/Reuters

U.S. officials have privately acknowledged that Russia has reinvigorated its military production rates much faster than they anticipated, likely because of this foreign assistance.

Release of the new details of China’s support for that effort is aimed in part at enlisting European countries—with whom China seeks closer economic ties—in pressuring Beijing to halt those sales to Russia. 

The U.S., increasingly alarmed by China’s backing for Russia, has complained to top leaders in Beijing, although there is little sign they are changing course.

President Biden voiced his objections in a call last week with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen raised similar concerns during her trip to China this month. 

Before Secretary of State Antony Blinken heads to Beijing soon, he will attend a meeting of Group of Seven foreign ministers in Capri, Italy, next week where he will be discussing with them details of the Chinese technical assistance to Moscow. Blinken pressed the issue during meetings in Paris earlier this month with French President Emmanuel Macron and other European officials. 

To support its case, the administration is now detailing the ways in which China’s technical assistance is providing important benefits for Russia’s military production. Chinese technology and components include optics for Russian tanks and armored vehicles, and turbojet engines for cruise missiles.

U.S. officials also highlighted China’s provision to Russia of a compound called nitrocellulose used to manufacture ammunition and rockets. Chinese and Russian entities are jointly producing drones on Russian territory, administration officials said. 

China is also providing satellite imagery that Russia has drawn on for its war effort and is helping Moscow strengthen its own space-based capabilities for use in Ukraine, the officials added. 

Economists say that Russia’s import of Chinese technology is helping soften a labor shortage that could crimp defense production. “The labor shortage will bother them but the new machinery will help them mitigate the impact,” a European diplomat said. 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to discuss details of China’s technical assistance to Moscow with other G-7 foreign ministers. PHOTO: JOSE LUIS MAGANA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

While Biden administration officials are hoping to encourage the Europeans to join Washington in pressuring Beijing, critics question whether the U.S. has moved firmly enough to impose costs on China for its support to Russia.

“So long as China faces no consequences for its actions, its backing of Russia will continue unabated, directly undercutting the administration’s efforts to shift battlefield dynamics in Ukraine,” said Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank. 

In a separate action targeting Putin’s war funding, the U.S. Treasury Department announced late Friday a new ban on purchases of Russian metals. The new ban, coordinated with the U.K., prohibits the import of those metals into the U.S. and restricts derivative trading on new production, including at the 

Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the London Metal Exchange. Ian Talley contributed to this article.

Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com, Warren P. Strobel at Warren.Strobel@wsj.com and Alan Cullison at alan.cullison@wsj.com

8. Opinion | The Middle East is on the precipice of the wider war no one wants

The "gospel of de-escalation." I am going to borrow that. We have telegraphed our strategic weakness. We are so focused on de-escalation that we are ceeding the initiative to our adversaries.

Unfortunately the "gospel of de-escalation" is actually focused on the domestic US audience to demonstrate that the US administration does not seek war. I believe the paradox is that the more we focus on de-escalation the more likely our adversaries will push escalation resulting ultimately in some level of conflict.

Excerpt:

Administration officials keep preaching the gospel of de-escalation of the war in Gaza and other regional violence. The White House hopes in this latest crisis, too, that once Iran has punched back, the tide of violence will ebb. But on Friday, no one appeared to be heeding that message, and a dangerous new round seemed set to begin.

Opinion | The Middle East is on the precipice of the wider war no one wants

The Washington Post · by David Ignatius · April 12, 2024

The Biden administration is using every diplomatic and military tool to contain what officials expect will be an imminent Iranian reprisal attack against Israel — in the hope that U.S. pressure can keep the conflict from escalating into a regionwide catastrophe.

Call it “the guns of April.” Though this is hardly a conflagration on the order of World War I, it’s a moment that eerily evokes the dynamics of summer 1914, when a war that every power sought to avoid suddenly appeared inevitable, with consequences that no one could predict. Officials hope that any exchange between Iran and Israel will be short and contained — and won’t draw in other powers. But they truly don’t know what’s ahead.

President Biden said on Friday that he expects that Iran will strike Israel “sooner [rather] than later” in retaliation for an April 1 attack that killed seven Quds Force operatives in Damascus, Syria. U.S. intelligence has observed signs of Iranian preparation for attack, sources said, and the expectation on Friday was that the strike could happen within 24 to 48 hours. Biden’s message to Tehran was: “Don’t.”

The United States is moving on two tracks to steer this crisis away from what could be a devastating cycle of escalation. On the military front, the United States and Israel are both stressing defenses that could neuter an Iranian attack. But if Iran or its proxies succeed in a major strike, Israeli and U.S. officials have warned that it could trigger an offensive spiral that might eventually involve the United States.

Israel has the best air-defense system in the world, and U.S. officials hope the Israelis could shoot down Iranian drones, cruise missiles or ballistic missiles — the three most likely forms of attack. Israel’s defense will be supplemented by antimissile systems on U.S. destroyers that have been rushed to the region, as well as an aircraft carrier and other forces that are already there.

The Biden team warned Iran this week about the danger of overreaching, in messages sent through the Swiss Embassy in Tehran. Administration officials also asked diplomats from China, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Iraq to pass the same signal to Iranian leaders.

The Iranians have responded through the Swiss, as recently as Wednesday, that they don’t want a confrontation with the United States. Tehran has sent the same message through China and other nations that have been passing messages.

“Iran has to respond, but it will be contained,” is how one source described the Iranian messages that have been sent through diplomatic channels. But U.S. officials worry that these reassurances might not be reliable — and that once direct conflict begins, it could move in unpredictable and dangerous ways.

The tension within the administration was palpable Friday as the window opened for expected Iranian action. The wider war that the White House has sought to avoid since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack and Israel’s devastating response seemed possible within hours. “Praying that things stay calm,” one Israeli official messaged me.

Israel lives under the constant threat of missile attack, so this isn’t a unique threat. And Israel and Iran have been waging a covert war of assassinations and sabotage for years. But for Israelis, it’s an ominous moment.

The Biden administration has assumed since the Damascus attack that some form of Iranian retaliation was inevitable — but it has hoped that Tehran would limit its response because of fears that direct Israeli or U.S. attacks could destabilize the regime.

As Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace explains, Iranian leaders know they have a dilemma in weighing retaliation: “If they do too little, they lose face. But if they do too much, they could lose their heads.”

To underline the military risks that Iran could face if it mounts a major attack, Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, the head of U.S. Central Command, visited Israel this week. Centcom stages regular exercises with Israel Defense Forces to demonstrate how U.S. military power could backstop Israel in the event of a regional conflict.

Though a show of military muscle has been part of the U.S. messaging strategy, there has also been intense use of behind-the-scenes diplomatic channels. After Damascus, Iran messaged through the Swiss channel that the United States was responsible for the attack, according to knowledgeable sources. The administration promptly responded through the Swiss denying any U.S. role and saying that Washington hadn’t been aware of Israeli plans.

U.S. diplomatic contact with Iran to contain the war in Gaza has included face-to-face meetings. In January, Brett McGurk, the Middle East director for the National Security Council, met in Oman with Ali Bagheri Kani, Iran’s deputy foreign minister. The meeting was suggested by Oman, which has often acted as an intermediary between the two countries.

McGurk warned his Iranian counterpart at that meeting that if Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen continued their attacks against shipping in the Red Sea, the U.S. Navy would retaliate. Another Houthi attack came the night after their meeting, and the United States delivered on its warning with a military campaign that has continued with almost daily Centcom strikes.

The Biden administration believes it has restored deterrence by attacking Iranian proxies in Iraq and Syria that had been targeting U.S. forces. Officials say these proxy attacks against American targets stopped after a February missile strike on Baghdad that killed a commander of Kataib Hezbollah who had planned attacks against U.S. troops.

Administration officials keep preaching the gospel of de-escalation of the war in Gaza and other regional violence. The White House hopes in this latest crisis, too, that once Iran has punched back, the tide of violence will ebb. But on Friday, no one appeared to be heeding that message, and a dangerous new round seemed set to begin.

The Washington Post · by David Ignatius · April 12, 2024

9. Myanmar’s Collapsing Military Creates a Crisis on China’s Border

is the geostrategic location for strategic competition?

Excerpts:

China has emerged by far as the party most actively involved in attempting to shape the trajectory of the conflict in Myanmar. It is currently focused mainly on achieving this through coercive mediation, but this could potentially change as China’s efforts are frustrated. In early April, China launched major military exercises along the border with Kachin State, signaling a redline in terms of instability along the border. Meanwhile, Chinese policy advisors linked to China’s state-owned proponent of the Kyaukphyu Port project have begun to make public calls for China to deploy a robust security presence in Myanmar to protect its interests. Chinese state media personalities have even hinted at the idea that the People’s Liberation Army is prepared “if [Myanmar’s junta chief] Min Aung Hlaing’s government can’t handle the situation.”

The lack of other states getting their hands dirty and supporting solutions on the ground gives China the space to focus its interventions on enhancing its interests rather than working toward long-term peace. This has significant implications in terms of the interests and incentives of the anti-junta forces on the ground. In the absence of robust international support, resistance actors, including the NUG, are navigating further into China’s orbit, as can be seen by positions that the NUG has taken vis-à-vis China on key political questions. This gives EAOs presently in China’s sphere of influence, and which largely follow authoritarian models of governance, an advantage, as well as disincentives when it comes to embracing democracy. This is perhaps of greatest significance for India, which stands to lose remarkably if the current trajectory continues, with China becoming the dominant actor with major parties controlling territory and connectivity along the India-Myanmar border, including the KIA and AA. It also has implications for Thailand, which has failed to set redlines vis-à-vis the junta’s use of violence on the border.

Myanmar’s Collapsing Military Creates a Crisis on China’s Border

With China taking bolder steps to shape the trajectory of the conflict, other countries remain aloof.

https://www.usip.org/publications/2024/04/myanmars-collapsing-military-creates-crisis-chinas-border

Thursday, April 11, 2024 / BY: Jason Tower

Operation 1027 — an offensive launched in October 2023 by an alliance of three ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) against the military junta in Myanmar — has disrupted hundreds of forced labor scam syndicates operating under the protection of Myanmar’s army, dented the army’s image of invincibility and decimated the lucrative China-Myanmar border trade. A second operation launched on March 7 by another EAO in Kachin State has compounded China’s economic woes by adding to the impact on trade.

Rebel militia fighters of the People’s Defense Forces patrol a frontline area near government military positions in the Kayin State of Myanmar, March 9, 2022. (Adam Dean/The New York Times)

Together, these operations have severed China’s links to the Indian Ocean, imperiled a geostrategic oil and gas pipeline project, and triggered action by China’s People’s Liberation Army, which has conducted live-fire exercises in southwestern Yunnan Province on the border with Myanmar. As China scales up its efforts to influence the trajectory of the conflict in Myanmar, concerns increase that this will dim the prospects for democracy and generate greater challenges for other countries.

Myanmar’s Army Loses Ground

While there is overwhelming evidence that China had advance knowledge of, and supported, Operation 1027 with the goal of addressing rampant criminality on its border, the outcome of the offensive is also increasingly seen as hurting Chinese interests.

Between October 2023 and January, the Three Brotherhood Alliance (3BHA) — comprising the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), Arakan Army (AA) and Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) — seized control of more than 20,000 square kilometers of territory, including vital positions along the China-Myanmar pipeline project. As a result, locations of critical infrastructure in Rakhine State and the entry point into China at Muse have turned into flashpoints between the belligerent parties. Myanmar’s army no longer has a monopoly over the provision of security to geopolitically and economically vital infrastructure. And the army’s loss of land ports critical to cross-border trade with China, including the port city of Chinshwehaw, is costing Chinese businesses millions of dollars in lost trade per day.

Coercive Chinese Mediation

Its interests at risk, China moved quickly in December of 2023 to take on an unfamiliar role of attempting to mediate the conflict in Myanmar. Between December 2023 and March, China brokered four rounds of talks between the 3BHA and Myanmar’s army that helped tentatively freeze the conflict in Northern Shan State. The initial rounds of talks focused on stabilizing the China-Myanmar border, with China attempting to persuade Myanmar’s army to peacefully hand over the Kokang territory to the MNDAA in exchange for the 3BHA halting its offensive and permitting the safe passage of the Myanmar army’s troops. In an attempt to pressure Myanmar’s army into accepting this arrangement, China issued arrest warrants for the army’s border guard force (BGF) leaders — individuals that the army relied on to defend Kokang — in the midst of initial rounds of talks in the second week of December.

Despite this pressure, Myanmar’s army did not comply and the 3BHA resumed its offensive after the negotiated deadline for the army’s withdrawal from Kokang passed on December 31. On January 5, Myanmar’s army, overpowered and under pressure from China, surrendered to the MNDAA. This setback severely eroded the army’s image of invincibility and triggered a crisis within the military’s leadership over responsibility for the defeat.

Peng Deren, the commander in chief of the MNDAA, noted that the army’s defeat in Kokang had “crushed the myth that the Myanmar army is invincible.” It revealed to the army’s foes and Myanmar’s neighbors the weakness of what many had otherwise thought to be one of the region’s most powerful armies.

The Haigeng Agreement 

With the military’s surrender of Kokang likely to embolden the resistance, China stepped in more forcefully, using leverage gained over the MNDAA as it took over Kokang to coerce the 3BHA and the military to agree to a cease-fire on January 11. Named after the lakeside park in Kunming where the talks were held, the Haigeng Agreement effectively froze the conflict in Northern Shan State along China’s border by stipulating that the military forgo airstrikes and heavy artillery attacks on positions held by the 3BHA as of January 12 in exchange for the 3BHA stopping its offensive in the state. Myanmar’s army and the 3BHA also pledged to collectively safeguard Chinese investments, businesses and nationals in Myanmar.

The Haigeng Agreement has three important implications. First, the agreement only applies to four parties — the 3BHA and the army — in Northern Shan State. It does not ensure the stability of the whole of the border area, nor does it halt military actions of other parties. Second, the agreement was useful for the MNDAA, as preventing junta airstrikes enabled the EAOs to return to Kokang more than 50,000 internally displaced persons who had been displaced into the Chinese-speaking United Wa State Army’s (UWSA) territory. It also opened the possibility that China might resume electricity and internet connectivity in Kokang, and enabled the MNDAA to begin governing Kokang and collecting taxes. Third, the agreement gave the military the opportunity to regroup in Northern Shan State, and to avoid the immediate loss of its remaining positions in Muse and Lashio, which are fully surrounded by the 3BHA.

Economic Woes and the Need to Resume Trade

While the Haigeng Agreement has held in Northern Shan State, by early March pressure started building in China’s Yunnan Province where prospects for trade remain bleak. According to the 2024 work report of Lincang City, the sub-provincial government that administers the territory bordering Kokang, local party officials aim to increase trade by 15%, investment by 12% and to achieve GDP growth of 7%. Other governments across Yunnan Province aim to achieve similar goals, but none of them will manage this unless they are able to restart trade with Myanmar.

The need to restart cross-border trade coupled with rapid junta losses in Rakhine State prompted China to launch a new round of negotiations in early March with the goal of compelling the 3BHA and the military to establish trade cooperation, and pressuring the 3BHA and the military to freeze the conflict in Rakhine State. China failed to accomplish these goals largely due to the military junta’s unwillingness to make any meaningful concessions to the 3BHA.

Myanmar’s Army as a Junior Partner

While the March talks came close to achieving a deal, a key obstacle related to demands raised by both the Chinese and Myanmar’s army that the port of Chinshwehaw, bordering China’s Yunnan Province and critical to the flow of trade from Myanmar to China, be managed by national-level entities. While the MNDAA attempted to make the case that it is a federal-level EAO and can manage the Chinshwehaw port on its own, Myanmar’s army insisted not only that the State Administration Council’s (SAC) Ministry of Commerce should manage the port, but that army personnel would need to be deployed to secure trade.

For the MNDAA, which had just liberated its territory from the military, this was a nonstarter. A leaked version of the proposed deal indicated that Myanmar’s army was willing to go as far as accepting a role as junior partner in terms of the share of the trade benefits, offering the MNDAA 70% of the customs and tax fees on trade. Neither party was happy with the deal, and while it was announced on March 4 that a consensus had been reached, no details were made available, purportedly as the Chinese side had demanded the parties keep them confidential. Surprisingly, on March 5, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), which together with the 3BHA make up the Northern Alliance, leaked the details of the agreement, which sparked a strong reaction from Myanmar’s army. The army was likely humiliated that the draft agreement gave it “junior” status vis-à-vis trade revenue. This made the prospects of a deal much less likely, once again causing frustration for China. This frustration was undoubtedly compounded by the lack of interest from the parties in expanding the Haigeng Agreement to cover Rakhine State.  

Operation 0307

Just four days after leaking the details of the agreement, the KIA launched Operation 0307, which has focused on systematically ejecting Myanmar’s army from the KIA’s traditional control areas, especially along the China border and the strategically important Bhamo-Lweje Road. The timing of the KIA’s move was strategic for two reasons: (1) with the trade talks ongoing, the KIA saw a strategic opening to capture control over the lucrative border trade in a move that might benefit the KIA, and which also might help increase Chinese leverage over an even weaker military when talks resume in April, and (2) the KIA had become increasingly concerned that all of the other northern EAOs had taken vast territories, and pushed the military out of their spheres of influence, while the KIA remained encircled.

Operation 0307 has proven to be no less successful than Operation 1027. In just four weeks, the KIA captured over 60 military positions, pushing the military out of its key territories around Laisin and Laiza; has taken a key border town adjacent to China’s Zhangfeng border crossing; and has brought over 2,000 square kilometers of territory under its control. This has further complicated the situation along the China-Myanmar border, resulting in China losing connectivity along nearly all key border crossings. In a sign of desperation, China’s Dehong Prefecture began rerouting goods via airfreight to Yangon in early April, which has most certainly resulted in a major increase in the cost of transportation.

An Increasingly Complex Border

While China has been focused on trying to reshape relations between Myanmar’s army and the 3BHA, much more serious developments are underway in northern Myanmar, which Beijing has largely ignored. These include two key trends. First, the EAOs are exhibiting a preference for dealing with Myanmar’s opposition National Unity Government (NUG) as they push the military out of the borderlands. While the MNDAA has refused to permit Myanmar’s army from having boots on the ground in its territory, it has no such hesitation regarding the NUG and its key allies. Throughout Operation 1027, a contingency of the Karenni National Defense Force was stationed in Kokang and fought alongside the 3BHA.

Meanwhile, the MNDAA hosted the NUG’s minister of defense in its territory in February, raising questions as to whether the NUG and MNDAA might announce a deal to jointly manage border trade. Second, rivalries among rising powers are growing. In March, hostilities erupted between two of the most powerful of the EAOs — the UWSA and MNDAA — around an incident involving UWSA officials entering MNDAA territory. The incident resulted in violence between the two armies and a harsh exchange that culminated in the MNDAA going as far as to tell the UWSA that it will “no longer play the role of the little brother to the UWSA.” This was followed by tensions between the Northern Shan Army and MNDAA, which fought a battle over territory contested between the two parties. Similar tensions have flared between the TNLA and both the North and the South Shan Army, and between the KIA, TNLA and MNDAA. In many respects, this should be expected given the dramatic shift in territorial control, and the growing relative power of the 3BHA vis-à-vis the other northern EAOs and the weakening military.

These dynamics point to a major need for support to processes that might help these parties establish effective mechanisms to de-escalate conflict, and to ultimately work toward building consensus between them regarding the country’s future. China’s focus on immediately resetting trade by pushing some of these parties to deal with the junta does nothing other than create further complications vis-à-vis this need.

International Implications

China has emerged by far as the party most actively involved in attempting to shape the trajectory of the conflict in Myanmar. It is currently focused mainly on achieving this through coercive mediation, but this could potentially change as China’s efforts are frustrated. In early April, China launched major military exercises along the border with Kachin State, signaling a redline in terms of instability along the border. Meanwhile, Chinese policy advisors linked to China’s state-owned proponent of the Kyaukphyu Port project have begun to make public calls for China to deploy a robust security presence in Myanmar to protect its interests. Chinese state media personalities have even hinted at the idea that the People’s Liberation Army is prepared “if [Myanmar’s junta chief] Min Aung Hlaing’s government can’t handle the situation.”

The lack of other states getting their hands dirty and supporting solutions on the ground gives China the space to focus its interventions on enhancing its interests rather than working toward long-term peace. This has significant implications in terms of the interests and incentives of the anti-junta forces on the ground. In the absence of robust international support, resistance actors, including the NUG, are navigating further into China’s orbit, as can be seen by positions that the NUG has taken vis-à-vis China on key political questions. This gives EAOs presently in China’s sphere of influence, and which largely follow authoritarian models of governance, an advantage, as well as disincentives when it comes to embracing democracy. This is perhaps of greatest significance for India, which stands to lose remarkably if the current trajectory continues, with China becoming the dominant actor with major parties controlling territory and connectivity along the India-Myanmar border, including the KIA and AA. It also has implications for Thailand, which has failed to set redlines vis-à-vis the junta’s use of violence on the border.

10. How Iraq was lost (book review by Robert D. Kaplan)

Excerpts:

As the tragedy reaches its denouement, the author continues to expose popular myths. Of Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi operator supported by Washington war hawks as a potential successor to Saddam, Coll writes: “Chalabi would later be credited with conning America into war. Yet he was pushing on an open door. To overestimate his importance risks scapegoating a foreigner with an accent and ignoring the responsibility – even eagerness – of Republican and Democratic members of Congress, aspiring cabinet members, and think-tank writers,” to go to war.

There was such an obsession with toppling a weakened Saddam in a demonstration of American power that there was comparatively little planning for how Iran and its security services would react. Even the CIA had been focused so much on the war and WMD that it had never truly grappled with the Iranian factor.

This sets up a further irony that Coll implies but does not directly address. The security vacuum that followed the end of the Baathist regime provided an historic opening for Iran to influence and subvert Iraqi politics. But what if the US had merely continued with the sanctions, as opponents to the war were essentially advocating? Iraq, its economy and its people would continue to have been weakened, and be open to similar Iranian infiltration as the years passed, especially as, Coll reveals, Saddam himself was becoming more introspective and given to novel-writing. Ultimately, we might have been faced with a similar situation as we now have: an Iran as a great regional power destabilising the region. Alas, it has been the very artificiality and fragility of the Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria that created such a vacuum for Iranian imperialism to fill.

Hindsight is easy. Nevertheless, hindsight demonstrates that perhaps that the wisest, albeit most ruthless, policy the US might have adopted at some time in the 1990s was to offer Saddam a way out of the economic sanctions in order to strengthen his cruel regime against Iran. But, at least to my knowledge, few in Washington were advocating such a position. And it would have had virtually no public support at the time, given Saddam’s reputation for atrocities. What was really needed was politically undoable.

The story of America and Iraq is epic in its dimensions, of which Steve Coll has provided the most comprehensive blueprint thus far.

How Iraq was lost

Steve Coll’s account of America’s relationship with Saddam Hussein reveals a series of devastating blunders.

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2024/02/how-iraq-was-lost-achilles-trap-steve-coll

By Robert D Kaplan

US marines prepared to topple a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, 9 April 2003. Photo by Gilles Bassignac / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Steve Coll is the Thucydides of American journalists: dry, cold, strictly factual, and exhaustive. Reading his books on America’s Middle East wars, you have the sense that you are getting the final word on the subject. His interpretations of what transpired are not always obvious, but – as in Thucydides – have to be teased out of the minutiae of facts as he presents them.

In The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq, the story Coll presents is devastating, yet the presentation is so painstaking and low-key that there are relatively few gotcha moments. He doesn’t go after people, but instead allows them to emerge on the page. Rather than present merely a Washington tragedy of the George W Bush administration, Coll centres on Iraq and the problems with analysing what was actually going on there – all the way back to the Reagan years.

The chief protagonist in The Achilles Trap is Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator who killed hundreds of thousands of people and imprisoned and tortured tens of thousands more. Coll’s portrait of Saddam is granular in the extreme, down to his family relations, the number of Cuban cigars he smoked each day, the novels he wrote and the leaders who fascinated him. The Western media made much of his obsession with Joseph Stalin, but Saddam was also absorbed by Mao Zedong, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Nelson Mandela. Saddam was a great listener who unnerved his visitors as they talked to him because his expression was immobile and therefore his mind could not be read. He was also moody and arbitrary, and pardoned and executed with abandon. His top nuclear scientists could be imprisoned for months before being awarded with even more bureaucratic responsibility. In keeping with Coll’s style – the product of conducting legions of interviews and poring over countless documents – the lives, families, and personalities of Saddam’s nuclear experts are also chronicled in great detail.

Coll reveals that the Reagan administration and particularly the CIA offered Saddam as much support as they could to hold off Iran in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, and were frustrated by the poor generalship of the Iraqi army, caused by Saddam’s tendency to fill the upper ranks with Baath Party hacks. As for the US State Department Arabists in the Reaganite 1980s, they were aware of Saddam’s cruelty, yet rationalised their support of him on account of his being a secular moderniser. There was a lot to swallow here, as Coll reveals. There was the mass executions of Baath party cadres carried out soon after Saddam achieved total power in 1979, his use of mustard gas against teenage Iranian soldiers in the mid-1980s, the gassing and killing of tens of thousands of Kurdish civilians in 1988, and so forth. “The sheer arbitrariness of Saddam’s rule was an aspect of its cruelty,” Coll summarises.

As president from 1989 to 1993, George HW Bush not only continued Ronald Reagan’s policy of engagement with Saddam but actively sought to improve bilateral ties, again, because of Iraq’s role in holding off Iran for the benefit of the rest of the Arab world. Here Coll dramatically flips the conventional script in the story of the US and Iraq, simply by laying out the facts. On the eve of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990, the Iraqi leader summoned the US ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie, for a meeting. In the course of the encounter, Glaspie indicated that the US took no position on inter-Arab disputes. The news of this electrified the Washington nomenklatura a few days later, which immediately blamed Glaspie for a weak performance that, in effect, gave Saddam a green light to invade Kuwait. Glaspie’s career was in significant measure ruined. (Disclosure: I also blamed Glaspie in my 1993 book, The Arabists.) But Coll, in giving Glaspie a powerful measure of redemption, documents how she was merely reiterating the policy of the elder Bush’s administration. Coll explains that, because she wasn’t a special presidential envoy but only an ambassador, Glaspie had no authority to freelance in her statements to Saddam.

Alas, it was that administration that abjectly failed at deterrence: neglecting to warn Saddam in the days and weeks before the invasion of Kuwait that he would face strong resistance from the United States if his armies crossed into another Arab country. That failure led to the first Gulf War, in 1991, without which there probably would not have been a second Gulf War in 2003.

Having been a potential friend to Saddam, George HW Bush and his government immediately cast the Iraqi leader as another Hitler, who had to be militarily defeated. During the first Gulf War the US military and intelligence apparatus even made attempts to assassinate him. But in the war’s aftermath, Bush flinched, realising he needed Saddam in power to prevent chaos in Iraq and serve as a buffer against Iran.

Thus was born the sanctions regime, in which economic penalties were inflicted on Iraq until Saddam came completely clean about his weapons-of-mass-destruction (WMD) programme. And it wasn’t just nuclear weapons, but chemical and biological ones, too, that concerned the West. The elder Bush administration had much to be suspicious about, since, as Coll documents, Saddam at the time did have an active nuclear-weapons programme, run at times by his son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, which the Iraqis were trying to hide from United Nations inspectors. There were even cat-and-mouse chases that had a cartoonish quality between the UN inspectors and the Iraqis to find component parts stored on moving trucks.

Saddam’s obsession with nuclear weapons is normally ascribed to his fear of Iran. But Coll shows that this was a simplistic explanation. Saddam also believed that nuclear weapons would help secure his power base at home and give him a sort of a strategic parity with Israel, the only nuclear power in the region. There was also a side to Saddam’s personality that was rather subtle, and which the CIA therefore misinterpreted, where he simply wanted to be feared – by being assumed to be guilty of things he didn’t even do – thus granting him another form of insurance. For example, Coll reports that it was never proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Saddam attempted to have George HW Bush assassinated while the president was visiting Kuwait in 1993, but that Saddam was pleased when he heard that the world assumed it was true.

Bill Clinton’s eight years in office (1993-2001) were defined by supporting strong UN inspection regimes to find WMD, combined with half-baked plots hatched in Washington and abroad to remove Saddam from office. The Iraqis became increasingly enraged by the inspections because they saw no end-point to them, even if they fully complied. It was all sticks and no carrots. Although Clinton did not commit a history-making blunder like his successor would, he nevertheless completely lacked a vision regarding Iraq.

The 1990s were crucial in that the economic sanctions against Saddam were killing tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians through malnutrition and other hardships, even as the onerous inspections were actually working in preventing Saddam producing weapons of mass destruction: so much so that, as Coll writes, Saddam “assumed that an all-powerful CIA already knew that he had no nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons”. Yet with all the on-site inspections, the laboratory test samples, and the U-2 spy planes flying overhead, the Americans were, in fact, not completely confident that the problem had been solved. And then Saddam kicked the UN inspectors out, a decision partly arising from his sheer frustration with the process.

By the time George W Bush was elected president in 2000, Saddam and his regime were weaker than they had been in decades past. As Coll writes of Saddam: “Age, isolation, and a decade of family struggles had sapped some of his fire.” The great irony is that just as Iraq was becoming less of a threat the Washington elite was becoming more obsessed with the danger Iraq posed. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, though not at all tied to Saddam, primed the Bush administration for focusing on him.

As the tragedy reaches its denouement, the author continues to expose popular myths. Of Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi operator supported by Washington war hawks as a potential successor to Saddam, Coll writes: “Chalabi would later be credited with conning America into war. Yet he was pushing on an open door. To overestimate his importance risks scapegoating a foreigner with an accent and ignoring the responsibility – even eagerness – of Republican and Democratic members of Congress, aspiring cabinet members, and think-tank writers,” to go to war.

There was such an obsession with toppling a weakened Saddam in a demonstration of American power that there was comparatively little planning for how Iran and its security services would react. Even the CIA had been focused so much on the war and WMD that it had never truly grappled with the Iranian factor.

This sets up a further irony that Coll implies but does not directly address. The security vacuum that followed the end of the Baathist regime provided an historic opening for Iran to influence and subvert Iraqi politics. But what if the US had merely continued with the sanctions, as opponents to the war were essentially advocating? Iraq, its economy and its people would continue to have been weakened, and be open to similar Iranian infiltration as the years passed, especially as, Coll reveals, Saddam himself was becoming more introspective and given to novel-writing. Ultimately, we might have been faced with a similar situation as we now have: an Iran as a great regional power destabilising the region. Alas, it has been the very artificiality and fragility of the Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria that created such a vacuum for Iranian imperialism to fill.

Hindsight is easy. Nevertheless, hindsight demonstrates that perhaps that the wisest, albeit most ruthless, policy the US might have adopted at some time in the 1990s was to offer Saddam a way out of the economic sanctions in order to strengthen his cruel regime against Iran. But, at least to my knowledge, few in Washington were advocating such a position. And it would have had virtually no public support at the time, given Saddam’s reputation for atrocities. What was really needed was politically undoable.

The story of America and Iraq is epic in its dimensions, of which Steve Coll has provided the most comprehensive blueprint thus far.

Robert D Kaplan holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His most recent book is “The Loom of Time” (Random House)

The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq

Steve Coll

Allen Lane, 576pp, £30

Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops

11. J.D. Vance: The Math on Ukraine Doesn’t Add Up

I don't much care for the Senator and his politics but he asks some important questions that our political leaders need to answer to inform the American people. I strongly support aid to Ukraine for as long as it takes to defeat Russia which I believe is in the US national interest but as I said the American people deserve some explanations.  The plan to succeed must be provided to the American people. I hope the administration takes this OpEd as a wake up call and perhaps uses it as a blueprint to develop the necessary effective narrative to ensure public support for US national security policies and strategy toward Russia and Putin's War and the defense of Ukraine. Answer these questions and effectively counter some of the points in this OpEd and popular support may increase.

Leaders need to be able to explain this:

The most fundamental question: How much does Ukraine need and how much can we actually provide? Mr. Biden suggests that a $60 billion supplemental means the difference between victory and defeat in a major war between Russia and Ukraine. That is also wrong. This $60 billion is a fraction of what it would take to turn the tide in Ukraine’s favor. But this is not just a matter of dollars. Fundamentally, we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war.

...

By committing to a defensive strategy, Ukraine can preserve its precious military manpower, stop the bleeding and provide time for negotiations to commence. But this would require both the American and Ukrainian leadership to accept that Mr. Zelensky’s stated goal for the war — a return to 1991 boundaries — is fantastical.

The White House has said time and again that it can’t negotiate with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. This is absurd. The Biden administration has no viable plan for the Ukrainians to win this war. The sooner Americans confront this truth, the sooner we can fix this mess and broker for peace.

OPINION

GUEST ESSAY

J.D. Vance: The Math on Ukraine Doesn’t Add Up

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/12/opinion/jd-vance-ukraine.html

April 12, 2024

In Scranton, Pa., 155-millimeter artillery shells are being manufactured.Credit...Brendan McDermid/Reuters

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By J. D. Vance

Mr. Vance, a Republican, is the junior senator from Ohio.

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President Biden wants the world to believe that the biggest obstacle facing Ukraine is Republicans and our lack of commitment to the global community. This is wrong.

Ukraine’s challenge is not the G.O.P.; it’s math. Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can field, even with draconian conscription policies. And it needs more matériel than the United States can provide. This reality must inform any future Ukraine policy, from further congressional aid to the diplomatic course set by the president.

The Biden administration has applied increasing pressure on Republicans to pass a supplemental aid package of more than $60 billion to Ukraine. I voted against this package in the Senate and remain opposed to virtually any proposal for the United States to continue funding this war. Mr. Biden has failed to articulate even basic facts about what Ukraine needs and how this aid will change the reality on the ground.

The most fundamental question: How much does Ukraine need and how much can we actually provide? Mr. Biden suggests that a $60 billion supplemental means the difference between victory and defeat in a major war between Russia and Ukraine. That is also wrong. This $60 billion is a fraction of what it would take to turn the tide in Ukraine’s favor. But this is not just a matter of dollars. Fundamentally, we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war.

Consider our ability to produce 155-millimeter artillery shells. Last year, Ukraine’s defense minister estimated that the country’s base-line requirement for these shells was over four million per year but that it could fire up to seven million if that many were available. Since the start of the conflict, the United States has gone to great lengths to ramp up production of 155-millimeter shells. We’ve roughly doubled our capacity and can now produce 360,000 per year — less than a tenth of what Ukraine says it needs. The administration’s goal is to get this to 1.2 million — 30 percent of what’s needed — by the end of 2025. This would cost the American taxpayers dearly while yielding an unpleasantly familiar result: failure abroad.

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Just this week, the top American military commander in Europe argued that absent further security assistance, Russia could soon have a 10-to-1 artillery advantage over Ukraine. What didn’t gather as many headlines is that Russia’s current advantage is at least 5 to 1, even after all the money we have poured into the conflict. Neither of these ratios plausibly leads to Ukrainian victory.

Proponents of American aid to Ukraine have argued that our approach has been a boon to our own economy, creating jobs here in the factories that manufacture weapons. But our national security interests can be — and often are — separate from our economic interests. The notion that we should prolong a bloody and gruesome war because it’s been good for American business is grotesque. We can and should rebuild our industrial base without shipping its products to a foreign conflict.

The story is the same when we look at other munitions. Take the Patriot missile system — our premier air defense weapon. It’s of such importance in this war that Ukraine’s foreign minister has specifically demanded them. That’s because in March alone, Russia reportedly launched over 3,000 guided aerial bombs, 600 drones and 400 missiles at Ukraine. To fend off these attacks, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and others have indicated they need thousands of Patriot interceptors per year. The problem is this: The United States only manufactures 550 per year. If we pass the supplemental aid package currently being considered in Congress, we could potentially increase annual production to 650, but that’s still less than a third of what Ukraine requires.

These weapons are not only needed by Ukraine. If China were to set its sights on Taiwan, the Patriot missile system would be critical to its defense. In fact, the United States has promised to send Taiwan nearly $900 million worth of Patriot missiles, but delivery of those weapons and other essential resources has been severely delayed, partly because of shortages caused by the war in Ukraine.

If that sounds bad, Ukraine’s manpower situation is even worse. Here are the basics: Russia has nearly four times the population of Ukraine. Ukraine needs upward of half a million new recruits, but hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men have already fled the country. The average Ukrainian soldier is roughly 43 years old, and many soldiers have already served two years at the front with few, if any, opportunities to stop fighting. After two years of conflict, there are some villages with almost no men left. The Ukrainian military has resorted to coercing men into service, and women have staged protests to demand the return of their husbands and fathers after long years of service at the front. This newspaper reported one instance in which the Ukrainian military attempted to conscript a man with a diagnosed mental disability.

Many in Washington seem to think that hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians have gone to war with a song in their heart and are happy to label any thought to the contrary Russian propaganda. But major newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic are reporting that the situation on the ground in Ukraine is grim.

These basic mathematical realities were true, but contestable, at the outset of the war. They were obvious and incontestable a year ago, when American leadership worked closely with Mr. Zelensky to undertake a disastrous counteroffensive. The bad news is that accepting brute reality would have been most useful last spring, before the Ukrainians launched that extremely costly and unsuccessful military campaign. The good news is that even now, a defensive strategy can work. Digging in with old-fashioned ditches, cement and land mines are what enabled Russia to weather Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive. Our allies in Europe could better support such a strategy, as well. While some European countries have provided considerable resources, the burden of military support has thus far fallen heaviest on the United States.

By committing to a defensive strategy, Ukraine can preserve its precious military manpower, stop the bleeding and provide time for negotiations to commence. But this would require both the American and Ukrainian leadership to accept that Mr. Zelensky’s stated goal for the war — a return to 1991 boundaries — is fantastical.

The White House has said time and again that it can’t negotiate with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. This is absurd. The Biden administration has no viable plan for the Ukrainians to win this war. The sooner Americans confront this truth, the sooner we can fix this mess and broker for peace.

More on Ukraine aid

Opinion | Christopher Caldwell

Everyone Wants to Seize Russia’s Money. It’s a Terrible Idea.

April 9, 2024

Opinion | The Editorial Board

Help Ukraine Hold the Line

April 6, 2024

J.D. Vance (@JDVance1), a Republican, is the junior senator from Ohio.

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A version of this article appears in print on April 13, 2024, Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: The Math on Ukraine Doesn’t Add Up. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

12. Taiwan's Ma visits Xi, whose intentions he trusts

​Excerpts:

Ma is described as a “useful idiot” in remarks Tuesday by Yu Tsung-chi, a retired major general in Taiwan and the dean of the National Defense University’s Fu Hsing Kang College. Yu sees Ma as being used by Beijing to arouse anti-Japan sentiment and advocate unification with Taiwan.

Yu says Beijing wants to use people’s memories of KMT’s eight-year war of resistance against Japan in 1937-1945 to elicit a sense of solidarity with the modern KMT and erode Taiwan’s relationship with Japan and the US.

Whether or not the “idiot” charge is deserved, Ma made a careless mistake during his latest meeting with Xi, according to Taiwanese media.

In his opening speech, Ma originally wanted to say that “the Chinese nation (Zhonghua Minzu)” had faced a century of humiliation in the past but is now marching towards the road of revitalization.

But he mistakenly pronounced the subject as “the ROC (Zhonghua Minguo),” a term which CCP leaders did not expect or want to hear in the meeting. He corrected himself immediately.

Taiwan's Ma visits Xi, whose intentions he trusts - Asia Times

Some in Taiwan see Ma as China’s useful idiot, but the Kuomintang brass avoid uttering such harsh judgments

asiatimes.com · by Jeff Pao · April 10, 2024

Former Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou met with Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in Beijing on Wednesday, their first meeting since Singapore in November 2015.

The latest Xi-Ma meeting came ahead of a summit between United States President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Washington on Wednesday US time.

During the meeting, Ma said the Chinese nation could not bear for a war to break out in the Taiwan Strait. He said he believes that leaders on both sides have the wisdom to maintain a peaceful and stable environment in the region for economic development.

Xi said there is nothing that people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait cannot discuss, and that there is also no power that can separate them.

“People on both sides of the Taiwan Strait long for peace in their homes and harmonious coexistence with their families,” Xi said. “To this end, we must promote the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations.”

“As long as the country is not divided and we recognize that both sides of the Taiwan Strait are Chinese and one family, we can sit down and communicate with each other,” he said.

He added that the communication in the cross-Strait relations must be based on the principle of the “1992 Consensus.”

The 1992 Consensus was achieved in a meeting between the semi-official representatives of the CCP-led People’s Republic of China (PRC) of mainland China and Kuomintang (KMT)-led Republic of China (ROC) of Taiwan.

The CCP said the 1992 Consensus means that both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to “one China,” which is solely represented by the PRC. The KMT understanding of the consensus is “one China, different interpretations,” meaning that China can be interpreted as either PRC or ROC.

The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the ruling party of Taiwan, has never acknowledged the 1992 Consensus. The DPP’s leader Lai Ching-te won the island’s presidential election on January 13 and will replace Tsai Ing-wen as the new Taiwanese President on May 20.

KMT’s stance

On January 8, Ma said in an interview with Germany’s DW that the best approach is to communicate and cooperate with China as Taiwan can never win a war against China.

He said that, in cross-strait relations, he trusted Xi, who he insisted harbored no plan to invade the island. He also said Taiwan should avoid boosting its defense expenses as that would provoke China.

Following those January comments by Ma, Hou You-ih, then the KMT’s presidential candidate, said he had different thoughts than Ma. He said he did not place unrealistic hopes on “one country, two systems.”

Ma’s latest trip to China has drawn controversy among top KMT leaders. KMT Chairman Eric Chu reportedly took leave for a family trip to the US starting in late March.

KMT Vice Chairman Andrew Hsia, who chaired a meeting of the party’s standing committee on March 27, said the Party highly appreciates Ma’s visit to Beijing and wishes for its success.

However, Hsia is leading a KMT delegation to meet with US think tanks and lawmakers in Washington this week. On April 8, he met with some officials in the US State Department.

“Ma’s China trip is not only a big political event, but also a fight of ideologies and stances,” a Zhejiang-based columnist using the pen name “Xia Jie” says in an article posted on Wednesday. “How the DPP and KMT will react to Ma’s ‘trip of peace’ will result in different situations in Taiwan.”

“In the past, Eric Chu had a friendly political stance towards mainland China. But in recent years, he has clearly shown his stance of getting closer to the US and staying away from the mainland,” a Hubei-based writer called “Dabaihua” says in an article. “It seems that Chu wants to avoid commenting on Ma’s China trip by secretly departing Taiwan.”

The writer says Chu has also faced serious criticism within his party after he closed the KMT’s Huang Fuxing branch, or the National Veterans Committee, which firmly opposed Taiwan independence, last month.

He says it’s now urgent for Beijing to bring out a message that it has tried its best to achieve peaceful reunification and will not allow anyone to separate Taiwan from China.

Taiwan-based Hong Kong commentator Yau Ching-yuen says on his YouTube channel that Beijing may have overestimated Ma’s influence on Taiwanese politics.

Citing a recent survey conducted by the National Chengchi University, Yau says only 2.4% of people in Taiwan recognize themselves as Chinese. He says most Taiwanese oppose Beijing’s “one country, two systems” approach after seeing its failure in Hong Kong.

‘Useful idiot’

In his latest trip to China, Ma did not carry any official title and was called “Mr Ma” by Xi. In return, he called Xi “general secretary” and “Mr Xi.”

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Prior to this meeting, Ma led a group of young Taiwanese people to visit Guangdong, Shaanxi and Beijing on April 1-9. He visited China’s anti-Japan war museum in Beijing on Monday.

Ma is described as a “useful idiot” in remarks Tuesday by Yu Tsung-chi, a retired major general in Taiwan and the dean of the National Defense University’s Fu Hsing Kang College. Yu sees Ma as being used by Beijing to arouse anti-Japan sentiment and advocate unification with Taiwan.

Yu says Beijing wants to use people’s memories of KMT’s eight-year war of resistance against Japan in 1937-1945 to elicit a sense of solidarity with the modern KMT and erode Taiwan’s relationship with Japan and the US.

Whether or not the “idiot” charge is deserved, Ma made a careless mistake during his latest meeting with Xi, according to Taiwanese media.

In his opening speech, Ma originally wanted to say that “the Chinese nation (Zhonghua Minzu)” had faced a century of humiliation in the past but is now marching towards the road of revitalization.

But he mistakenly pronounced the subject as “the ROC (Zhonghua Minguo),” a term which CCP leaders did not expect or want to hear in the meeting. He corrected himself immediately.

Read: Beijing reminds Taiwanese to pick the ‘right’ leaders

Follow Jeff Pao on Twitter at @jeffpao3

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asiatimes.com · by Jeff Pao · April 10, 2024

13. A Warm Welcome for Japan’s Kishida in Washington

Excerpt:

The next meeting involving Biden and Kishida is scheduled for July. It will take place on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Washington. South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol – with whom Biden and Kishida met in another historic trilateral back in August – has also been invited.

A Warm Welcome for Japan’s Kishida in Washington

thediplomat.com

Japan’s Prime Minister Kishida addressed the U.S. Congress and met the president of the Philippines. However, a tentative offer to join the AUKUS security pact presents Japan with a dilemma.

By Duncan Bartlett

April 12, 2024

From left: Mrs. Kishida Yuko, Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, U.S. President Joe Biden, and First Lady Jill Biden greet the U.S. and Japanese delegations during the State Arrival Ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House, Apr. 10, 2024.

Japan’s Prime Minister Kishida Fumio has basked in an outpouring of respect and appreciation in Washington this week. He was feted by U.S. President Joe Biden at a state dinner at the White House. The event was attended by a host of celebrities, such as Robert de Niro, as well as top brass from the U.S. military, and the architects of American foreign policy in Asia.

This generated upbeat coverage on U.S. websites, with accompanying pictures of the prime minister in a tuxedo.

It was a sharp contrast to the much gloomier press coverage Kishida receives in Japan.

In general, the media at home seems to have decided that Kishida is on his last legs, struggling to recover from a fundraising scandal that led several senior members of his government to resign.

However, in the United States, Kishida still has a chance to be seen as a hero.

“It is frankly unimaginable that any other leader than Fumio Kishida could have taken the alliance to this level,” said one senior official from the Biden administration. “What he’s done in the U.S.-Japan context is nothing short of remarkable. He’s modernized it, and put us on a pathway to even bigger things.”

Kishida is an enthusiastic supporter of Biden’s Asia strategy. When the leaders met this week, they used similar phrases about ensuring an open and secure Indo-Pacific and maintaining an international order based upon the rule of law.

“We are your global partner today and we will be your global partner in the years ahead,” Kishida told Congress in a speech delivered in English on April 11. He was fulsome in his praise for American democracy. This received applause from supporters of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who face a rematch in November for the presidency. TV networks gave Kishida plenty of attention.

In office, Trump pressed U.S. allies to “share the burden” of their security by committing to high levels of defense speeding. Since Kishida became Japan’s prime minister, the Diet in Tokyo has agreed to double its defense budget to 2 percent of GDP. Japan is set to become the third-largest military spender in the world.

Japan has also acquired counterstrike capability, which means that its Self Defense Forces could – in theory – fire missiles at targets in North Korea or China in the face of an imminent attack.

Kishida has often drawn a parallel between the threats to Japan’s security and the invasion of Ukraine.

In his speech to Congress he said, “Russia’s unprovoked, unjust, and brutal war of aggression against Ukraine has entered its third year. Russia continues to threaten the use of nuclear weapons, which has contributed to worldwide concern that yet another catastrophe by nuclear weapon use is a real possibility.”

The Japanese prime minister – who is from Hiroshima – has previously used speeches to “try to pull the world back from the brink of nuclear conflict,” as he puts it.

Inevitably, the nuclear capacity of the United States and its allies Britain and France presents Kishida with a dilemma. He must now wrestle with the question of whether Japan should become a member of AUKUS, an informal security pact involving Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States underlined by Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines.

The defense ministers of the three AUKUS countries met in Washington shortly before Kishida arrived in the U.S. capital. They discussed enhancing cooperation with Japan. However, they stopped sort of saying Japan should join the group, choosing instead to say they would “explore” the idea.

The defense ministers appear to be preparing to invite Japan to join “Pillar II” of AUKUS, which focuses on advanced technology, ranging from artificial intelligence and quantum computing to hypersonic weapons.

According to Biden, Japan and the United States will “increase the interoperability and planning of our militaries.” They will also create a joint network of air missile and defense architecture, along with Australia.

The AUKUS arrangement is built around a commitment from the U.S. and the U.K. to provide Australia with advanced equipment for nuclear-powered submarines.

Biden has stressed that the submarines would be “nuclear-powered, not nuclear-armed.” Nevertheless, China has accused the Western allies of setting back nuclear non-proliferation efforts. A well-placed source claims this is a point that pricks at Kishida’s conscience.

“Under current circumstances, it would not be possible for Japan to become a full member of AUKUS,” the source explained to The Diplomat. “Politicians would not tolerate a deal which draws Japan into a defense arrangement which involves nuclear-powered submarines. This would be seen as undermining the international nuclear non-proliferation treaty, of which Japan is a committed member. For example, how could Japan express disapproval of a nuclear deal between Russia and North Korea, if Tokyo has entered into a nuclear arrangement with Washington, London and Canberra?”

“Furthermore,” the source added, “such a step could be regarded as a provocative act towards China, which could increase the risk of escalation.”

The Washington meetings were also an opportunity for the Biden administration to bolster relations with another friendly Asian country: The Philippines. A trilateral summit involving Kishida, Biden, and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took place on the same day as Kishida’s speech to Congress.

From left: President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, U.S. President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Kishida Fumio of Japan in the Blue Room before their trilateral meeting in the East Room of the White House, Apr. 11, 2024. Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz.

Marcos told reporters that the nations are bound by a shared vision.

It was announced that coastguards from the United States, Japan, and the Philippines will conduct joint patrols later this year. Japan will also supply equipment to the Philippines coast guard to help it monitor the activity of Chinese ships.

Admiral John Aquilino, head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, has said that he is “very, very concerned” about “dangerous and illegal” Chinese actions around the Sierra Madre, a rusty boat that lies on a shoal within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines.

According to the Financial Times, Chinese coast guard ships have used water cannons and other aggressive measures to impede the Philippines from resupplying marines stationed on the Sierra Madre.

Manila ran the vessel aground in 1999 to bolster its claim to the contested reef and routinely sends boats to resupply the marines stationed there. China has accused the Philippines of bringing construction materials to reinforce the ship.

Rory Green, China economist at GlobalData TS Lombard, said this issue could flare into a major flashpoint.

“It is a test of America’s commitment to the region,” he said.

During the trilateral meeting in Washington, Biden reassured the two visiting Asian leaders that America’s commitment to their nations is “ironclad” and added that an attack on Filipino ships in the South China Sea would invoke the Philippines-U.S. defense treaty.

Aside from security issues, Green noted the potential advantages to the Philippines of closer ties to two countries that have much larger economies.

“This strikes me as part of a plan to try to counter China’s economic heft in the region,” Green told The Diplomat. “China has done very well in providing funding and expertise as an infrastructure provider, and by offering a market to exporters from other countries. These are not areas in which America has done particularly well, although in a sense, the U.S. is fighting geography.”

Green went on: “China is by far the biggest regional economy in the Asia-Pacific, and the proximity factor definitely matters. However, bringing the economic weight of Japan onto the American side helps to address the balance. This may well appeal not just to the Philippines but to other countries in Southeast Asia which are wondering how they should position themselves in terms of U.S.-China rivalry.”

The next meeting involving Biden and Kishida is scheduled for July. It will take place on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Washington. South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol – with whom Biden and Kishida met in another historic trilateral back in August – has also been invited.

Authors

Guest Author

Duncan Bartlett

Duncan Bartlett is a research associate at the SOAS China Institute, where he presents the weekly podcast, China In Context. He is the Diplomatic Correspondent for Japan Forward.

thediplomat.com

14. The End of Secular India

Conclusion:

In the meantime, the BJP marches on. It seems certain to win in the coming election, so the next five years are all but guaranteed to feature further authoritarianism and increasing marginalization of Muslims. But if the party scores big, it may be able to irrevocably restructure the Indian polity. The margins, therefore, matter. The fate of over 1.4 billion people hangs in the balance.

The End of Secular India

Modi’s Quest to Entrench Hindu Nationalism

By Hartosh Singh Bal

April 12, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Waters Close Over Us: A Journey Along the Narmada · April 12, 2024

On April 19, India will kick off the largest election in history. Over 44 days, more than 500 million people—or 65 percent of the country’s nearly one billion eligible voters—are expected to participate. The exercise will be spectacular, with ballots printed in over a dozen languages and distributed from islands to remote mountain communities. But the result is not really in doubt. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party are expected to return to power for a third term.

The BJP’s margin is likely to be sizable. Modi’s approval ratings are high, and the party leads in every poll. And yet the BJP has gone into overdrive, using any means possible to subdue an already weak opposition. It has, most notably, turned the Enforcement Directorate, a body designed to investigate financial crimes, into a vehicle for prosecuting opposition politicians. Its latest and perhaps highest-profile target is Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi, who rose to public prominence leading an anticorruption movement. He was arrested in March on graft charges and is now running his government from jail.

At first, these measures may seem surprising. To win reelection, the BJP does not need to imprison Kejriwal or any other opponent. Such steps, which have created many controversies, seem gratuitous at best and risky at worst—needless gambles for a party cruising to victory.

But the BJP is not like most parties. Its goal is not just to win elections and pass discrete policies: the party sees political power as a means to a much grander end. The BJP is a Hindu nationalist organization that aims to completely restructure the Indian state as a Hindu nation. It wants to put Hinduism at the center of public life. It wants to make full Indian citizenship contingent on being Hindu. It has even set in motion laws that threaten many of the country’s Muslims with detention and eviction.

To make these bigger changes, the BJP must do more than just win a third term. It has to win big, with majorities large enough to completely steamroll the country’s opposition.

A CENTURY IN THE MAKING

Hindu nationalism may seem like an old ideology. It is not. It began to take shape in the 1920s in the work of the activist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. The British government had imprisoned him for over a decade for his opposition to colonial rule. Following several mercy petitions asking for forgiveness, Savarkar was released in 1924 after he pledged undying allegiance to the United Kingdom. For the rest of his life, he never betrayed this oath. Instead of agitating against colonialism, Savarkar stuck to a habit he acquired in prison: writing about Hindus and Muslims in a way that sought to highlight the antipathy between India’s two largest religious communities and make their differences irreconcilable.

Savarkar was an atheist, but that was no obstacle to his mission. He saw Hinduness, or “Hindutva”—as he termed it—as a cultural source of identity. In his book on Hindutva, published in 1923, Savarkar argued that India should belong to this nation of Hindus, who considered the subcontinent both their fatherland and their holy land. Savarkar believed that Muslims and Christians could not belong to this nation. “Hindusthan” may be their fatherland, he wrote, “yet it is not to them a holy land too.”

Savarkar’s ideas quickly caught on. In 1925, a group of high-caste Hindus founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an organization dedicated to creating the nation Savarkar imagined. The RSS saw India as an exclusively Hindu nation and argued that Christians and Muslims had no place in it. One of the founders of the organization, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, argued that Muslims were “yavana snakes,” borrowing an archaic term for foreigners.

The BJP is not like most parties.

By the early 1930s, the RSS had gathered enough strength to send a delegation to Italy to meet with its leader, Benito Mussolini, and learn the art of cadre building from his fascist organization. Under the leadership of M. S. Golwalkar, Hedgewar’s successor, the group patterned itself on Mussolini’s party, creating a system of educational centers where members lived, studied, and trained, replete with uniforms and drills. Golwalkar also learned from European fascists’ views on minorities. In his writings, he claimed that the final solution in Germany was a model for how India should treat its own minority groups. (Modi has written and spoken of Golwalkar as one of his guiding lights.)

Such exclusionary views ensured that the RSS had little or no participation in India’s freedom struggle, which enjoyed the broad support of both Hindus and Muslims. The group was further marginalized after an RSS member assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. And it was decidedly uninvolved in the debates that led to the writing of the Indian constitution, which was adopted in 1950. As late as 1966, the RSS made clear its criticism of the founding document. The constitution “is just a cumbersome and heterogeneous piecing together of various articles from various Constitutions of Western countries,” Golwalkar wrote. “It has absolutely nothing which can be called our own.”

But gradually, the group began to enter Indian politics. In 1951, it founded the Jan Sangh—a precursor to the BJP—which contested and won seats in Parliament. Its members joined the bureaucracy, universities, and other prominent institutions. Although the RSS never concealed its vision of what India should be, its vast array of sympathizers lived out a variant of what the Polish-American writer Czeslaw Milosz described as ketman: they publicly accepted and even endorsed the country’s prevailing secular norms while concealing their true beliefs.

This strategy allowed the Jan Sangh to work closely with mainstream political groups, including ones that termed themselves socialists and progressives. Soon, the party was sharing power with such outfits at the provincial level. After the 1977 elections, which booted the Indian National Congress from government for the first time since independence, the RSS affiliate briefly shared political power as a junior partner in a diverse alliance. The coalition soon collapsed, and the Jan Sangh evaporated. But in 1980, the RSS set up a new political wing: the BJP. And in 1998, the party placed first in the national elections. An RSS-trained politician, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, became India’s prime minister.

The BJP may be carrying out the largest marginalization in human history.

During Vajpayee’s tenure, the BJP sought to allay any apprehension that it would act according to the stated desires of its parent organization. It worked well within the constitutional mandate, contesting elections without foul play and selecting candidates who did not publicly articulate the RSS’s disdain for the constitution. But in hindsight, it is clear Vajpayee was constrained only by legislative math. The BJP and its ideological partners did not have a majority in Parliament, so they had to work in coalition with more moderate groups.

That changed when the BJP came to power in 2014 with a majority—and under the leadership of Modi. This prime minister was a dyed-in-the-wool Hindu nationalist, one who began volunteering for the RSS as a child. He then became a pracharak, a formal organizer for the group, serving until 1985. The RSS eventually seconded Modi to the BJP, where he quickly rose up the ranks. In 2001, he was elected chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat. Under his tenure, Hindu mobs carried out a pogrom there, killing at least 800 Muslims. The police, which reported to Modi’s government, largely stood aside.

Modi carried RSS ideology with him into national leadership. Over his ten years in office, the prime minister has successfully relegated Muslims to second-class status in Indian society. He has, for example, passed laws that could strip many Muslims of their citizenship. His party has fielded just one Muslim candidate in the 2024 elections, from a district where Muslims make up over 70 percent of the population, depriving the religious group of representation in government. And BJP-controlled states have enacted bills that make it extremely difficult for Hindus and Muslims to marry, for anyone to convert to Islam, and for Muslims to purchase property in Hindu-dominated areas. Many of the bills’ provisions also affect Christians. Hindus may make up 80 percent of India’s population, but given its size, the number of people affected by the BJP’s discrimination exceeds 200 million. The party may well be carrying out the largest marginalization in human history.

The discrimination has accelerated the longer Modi has stayed in power. Since winning reelection in 2019, his government has advanced many large-scale legal changes that were once considered out of bounds for even hardcore Hindu nationalists. Modi has, for instance, revoked the special status of Kashmir—once India’s only Muslim-majority state. (The government also divided the state in half and relegated the resulting parts to “union territories” run by the federal government.) The government has overseen the construction of a Hindu temple atop the ruins of a medieval mosque that an RSS-affiliated mob vengefully tore down in 1992. Uttarakhand, a state under BJP control, has even implemented a civil code that, while quashing Muslims access to laws of their own, still allows Hindus to access specific tax provisions that result in significant savings.

A NEW NATION

Today, the RSS is closer than ever to creating the country of its imagination. But it is not yet sated. As the group approaches its 100th anniversary, it wants to render the de facto Hindu nation it has built into one that is de jure. And if Modi wins a third term, he will do whatever he can to deliver.

Modi’s success will depend on the size of his majority. Today, the BJP and its allies control 346 of the 543 seats in the lower house of Parliament. They are just shy of a majority in the upper house, where they control 122 of the 245 seats. These seats are elected by provincial legislatures over a six-year cycle rather than through a direct vote. But the BJP will almost certainly obtain a majority in the upper house by 2025 and is expected to preserve its majority in the lower house. The party will then be able to advance legal changes that have eluded it so far. It may, for example, extend the civil code adopted in Uttarakhand across the country.

The BJP will also build on past provisions. It could, in particular, fully implement the national register of citizens that it announced in 2019. The register, the government claims, will allow it to detain and deport undocumented immigrants. In reality, it is a mechanism through which New Delhi can deport Christians and Muslims. To join the registry, Indians must prove their citizenship by providing certain documents. In a country where good records can be hard to find, many will fail to get the papers they need. In the prevalent Islamophobic climate, it would then be easy to label Muslims as illegal immigrants and threaten to detain and expel them.

To make other fundamental shifts, the BJP will need to alter the constitution. That will be a much harder task. Constitutional amendments must pass each of the two houses by what is called a “special majority,” a vote in which at least two-thirds of the members of each house participate. This means opposition parties can block an amendment if they control at least a third of either chamber. The BJP and its allies must therefore gain an additional 30 seats in the lower house and 42 in the upper house if they want to change India’s foundational text. But if the party can succeed in 2025 and then in subsequent state elections, it will finally be able to scrub the constitution of its secular provisions and language.

Modi’s success will depend on the size of his majority.

These numbers help explain why the BJP has resorted to controversial methods going into these elections. To complete its mission, the RSS must stamp out any serious opposition—to the point where no party can challenge Hindu nationalists in state or federal elections. And to do that, the party has employed even more autocratic and illiberal techniques, including arresting opposition leaders such as Kejriwal.

Although such acts are controversial, there are reasons to think the BJP will not pay an electoral penalty for them. The mass media is effectively controlled by the BJP and its affiliates. It has largely prevented details about the government’s misuse of power from reaching ordinary voters, and when it does allow news to seep through, the information is typically couched in discourse about how the opposition has done and will do far worse things.

The Indian opposition will also struggle to capitalize on any of the BJP’s vulnerabilities. The country’s election process is overseen by a body that is now staffed by ex-bureaucrats selected by the government, and their behavior during other recent elections suggests they will ignore the BJP’s dog whistles about Muslims and punish the opposition for even minor infractions. (In the past, for example, they have disqualified legislators.) Even without such penalties, the opposition will be feeble. Kejriwal is in jail. The de facto leader of the Indian National Congress—Rahul Gandhi—has not been imprisoned (he has been convicted of defaming Modi but remains free on appeal), but he is widely considered ineffective. The scion of a political dynasty, Gandhi has worked hard to improve his personal branding, but he has failed to create an organization that can take on the BJP. In an effort to stay above the day-to-day fray of politics, he has placed other politicians in charge of rebuilding the once dominant party. But as long as he remains involved, they cannot wield real authority. The result is an irresolvable dilemma. India’s biggest opposition party is helmed by a leader who does not want to lead, but that can only be led by him.

In the meantime, the BJP marches on. It seems certain to win in the coming election, so the next five years are all but guaranteed to feature further authoritarianism and increasing marginalization of Muslims. But if the party scores big, it may be able to irrevocably restructure the Indian polity. The margins, therefore, matter. The fate of over 1.4 billion people hangs in the balance.

• HARTOSH SINGH BAL is Executive Editor of The Caravan in New Delhi and the author of Waters Close Over Us: A Journey Along the Narmada.

Foreign Affairs · by Waters Close Over Us: A Journey Along the Narmada · April 12, 2024

​15. China’s Public Memory Management in Kyrgyzstan

George Orwell: Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.

China’s Public Memory Management in Kyrgyzstan

https://jamestown.org/program/chinas-public-memory-management-in-kyrgyzstan/

By: Niva Yau

April 12, 2024 09:26 AM Age: 23 hours

(Source: SCMP)

Executive Summary:

• Beijing practices public memory management beyond its borders to neutralize critics by coopting elites and suppressing independent voices.
• Despite protests, Kyrgyzstan has consistently supported Beijing’s interests, particularly regarding a land transfer and the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
• Beijing continues to incentivize ruling elites in Kyrgyzstan and elsewhere to prioritize PRC interests over national interests, fostering economic dependence through trade deals and investments.

Beijing regularly practices public memory management well beyond its borders. The approach of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has proven quite effective over time, neutralizing critical events that could have left a strong mark on bilateral relations with numerous countries. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has perfected various methods that it continues to use in responding to and adjusting any inconvenient narratives against Beijing.

In Kyrgyzstan, in the early 2000s, a mass attempt was made to stop a controversial land transfer to China (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, February 11, 2002). In concluding the closed-door negotiations with Beijing, then-President Askar Akayev asked the Kyrgyz parliament to ratify the transfer of 125,000 hectares of Kyrgyz territory to China, including the Uzengi-Kush mountain range which contains high-value deposits of minerals and is a critical water source for Western Xinjiang (Commission of Security and Cooperation in Europe, April 7, 2005; Cabar.asia, September 27, 2021; Central Asian Survey, August 22, 2022). Opposition groups, however, united against the initiative and enjoying mass support from across the country, rallied in the capital (Eurasianet, December 16, 2002). Over 700 citizens participated in hunger strikes to stop the land transfer (OMCT, August 3, 2002). In response, the government arrested opposition members of parliament and ordered violence against the protesters. In Aksy, the hometown of Azimbek Beknazarov, leader of the opposition alliance, police shot dead five peaceful protesters (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 19, 2002).

In a strange twist, among the few remaining local Kyrgyz critics of Beijing, almost no one touches on how the PRC incentivized the ruling elites in Bishkek to further Chinese goals even at the cost of their own national interest. Instead, some focus their comments on debt issues, while others stick to stereotypical negative comments about the Chinese people.

On March 16, 2022, 20 years after the violent crackdown, I stood at a street corner across from a monument put up in memory of those who gave their lives to protest the land transfer. At 10:00 a.m., police arrived with groups of men in plainclothes, ostensibly to prevent any sort of demonstration from breaking out. I left to join a memorial event organized by a local nongovernmental organization, where only about 30 people showed up. To my disappointment, even there, the conversation did not center on the land transfer and the alleged corruption. The word “China” was barely even mentioned.

Over the past 20 years, the CCP has continuously managed public memory of the Aksy event and the land deal by coopting elites who have worked to shield Beijing from criticism, propagating their own narratives. These efforts also suppressed independent views on the issue. At the time, Askar Salymbekov, mayor of Naryn and owner of Dordoi Bazaar, in a clear conflict of interest, was one of the lobbyists who insisted that the Uzengi-Kush mountain range was not valuable (Author’s interview, 2021). Having obtained control over the country’s only trade route bordering the PRC in Naryn, Salymbekov grew the Dordoi Bazaar into a regional hub for Chinese products. This development cemented Kyrgyzstan’s economic dependence on the export and import of Chinese commodities. In 2014, the bazaar contributed to one-third of the country’s gross domestic product (Cacianalyst.org, February 5, 2014). Salymbekov went on to become one of the most successful businessmen in Kyrgyzstan as a pro-China lobbyist who has consistently backed Chinese projects, including a controversial $275 million Chinese logistics hub in his hometown, At-Bashy (South China Morning Post, October 17, 2020; Iri.org, September 2022).

At the memorial event, discussion centered around admiration for those who went on extended hunger strikes and disproval against local law enforcement for shooting at the protesters. Yet, it seemed to me that some seriously important storylines were missing from the conversation. I was even more shocked to see Ishak Masaliev, head of the Kyrgyz Communist Party, as a speaker invited to talk about how government-ordered violence was a mistake. Masaliev himself is a known supporter of Beijing’s oppressive treatment of the Muslim population, a self-proclaimed frequent visitor to the PRC, and an admirer of the CCP’s “successes.”

In recent years, PRC land grabs in the surrounding region have extended to Nepal and Bhutan, where yet again the public is kept in the dark with no access to the closed-door negotiations (China Brief, February 2). In Bishkek, several veteran independent journalists told me that the government did all it could to contain the situation. Initially, government officials told state media not to report on the protests. Then, they created their own narratives in an attempt to break up national solidarity in protecting Kyrgyzstan’s land. Bishkek even directly ordered media outlets not to mention the world “China” in their reporting on the Aksy event. “At that time, the State Secretary invited me to the 5th floor of the White House [in Bishkek] and handed me a very thick envelope with money. I refused. He recommended that I flee to Europe” (Author’s interview, December 2021). Some citizens told me that, even today, children of the key opposition figures who fought against the land deal are still being threatened not to talk about the event.

Despite numerous changes over the past 30 years, Kyrgyzstan has maintained its approach to supporting PRC interests. On Uyghur issues, Bishkek has sided with Beijing from the beginning, enacting policies and fomenting sentiments that frame the groups that protested ethnic-based discriminative policies in Xinjiang as terrorists. An independent journalist who tried to write about this reality in connection with the 2016 Chinese Embassy bombing in Bishkek was subsequently barred from entering the PRC. He was approached by local law enforcement who told him that the PRC ambassador intervened and protested his reporting (Author’s interview, 2022). Today, few Kyrgyz citizens know about the discriminative policies that the ethnic minorities across the border are suffering, including land grabs, eradication of ethnic languages, denial of access to education, and unemployment.

Bishkek even evokes a sense of pragmatism and patriotism among the population as a response to any negative comments about Beijing. In explaining this approach, a Kyrgyz member of parliament (MP) told me that no one had to physically intimidate or threaten him. Coercion was calm and indirect, with members of the Presidential Administration simply saying, “We need financial support from China, when you speak out on China like this, do you think that they will still give us money? Think about what you said and how many poor Kyrgyz lives here you will cost” (Author’s interview, 2021). This same parliamentarian once made a request to the Foreign Ministry to initiate an investigation on the conditions of Kyrgyz citizens who have been detained in the re-education camps across the border.

The rationale today is that voices critical of Beijing are not conducive to local development and hurt Kyrgyzstan’s economic interests. Therefore, all protection of PRC interests in the country are justified. This approach seems to have worked, the Kyrgyz MP told me. “Only because of my little speech can China deprive us of grants. I understood that with this action. I can make a huge mistake that may lead to even worse economic situation for my Kyrgyz people” (Author’s interview, 2021).

Managing public memory is not just a domestic practice for Beijing. Abroad, the CCP uses a continuous, fluid, and adaptative approach to expanding its interests. The underlying method of coopting elites, suppressing independent voices, and eventually creating national dependency ends with the consolidation of resilience against any critical voices, be they official narratives or individual protests.

Today, the mountain range that makes up the eastern part of Kyrgyzstan is widely referred to within the country as “Tian Shan (天山),” the Chinese name. Even the public policy think tank at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek is named the Tian Shan Policy Center. The designation “Uzengi-Kush” itself has been almost completely removed from public discourse.

16. Ukraine Already Uncovers 11 Spy Cells This Year: Ukrainian Intelligence

Ukraine Already Uncovers 11 Spy Cells This Year: Ukrainian Intelligence

kyivpost.com · by Kyiv Post · April 13, 2024

Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) Chief Vasyl Maliuk said Ukraine has exposed 11 intelligence networks spying for Russia so far this year, where some agents were working for state enterprises.

by Kyiv Post | April 13, 2024, 2:51 pm

Vasyl Maliuk speaks to members of the Ukrainian Parliament on February 7, 2023. ANDRII NESTERENKO / AFP

• Ukraine
• Kyiv

Vasyl Maliuk, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), said the agency has identified 11 spy cells working for Russia so far this year, where some of the agents were former law enforcement officers and employees of state enterprises.

“In total, in 2023, the SBU exposed 47 intelligence networks, all the scoundrels were arrested, and since the beginning of this year, another 11 have been exposed," said Maliuk during a speech at the Congress of Local and Regional Councils under the President of Ukraine.

An official SBU press release named some of the espionage activities the agency managed to prevent, such as the infiltration of critical infrastructure (including cyberspace), identification of Western aid deliveries and relaying the locations of military installations.

“For example, the SBU recently detained a Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agent in Dnipro, who was taking photos and videos of the local thermal power plant (TPP) and preparing enemy missile strikes, a former policeman in Zaporizhzhia who was monitoring military equipment facilities, as well as several employees of [Ukrainian state-owned railway] Ukrzaliznytsia who provided information to the enemy about the logistics of moving weapons and equipment damage,” read the press release.

During his speech, Maliuk also provided various figures on the SBU’s work since the beginning of this year, which included 352 criminal proceedings for treason (98 persons were convicted), 807 for collaborative activity (177 convicted), 108 for aiding Russia (7 convicted) and 66 for passing information about the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) to Russia (19 people were convicted).

On April 10, sources within the SBU told Kyiv Post that Maliuk became the Kremlin’s primary target, who was planning to blame the SBU chief for orchestrating the attack on Crocus City Hall.

kyivpost.com · by Kyiv Post · April 13, 2024

17. ​Hamas has a secret weapon no one talks about: Western stupidity

Excerpts:

At the heart of this thought decay are a number of trends. likely driven by social media. that are diminishing people’s ability to listen to each other, to communicate, and to think. From dropping IQ scores, decreasing attention spans, and increased rates of loneliness and isolation, Hamas has been able to capitalize on the West’s addiction to social media and subsequent stupefaction to mobilize public support for their genocidal cause. Ironically, the loudest Western voices incessantly echoing Hamas talking points are people the group would likely consider infidels or apostates, people the group would waste no time killing – after dealing with Israel first, of course.

All told, if we don’t find ways to reform our new digital public squares on platforms like TikTok, X, and Instagram and curtail our eroding abilities to think constructively and speak thoughtfully, the West will face a precipitous social and cognitive collapse – precisely what Hamas and its backers need and want.

​Hamas has a secret weapon no one talks about: Western stupidity

From jihadis in Beirut to extremists in Tehran, the erosion of thoughtful conversation has emboldened the world’s most dangerous groups

APR 13, 2024, 2:55 PM

blogs.timesofisrael.com · by Casey Babb · April 13, 2024

Since the advent of social media, the world has undergone an unprecedented period of mass stupefaction. To put it bluntly – large groups of people on both the left and the right are getting dumber faster. Sadly, this trend has proven to be tremendously beneficial for Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group hell-bent on Israel’s destruction.

In his 2022 article “Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt explains how online echo chambers have significantly weakened people’s ability to communicate with one another – particularly those with opposing views. As Haidt notes, tribalistic enmity which has been amplified and accelerated by things like Facebook’s Like and Share buttons, or X’s retweet function, has not only corroded nuanced thought and conversation, it has “supercharged” confirmation bias, the most significant obstacle to “good thinking.” However, what Haidt doesn’t address is how beneficial this tsunami of stupidity has been to the most nefarious people on earth – including terrorists.

From jihadis in Beirut to extremists in Tehran, the erosion of thoughtful conversation combined with an explosion of algorithmically enabled animosity has emboldened the world’s most dangerous groups, particularly Hamas. Indeed, since their heinous attacks in Israel on October 7, Hamas appears to be winning the war of public opinion in the West – not through strategically designed information campaigns – but through an international army of thoughtless individuals with an aversion to critical thinking and any information that could, God forbid, potentially challenge their worldviews.

For years, we have known that the Internet has been – as Charlie Warzel recently described it – a “window” through which virtually everyone on the planet has observed many of the most heinous acts ever committed. In fact, despite my own best efforts, I’ve been exposed to a variety of terrible videos and gruesome content which, in many ways, has shaped my perspective on the world. From the barbaric execution of the late great Daniel Pearl (to whom I dedicated my PhD dissertation) in Pakistan in 2002, to the sadistic murder of Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh by ISIS in 2015, to footage of Hamas’s massacre in Israel, recorded violence on the Internet has become sadly familiar. However, what isn’t familiar is what we have seen since October 7, which is the pairing of violent online content with seemingly endless mis- and disinformation, spread, embraced, and amplified by millions of willfully blind people using it to validate their own identities, confirm preferred beliefs, and convince themselves they’re standing up for the oppressed.

This deadly and destabilizing convergence of terrorism-related content, pervasive manipulation of information on social media, and the hijacking of Jewish trauma for political and ideological gain, is legitimizing and strengthening Hamas in unprecedented ways.

For starters, it is important to note that while Hamas might be utterly barbaric – the group isn’t stupid. In fact, they stated publicly in an interview with The New York Times, that they’ve been exploiting a lack of content moderation on X to post graphic and violent videos designed to terrorize Israelis – part of the psychological warfare they’ve unleashed on the Jewish state since October 7. This includes bodycam footage of Hamas terrorists murdering Israeli families, images of dead Israeli soldiers, burned-out homes, and injured hostages being violently dragged back into Gaza.

Unfortunately, many people who consider themselves to be “progressive activists” have taken troves of this content and repurposed it for their own agendas. In their view, the victims seen in videos, heard on recordings, and shown in images, aren’t victims at all, they’re settlers, colonizers, and Zionists – fair game when it comes to “armed resistance.” From this perspective, Hamas has achieved a double whammy. They’ve been able to traumatize Israelis and the Jewish diaspora in ways not seen since the Holocaust, while simultaneously relying on their progressive western sympathizers to dehumanize their victims and justify their atrocities in the name of liberation.

Then there is the issue of Hamas intentionally polluting the information space with false or misleading content. From pointing the finger at Israel for the deadly Al-Ahli Arab Hospital bombing in Gaza (which Western media outlets quickly ran with), to conflating civilian deaths with fighter casualties, to suggesting Israel has fabricated what happened on October 7, Hamas has flooded the online environment with dangerous and misleading information that social media users around the world have eaten up, turned around, and parroted themselves.

For instance, one study found that in a single 24-hour period, a series of posts on X sympathetic to terrorist activities in Gaza and Israel, which also contained misleading information, received over 16 million views. In addition, the Atlantic Council found that the Telegram channel for Hamas’s military wing, Al-Qassam Brigades, had “tripled in size from pre-war levels” while the account of Gaza Now, an online group linked to Hamas, has seen their average views per post increase roughly tenfold since October 7. While much of this disinformation is harmful in that it obfuscates reality and increases support and sympathy for Hamas, it also plays into a variety of antisemitic conspiracy theories, including that Jews lie, that they’re untrustworthy, and that they’re a scheming tribe of nefarious individuals committed to Palestinian oppression.

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In addition, there are the online echo chambers fueling confirmation bias that Haidt warned us about. Since October 7, people obsessed with Israel and already set on their favored Palestinian narratives, have found an endless stream of social media content to validate their preferred beliefs, beliefs which thanks to Hamas are known to be only partially true or even entirely false. To the benefit of Hamas, these echo chambers have evolved quite dramatically over the last several years. While Western activists once appeared at least notionally interested in improving the lives of Palestinians and having somewhat moderately reasonable conversations about things like a two-state solution and specific Israeli policies, the post-October 7 echo chambers have been dominated by blatant Jew-hatred, conspiracy theories, fabricated information, and content explicitly calling for the complete erasure of Israel.

At the heart of this thought decay are a number of trends. likely driven by social media. that are diminishing people’s ability to listen to each other, to communicate, and to think. From dropping IQ scores, decreasing attention spans, and increased rates of loneliness and isolation, Hamas has been able to capitalize on the West’s addiction to social media and subsequent stupefaction to mobilize public support for their genocidal cause. Ironically, the loudest Western voices incessantly echoing Hamas talking points are people the group would likely consider infidels or apostates, people the group would waste no time killing – after dealing with Israel first, of course.

All told, if we don’t find ways to reform our new digital public squares on platforms like TikTok, X, and Instagram and curtail our eroding abilities to think constructively and speak thoughtfully, the West will face a precipitous social and cognitive collapse – precisely what Hamas and its backers need and want.

blogs.timesofisrael.com · by Casey Babb · April 13, 2024

18. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, April 12, 2024

https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-april-12-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Iraq: The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—an umbrella organization of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias— threatened to renew its attack campaign targeting US forces in Iraq.
• Northern Gaza Strip: The IDF killed multiple Hamas personnel affiliated with Hamas’ governance structures and military organizations in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip.
• The IDF continued an operation on the outskirts of Nuseirat along Wadi Gaza.
• West Bank: Israeli forces killed senior Hamas commander Muhammad Omar Daraghmeh in Tubas on April 12.
• Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least four attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel.
• Iran: US CENTCOM Commander Gen. Michael Kurilla continued to meet with Israeli officials in Israel to discuss preparations for a possible Iranian attack targeting Israel.
• Yemen: US CENTCOM intercepted a Houthi anti-ship ballistic missile over the Red Sea.

IRAN UPDATE, APRIL 12, 2024

Apr 12, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Iran Update, April 12, 2024

Ashka Jhaveri, Johanna Moore, Amin Soltani, Kathryn Tyson, and Brian Carter

Information Cutoff: 2:00 pm ET

The Iran Update provides insights into Iranian and Iranian-sponsored activities abroad that undermine regional stability and threaten US forces and interests. It also covers events and trends that affect the stability and decision-making of the Iranian regime. The Critical Threats Project (CTP) at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) provides these updates regularly based on regional events. Click here to see CTP and ISW’s interactive map of Israeli ground operations. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

CTP-ISW defines the “Axis of Resistance” as the unconventional alliance that Iran has cultivated in the Middle East since the Islamic Republic came to power in 1979. This transnational coalition is comprised of state, semi-state, and non-state actors that cooperate with one another to secure their collective interests. Tehran considers itself to be both part of the alliance and its leader. Iran furnishes these groups with varying levels of financial, military, and political support in exchange for some degree of influence or control over their actions. Some are traditional proxies that are highly responsive to Iranian direction, while others are partners over which Iran exerts more limited influence. Members of the Axis of Resistance are united by their grand strategic objectives, which include eroding and eventually expelling American influence from the Middle East, destroying the Israeli state, or both. Pursuing these objectives and supporting the Axis of Resistance to those ends have become cornerstones of Iranian regional strategy.

We do not report in detail on war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We utterly condemn violations of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions and crimes against humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—an umbrella organization of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—threatened on April 12 to renew its attack campaign targeting US forces in Iraq.[1] The Islamic Resistance in Iraq rejected any bilateral agreement between the United States and Iraq that permits US forces to remain in Iraq. The group threatened to “torment [the United States] with fire” if US forces are not removed from Iraq.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al Sudani will meet with US President Joe Biden in Washington, DC, on April 15 to discuss the trajectory of US-Iraqi relations under the Strategic Framework Agreement.[2] The Islamic Resistance in Iraq’s threat follows Sudani’s article in Foreign Affairs on April 11 in which he articulated his intent to expand US and Iraqi cooperation beyond security and military affairs to include economic, agricultural, industrial, technological, and energy cooperation.[3] Sudani’s articulated policy is currently at odds with the demands set by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, which include the full withdrawal of US forces.

CTP-ISW previously warned that some Iranian-backed Iraqi militias may regard Sudani’s visit to Washington as a decisive moment and could decide to resume attacks targeting US forces if the visit does not result in tangible steps toward removing US forces from Iraq.[4] The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has paused attacks targeting US forces in Iraq and Syria since February 2024, when the United States killed a senior Kataib Hezbollah commander in Baghdad.[5] The pause in attacks coincided with the start of negotiations between Washington and Baghdad over the status of the US-led international coalition in Iraq.[6] Asaib Ahl al Haq Secretary General Qais Khazali suggested on April 10 that Iranian-backed Iraqi militias could resume attacking US forces if Sudani’s upcoming visit to Washington, DC fails to force the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.[7]

Key Takeaways:

• Iraq: The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—an umbrella organization of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias— threatened to renew its attack campaign targeting US forces in Iraq.
• Northern Gaza Strip: The IDF killed multiple Hamas personnel affiliated with Hamas’ governance structures and military organizations in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip.
• The IDF continued an operation on the outskirts of Nuseirat along Wadi Gaza.
• West Bank: Israeli forces killed senior Hamas commander Muhammad Omar Daraghmeh in Tubas on April 12.
• Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least four attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel.
• Iran: US CENTCOM Commander Gen. Michael Kurilla continued to meet with Israeli officials in Israel to discuss preparations for a possible Iranian attack targeting Israel.
• Yemen: US CENTCOM intercepted a Houthi anti-ship ballistic missile over the Red Sea.

Gaza Strip

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Erode the will of the Israeli political establishment and public to sustain clearing operations in the Gaza Strip
• Reestablish Hamas as the governing authority in the Gaza Strip

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) killed multiple Hamas personnel affiliated with Hamas’ governance structures and military organizations on April 11 in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip. The IDF Air Force conducted an airstrike that killed the head of Hamas’ internal security in Jabalia, Radwan Muhammad Abdallah Radwan.[8] Palestinian media reported that Radwan was the director of a police station and that he coordinated aid distribution.[9] The IDF said that Radwan was also a member of Hamas’ military wing and directed other Palestinian fighters to take over humanitarian aid trucks in the area.[10] The IDF also killed another senior official in Hamas’ internal security operations in Jabalia and another fighter in an unspecified Hamas battalion in Jabalia.[11]

Hamas remains determined to reconstitute itself militarily and reassert its authority in the Gaza Strip. Hamas has made attempts to coopt and undermine possible alternatives to its rule, facilitate trade, and rehabilitate its local police in the northern Gaza Strip.[12] The IDF is conducting operations in the northern Gaza Strip to disrupt Hamas' attempts to reconstitute its governing authority.[13] Israel has previously targeted members of Hamas’ police and internal security apparatus. The Civil Police and the Hamas-controlled Interior Ministry’s Internal Security Forces in Gaza both employ fighters from the Hamas military wing.[14]

The IDF continued an operation on the outskirts of Nuseirat along Wadi Gaza on April 12. Elements of the IDF 162nd Division, including the Nahal and 401st Brigades, killed Palestinian fighters and destroyed military infrastructure.[15] Israeli forces raided a school in Zahra, north of Nuseirat. The IDF discovered weapons and a residence at this location. The IDF reported that Hamas fighters were staying at the residence.[16] The IDF 215th Artillery Brigade supported ground operations in the central Gaza Strip.[17]

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) claimed that its fighters detonated a minefield and used an explosively formed penetrator to target Israeli armor in a complex attack at a military position north of Nuseirat.[18] Palestinian militias, including PIJ and Hamas, claimed several attacks targeting Israeli forces in Zahra in mid-March 2024.[19] The militias may have infiltrated into Zahra and other areas of southern Gaza City from areas of the central Gaza Strip that the IDF has not yet cleared. The militias also likely reactivated dormant cells after the Israelis decreased the number of IDF troops in the northern Strip in late December.

The IDF Air Force struck more than 60 targets in the Gaza Strip on April 12, including underground military infrastructure.[20]

A humanitarian aid convoy entered the northern Gaza Strip on April 12 through a new crossing.[21] The convoy underwent security checks at the Kerem Shalom crossing before entering the Gaza Strip. The aid delivery was coordinated by the IDF and the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT)—a department within the Israeli Defense Ministry—“as part of efforts to enhance the humanitarian aid corridors to the Gaza Strip in general, and to the north in particular.”[22] The IDF said on April 11 that Israel approved the construction of another border crossing into the northern Gaza Strip as part of Israeli efforts to boost aid.[23] 

The American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA) charity resumed aid operations in the Gaza Strip on April 11.[24] ANERA temporarily paused operations following the death of an ANERA staff member and the Israeli strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid workers on April 1.[25] ANERA said that Israeli authorities informed them during a meeting that “certain measures would be taken to protect humanitarian aid workers in the Gaza Strip.”[26] Israeli military officials met with several international aid organizations on April 10 to discuss the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.[27]

The United States Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated three entities on April 12 affiliated with Hamas’ offensive cyber and drone operations.[28] The European Union simultaneously imposed sanctions targeting Hamas.[29] These designations are part of broader US efforts to disrupt Hamas’ ability to conduct future attacks.

OFAC sanctioned the following individuals:

• Hamas’ military wing spokesperson Hudhayfa Samir Abdallah al Kahlut (al Kahlut) also known as “Abu Ubaida”
• William Abu Shanab (Abu Shanab)
• Baraa Hasan Farhat (Farhat)
• Khalil Muhammad Azzam (Azzam)

A bipartisan group of US House of Representatives members is introducing legislation to sanction the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) for their role in the October 7 attacks.[30] The PRC is a Palestinian militia aligned with Hamas in the war. The group has claimed multiple attacks targeting Israeli forces and Israel during IDF ground operations.[31] Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) stated that the militia has “flown under the radar and avoided real consequences for their horrific crimes.”[32] The legislation also requires the US Department of State to issue a report on whether to designate the PRC and the West Bank-based Lion’s Den group as terrorist organizations.[33]

Palestinian fighters did not conduct any indirect fire attacks from the Gaza Strip into Israel on April 12.

West Bank

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Establish the West Bank as a viable front against Israel

Israeli forces engaged Palestinian fighters in two locations in the northern West Bank on April 12.[34]  The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades fired “light weapons” and detonated improvised explosive devices in two separate attacks targeting Israeli forces around Tubas and Qalqilya.[35] Israeli forces detained five wanted individuals in overnight operations across the West Bank.[36]

Israeli forces killed senior Hamas commander Muhammad Omar Daraghmeh in Tubas on April 12.[37] The IDF reported that Daraghmeh shot at Israeli forces who returned fire and killed him. The IDF said that Daraghmeh was a “central Hamas operative” and “promoted” militia activity in the region.[38] Israeli forces killed Daraghmeh’s predecessor “about a month and a half ago,” according to Israeli Army Radio.[39] Hamas confirmed Daraghmeh’s death.[40] Palestinian Authority-affiliated media reported that Israeli forces killed another Palestinian fighter during fighting in al Faraa refugee camp during the raid.[41]

The IDF announced on April 12 that it launched a search and rescue operation for a 14-year-old boy near the Malachi Shalom settlement.[42] Israeli media reported that the IDF air, ground, and special operations forces launched a search and rescue operation with Israeli settlers from Malachi Shalom to find the boy who went missing while herding sheep.[43] The settlers volunteered to assist the IDF. The exact cause of the boy’s disappearance is still unknown.[44]

Israeli and Palestinian media reported violence occurred in al Mughayir, west of Malachi Shalom. Local footage confirms these reports.[45] The IDF confirmed that there were “violent disturbances” in al Mughayir but that the IDF entered the town and removed the Israeli citizens from the town.[46] Israeli and Palestinian media also reported Israeli and Palestinian casualties.[47] Palestinian Authority-affiliated media confirmed that at least one Palestinian civilian died during the violence.[48] The details of these events are unclear. CTP-ISW will provide additional details as information becomes available.

This map is not an exhaustive depiction of clashes and demonstrations in the West Bank.

Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Deter Israel from conducting a ground operation into Lebanon
• Prepare for an expanded and protracted conflict with Israel in the near term
• Expel the United States from Syria

Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least four attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on April 11.[49]

Hezbollah fired approximately 40 rockets targeting Israeli “artillery positions” in al Zaoura in the Golan Heights on April 12.[50] The IDF said that it intercepted some rockets and that the rest of the rockets fell in open areas.[51]

Recorded reports of attacks; CTP-ISW cannot independently verify impact.

Iran and Axis of Resistance

US Central Command (CENTCOM) Commander Gen. Michael Kurilla continued to meet with Israeli officials in Israel on April 12 to discuss preparations for a possible Iranian attack targeting Israel.[52] Kurilla met with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi to discuss US and Israeli preparations ahead of a potential Iranian attack against Israel.[53] Kurilla also met with other senior Israeli military officials, including IDF spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, on April 11.[54] Iranian officials have repeatedly threatened that they will retaliate against Israel in response to the Israeli airstrike that killed several senior IRGC officers in Damascus on April 1.[55]

Kurilla’s visit to Israel coincides with heightened US military readiness and warnings of an “imminent” Iranian attack targeting Israel. US media and US government officials said on April 12 that the United States is moving additional assets into the region, including air defenses to protect US forces in Iraq and Syria, in preparation for the “viable threat” of an Iranian attack on Israel.[56] The Wall Street Journal reported that the additional assets include two US Navy destroyers.[57] Unspecified US officials also warned that the US and Israel are expecting a “major Iranian attack” using “more than 100 drones and dozens of missiles” on “southern or northern Israel” as early as April 12 or 13.[58] US officials similarly told Western media on April 10 and 11 that an Iranian drone and missile attack targeting Israel was "imminent.”[59]

The present nature of the information space makes it difficult to forecast when precisely Iran might launch a retaliatory strike targeting Israel, if Iran attacks Israel at all. Western estimations of when Iran will conduct an attack have varied and could be subject to change. The likelihood that Iran is spreading disinformation surrounding its strike increases the difficulty of forecasting the timing of the retaliation.[60]

President Ebrahim Raisi and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari discussed recent tensions between Iran and Pakistan during a phone call on April 11.[61] Raisi is scheduled to travel to Pakistan on April 22.[62] He warned that “hegemonic world powers”—a standard Iranian reference to the United States and the West—are attempting to create divisions between Tehran and Islamabad. He also stressed the need for Muslims to reject Salafi-jihadi groups, including ISIS. Raisi also called for information sharing between Pakistan and Iran to “overcome security challenges.”[63] A series of attacks in southeastern Iran since December 2023 by Salafi-jihadi groups operating along the Iran-Pakistan border has strained relations between Pakistan and Iran. Pakistan designated the Zainabiyoun Brigade–an Iran-backed Pakistani Shia militia operating in Syria–as a terrorist organization on April 11.[64] Iran and Pakistan also exchanged missile and drone strikes in January 2024 after Iran targeted anti-regime militants inside Pakistan.[65]

US CENTCOM intercepted a Houthi anti-ship ballistic missile over the Red Sea on April 11.[66] CENTCOM said that the missile was launched from Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen and did not cause any damage to US, coalition, or commercial ships.

19. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 12, 2024

https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-april-12-2024

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 12, 2024

Key Takeaways:

• Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged that Russia’s ongoing strike campaign against Ukrainian energy facilities aims in part to devastate the Ukrainian defense industry, confirming ISW’s ongoing assessment that Russian strikes against Ukrainian energy facilities aim to degrade Ukrainian defense industrial capacity.
• ISW continues to assess that the development of Ukraine’s defense industrial base (DIB) over time can allow Ukraine to sustain its defense against Russia and longer-term national security needs with significantly reduced foreign military assistance.
• Russian forces are domestically producing and fielding a new air-to-surface subsonic cruise missile against Ukraine designated the Kh-69 as part of continued efforts to improve strike packages and penetrate Ukraine’s degraded air defense.
• The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed that it prevented a group of Central Asians from perpetrating a terrorist attack against a Russian military facility in occupied Ukraine with Ukraine’s help, likely as part of efforts to set information conditions to portray any future Ukrainian attack on legitimate Russian military targets in occupied Ukraine as “terrorist” attacks.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Avdiivka and Donetsk City.
• Russia is reportedly sending about 2,400 Eastern Military District (EMD) military personnel currently in Russia to fight in Ukraine to make up for personnel losses at the front.
• Russian occupation officials continue to expand educational programs that aim to indoctrinate Ukrainian children and erase their Ukrainian identity.

Apr 12, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 12, 2024

Angelica Evans, Christina Harward, Grace Mappes, Riley Bailey, and Frederick W. Kagan

April 12, 2024, 5:55pm ET

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

Click here to see ISW’s 3D control of terrain topographic map of Ukraine. Use of a computer (not a mobile device) is strongly recommended for using this data-heavy tool.

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

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 12:45pm ET on April 12. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the April 13 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged that Russia’s ongoing strike campaign against Ukrainian energy facilities aims in part to devastate the Ukrainian defense industry, confirming ISW’s ongoing assessment that Russian strikes against Ukrainian energy facilities aim to degrade Ukrainian defense industrial capacity. Putin stated during a meeting with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on April 11 that Russian drone and missile strikes against Ukraine’s energy sector are connected to Russia’s goal of “demilitarizing” Ukraine – one of his three stated goals in Ukraine.[1] Putin characterized Russia’s ongoing strikes against Ukrainian energy infrastructure as a “forced” response to recent Ukrainian drone strikes against Russian oil and gas facilities and openly stated that Russian strikes indirectly aim to degrade Ukraine’s defense industrial capacity. The recent Russian strike campaign is degrading Ukraine's power generation capacity while also exploiting reported Ukrainian air defense missile shortages in a renewed effort to collapse Ukraine’s power grid.[2] Putin likely hopes to prevent Ukraine’s defense industry from developing to the point of near self-sufficiency in the long term as a strong defense industry could put Ukraine in a good position to defend against future Russian aggression and significantly reduce Ukraine's dependence on Western aid.[3] Significant delays in Western aid, due in part to successful Russian information operations and Western hesitancy, have created an opportunity for Russian offensive operations and Russia’s strike campaign.

ISW continues to assess that the development of Ukraine’s defense industrial base (DIB) over time can allow Ukraine to sustain its defense against Russia and longer-term national security needs with significantly reduced foreign military assistance.[4] Ukrainian officials have expressed their intention to expand Ukraine’s DIB domestically and abroad since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, and Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov previously identified increased Ukrainian domestic production of weapons and military equipment as a priority for 2024.[5] US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller has stated that the short- and medium-term provision of Western air defenses to Ukraine will be a critical element of Ukraine’s ability to stand up its defense industry, which will, in turn, decrease Ukrainian dependence on Western aid and especially US aid to Ukraine in the long term.[6] Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently emphasized that Ukraine cannot mitigate the lack of sufficient air defense systems and that only Western-provided air defense systems, namely Patriot systems, allow Ukraine to defend Ukraine against the intensified Russia strike campaign.[7] ISW continues to assess that the US will not need to send large security assistance packages to Ukraine indefinitely if Ukraine can sufficiently expand its defensive industrial capacity, but the West’s provision of air defense systems and missiles to Ukraine is crucial for Ukraine’s ability to defend its energy infrastructure and its developing defense industry against Russian strikes.[8]

Russian forces are domestically producing and fielding a new air-to-surface subsonic cruise missile against Ukraine designated the Kh-69 as part of continued efforts to improve strike packages and penetrate Ukraine’s degraded air defense. Ukrainian media reported on April 11 that Ukrainian law enforcement sources stated that Russian forces destroyed the Trypilska Thermal Power Plant (TPP) in Kyiv Oblast on April 11 with new Kh-69 missiles, which Russian forces had reportedly used in “isolated cases” in 2023 prior to the April 11 strike.[9] Ukrainian Air Force Spokesperson Major Ilya Yevlash confirmed on April 12 that Russian forces used the Kh-69s in the April 11 strike and described the Kh-69 missiles as an improved version of Kh-59 cruise missiles, which Russian forces have frequently used in strike packages against Ukraine in recent weeks.[10] ISW has not previously observed the Russian use of Kh-69 missiles in Ukraine. Russian forces have reportedly launched Kh-69 missiles from 400 kilometers away from their targets, exceeding a previous estimated range of 300 kilometers and the 200-kilometer range of the most recent Kh-59MK2 variant.[11] Russian forces can reportedly launch the missiles from more numerous Su-34 and Su-35 tactical aircraft rather than exclusively from strategic bombers.[12] Yevlash stated that Russian forces are domestically producing the Kh-69 missiles but that their ability to manufacture the missiles depends on their ability to source critical components.[13] While the Russian stockpiles and production capability of these Kh-69 missiles are unclear, Russia is unlikely to be able to produce them at a significantly greater speed or quantity than its other domestically produced missiles. Yevlash noted that Ukrainian forces are still developing methods to counter the Kh-69s but emphasized that Patriot air defense systems would likely be able to intercept them.[14]

The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed that it prevented a group of Central Asians from perpetrating a terrorist attack against a Russian military facility in occupied Ukraine with Ukraine’s help, likely as part of efforts to set information conditions to portray any future Ukrainian attack on legitimate Russian military targets in occupied Ukraine as “terrorist” attacks. The FSB claimed on April 11 that it detained six citizens of an unspecified Central Asian state for allegedly preparing a Ukrainian-orchestrated terrorist attack on a Russian military facility in occupied Donetsk Oblast.[15] The FSB claimed that the attackers were planning to go to Turkey and then back to Ukraine after carrying out the attack - a narrative that likely attempts to parallel how the Crocus City Hall attackers traveled to Turkey before the March 22 attack.[16] Russia routinely labels Ukrainian strikes against legitimate Russian military targets in occupied Ukraine and within Russia as ”terrorist” attacks.[17]

The FSB also claimed that it prevented a terrorist attack on a synagogue in Moscow on April 10 and that the FSB killed one of the alleged terrorists, a native of an unspecified Central Asian country, during a shootout.[18] The FSB claimed on March 7 that it prevented members of the Islamic State (IS) in Kaluga Oblast from conducting an attack on a Moscow synagogue.[19] The FSB may have not claimed that Ukraine was involved in the attack that the FSB allegedly stopped on April 10 due to the FSB’s prior public statements connecting the previous plans for an attack on a Moscow synagogue to IS. Russian authorities recently conducted counterterrorism operations in the Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria and the Republic of Dagestan, and ISW continues to assess that the increased frequency of counterterrorism operations in Russia is likely due to either Russian law enforcement’s actual heightened fears of another terrorist attack in Russia or is part of efforts to show the Russian public that authorities are taking competent preventative steps following the major law enforcement and intelligence failure that was the Crocus City Hall attack.[20] These counterterrorism activities are also further evidence that Russian authorities actually assess that terrorist threats emanate from Central Asian and Muslim communities instead of Ukraine.[21]

Key Takeaways:

• Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged that Russia’s ongoing strike campaign against Ukrainian energy facilities aims in part to devastate the Ukrainian defense industry, confirming ISW’s ongoing assessment that Russian strikes against Ukrainian energy facilities aim to degrade Ukrainian defense industrial capacity.
• ISW continues to assess that the development of Ukraine’s defense industrial base (DIB) over time can allow Ukraine to sustain its defense against Russia and longer-term national security needs with significantly reduced foreign military assistance.
• Russian forces are domestically producing and fielding a new air-to-surface subsonic cruise missile against Ukraine designated the Kh-69 as part of continued efforts to improve strike packages and penetrate Ukraine’s degraded air defense.
• The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed that it prevented a group of Central Asians from perpetrating a terrorist attack against a Russian military facility in occupied Ukraine with Ukraine’s help, likely as part of efforts to set information conditions to portray any future Ukrainian attack on legitimate Russian military targets in occupied Ukraine as “terrorist” attacks.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Avdiivka and Donetsk City.
• Russia is reportedly sending about 2,400 Eastern Military District (EMD) military personnel currently in Russia to fight in Ukraine to make up for personnel losses at the front.
• Russian occupation officials continue to expand educational programs that aim to indoctrinate Ukrainian children and erase their Ukrainian identity.

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

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Air, Missile, and Drone Campaign
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Russian Technological Adaptations
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas
• Ukrainian Defense Industrial Base Efforts
• Russian Information Operations and Narratives
• Significant Activity in Belarus

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

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

Limited positional fighting continued in the Kreminna area on April 12. A Russian milblogger claimed on April 11 that Russian forces pushed Ukrainian forces back 1.5 kilometers in the Krupna Balka area east of Terny (west of Kreminna), although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[22] Positional fighting continued south of Kreminna near Bilohorivka, and the Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces did not conduct any assaults elsewhere in the Lyman direction or anywhere in the Kupyansk direction.[23]

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

Note: ISW will be orientating activity in the immediate Bakhmut area around Chasiv Yar for the foreseeable future as ISW assesses that the seizure of Chasiv Yar is the current Russian operational objective in the area. 

Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces marginally advanced northeast of Bakhmut. Milbloggers claimed on April 11 and 12 that Russian forces marginally advanced west of Zolotarivka towards Verkhnokamyanske (both east of Siversk), and southeast of Siversk near Vesele and Vyimka.[24] Positional fighting also continued near Spirne (east of Siversk) and Rozdolivka (south of Siversk) on April 12.[25] Elements of the Russian 137th Airborne (VDV) Regiment (106th VDV Division) are reportedly operating near Rozdolivka.[26]

Positional fighting continued near Chasiv Yar on April 12, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces are advancing on the outskirts of the Kanal microraion (easternmost Chasiv Yar) and towards Kalynivka from Bohdanivka (both northeast of Chasiv Yar).[27] Milbloggers also claimed that elements of the Russian 98th VDV Division are advancing on the southeastern outskirts of Chasiv Yar.[28] Fighting also continued east of Chasiv Yar near Ivanivske and southeast of Chasiv Yar near Klishchiivka.[29] Elements of the Russian 83rd VDV Brigade are reportedly fighting near Klishchiivka.[30]

Russian forces recently made marginal advances west of Avdiivka amid continued fighting in the area on April 12. Geolocated footage published on April 12 shows that Russian forces recently marginally advanced north of Berdychi (northwest of Avdiivka) and south of Umanske (west of Avdiivka).[31] Russian milbloggers also claimed that Russian forces advanced in fields north and south of Novokalynove (northwest of Avdiivka), where Russian forces are conducting heavy glide bomb strikes, but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these advances.[32] Positional fighting also continued northwest of Avdiivka near Novobakhmutivka; west of Avdiivka near Tonenke, Semenivka, and Yasnobrodivka; and southwest of Avdiivka near Pervomaiske and Netaylove.[33]

Russian forces recently advanced southwest of Donetsk City amid continued fighting on April 12. Geolocated footage published on April 10 and 11 shows that Russian forces recently marginally advanced in southeastern Krasnohorivka (west of Donetsk City).[34] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces continued to advance westward within Novomykhailivka (southwest of Donetsk City), but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[35] Positional fighting also continued west of Donetsk City near Heorhiivka and southwest of Donetsk City near Pobieda, Kostyantynivka (west of Novomykhailivka), and Vodyane (southeast of Vuhledar).[36] Footage published on April 11 shows Ukrainian forces conducting glide bomb strikes against Russian forces near Krasnohorivka.[37]

Russian forces reportedly marginally advanced in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area amid positional fighting on April 12. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces crossed the Mokryi Yaly River and entered the southern outskirts of Urozhaine (south of Velyka Novosilka), but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[38] Positional fighting also continued near Staromayorske (south of Velyka Novosilka).[39]

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

Positional engagements continued in western Zaporizhia Oblast on April 12, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline in this area. Positional engagements continued near Robotyne and Verbove (east of Robotyne).[40] Ukrainian forces appear to have conducted a successful HIMARS strike against a Russian Tor-M2 air defense system south of Vasylivka (west of Robotyne).[41] Elements of the Russian 392nd Motorized Rifle Regiment (likely a mobilized unit) are operating in the Zaporizhia direction.[42]

Positional engagements continued in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast near Krynky on April 12, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline in this area.[43]

Russian Air, Missile, and Drone Campaign (Russian Objective: Target Ukrainian military and civilian infrastructure in the rear and on the frontline)

Russian forces conducted a series of drone and missile strikes against Ukraine on the night of April 11 to 12 and during the day on April 12. Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces launched 17 Shahed-136/131 drones from occupied Crimea and a Kh-59 cruise missile from occupied Donetsk Oblast on the night of April 11 to 12.[44] Ukrainian forces reportedly downed 17 Shahed drones over Mykolaiv, Odesa, Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk, Vinnytsia, and Khmelnytskyi oblasts. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian air defenses destroyed a Russian-launched Kh-59 missile later during the day on April 12.[45] Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Colonel Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian drone strikes on April 12 were a test of the “classic routes” that Russian drones use during strikes and reiterated that Russian forces launch drones in different directions in order to overload Ukrainian air defense systems.[46]

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

Russia is reportedly sending about 2,400 Eastern Military District (EMD) military personnel currently in Russia to fight in Ukraine to make up for personnel losses at the front. The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) stated on April 12 that Russia will send military personnel of the Pacific Fleet (EMD) and 11th Air Force and Air Defense Army (Russian Aerospace Forces [VKS] and EMD) to Ukraine in order to replenish Russian personnel losses.[47] The GUR stated that Commander of the Pacific Fleet Admiral Viktor Liina decided to stop all rotations to Syria and to send about 2,000 military personnel from Primorsky Krai and Kamchatka Krai to Ukraine. The GUR did not specify if all 2,000 personnel were initially destined for deployments to Syria. The Pacific Fleet operates at the Russian naval base in Tartus, Syria, but it remains unclear if the end of the Pacific Fleet's rotations in Syria will herald a larger transfer of Pacific Fleet assets from Syria to Ukraine or elsewhere.[48] The GUR stated that Russia will also transfer about 400 military personnel from the 11th Air Force and Air Defense Army from Khabarovsk Krai to Ukraine to “patch the holes” in areas of the front where elements of the understaffed 155th and 40th naval infantry brigades (Pacific Fleet, EMD) are operating. Elements of the 155th Brigade are reportedly operating near Novomykhailivka, and elements of the 40th Brigade are reportedly operating near Velyka Novosilka.[49] The GUR stated that an unspecified number of personnel from the EMD will join a new, unspecified motorized rifle brigade that Russia is forming in Voronezh.[50]

Russian Technological Adaptations (Russian objective: Introduce technological innovations to optimize systems for use in Ukraine)  

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed on April 12 that the Russian Strategic Missile Forces successfully launched an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) from a mobile ground-based missile system at the Kapustin Yar test site in Astrakhan Oblast.[51] The Russian MoD claimed that Russia conducted the launch as part of tests of “promising” missile systems and checks on the stability of missiles in service.

Ukrainian Defense Industrial Efforts (Ukrainian objective: Develop its defense industrial base to become more self-sufficient in cooperation with US, European, and international partners)

ISW is not publishing coverage of Ukrainian defense industrial efforts today.

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

Russian occupation officials continue to expand educational programs that aim to indoctrinate Ukrainian children and erase their Ukrainian identity. Luhansk Peoples Republic (LNR) Head Leonid Pasechnik signed an agreement with the Russian “Avangard” Educational and Methodological Center for Military-Patriotic Education of Youth on April 9 to host patriotic education and basic military training exercises for students in occupied Luhansk Oblast.[52] Zaporizhia Oblast occupation officials claimed on April 10 that Russian Presidential Administration Deputy Head Sergei Kiriyenko visited occupied Berdyansk to view the construction of military-patriotic education youth and wellness centers.[53] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that representatives from the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) are visiting orphans and children without parental guardians in occupied Ukraine to try to convince the children to enroll in specialized MVD-affiliated educational institutions.[54]

Russian occupation authorities continue to illegally deport Ukrainian children to Russia – a practice that Russian authorities reportedly intensified in the days leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russian Senator Konstantin Basyuk stated on April 10 that Russian authorities sent children from occupied Chaplynka, Kherson Oblast to the “Ocean” children’s center in Primorsky Krai in March 2024.[55] Basyuk stated that the first group of Ukrainian children went to the ”Ocean” children’s center in October 2023 following agreements between Kherson Oblast occupation administration head Vladimir Saldo, Russian Duma Deputy Roza Chemeris, Primorsky Krai Deputy Igor Chemeris, and the management of the “Ocean” children’s center in summer 2023. Russian opposition outlets Verstka and Vazhnye Istorii reported on April 8 that Russian authorities deported at least 400 Ukrainian children from orphanages and boarding schools for children with disabilities in occupied Donetsk Oblast to Russia in the days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.[56]

Russian Information Operations and Narratives

The Kremlin is once again intensifying an information operation feigning interest in meaningful negotiations about Ukraine as part of an ongoing effort to elicit preemptive Western concessions on Ukrainian territorial integrity and sovereignty. Russian President Vladimir Putin stated in a meeting with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on April 11 that Russia has never “given up” on a peaceful resolution to the war in Ukraine and reiterated a narrative alleging that the West dissuaded Ukraine from signing an agreement favorable to Russia during negotiations in Istanbul in April 2022.[57] Putin disparaged the Global Peace Summit in Switzerland scheduled for June 2024 and claimed that Russia opposes any negotiation format that is “not in line with [the Kremlin’s] reality.”[58] Putin stated that maybe Lukashenko should initiate peace negotiations, prompting Lukashenko to place the onus for the lack of negotiations on the West.[59] Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov reiterated that the alleged treaty supposedly almost signed in Istanbul can serve as a basis for negotiations but that several new ”realities” have emerged in the past two years that need to be considered, likely referring to Russia’s illegal annexation of occupied Ukrainian territories.[60] Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov similarly blamed the West for a lack of negotiations at a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers of Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) members on April 11.[61] Kremlin officials previously amplified false interests in negotiations ahead of the Ukrainian summer 2023 counteroffensive in order to discourage critical Western aid to Ukraine, and Russian officials are likely aiming to repeat these efforts amid ongoing debates about US security assistance to Ukraine.[62]

Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) Department of Non-proliferation and Arms Control Director Vladimir Yermakov reiterated boilerplate rhetoric about nuclear escalation aimed at the US, United Kingdom (UK), and Finland in an interview with Kremlin newswire TASS on April 12.[63] The Kremlin routinely issues escalatory nuclear rhetoric to force the West into self-deterrence over support for Ukraine.[64]

Russian opposition outlet SOTA reported on April 12 that bots on Russian social media platform Vkontakte (VK) are increasingly promoting content critical of Moldovan President Maia Sandu and that the effort may be connected to Russian Presidential Administration Deputy Head Sergei Kiriyenko and his son, Vladimir Kiriyenko, who owns the Mail.ru group.[65] SOTA noted that the anti-Sandu rhetoric intensified on April 10, following pro-Russian Moldovan autonomous region of Gagauzia Governor Yevgenia Gutsul’s visit to Moscow on April 9 to illegally sign an agreement on pensioner accounts with a Russian state-owned bank.[66] The Kremlin is likely attempting to use pro-Russian actors in Moldova to destabilize Moldovan democracy and society, prevent Moldova’s accession to the European Union (EU), or even justify future hybrid or conventional operations against Moldova.[67] Russian information operations that aim to discredit the current Moldovan leadership will likely intensify as these destabilization efforts continue.

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

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko stated on April 11 that there is currently no need for Belarus to create a demilitarized “sanitary zone” between Belarus and Ukraine as part of a Russian information operation aimed at deterring further Western military assistance to Ukraine.[68] Lukashenko claimed that Belarus’ ”need” for a demilitarized zone also depends on Western states, describing Western weapons and ammunition transfers to Ukraine as ”escalations,” and claimed that Western states are considering stationing their forces in Ukraine along the border with Belarus.[69] Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously suggested creating a demilitarized ”sanitary zone” in Ukrainian-controlled areas along the Ukrainian-Russian international border to place Russian territory and Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories out of the range of frontline artillery systems and Western-provided long-range systems.[70]

Lukashenko stated during his meeting with Putin on April 11 that Belarus is beginning to domestically produce microchips and other unspecified electronic components, likely as part of Russian and Belarusian efforts to address their continued reliance on Western-produced, sanctioned components.[71] 

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

20. China-Taiwan Weekly Update, April 12, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/china-taiwan-weekly-update-april-12-2024

Key Takeaways  

• CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping met with former ROC President Ma Ying-jeou on April 10 for the first time since 2015. The Xi-Ma meeting is consistent with a CCP effort to legitimize the KMT as its negotiating partner in Taiwan and to promote the Ma administration’s cross-strait policies as its preferred vision of cross-strait relations.
• PRC civilian drones repeatedly approached islands of Taiwan’s Kinmen archipelago to film military facilities on the islands.
• The PLA participated in the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement (MMCA) Working Group with their American counterparts in early April for the first time since December 2021.
• The PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) criticized the United States and Japan for expanding security relations to counter the PRC. The PRC perceives a deterioration in the threat environment from Japan’s deepening integration into the US-led regional security framework.
• The PRC has normalized Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) harassment of Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) and supply ships near the Second Thomas Shoal since December 2023 to render the Philippines unable and unwilling to defend its claim to the Second Thomas Shoal.

CHINA-TAIWAN WEEKLY UPDATE, APRIL 12, 2024

Apr 12, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

China-Taiwan Weekly Update, April 12, 2024

Authors: Nils Peterson, Matthew Sperzel, and Daniel Shats of the Institute for the Study of War

Editors: Dan Blumenthal and Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute

Data Cutoff: April 10 at 5 pm ET

The China–Taiwan Weekly Update is a joint product of the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute. The update supports the ISW–AEI Coalition Defense of Taiwan project, which assesses Chinese campaigns against Taiwan, examines alternative strategies for the United States and its allies to deter the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) aggression, and—if necessary—defeat the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The update focuses on the Chinese Communist Party’s paths to controlling Taiwan and cross–Taiwan Strait developments.

Key Takeaways  

• CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping met with former ROC President Ma Ying-jeou on April 10 for the first time since 2015. The Xi-Ma meeting is consistent with a CCP effort to legitimize the KMT as its negotiating partner in Taiwan and to promote the Ma administration’s cross-strait policies as its preferred vision of cross-strait relations.
• PRC civilian drones repeatedly approached islands of Taiwan’s Kinmen archipelago to film military facilities on the islands.
• The PLA participated in the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement (MMCA) Working Group with their American counterparts in early April for the first time since December 2021.
• The PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) criticized the United States and Japan for expanding security relations to counter the PRC. The PRC perceives a deterioration in the threat environment from Japan’s deepening integration into the US-led regional security framework.
• The PRC has normalized Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) harassment of Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) and supply ships near the Second Thomas Shoal since December 2023 to render the Philippines unable and unwilling to defend its claim to the Second Thomas Shoal.

Cross-Strait Relations

CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping met with former ROC President Ma Ying-jeou on April 10 for the first time since 2015. The Xi-Ma meeting is consistent with a CCP effort to legitimize the KMT as its negotiating partner in Taiwan and to promote the Ma administration’s cross-strait policies as its preferred vision of cross-strait relations. The two leaders met in Beijing near the end of Ma’s trip to the PRC, which spanned from April 1-11. Xi Jinping praised “Mr. Ma” for upholding the “1992 Consensus,” opposing Taiwanese independence, and promoting the peaceful development of cross-strait relations and exchanges.[1] He claimed that “compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are all Chinese” and that “there is no grudge that cannot be resolved, no issue that cannot be discussed, and no force that can separate us.” Xi stressed that people on both sides must “protect the common home of the Chinese nation” by opposing Taiwanese “separatism” and external interference, work together for their long-term well-being, build a sense of community for the Chinese nation, and “realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” He also said that “we have realized the blueprint drawn by Dr. Sun Yat-sen” and “created many achievements that far exceed Dr. Sun Yat-sen's imagination.”[2] Sun Yat-sen was the founder of the Republic of China and the Kuomintang, Ma’s political party.

Ma said that Chinese people on both sides of the strait have “made steps together toward Chinese revitalization” over the past 30 years. He acknowledged recent tensions but said that a cross-strait war would have "unbearably heavy" consequences. He urged both sides to adhere to the 1992 consensus, oppose Taiwan's independence, look for common ground while setting aside disputes, seek out "win-win" solutions, and pursue peaceful development. Ma described the 1992 consensus as both sides agreeing to a "one China principle," with each side free to determine what "China" means.[3] The 1992 Consensus is an alleged verbal agreement between semi-official representatives of the PRC and the then KMT-ruled ROC following negotiations in 1992. It states that both sides agree there is only one China and that Taiwan is part of China. The CCP interprets this “one China” to be the People’s Republic of China, while the KMT interprets it to be the Republic of China. The PRC has never publicly recognized the part of the “consensus” that acknowledges differing interpretations of “China” and did not include this part of Ma’s comments in its official readout of the meeting.

Radio Free Asia and Taiwanese media reported that Ma’s meeting with Xi, which neither Ma nor the CCP confirmed in advance, was originally scheduled for April 8 but was postponed to April 10.[4] The April 10 date coincides with a meeting between US President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida as well as the 45th anniversary of the signing of the Taiwan Relations Act in the United States.[5] Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislative caucus speculated that in moving the meeting to April 10, the CCP has made Ma into a “pawn” in its confrontational “game” with the United States.[6]

Ma did not meet Xi in an official capacity, as he is no longer an official in Taiwan’s government or his party, the Kuomintang (KMT). The stated purpose of Ma’s trip, which he called a “journey of peace and friendship,” was to lead a delegation of Taiwanese students to participate in exchanges with mainland youth, visit cultural and historical sites, and promote cross-strait stability.[7] Ma claimed throughout his trip that Taiwanese people have a strong belief in Chinese culture and national identity. He stressed that disputes must be resolved peacefully.[8] Ma visited the Chinese People's Anti-Japanese War Memorial Hall and Marco Polo Bridge in Beijing on April 9, important sites representing the KMT and CCP’s joint resistance against Imperial Japan during World War II. Ma also visited the Forbidden City with TAO Director Song, where he stressed that “de-Sinicization” will not succeed.[9]

Ma last met Xi in Singapore in 2015, when Ma was the president of Taiwan. This was the first meeting between the leaders of the PRC and Taiwan. In March 2023, Ma became the first former Taiwanese president to visit the PRC, in a visit that overlapped with sitting president Tsai Ing-wen’s trip to the United States. Ma did not meet Xi on that visit, however.

TAO spokesperson Chen Binhua said on March 14 that Taiwan would be able to alleviate tensions and “sleep soundly” if it could relive the “peaceful development period across the Taiwan Strait from 2008-2016.” Chen’s statement refers to the years of Ma’s presidency.[10] The PRC cut off official exchanges with Taiwan after Tsai Ing-wen of the DPP became president of Taiwan in 2016. CCP officials have repeatedly met with KMT officials during this time. The CCP insists that all cross-strait negotiations must be on the mutual basis of the “1992 consensus,” which Ma and the KMT recognize but Tsai and the DPP do not.

Taiwan’s political parties were split in their reaction to Ma’s meeting with Xi. The incumbent DPP administration’s Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said it “deeply regrets” that Ma “failed to publicly convey to China the Taiwanese people's insistence on safeguarding the sovereignty of the Republic of China and its democratic and free system.” The MAC also urged the PRC to engage in dialogue without political preconditions, noting a poll that found nearly 80% of Taiwanese people did not agree with the CCP’s insistence that accepting the “1992 Consensus” is a precondition to cross-strait dialogue.[11] Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said that Taiwanese people are concerned about the PRC’s escalating military intimidation, diplomatic pressure, and economic coercion against Taiwan, rather than any “discussions that do not represent mainstream Taiwanese public opinion.”[12] The KMT legislative caucus, however, praised the Ma-Xi meeting as a break in the deadlock and antagonism between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. It said the meeting showed the PRC and the international community that Taiwan does not only have “anti-China” voices. It said opposition to Taiwanese independence is the international consensus, including among Taiwan-friendly countries like the United States and Japan. It also praised Ma for bringing up to Xi that the “1992 Consensus” includes differing interpretations of “China.”[13]

The PRC Taiwan Affairs Office said on the 45th anniversary of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) that the TRA and the United States’ “Six Assurances” to Taiwan are “completely wrong, illegal, and invalid.” TAO spokesperson Zhu Fenglian claimed the TRA and Six Assurances “seriously violate the one-China principle and the three communiques, violate the norms of international relations, and grossly interfere in China’s internal affairs.”[14] The TRA and the Six Assurances to Taiwan form the basis of the modern US relationship with Taiwan. US President Jimmy Carter signed the TRA in 1979 to define the basis of US-Taiwan relations after the United States ended its diplomatic recognition of Taiwan to form relations with the PRC. The law authorized the United States to maintain de facto relations with Taiwan through the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT). It also committed the United States to sell military equipment to Taiwan as necessary to allow Taiwan to maintain “sufficient self-defense capacity” and to allow the United States to “resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan.”[15] The Six Assurances are a series of clarifying statements that the United States released in 1982 to reassure Taiwan of its continued commitments after the United States switched diplomatic recognition to the PRC and issued three joint communiques with the PRC. The last joint communique said that the United States does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan and intends gradually to reduce them. The Six Assurances stated that the United States: 1) did not agree to set a date for ending arms sales to Taiwan; 2) did not agree to consult with the PRC on arms sales to Taiwan; 3) will not mediate between Taipei and Beijing; 4) did not agree to revise the Taiwan Relations Act; 5) has not altered its position regarding sovereignty over Taiwan; and 6) will not pressure Taiwan to enter into negotiations with the PRC.[16]

The PRC deputy representative to the United Nations accepted condolences for the casualties of the earthquake in Taiwan on behalf of Taiwan. A 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck the east coast of Taiwan on April 3, killing at least 9 people and injuring at least 1,000. This was the strongest earthquake to hit Taiwan since 1999.[17] PRC Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Geng Shuang told the UN Security Council that day that the PRC expressed its condolences to “Taiwan compatriots” for the earthquake that occurred in “Taiwan, China,” was willing to provide disaster assistance, and was “grateful to the international community for their expressions of sympathy and concern.”[18] Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the PRC’s “shameless behavior of using the Taiwan earthquake to carry out cognitive warfare in the international community.” It said Geng’s statement demonstrated that the PRC only has “political calculations” against Taiwan and no goodwill.[19] ROC Foreign Minister Joseph Wu also strongly condemned Bolivia for expressing solidarity with the PRC after the earthquake. Wu said Bolivia “shouldn’t be the evil, expansionist PRC’s pathetic puppet that jumps when Beijing says jump. Just like Taiwan, Bolivia is NOT part of communist China. No more, no less.”[20] The ROC Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Bolivia was “bewitched by the Chinese government” and spread false statements that belittled Taiwan’s sovereignty.[21]

PRC civilian drones repeatedly approached islands of Taiwan’s Kinmen archipelago to film military facilities on the islands. PRC aerial photography drones repeatedly flew over Taiwan’s Erdan and Dadan islands, part of the Kinmen Island group located 10 kilometers (around 6 miles) from the PRC mainland, and filmed footage that was later posted on the internet. Drones filmed Taiwan Army activities on the island of Erdan on March 30.[22] A video that circulated on the Internet on April 1 claimed to show Taiwanese soldiers on Erdan and Dadan being “scared away” by the drone filming them.[23] The Army’s Kinmen Defense Command said it used flares and jamming guns to drive away PRC civilian drones approaching Erdan and Menghu Island on April 8.[24] ROC Army Chief of Staff Chen Chien-yi said on April 3 that such drones constituted “gray zone intrusions” and “cognitive operations” by the PRC. He dismissed the possibility that “mainland civilian bloggers trying to gain popularity on the Internet” were responsible for the drone incursions and instead said it was part of PRC “cognitive warfare” to undermine Taiwanese and international confidence in Taiwan’s military. Chen said such drone incursions had happened before and would happen again in the future. He said it was standard policy to shoot down drones over military facilities if the drones are in range.[25]

Civilian drone incursions into Kinmen’s airspace may be part of a broader effort to test and erode Taiwan’s military readiness and control over Taiwan’s territory. The PRC has normalized daily air and naval activities around Taiwan, including near-daily aerial crossings of the median line in the Taiwan Strait into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), since 2020.[26] It also normalized the use of high-altitude balloons that fly through Taiwan’s ADIZ near or directly over Taiwan, including near-daily balloon overflights in the weeks before and immediately after Taiwan’s election in January 2024. Taiwan does not scramble aircraft in response to all PRC ADIZ violations, but it does put military personnel on standby to respond quickly if needed. The high frequency of ADIZ violations drains Taiwan’s resources, exhausts military personnel, and degrades Taiwan’s threat awareness. The use of civilian assets such as photography drones and balloons in tandem with law enforcement and military incursions further wears down Taiwan’s response capability by making it more difficult for Taiwan to determine which air incursions constitute actual threats.

Taiwan

Czech media reported that a PRC military attaché tailed Taiwan vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim while she was in Prague in March. Hsiao visited the Czech Republic on March 17-19 at the invitation of Czech Senate President Miloš Vystrčil. Czech media Seznam Zpravy reported that Prague police stopped a PRC embassy staff member who ran a red light and almost caused a car accident while tailing Hsiao’s motorcade through Prague. The diplomat followed Hsiao to her hotel. The Czech foreign ministry summoned PRC Ambassador to Czechia Feng Biao for an explanation. Czech Foreign Minister Jan Libavsky said he was not satisfied with Feng’s explanation and did not consider the matter closed.[27] Members of the DPP condemned the incident.[28] The TAO reiterated on April 10 that the PRC has always opposed “any form of official exchanges between countries that have diplomatic relations with China and Taiwan.” It said that the DPP, Hsiao’s political party, was “colluding with external forces” but “cannot change the fact that Taiwan is part of China.”[29]

China

The PLA participated in the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement (MMCA) Working Group with their American counterparts in early April for the first time since December 2021.[30] President Joe Biden and CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping previously agreed to restart the MMCA during their meeting on November 15, 2023.[31] The United States views military-to-military talks as a means of escalation management to prevent and control crises. The CCP views these talks, at least in part, as a bargaining chip that it can use to influence US behavior to the party’s benefit, however. The CCP could end military-to-military dialogue in response to a US action it opposes, for example. The party previously did this by cutting off high-level military dialogue in the aftermath of then-Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022.[32]

Northeast Asia

Japan

The PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) criticized the United States and Japan for expanding security relations to counter the PRC. The United States and Japan announced a series of measures to deepen their security and defense cooperation on April 10 during Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s state visit to the United States. The White House announced that the two countries would modernize command and control structures and work towards improving interoperability between their militaries, in what President Biden called “the most significant upgrade to the US-Japan alliance” since its inception.[33] MFA spokesperson Mao Ning framed the Biden-Kishida meeting as representative of a “Cold War mentality” and labeled their cooperation as harmful to regional stability.[34] Mao centered the PRC’s disapproval around US-Japan interference in Taiwan after Biden commended Kishida for his support in maintaining peace in the Taiwan Strait. Kishida’s visit culminated in a trilateral summit with Philippines President Bongbong Marcos on April 11, during which the three heads of state advocated for “multilayered cooperation” in the interest of maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific.[35] Mao expressed the PRC’s disapproval of the trilateral summit, criticizing it for forming “exclusive small circles and camp confrontation.”[36]

PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Mao Ning also criticized AUKUS for forming exclusive cliques and instigating an arms race in the Asia Pacific.[37] Japan is in talks to increase cooperation with AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership including the US, UK, and Australia. The AUKUS Defense Ministers issued a joint statement on April 8 signaling their intent to bolster collaboration with Japanese industry on developing military technologies.[38] Mao’s comments echo the PRC’s concerns that a US-led regional security network risks the formation of a united front to collectively deter Chinese aggression, carrying implications for the PRC’s irridentist claims to Taiwan and the South China Sea.

The PRC is taking steps to discourage the formation of PRC-facing multilateral security cooperation. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Southern Theater Command conducted joint naval and air exercises in the South China Sea on April 7-8, coinciding with joint exercises in between the US, Japan, Australia, and the Philippines in the latter’s exclusive economic zone.[39] The Southern Theater Command announced that military activities aimed at disrupting the South China Sea and creating “hot spots” were under control.[40] Mao called the exercises an act of hegemony and emphasized that the PRC would not be deterred from safeguarding its territorial sovereignty and maritime rights.[41]

The national security advisors from the US, Japan, and the Philippines held a joint call in December, in which they reaffirmed their commitment to strengthen trilateral cooperation amidst escalating PRC provocations against the Philippines over disputed islands in the South China Sea.[42] The three advisors previously agreed to enhance trilateral defense and security capabilities by leveraging mechanisms such as Japan’s technology and equipment-sharing policy and the QUAD’s Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA) training and technology initiative.[43] Japan recently took steps to increase the transfer of military equipment to the Philippines, demonstrated by its sale of an advanced air surveillance radar system to the Philippines on December 20.[44] Japan is also in the process of finalizing a Reciprocal Access Agreement with the Philippines, which would enable the temporary stationing of troops to each other’s territory for exercises and patrols.[45] Japan finalized a Reciprocal Access Agreement with Australia in August 2023. [46]

Southeast Asia

Philippines

The PRC has normalized Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) harassment of Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) and supply ships near the Second Thomas Shoal since December 2023 to render the Philippines unable and unwilling to defend its claim to the Second Thomas Shoal. The CCG harassed the PCG and associated supply ships six times at the Second Thomas Shoal between November 2021 and November 2023.[47] The CCG has increased the rate of harassment at the Second Thomas Shoal by doing so 11 times since December 1, 2023. The methods of harassment that the CCG employs have remained constant during the past three years. The CCG shines military-grade lasers to blind the PCG crews, sprays water cannons to immobilize supply ships and injure Filipino sailors, and rams PCG ships.[48] CCG water cannons damaged the Unaizah Mae 4 supply ship twice in March. The Philippines stated that such actions aim to deter it “from exercising our legal rights over our maritime zines, including Ayungin Shoal [Second Thomas Shoal] which forms part of our EEZ and continental shelf.”[49] The PRC MFA also stated on April 3 that the Philippines is the “root cause” of the South China Sea dispute by “relying on the support of external forces… and repeatedly provoking China.” [50]  The harassment of PCG ships combined with the PRC MFA statement indicates that the CCP aims to degrade the Philippines’ willingness and capability to defend its presence on the shoal.

The CCP used a similar strategy in 2012 that resulted in the Philippines withdrawing from the Scarborough Shoal, indicating the party’s intent with CCG activity around disputed shoals is to gain control of that territory. The CCP engaged in negotiations with the Philippines in 2012 to end a standoff at the Scarborough Shoal, which Manilla administered at the time, while steadily increasing the number of Chinese Coast Guard ships near the shoal.[51] This resulted in the Philippines withdrawing its ships from the shoal in mid-June 2012 under a now-disputed agreement that the PRC would do the same.[52] The CCP subsequently kept its ships near the shoal and achieved its political objective of gaining de facto control of the Scarborough Shoal by July 2012.[53]

Oceania

Fiji

Fiji ordered PRC police to leave the country after choosing to maintain a Fiji-PRC policing agreement. Fiji decided on March 15 to uphold a Fiji-PRC police cooperation agreement signed in 2011 after putting the agreement on hold for a 12-month review.[54] Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka announced on March 27 that his government has removed PRC officers who were embedded with Fiji’s police force, however. Rabuka said Fiji had no need for the embedded PRC officers and expressed concern that the PRC’s growing presence in the Pacific could undermine democratic systems. Rabuka said senior Fiji police officers would continue training in the PRC.[55]

Tonga

Tonga is open to security cooperation with the PRC during the Pacific Islands Forum in August. Tonga Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni said on April 4 that he is open to the PRC’s offer of security support when Tonga hosts leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum in August if Tonga police deem it necessary. He said discussions with the PRC have focused on the PRC providing vehicles and training for Tongan police ahead of the forum. The PRC is not a member of the Pacific Islands Forum. The PRC has pursued security and policing cooperation with many South Pacific countries, including a controversial security pact with the Solomon Islands in 2022. The United States has urged countries in the region not to strike security pacts with the PRC over fears that the PRC could use such agreements to expand its influence and military involvement in the region.[56]

Tongan officials privately criticized Australia and New Zealand’s negative response to the PRC security agreement with the Solomon Islands. A leaked document from Tonga's Ministry of Foreign Affairs showed officials criticizing Australia and New Zealand’s “condescending” and “frantic” response to a controversial 2022 security agreement between the PRC and the Solomon Islands. The document characterized Australia and New Zealand’s views were that “only they (or the Pacific [region collectively]) can decide which countries Pacific states should align themselves with.” The document acknowledged that many Pacific Island states are facing "threats to strategic independence as a result of growing indebtedness to Beijing.” It stressed that the Solomon Islands is a sovereign nation and has the right to make decisions about its security, however.[57] A leaked draft of the PRC-Solomon Islands agreement included language granting the PRC access and replenishment rights to Solomon Islands ports, as well as the right to use its armed forces to protect Chinese projects and personnel in the Solomon Islands.[58] Australia, New Zealand, and the United States warned at the time that the broadly worded agreement could open the door for PRC troops or even a PRC military base on the Solomon Islands.[59]

Russia

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met with CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on April 9 in the leadup to a Xi-Putin meeting in the unspecified future. Kremlin newswire TASS reported that Wang suggested that China and Russia engage in “dual counteraction” in response to alleged Western attempts at “dual containment” targeting Russia and China.[60] Xi reaffirmed his commitment to “intensify” bilateral collaboration with Russia and through international bodies to “promote the reform of the global governance system.”[61] Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to specify the date of Putin’s visit, but stated on April 9 that Lavrov’s visit “can be seen as preparation for upcoming contact at the highest level.”[62] Reuters reported on March 19 that Putin will travel to China in May to meet with Xi.[63]

21. SPECIAL REPORT: RUSSIAN STRIKES MORE EFFECTIVE AS UKRAINE EXHAUSTS DEFENSES

https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/special-report-russian-strikes-more-effective-ukraine-exhausts-defenses

SPECIAL REPORT: RUSSIAN STRIKES MORE EFFECTIVE AS UKRAINE EXHAUSTS DEFENSES

Apr 12, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Riley Bailey and Frederick W. Kagan

April 12, 2024, 11am ET

*Note on graphic: ISW compiled this data from Ukrainian reporting of Russian drone and missile strikes. Ukrainian officials have offered thorough reporting of particularly large missile and drone strikes but have provided less clear and detailed reporting about smaller individual strikes that Russian forces conduct along the frontline and against rear areas daily. Reporting specifically on the Russian use of Iskander ballistic missiles and S-300/S-400 missiles periodically lacks specificity, and therefore this graphic is not a comprehensive depiction of all Russian missile and drone strikes in Ukraine. The graphic does depict all notable strike series against critical infrastructure and Ukrainian cities away from the front lines since October 1, 2023, however. 

The exhaustion of US-provided air defenses resulting from delays in the resumption of US military aid to Ukraine combined with improvements in Russian strike tactics have led to the increasing effectiveness of Russian missile and drone strikes against Ukraine without a dramatic increase in the size or frequency of such strikes. Russian forces have conducted two sets of large missile strikes since intensifying missile and drone strikes at the end of December 2023: a series of strikes primarily targeting industrial and military facilities and critical infrastructure between December 2023 and February 2024 and an ongoing series of strikes heavily targeting Ukraine’s energy grid since late March.[1] Russian forces have not notably increased the number or size of their strikes since the initial intensification of their strike campaign in December 2023 and have conducted a relatively consistent number and intensity of strikes over the winter and into the spring. Russian forces have nonetheless inflicted increasing and long-term damage to Ukrainian energy infrastructure this spring.[2] The increased effectiveness of Russian strikes does not appear to result from the use of more missiles and drones in each strike. Instead, Russian forces are exploiting the degradation of Ukraine’s air defense umbrella caused by continued delays in Western security assistance and appear to be leveraging tactical adaptations stemming from several months of Russian efforts to test Ukrainian air defenses.[3]  This pattern is alarming because it suggests that, absent a rapid resumption of US military aid, Russian forces can continue to deal severe damage to Ukrainian forces on the front lines and to Ukrainian critical infrastructure in the rear even with the limited number of missiles Russia is likely to have available in the coming months.

The degradation of Ukraine’s air defense umbrella appears to be offering Russian forces greater opportunities to cause significant damage to Ukrainian critical infrastructure. Ukrainian forces reported a roughly 60 percent interception rate of missiles during the five large-scale Russian missile attacks between December 2023 and February 2024 and a roughly 50 percent interception rate during the three large-scale Russian missile strikes against Ukrainian energy infrastructure since March 22.[4] Ukrainian forces have reported an interception rate below 50 percent for missiles in two of the three large-scale Russian missile strikes since March 22 as compared to only one of the five large-scale Russian missile strikes between December 2023 and February 2024.[5] Russian strikes since March 22 have caused significant damage to Ukrainian energy infrastructure facilities, destroying or disabling several thermal power plants and hydroelectric power plants (TPPs/HPPs) and reportedly disrupting roughly 80 percent of electricity generation at Ukrainian TPPs.[6] The increasing damage and disruptions to major Ukrainian power plants threaten to accelerate the degradation of Ukraine’s energy generation capabilities and constrain Ukraine’s ability to stabilize future disruptions to its energy grid in the long term.[7] Ukrainian officials did not report similar widespread and long-term damage during Russian missile and drone strikes in the winter, although Russian forces primarily targeted Ukrainian defense industrial base (DIB) facilities and Ukrainian military infrastructure, causing effects that Ukrainian officials are generally more reluctant to provide details about.[8]

Ukrainian officials noted that large Russian missile and drone strikes in the winter forced Ukraine to use a considerable portion of Ukraine’s air defense missile stockpile, and both Ukrainian and Western officials increasingly began to warn about critical shortages of air defense missiles in late January and February.[9] Zelensky warned in April that if Russian forces sustain the tempo of their current missile and drone strikes then Ukraine will likely lack the air defense missile stocks needed to protect Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure.[10] The continued degradation of Ukraine’s air defense in the absence of US military aid will likely expand Russia’s opportunities to inflict long-term and significant damage to Ukraine.

Russian strikes are reportedly becoming more accurate as Russian forces are likely improving on tactical adaptations that they have been experimenting with for months. The Washington Post reported on March 29 that Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK, stated that more accurate and concentrated Russian strikes are inflicting greater damage against Ukrainian energy facilities than previous Russian attacks did.[11] Russian forces conducted a series of missile and drone strikes of varying sizes, using various combinations of drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles, throughout the spring and fall of 2023.[12] On December 29, Russian forces conducted the largest missile and drone strike against Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion and used a strike package that was likely a culmination of this experimentation.[13] Russian forces have since used diverse combined strike packages including large numbers of Shahed drones and various cruise and ballistic missiles against Ukraine, and the Russian military has likely further adapted these large, combined strikes after observing how Ukrainian air defense has responded.[14] Russian forces particularly appear to be leveraging ballistic missiles in these strikes since Ukraine only has a few air defense systems suitable for intercepting such missiles.[15] The systems that can intercept Russian missiles are also the ones most able to attack Russian fighter-bombers conducting glide-bomb attacks against Ukrainian front-line forces, and the Russians are taking advantage of the withdrawal of those air defense systems from the front lines to make slow but steady gains on the ground, as ISW has reported.[16] Russian forces will likely continue to adapt strike packages as Ukrainian and Russian forces compete in an offense-defense race around missile and drone strikes and air defense.

The increasingly effective Russian strike campaign in Ukraine threatens to constrain Ukraine’s long-term warfighting capabilities and set operational conditions for Russia to achieve significant gains on the battlefield. Russian strikes have previously pressured Ukraine to prioritize protecting strategic objects, population centers, and energy infrastructure in deep rear areas over the frontline, offering Russian tactical aviation relative security to conduct intensified glide bomb strikes in support of Russian ground offensive operations.[17] Increased pressures on Ukrainian air defense may offer more flexibility to Russian aircraft and likely allow Russian forces to conduct glide bomb strikes at a greater scale and may even over time permit Russian forces to conduct large-scale aviation operations to bomb rear Ukrainian logistics and cities to devastating effect.[18] Increased Russian glide bomb strikes and expanded aviation operations would present Russian forces with greater opportunities to achieve operationally significant advances on the frontline.

Russia may be attempting to collapse Ukraine’s energy grid to constrain Ukraine’s defense industrial capacity, and long-term damage to Ukrainian power generation and transmission will likely have cascading effects on Ukraine’s ability to expand its DIB and attract partners for joint production within Ukraine.[19] Russia’s effort to collapse Ukraine’s energy infrastructure may also aim to exacerbate the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and generate migration flows that place further strains on the Ukrainian government and Europe. Russia may ultimately aim to prevent Ukraine from being an economically viable state with cities devoid of basic services in order to incentivize outward migration and prevent the return of Ukrainians who left the country following the start of the full-scale invasion, and therefore, limit the Ukrainian military’s manpower recruitment pool.

Ukrainian forces have previously been able to blunt the effects of the Russian strike campaign when they have had sufficient air defense assets and interceptors. Ukrainian forces prevented Russia’s first attempt to collapse its energy grid in winter 2022-2023 after the arrival of critical Western air defense systems and reported a relatively high interception rate against Russian strikes in the spring and fall of 2023.[20] Zelensky recently stated that Ukraine will need an additional 25 Patriot air defense systems, likely meaning launchers, to extend full air defense coverage to all of Ukraine’s territory.[21] The Washington Post reported on April 10 that Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba is currently focusing on obtaining seven Patriot batteries from other countries as quickly as possible to defend Ukraine’s largest cities.[22] Kuleba reportedly stated that Ukraine would place at least one of these batteries closer to the frontline, presumably to constrain Russian aviation activity against Ukrainian ground forces trying to hold their ground in the face of Russian offensive operations.[23] Consistent and sufficient aid that allows the Ukrainian military to establish a robust and wide air defense umbrella would likely allow Ukrainian forces to mitigate any adaptations Russian forces may attempt to employ in their strike campaign against Ukraine. Ukraine would then be able to defend its cities and critical infrastructure and disrupt Russian air attacks on Ukrainian frontline forces, allowing Ukrainian ground forces to slow or halt Russian gains.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com